My journey is much more mundane than one might expect.  For someone so outlandish and odd, I have had a fairly easy road to where I am now.  Not easy, per se, but from an outside perspective, I haven’t had much grief.  I have a loving and accepting family, an admittedly good school that has respected me as much as they are legally capable of, a group of friends that are the best in the world, and an adequately simple life.  I wasn’t bullied a lot as a child and I was never forced to be this way or that, but that doesn’t mean that my struggles were moot.
In fact, you don’t even know the half of it.

Oddly enough, I have created the worst mental situation one could possibly imagine for myself.  Before I truly found my identity, I was uncomfortable and unstable and unsure of everything.  I didn’t know what to do in any social situation.  I was lost.  Completely lost.  I spent a majority of my time in my room in front of my computer, making social media accounts under the guise of male names and pictures of myself with my hair pushed under a cap.
I never thought anything of these things.  I always thought this to be normal.  I didn’t want to be myself, so I decided to be someone completely different.
However, that escape was, in fact, male.

Ever since I was a child, I always found myself more male, but never masculine, which is an odd thing to discuss.  I wore dresses and had long hair and wanted to wear make-up as a child, but I never really felt like a female doing so.  This behaviour made me incredibly uncomfortable once I started falling into my trans identity.  I heard story upon story of transguys always knowing they were male.  They had always been masculine and butch from the start, but here I was, a scared little gay boy who had wore dresses and make-up as a child.
I never liked discussing my past because I thought that other trans* people would invalidate my trans* identity because I wasn’t this picture perfect idea of what a trans guy should look like.  I never felt butch.  I was never comfortable in baggy jeans and shirts and ball-caps.  I was comfortable in nice cardigans and shiny shoes and tight jeans.  I was a flamboyant gay boi through and through, I just didn’t recognize that at first.

It took me a hell of a long time to realise that not all guys are the same, especially trans guys.  They come (excuse the cheesy line) in all shapes and sizes and are never the exact same.  Just because there are a lot of guys who like to play sports and hit on girls doesn’t mean that I couldn’t be someone who painted his nails and wrote gay fictional stories.  It took me much too long to realise that.

At first, I started questioning my trans* identity.  I wasn’t sure if I had jumped in too fast or if I was simply going through a phase.  The whole femininity aspect threw me off because I wanted so badly to just be that butch football fan with a buzzed head and a scowl on his lips.  Instead, I found myself watching Rupaul’s Drag Race and admitting that the queens were terribly attractive in their androgyny.  Then I really got into Tumblr.  It took a while but I made an account and I got into it.  I found out about things like “genderqueer” and “pansexual” and I figured that I wasn’t just some butch transguy.  I could be a limp-wristed queer with make-up on his eyes and binding on his chest.  I didn’t think I was really male and I definitely wasn’t female.  I might be something inbetween.

I got really into the whole genderqueer idea, so much so that I completely ignored the male part of me and just flounced around with my high heels and drag queens.  Finally I settled down and realised that this wasn’t exactly right either.  This is when I started getting really frustrated.  I’m not female, I’m not male, I’m not butch, I’m not in the middle… I was getting so confused.  Why couldn’t anything be right?

Finally, I wiped off the make-up and retired the heels.  The black and white dress and long black wig still patiently waits for the day I feel comfortable enough with my gender that I’m able to defy it.  I stuck with what I knew.  I stuck with the colourful v-neck shirts and the sweater-vests and the nice button-ups and the bow-ties.  I kept it mildly queer but I didn’t go all out.  I didn’t feel comfortable acting and looking like that, honestly.  I always felt like I had to watch my back to make sure no one thought I was too weird, which was unnerving.  Maybe one day I’ll get stubble on my chin and gather enough courage to apply some bright pink lipstick to go with it.

My queer journey is absolutely topsy-turvy.  There wasn’t a time when I was completely comfortable with myself (still isn’t, but now it’s less identity related, which is a nice change) and I’ve gone through sexualities like hair colours and still haven’t really settled on one that I’m completely comfortable with (although I’m teetering more towards the gay side of the spectrum).  My identity has changed and still changes every day.  I’ve gone from identifying as female, to questioning, to male, to genderqueer, to genderqueer transboi, to femmey genderqueer boi and beyond.  It changes depending on how I feel that day.  Perhaps not the most stable of identities, but it fits me and I’m okay with that.