One subconscious perception that eggs can have which I don’t think is talked about enough is that their perception of their body, and by extension bodies like theirs (read: their cis peers of the same AGAB) as being missing things— or, to phrase another way, as being the plain or the unceremonious default, whereas the other sex has the more exciting or desirable traits (even cultural ones)
Growing up as a boy, I thought a lot about the differences between men and women. But I didn’t view them as two different, equal things. My perception of a masculinized body was that it was lacking breasts, lacking female reproductive organs, missing the ability to have long hair and more varied and interesting clothing. It felt like it was incomplete— the base ‘template’ configuration, whereas a female body was the ‘upgraded’ version.
And I knew this wasn’t scientifically true— that’s not the point. I knew that all bodies began with an AFAB configuration and that the Y chromosome activates later in fetal development, but that’s not how it felt.
I was not looking at the differences between boys and girls as a boy, but instead as a girl who never had the chance to grow into herself, and was locked in a half-formed state as a result. And since I lacked the vocabulary to identify what that meant, I assigned that same feeling to the men around me, too.
To me, we were all girls who were simply denied the privilege of becoming
