Whenever anyone asks when did I first know that I was transgendered, my answer isn't what you often hear. It wasn't when I first put on a pair of my mom's panties or slipped into my sister's high heels. It had nothing to do with clothes or makeup or hairstyles. It didn't even have anything directly to do with sex. In fact, there was no one event that brought about a sudden a-ha moment of self-revelation. Rather it was the slow-dawning realization that I didn't understand boys at all. Everything about them seemed alien to me—how they talked, how they thought, how they acted—it was all incomprehensible and frankly scary to me. They seemed loud and aggressive and excitable and dangerous. I didn't understand their attitudes towards their bodies or their attitude towards girl's bodies. I felt distinctly and oppressively uncomfortable around them. I can never remember a time when I wasn't trying to figure out "how to be a boy." And failing. They were like a completely different species entirely. Worst of all, I was constantly baffled and frustrated that I was supposed to be one of them! As time went by, this expectation became an increasingly terrible burden, both psychological and physical. A lot of years were trashed, a lot of people were hurt, not even including myself, by society's insistence that I somehow (how?!) make a man out of myself, any kind of man, even a gay man. They might as well have asked me to make a 747 jet out of a pipe cleaner.