#ftm egg

I mean, I don’t want to be a boy.

I mean… maybe like… a soft boy… or a femboy … or a Midwest emo boy…

But like… not a boy-boy, ya know? Not a guy.

Definitely not a man, absolutely not.

… so… definitely not a trans guy.

I don’t want… brown fluffy short hair that I can run my hand through, cause it’d look bad on me. Or for skirts and hoodies to look right on me, cause they don’t right now. I don’t want to touch the soft invisible blond mustache on my upper lip. I don’t want trans guys telling me the small amount of thinly spread hair on my tummy is cute. I don’t want my eyeliner to look like a boy as opposed to a girl for no explainable reason.

I don’t have a lick of masculinity in me. In my bones. In my eyes. In my face. In my voice. In my speech. In my actions. In my personality.

I just… don’t think I’d make for a very convincing boy.

*takes out sock packer*

I have always had a plethora of strange experiences. No, I am not that kind of FTM person who has been knowing it through his whole life, but I could never fit in the girls' lot, and I would very often experience sensations, preferences and fantasies that made me think I must be out of my head.

Subtle signs, yes.

Learning that my experiences are very much common and well-known to all kinds of transmasculine people was extremely validating and affirming.

I have a quite long list of subtle - or not exactly subtle - signs, but I think I'll just write them down spontaneously, always the ones I recall at a certain time. Cannot really guarantee this to make sense or to be consistent.

Of course having a few experiences or attitudes like these ones cannot make one sure about them being some kind of transmasculine, but too many signs pointing at the same direction might make one stop and think for a while. Or, for a longer period of time.

Firstly, Gabriella is a name common in Italian and Spanish-speaking populations, neither group with whom me or my family belong to. In fact, the more common anglophone version of the name is Gabrielle, from the French.

As for the name I generally go by, I’ll tell you my thought process behind it. I learned that most people take the first two letters of a name, discard the rest, duplicate the second (now last) letter and add a y, I, or ie (Abby, Abbi, Abbie). That logic never made sense to me, so I little pre-K me just sort of discarded everything after the “b” and plopped a “y” in after it to get Gaby.

The choice to spell it this has caused me no small amount of grief over the years. Generally when I verbally give my name, people will spell it with two B’s and a Y. On rare occasions they’ll ask how it’s spelled. Sometimes they’ll look at how it’s written and pronounce it “Gay-Bee” instead of “Gah-Bee” once or twice they thought I was a boy (bitch, I might be). The only time I really felt seen was the Dream Academy Song “Gaby Says”

My point is, I’m not sure how I feel about my name anymore. All I know is that it’s not positive. This terrifies me, because my name is everywhere—my email accounts (both personal and professional), my water jug, several keychains, a pair of Japanese chopsticks, a wire sculpture I got in Italy when I was six, my birth certificate, my bank account, my debit cards…I could go on.

When I see these pictures, I just see a boy placed in a body that he neither asked for nor wanted. I see the pain in his eyes, and it’s gut-wrenching. He doesn’t want the long hair or the dresses. He wants to play with the other boys, get mud on his face, and be dared to eat the disgusting concoctions the other boys made. He wanted to date the girls and make inappropriate jokes. He wanted to wear SnapBacks and muddy sneakers and t-shirts that were last cleaned a month ago.

But instead, he’s a girl. He wears the dresses and the pink lipstick and lives to satisfy the people around him. He kept his hair long and he dated boys and he smiled. He smiled and put on the mask of a vibrant, happy-go-lucky girl. She rarely complains and apologizes frequently.

He asks himself, “Why me?” He asks what he did to incur god’s wrath. He wonders why he’s unhappy when he’s seemingly got everything he could have ever wanted. He’s depressed by 12, with seemingly no real reason. He doesn’t understand. Shouldn’t he be happy? Shouldn’t he want this?

Shouldn’t he be a girl?