Long before I started questioning my gender, I had this idle fantasy where one of my best lady friends would walk up to me and say, “give it up, you’re not fooling anyone.”
If you’d confronted me about this fantasy at the time, I couldn’t have told you what, exactly, I meant by “you’re not fooling anyone.” Deep down I knew that it was probably related to gender, but my lips wouldn’t have been able to form those words. All I knew was that I was pretending to be someone I was not, in some vague, passive, and ephemeral way.