Queering your brand.

When I get asked the when did you know question, I can’t help but get a little annoyed. It’s frustrating, not just because it’s a pretty personal and invasive question that has become somewhat of a trope in the trans community, but because… I don’t actually know.

To be honest, growing up, I was just never great at following rules. I had questions. Big ones! But, asking out loud the sorts of questions I had, in the late 80s and early 90s, was… well, let’s just say I was a quiet kid. My intrinsic inquiries forced me to recognize that I was indeed not like the other kids. At my very core, I was different. Uncertainty and curiosity come naturally to me and have been something I have adopted as part of my identity. I can’t recall a time when I was not perpetually perplexed by people’s seemingly odd expectations of me. Navigating my gender, my identity, and my place in this world, wasn’t something I did consciously, but it was certainly something I did constantly. I was asked and then corrected; I was evaluated and graded; judged then sentenced; forced to choose, then ridiculed; I was given a box, and told to get in, sit down, and shut up; I was being branded a boy. And there was nothing I could do about it.