This month's TG Mixed Tape will not have a contribution from me, sadly.

I had every intention of contributing something. Really I did.

I wish I could blame it on the illness (bronchitis, to be exact) that refuses to go away, even after nearly two months.But I can't, since really, I feel pretty good now, and conceivably could have contributed something in the limited window left to me.

Since my fiction stories are in various stages of completion at the moment, I told Hutcho that I'd contribute an essay on growing up as a disabled transperson. It seemed like a good idea, since there's not much written about folks like me, and no documentary to my knowledge has ever tackled the subject. Easy, right?

That was a deadly mistake, since I forgot something that ought to be on page one of every textbook on writing. Never, ever assume any piece of writing is going to be easy. You're just tempting fate to prove you wrong.

I got tripped up on the part which by rights should have been the easiest.

It seemed wise to give a little background information, so that's what I did. I wanted to show what made me an atypical little boy, aside from the obvious disability, so I searched the recesses of my brain for examples, and came up with several:

I had a doll from the time I was eighteen months old until I was seven years old. In other words, I got it long before I got the message that liking such things was "wrong."

My mother used to roll up her hair in huge rollers, and dry it in one of those clunky "helmet" hair dryers (this was the era of the bouffant hairdo.) I asked for some of her old curlers, and she gave me a few. She caught me a short time later attempting to put one of the curlers in my own too-short hair--I wanted curly hair like hers, only to scream in frustration when the hair wouldn't wind all the way around.

Long story short, she teased me about it, I turned about thirteen different shades of red, and crumpled into a ball. Suffice to say it never happened again.

I used to have what for lack of a better term were colored construction tiles, though I can't remember what they were called. But rather than make a house or a spaceship or some abstract object d'art, I made a little box out of them--a play oven for my plastic play food. In other words, I was playing house.

It was about here that I got bogged down. Yes, those things did happen. But the nagging little critic in my head kept whispering the dreaded words: "confirmation bias."

"Aren't you just reaching for clues to how you became this way? You had--and liked--boy things too, like toy cars and squirt guns. You pretended to be a superhero (I used one of my stepdad's old military helmets as a 'costume.') Awfully boy-like to me."

Yes, yes, I know. I'm stereotyping, buying into the gender binary. I've covered this ground before, in a 2012 blog entry (the period I to this day call my "Sylvia Plath moment.") I know, intellectually, that examples of stereotypical female behavior aren't necessarily indications that I'm trans.

But I really, desperately want them to be.

It would make my transition make sense. I mean, stereotypical or not, every MTF transkid I've ever seen, heard, or read about has similar stories. It sounds better than saying, "I just decided I wanted to be a girl when I was 14 and heard about SRS."

I suppose I'm wondering if I should include the above examples in my essay, or reject them as an exercise in self-delusion. After all, just because I want those incidents to be proof of being trans doesn't mean they are.