They say I’m a girl and that I was born a girl. The trouble has always been that I’ve never known exactly what being a girl is all about. I’ve known about trans girls and boys for as far back as I can remember and I’ve never considered that I may be a trans boy. I suppose it’s true to say I’ve always been well informed concerning matters of gender identity. However, from my point of view none of that knowledge seemed to be relevant to me. When the other girls at school were getting excited about periods and breasts and then getting giggly about boys the whole thing left me feeling outside of it all. I never admitted it, but I started my periods before any of the other girls, and my breasts started to develop before any of theirs. They got to be bigger than theirs too and remained that way to the day we left secondary school, but it all left me cold, uninvolved.

I was never interested in boys, despite their interest in me which I think was actually interest in my breasts and bottom not me. I was just the transport system for the bits they were interested in, and at that point they only ever talked to my bosom never to my eyes. I was no more interested in girls that way either, so I knew I wasn’t a lesbian. The idea of having sex with a boy or a even with a girl was of no interest to me, and the idea of bloating up like a dead whale on the beach due to pregnancy revolted me even more than the idea of an immature human being dependant on my swollen breasts for sustenance. I was completely different from my mum and sisters. I haven’t a maternal bone in my body. My sisters couldn’t wait to have a family once they got married. They were a little upset when I was completely uninterested in their newborn babies. My elder sister had a girl and my younger sister a boy. My sister in law had one of each and when she pushed me to take interest in her offspring she was mightily offended when I refused to have anything to do with them because I considered them to be creatures that would vomit on me from one end and extrude even more unmentionable material on me from the other. I didn’t visit with them for twelve months and to avoid them visiting with me I moved house after that, two hundred and fifty miles.

I’m happy with my life. I deal in stocks and shares purely for myself, and by most folks’ reckoning am extremely wealthy though I doubt if Elon Musk and Bill Gates would see it that way. I enjoy life. I used to ask myself, ‘What am I?’ Thinking I had to be able to attach a label to myself. I have come to realise that is a serious mistake. It is the ultimate in stereotyping when you do it to yourself. Defining oneself in terms of a label is seeing life the wrong way round. If you bother at all it makes more sense to define the label in terms of yourself. Having said that I do have a label for myself these days. I’m me.