I THOUGHT I WAS BROKEN. As a kid I knew I was different. I knew I didn’t fit right, I didn’t fit into the world everyone wanted me to fit into. I spent most of my childhood wondering what was so wrong with me.

I knew that telling my kids my truth, about who I am was the only option! That showing the world that it really isn’t that complicated. That when someone tells you their truth you believe them and love them, because their truth has always been there, now you just get to know it.

When do you tell people you don't know well that you're trans? Do you just let them notice on their own that you now have a beard?

This Vitamin T as people in the trans world affectionately call it is a fucking beast.  

An awesome beast don't get me wrong.  Everyday I look in the mirror and am pumped at the changes I see looking back at me but I gotta say guys--  the muscle growth, it's crazy.

I have a moustache now.  

Well sort of.  It's more like dark peach fuzz.  It's slightly embarrassing to look like a teenaged boy.  I'm rocking this 14 going on 32 thing hard.

"You've lived a very full life,"  he says to me, while looking down at my chart and simultaneously peering up over his glasses the way doctors do.  

"I'm very interested," he carries on.

I deflect the awkwardness of the fact that until the age of 31 I've lived my life as a woman by making a joke: "What, not all transmen have birthed 4 kids?"  

Once upon a time there was a little boy full of curiosity and questions, like all little boys. He loved roly-poly bugs and grasshoppers and skateboards and GI Joes. 

He wanted Ninja Turtle underwear more than anything. 

But there was a terrible misunderstanding. 

The grownups made him wear pink underwear. And dresses. They made him grow his hair long. All the adults told the little boy that he wasn’t a boy, he was a GIRL.