On a Monday afternoon, in the summer of '69, I was born. My name was already picked out but my dad had to have it his way and have his name first in my name. My dad was not your normal dad, not by far. He would throw tantrums, and would eventually state that God told him to kill me, an act that quickly led to my parents' divorce. Yeah... He was mentally ill. In fact, he had paranoid schizophrenia, an illness that he and his family had kept hidden from my mom until after my parents married. Shortly after my parents divorced, my dad went away to a psychiatric hospital and my grandparents moved in with us, which helped my mom pay the bills.
Somewhere around the age of four or five years, I realized I was different. I wanted to be someone else, or at least in someone else's body...a girl's body. I started putting on any of my mom's clothes that she had left in her bathroom. And to this day, I have a memory of playing with Barbie dolls, yet my mom adamantly says I never had any. Who knows, maybe it was at a friend's house. Apparently other people noticed something was different about me as well. I can remember picking up a barrette at my preschool and one of the teachers came over and put it in my hair. What I can't remember is if she just did it, or if she asked if I wanted it or if I asked for it.
Also somewhere during this time period, I got caught by my grandfather wearing one of my mom's bras. He yanked me by the arm and pulled me out of my mom's bathroom, which was in the back of the house, all the way down the hall to the livingroom and said, "Look at our little girl." I wrestled out of his grip and ran back to my mom's bathroom. My mom came in a couple minutes later and simply said to take the bra off and get dressed. From that moment on, wearing cross-gender clothing was my deepest secret.
