The first time I remember thinking about my gender was when I was three. I asked my mother what colour people chose when they didn’t know what sex the baby was going to be. She said yellow. I asked for my room to be painted yellow and obtained a yellow shirt which I wore as often as I could. Most now are aware that some people with female bodies feel like boys, and vice versa. But then there are others, like me, who don’t feel like either.
Experiencing oneself differently when one has no language with which to express it is disconcerting. Back in 1976, understanding of queer identities was rare. For the next 11 years I saw myself as some kind of malformed girl. I wasn’t the only one aware of a difference. At school, I was always on the boys’ side in games against girls. They wouldn’t let me play football with them because I wasn’t a boy, but they let me referee because, they said, I wasn’t really a girl either. Girls distrusted me. I could dress like them, try to speak like them, but we couldn’t relate to one another. It was something that went deeper than my feminist politics or the fact I got into fights. They seemed to sense that I wasn’t one of them, as if I were an accidental spy.
