Stellan’s Story

I am a boy. (yes, technically a young man, but I love to say “boy” because I never got to experience hearing it and I’m still young so I may as well overuse it.)

I think I’ve always been a boy. I’m not sure it would be right to say I was a “boy trapped in a girl’s body” though. I think I was just a boy Unseen. So unseen that even I didn’t see myself as… Well, I saw who everyone told me to see. I was who everyone told me to be. I sometimes questioned why I could only be a “girly girl” or a “tomboy,” but I noticed how living under one label earned me praise where the other assigned scorn, so I consciously chose “girly girl” by the time I was a tween. I cried for hours when I started menstruating for the first time. I eventually wrote a poem about it, except I imagined it was brought on by a Yoruba god named Eleggua. I’ve always been into mythology and I read he was known for bringing disruption and strife. 

Eleven-year-old me tried to embrace the idea of “entering womanhood,” but my future self was a gray staticky void being. I didn’t see a happy wife, a loving mother, I just saw nothing. So I started to hope for a shortened lifespan. Just so I wouldn’t have to meet the gray. It wasn’t until I learned about trans men and transmasculine people at 16 that I started to feel color trickle into my ideas about the future. It was easy for me to determine I was transgender; the hard part was not disowning myself for finding euphoria in masculinity and authenticity in manhood. And no one in my family helped that. Yet I stand triumphant.