I get a lot of questions. Things like, “does it hurt to wear that?” and “do the shots hurt?” and my personal favorite, “how does it feel to be trapped in the wrong body?” As if gender is that simple. As if the skin I walk in is a prison yard chaining me to concepts like “sister” and “girlfriend” and “woman”. Like being a man means I can’t sometimes be a woman. What the world can’t seem to understand is that I am not trapped in my body. I am trapped in other people’s perceptions in my body. I am trapped in a system where you cannot live outside the lines.

By the time I came to terms with my identity, I had already spent most of my formative years stewing in a Molotov cocktail made up of two parts denial and six thousand parts self-loathing. I hated myself and I hated my body and I hated the way I was attracted to all the genders. I didn't want to be queer and I didn't want to be trans and I most certainly didn't want to live a life where I wasn't the definition of unremarkable.

So I buried myself under a mountain of forced femininity and was well on my way to convincing myself I’d be better off buried six feet under when my best friend took me by the shoulders in the playground next to my house and said, “Why are you doing this to yourself? What are you so scared of?”

It was ironic, actually. My best friend Alex, my outrageously gay best friend Alex, who had seen more horrors than I could ever accurately articulate, asking me what I was scared of. The boy of color who walked through verbal hellfire on a daily basis, who was so used to being called a fag that it didn't hurt his feelings anymore, was worried about me, a white (seemingly heterosexual) kind-of female. And what’s more ironic is that I didn't have an answer for him. I didn't know what I was afraid of. My mother was and continues to be the most supportive adult in my life, Alex knew how I felt and didn't care what gender I chose to identify as…so what was there to be afraid of?

The answer was society. Society was what I was afraid of. It wasn't my family or my friends or the pronouns I wanted so badly to wrap myself into, it was how much I didn't fit into what the world expected of me. Even after I came out, hair buzzed, and chest strapped down like truck-bed construction equipment, I struggled to find a box I could check. The grass may be significantly greener on the other side, but I sometimes missed the flowers that grew through the cracks in the pavement of the life I left behind. Of the things I loved as a girl, but couldn't as a man.

I am a guy by standard definitions — hairy-legged, eighteen years old, and still playing Pokemon like 1999 never ended, but there are parts of me that aren't. My socks are knee-high, as neon as the day is long, and I haven’t tried to match them since I was in the sixth grade. I still refuse to sleep without a small battalion of stuffed animals and my collection of sassy buttons has never been more impressive. My favorite protagonists are female protagonists and I've never watched a movie without crying. I don’t understand sports, I don’t know how to talk to straight men, the manliest thing I have ever done is kill a spider by myself, and what that has taught me is this: gender is subjective.

I am trans. I a man who has known the tightrope walk of being woman and there are parts of me that still like to balance on the wire. A person’s gender is as unique to them as their fingerprints and it wasn't until I threw myself from the closet that I understood that. My gender is my own, just as my body is my own. It’s taken years of self-reflection, but I've found that I’m not trapped in my gender. The world is trapped in what it thinks of my gender.