CW: mentions of medical transition

When talking about the child I once was, I hesitate to gender the memories. I hesitate to speak, I stutter before recalling dialogue. Mess up my own lines. When Jack, my older brother but mostly the middle child,  was saving me from drowning in the frequently retold story I have no memory of, he wasn’t yelling for a babysitter or my mother saying that his little brother Brinker was dying. 

When my dad accidentally lost me in Epcot he wasn’t missing his youngest son, and he didn’t shout Brinker as he frantically hobbled through the park. 

My older brothers, Ben and Jack, didn’t call me “bro” or whatever they called each other. 

But I also don’t refer to the kid I grew up as, as a “she” or a girl. I don’t utter my deadname. I don’t feel totally comfortable rewriting the story, either. I call the past me with the dark hair and pale skin my brother's “little sibling.” I insert “Brinker” and use they/them pronouns and dance around gender like the floor is lava. 

I look at the child I was, like  most children, really, as a little genderless thing, because it feels like it gives this past version of me the fewest expectations and this little thing the most room to breathe. 

I can’t tell you I wasn’t raised as a girl. That when I looked in the mirror I always felt like something was so deeply off. I can’t look you in the eye and say that when I wore the same ivory tiered dress I wore as a flower girl in my aunt and uncle's wedding to my first communion I was ungendered. I can’t tell you that when my brothers called me soul sister, and sister blister, and “Sorella” for years and years, I was ungendered. I also can’t tell you I hated it. 

I look at this kid, this anxious pudgy thing with the too-long jeans and stained shirts and messy hair and an obsession with draping fabrics on their grandmother’s dress form and I want to give them this gift. I want to wrap them in something loose enough that they don’t have to worry so much about fit. About growing in all the wrong places and having to shop in the women’s department in sixth grade and not filling out their training bra and the fact that they are only allowed to warm up with Jack and the boys at wrestling and when the sparring starts they have to go sit down with the parents and baby siblings. I want to shroud that kid in something so they don’t feel so on-display, because they've always had stage fright. 

Trans people have learned to recite the same stories, retell the same tales to the kind cis doctors with the watery eyes so they can check off their lists. Trans people pass down storylines like hand-me-downs and learn to wear them even if they might never fit quite right. 

On the checklist with hundreds of questions, they ask you, yes or no, “Starting puberty felt like a betrayal.”

I learned to assign meaning to even small moments of discomfort in order to be believed. 

I’ve learned to erase the kid who loved glamour, and loved learning to balance books on their head and pose for photos in matching lip gloss with their babysitter when they were only in the first grade. 

I’ve learned to ignore the ache of nicknames, family jokes, and catchphrases that disappear. New ones will be made. If I mourn the loss of “soul sister” “sister blister” “Niente Por Sorella” and countless plays on my deadname, I give permission to the people in my life to miss those things too. I give people the option to revive them, to ignore where I am now. 

In ungendering my youth I can gain access to some of it again. 

It’s a wonder how hard it is not to pass judgement on a child. It’s a wonder how easy it is to hate someone so young and scared. 

I invite you to join me. 

A child with chin-length hair so dark that adults marvel at it, comb fingers through it, and ask the nearest adult if they dye it, all while the child fluctuates between cringing away and preening. The kid is scared to skateboard, but not scared of the skateboards, the loud sounds they make on the hollow ramps or the shouting boys riding them. Jack learned to skateboard at five, so everyone knows that his little sibling isn’t just too young. 

But the child still likes to run up the ramps and slide down on their butt when no one is using them. They still like to play pretend under the ramps, hideouts and spies and secret missions. They still like to go on “penguin rides” on their belly on Ben’s full sized boards shooting fast down the hill, and pulling themselves up, still on their stomach, with their hands on the asphalt pulling themself along like a surfer through waves. 

It’s harder and harder to not pass judgement the older the child gets.

In middle school, they reread select passages from The Care and Keeping of You every day like their grandmother reads from the bible. Their favorites are the advice sections, where girls from all over the country get their concerns assuaged in print. They can’t stop reading and rereading the ones about stuffing bras and getting periods in public.

Their second favorite is the two-page spread: one page features girls in dressing rooms with  different types of bras, and the other is about breast growth. Once a month, the child measures their chest with their best friend from down the street, comparing and waiting for change.

They were waiting for it. 

Did puberty feel like betrayal?

Did my body promise me something? How many times can a checklist dance around “liar”?

Another memory, older, maybe the oldest.

Two boys and a baby. The baby is a toddler in a crib, half-asleep until light and two boys creep into the room. The taller boy, Ben, kisses the baby’s forehead goodnight, then lifts the other boy so he can do the same. This smaller boy, Jack, is almost a baby himself, with long curly black hair and soft cheeks, but he’s determined to be a big brother and so he is. Jack wishes the baby goodnight, and they sneak out before any parents can ruin their mission.

Had my body already promised me something then? I was too young to remember the words, but their care and mischief stays with me. I wish I could say I haven’t in the past scrubbed memories like these for meaning, but I can’t. Now I refuse to let the way my big brother kissed the baby’s head, or Jack’s determination to treat care like a tactile assignment, be clues into something more. Some sort of binary trans epiphany. Some sort of prophetic vision of “trapped in a girl’s body.” Some sort of promise scrawled on my skin before I had the burden of thinking about it. Maybe if I had the right memory, the perfect story, I could draw out an irrefutable truth, one that not the doctors, not my family, not even I could question. But when I scrub theses memories, treasured memories of my brothers and I from when we were young enough to cover the stairs with our twin sized mattresses and play king of the hill, I don’t reveal some hidden messaging under freckled skin, I just end up with red, irritated flesh. Rug burn and a bruise, but with none of the choruses of laughter of the kids on the stairs. 

I am trying not to think of the stories I tell doctors as forced confessions. I am trying not to think of them. 

Instead, when the doctors ask me to lay trauma and childhood desires out like a tarp of newspaper for them to paint on top of, I let my mouth move and my eyes glaze over and I think of the kid. The kid whose parents are late to pick-up and so they sit on the bench in front of their elementary school and draw all over their own hands and legs with blue marker. And I say sorry.