I am a female, but if you looked at me you would see a man. My femality is so deeply embedded that it cannot be seen. I didn't see it for the longest time, but I felt it. "I'm a boy," I would think. "I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I'm a boy." Somewhere in the back of my mind, where I couldn't hear anything under the mantra of "I'm a boy," there echoed the voice of a girl. A lost voice.

I was a wayward little child, cold and sad. A melancholy little boy, there were many things that I didn't understand. There were many pieces that didn't fit. Square pegs in round holes. My mother was telling me one day about how everyone has a spirit, and I asked her a question.

"Mom, can a girl's spirit be in a boy's body?" I asked.

"No," my mother replied lovingly. "I don't think God would make a mistake like that."

I have no emotional memory of that time in my life, but I know that my mother's words sank into my subconscious, where they sprouted poisoned leaves. Somewhere deep down, in a place that I wasn't allowed to feel, I knew that I was "God's little mistake." I looked at the other little girls, and oh how I longed to be among them. The part of me that felt this was silenced. The little girl inside me was bound and gagged and put in a closet. After all, she was a mistake. She didn't deserve to exist. And she didn't exist for the longest time. I forgot about her, after I told her to hide and never came to claim her.

"Hide her! Hide her! If she is discovered then we will all be in trouble!"

My religion didn't permit such a thing. God didn't allow mistakes. How could I be a girl? Impossible. I'm a boy! I have a penis! I should be proud of my maleness! After all, it's an abomination in the sight of God for a man to dress as a woman (Right?). Even if I do desire to be a girl, then this is just a wicked desire placed in my heart by the Devil. If I listen to this desire, then I am toeing a dangerous line. And if I satisfy this desire, then I am going against my nature! But what is my nature?

My religion didn't recognize my inner femality. I knew who I was at my deepest core, but this knowledge ground against everything I was taught on the outside. My mother didn't recognize my inner femality. My brother noticed it once. He said, "When you walk, you swing your hips a little bit." I was horribly embarrassed! That's how a girl walks! I'm a boy! I'm not a girl! I became a Master Alchemist with spiritual anestesia, numbing myself to myself. I used spiritual eyedrops to blur my inner vision, so that I couldn't see who I truly was. I had to hide her, because she was a threat. But she was me. I was hiding myself from myself. I was the little girl bound and gagged, and put in a closet.

I have woken now, to find myself in the shadows of all I've created.

I listened to my mother, an underspoken feminist, as she talked with some of my aunts at a family gathering. I don't remember what she said, but I remember what I heard. What I heard reinforced what I feared, that women were better than men. What a tragedy! After all, I was a boy. What a frustration! I could never, ever, ever be a girl. I could not put my hair in pig tails, or wear a dress, or paint my fingernails. I was stuck in limbo between jump rope and baseball. I didn't want to play with the boys, and I couldn't play with the girls. I was sequestered from the girl section, put apart from my kind.

At sixteen, with no clue who I really was, I decided to quit church. This was the beginning of my un-numbing. There was nobody guarding the closet, and so my inner girl was allowed to leave. But she had forgotten how to walk. Her legs were too weak to carry her weight, since they hadn't moved in so many years. The door was open a crack, and she could see out, but the light was too bright for her to focus on anything. The chaotic unravelling of my religion was unnerving, but thru the shreds of spirituality I saw her. Her body lay half-way out of the closet, and I knew someone was there. I didn't know who it was, tho. I was seperate from myself. I looked at myself from the third person. I saw "her" when I looked in the mirror. I didn't even know the mirror was there. I thought it was a window.

The puzzle pieces of my self portrait started to come together as my religion fell apart. I noticed that when I spoke in the safety of my head, a girl's voice would come out. It would happen naturally, not out of fantasy, but out of the lack of fantasy. The voice that came out of my vocal chords was the false one.

story

One day I was socializing at a friend's house. Ironically, it was a church social. But, it was pretty fun. One of our activities was karaoke, but we didn't use a karaoke machine. Instead, we used an expensive digital keyboard, which had a microphone. One of the functions of this keyboard was a voice-changer. There were various settings, including Alien, Robot, Chipmunk, and Monster. The setting that caught my ear was a transgendering setting, one which made a woman's voice sound like a man's, and another that made a man's voice sound like a woman's. I decided to talk into the microphone with the male-to-female setting. When I heard my female voice, I almost burst with joy. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. It was my voice as it should be.