I was always a girl.

I didn't always see myself as a girl. I didn't always see myself as anything at all. I didn't see myself.

But I always knew something about how people talked about me felt wrong. And the moment I accepted I was a girl, it didn't feel wrong anymore

The moment I said, "I'm a woman" things made sense. But when people talked about me being a boy before, that alienation resumed. When I explained to my family how I needed them to never misgender me, even in the past, and my mom talked about my girlhood, my childhood made sense.

When I began talking about my girlhood, my childhood didn't start making sense because I felt like a girl at the time. I didn't feel like anything at the time.

It started making sense because "I was always a girl" rings me like a bell NOW.

I didn't always know. I had a sense young, then had it crushed out of my by several big waves of brutalization from loved ones. But I didn't always know.

But it gives me life, makes every cell in me sing, to acknowledge that while I may not have been able to admit it to myself, I've always been this girl. Just, before I was divorced from who I was.

Maybe you see me saying "I was always a girl" as respectability politics.

I don't see "everything you've ever assumed about me is wrong" to be respectability anything. I don't see "cisnormativity fcked up from the first second I drew breath" as anything but a middle finger.

There is nothing placatory about "I was never a boy". That's me saying that you didn't have a right to my gender before I came out. You never did. And you have no right to my past now.

I say who I was as a child for me. No one else. Everyone else's take on my past is unwelcome.