Evan Urquhart

There are trans people who were lucky/unlucky enough to be strongly gender nonconforming from early childhood, but there's also a lot of us who figured out what the expectations were and conformed to them, and I think we often feel a lot of self-doubt and shame because of it.

It's not enough to just say YOU ARE VALID. (Though, of course, you are.) Instead, say: These gender role expectations are a con. They're a crock of shit we inflict on children and very few children, cis or trans, come out entirely unscathed.

Its hard to imagine what I'd be like if my mom wasn't so freaked out by gender nonconformity, or if our relationship had been different. I eventually learned mom took an anti-miscarriage drug when she was pregnant with me that was later found to have masculinizing effects.

This explained a lot. It even explain why I'm trans- born that way not due to genetics but a drug in the uterine environment. But mostly it explains my moms intense anxiety around me showing any signs of masculinity.

I was never a tomboy. I was not a particularly masc little guy. But my mom told me how feminine I was *constantly* and never did the same with my sister. It a weird experience, constantly being told which toys I liked, which clothes I liked, and how girly everything I liked was.

It was basically classic gaslighting- but I know my mom believed. I can now understand that she was anxiously reassuring herself that I hadn't been masculinized by that drug... but as a child and adolescent the effect was disorienting.

Mom never once told me I wasn't allowed to have boy stuff, but she did tell me repeatedly that I didn't like that stuff and had never liked that stuff. Contradicting her felt impossible, even though I sort of knew something was off.