“But when I met you, you were such a girly girl.”

My stepmom leaned across the dining room table and told me this urgently, as if she was offering up incontrovertible evidence that I couldn’t possibly be transgender. 

It was a fair enough assertion. From the moment I was born – the first girl in a close-knit family of male cousins – I effortlessly fell into the preformed mold of femininity: I grew up in a bedroom with pink carpet and a four-poster lace canopy bed; I loved dresses and Barbies; my favorite game to play with my brother and cousins was house; by the time I was in fifth grade I had an absurd amount of make up, and the sleepovers I hosted always involved a make over. I can say that all of this was authentically me; but that is not what I told my stepmother.

“I was compensating.”

As a gender-different person growing up in the arms of Livejournal comment threads, I learned pretty quick that when talking to cisgender people – parents, friends, therapists – you sometimes have to bend the truth to be taken seriously.