How Mowing My Lawn Pulled Me from the Gender Closet
Many transgender people know their gender from a young age. Not me!
I’m a man now, but I was never a boy.
Throughout my childhood, I never felt like my gender as a girl limited my interests or opportunities. This is a bit surprising given my ultra-conservative upbringing, but it’s true. I’m sure if I were assigned male at birth, I would feel differently.
I never even felt like a boy, as far as I can recall. There were definitely some indications of my gender being… different, and I wanted to be one of the guys, but I assumed that just meant I was a tomboy.
And I was comfortable with that, more or less, all the way through college and into my early career.
I know from an old blog that I sometimes felt like a man all the way back in 2014, but I knew by then that being trans was more than a feeling. I didn’t want to claim the label incorrectly, and I had other priorities, so I didn’t really explore my personal relationship with gender at the time.
I did start to care deeply about trans issues. I remember an argument with a partner about an article about a trans person, and feeling like it bothered me more than made sense. I started to think of myself as probably some form of nonbinary.
