Not Just a Tomboy by Caspar Baldwin

Author:Caspar Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784508456
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The teenage years are the hardest time for most people, but mine were filled with a type of exquisite pain that cannot really be known by anyone who has not experienced it – though I have done my best to give a flavour of the daily struggles that, unlike other teen problems, had no end in sight, no future adult time when things would be different, be better. To be clear, I do not and have never thought that there is anything inherently wrong or nasty about female secondary sex characteristics and I can and do appreciate the beauty of the feminine form. It is just that they were not meant to be happening to me. Everything about seeing them on my body was wrong, the breasts, the hips, all of it just didn’t belong.

The slow torture of being a helpless bystander to my wrongly changing body and juggling the mental and emotional burden of the shame it invoked took a terrible toll on the quality of my life. I was no longer free to run and jump and play. The dysphoria from the breasts and the coping behaviours I had to implement left me feeling as though I had become disabled in some way. The mental burden was extraordinary, just to get through the most mundane of average days. Further, I am left with a profound sense of sadness for what dysphoria did to the development of my personality. I became shy, introverted, shrouded in melancholy and deeply concerned with my inner state, which was as fragile as a candle in the wind and forced constantly to lie and deceive. I am a fantastic liar, but I was not born with that skill, it developed in the years I spent faking illnesses, making up family engagements, encasing myself in jackets and jumpers, pretending I had forgotten to put on sun cream. These are the twisted, deceitful and conniving things I had to engage in to survive gender dysphoria. It felt awful having to lie to my friends and family but I had no choice, I could not bear the alternative.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have made it through this time, a time when many have fallen, but as I settled into my melancholic shadow existence, observing but never fully participating in the ordinary rites of youthful life, I could not see clearly how my life would unfold from here in any way that made it something to look forward to.

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