Back when I was pretending to be a boy, I had just hit 9th grade and moved to a new school. I was always a late bloomer in terms of my first puberty but it hit me like a freight train when it did.

All of a sudden my legs, arms, belly, nipples (weirdly) got hairy and I was terribly self conscious about it. Not that I had an obscene amount of hair, but it really felt like I did. It felt gross and uncomfortable. Never wore shorts or short sleeve shirts because of it. Even in the dead of summer.

After a few months of this curse, I decided enough was enough - stole one of my mom’s super cheap bic razors and hacked away at my entire body. Took me a few hours to get every inch. Many cuts and scraped, but I finally felt like I could be a bit more comfortable in my skin.

Felt great about my decision until everyone at school noticed and made fun of me because it was really “weird” and I didn’t have a good enough reason for why I did it other than “I felt trapped under all of the hair, I just really don’t like it”

Peer pressure took over and I eventually stopped after a few months. A decade later, my egg finally cracked.

Can you guess what the first thing I did was after realizing I am a woman?

electric razor noises

The first time I heard the phrase “do I want to be with her or do I want to be her” was a major holy shit moment for me. It made me realize that my relationship with the concept of “attraction” was way more complicated than I thought. At that moment, I had a realization that what I thought was attraction to women is actually a mix of both attraction and envy, and the reason I had always denied my attraction to men is that the idea of being in a mlm relationship made me unbearably dysphoric