Growing up trapped in a man's body

Tayler is a 21-year-old junior at Clemson University and one of the five young trangender people profiled in the MSNBC documentary "Born in the Wrong Body." In the following essay, Tayler describes growing up as a boy, despite always feeling that she was truly a girl, and her decision to bring her story to the public.

Most transgender stories begin with something along the lines of, “Even at my earliest memories, I knew something was not quite right.” I cannot say this is necessarily the case for me, but then, I was a fairly naïve kid.  My first memories are around the age of 3 — vivid memories, in fact — and I did not necessarily see anything wrong. Of course, this was mainly due to me being unaware that I was NOT a girl. Up until age 5, I had no real grasp that I was not going to grow up to be like my mom or sister. I did not realize that the dance classes and being a part of the Girl Scouts (which in retrospect might not be such a bad thing) were not in my future. 

It was not until about age 5 that I realized people did not perceive me as a girl. I remember the specific instance of playing with my sister and two of our friends. We were playing a game of “pretend,” and naturally, at least as I saw fit, I wanted to play as a girl named Lindy. As I was laughed at, I soon realized that something was not right, but I generally kept the thoughts to myself. Sure, I would often sneak into my sister’s room and try on her clothes, and when she came into the age of make-up, I would often dabble in her cosmetics. Of course, when the make-up levels dwindled unexpectedly, I had to make up the excuse of drawing and painting with it. All of this went reasonably unnoticed by my family because I was either good at hiding it, or my family never had the thought in their minds, thus making them a bit more gullible.

It certainly did not go unnoticed by me, though. I struggled each and every day to hide or deny my thoughts and feelings. I tried to do sports, which did not help much as I have never been a very competitive person. Plus, I developed my second crush on one of my teammates (the first crush being on Zack Morris from “Saved by the Bell”).  However, I was able to get along in a decent manner at this point; after all, it was before puberty hit most, and the differences between boys and girls were not so extreme. 

Along with my ultra-shyness growing up, my family tended to move around quite a bit, so friendships were rare and usually short-lived. I had given up on sports, and through the years — especially as puberty began to strike — I became more and more reclusive. I had mood swings from extreme sadness, sometimes spikes of anger, but more often than not, it was just a very numb, hollow feeling. By the time high school came around, I had lost interest in most things. Though they did not suffer overtly, I even lacked interest in my academics, which I had always strived for in the past. I had become completely hopeless by my sophomore year in high school.

Now, I had known about transsexuals and other transgender people since I was about 9 years old. I remember my first exposure was an episode of “Married With Children” in which a beautiful girl Bud photographs for a calendar and eventually falls in love with turns out to have been born male. In realizing I might not be alone in my feelings, I had researched a bit; I even looked at some of the surgical techniques used in the actual sex reassignment surgery.

Thus, when sophomore year rolled around, and I felt I had nowhere to go or anyone to talk to, I actually tried to operate on myself. One would think that such an ordeal of knives and scissors on such a seemingly sensitive area would hurt horribly. I will admit that it stung, but the sense of loathing I had for this particular body part, mixed with the absolute lack of hope, caused the pain to dull a bit. Of course, all I ended up doing was bleeding all over the place, and wearing a small bandage and pad on my groin for a few days. Fortunately, as a doctor later told me about a year later when this all came out in the open, there is a lot of blood down in this region, so healing took a reasonably short amount of time.

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