I Forgot How to Talk to Boys
I don’t know exactly when the split happened. All I remember is an all-too-sudden shift when it wasn’t okay to hang out with my friends anymore. I remember the days when people (unkindly) informed me that it would be weird to continue to play with the boys on the playground rather than the girls.
“Unless I liked a boy, of course. Only then was it mildly okay. ”
I remember feeling debilitated and misunderstood. When I was around the guys I became a secret agent. It felt powerful to cross the line from the “girls’ side” of the playground to the “boys’ side”. I was practically one of the boys, but not quite. I became Alex when I was around them. No gender, just Alex.
When I was around the girls in my grade the only thing I felt was discomfort. I felt like I was in an itchy costume that gave me rashes most of the time. I felt even more uncomfortable when someone would refer to the group of us as “girls”, or worse, “ladies”. The more time I spent with the girls, the more the adults around me talked about boys as if they were a different species.
I was too uncomfortable to hang out with the girls, and I couldn’t hang out with the guys without people making fun of me. I spent many long days feeling trapped in the middle. It was painful to look at the kids who played without boundaries and wonder why I couldn’t do the same thing.
It seems like I blinked and ended up in middle school. The most suggested links on my social media feed went from toy commercials to an endless amount of articles entitled something along the lines of “How to Talk to Boys”. I remember laughing when I realized those articles were geared toward my age group because of course I knew how to talk to boys. All you have to do is just…
Blank. My mind went completely blank.
I had forgotten how to talk to the people who used to be my best friends.
This happened around the time I realized I was genderqueer. When I realized that he/him and they/them pronouns fit me the best. When I realized that my gender identity was exactly like the secret agent persona I adopted when I was younger: not masculine enough to completely identify as a man, but masculine enough to where I could be called a man and feel comfortable.
As I transitioned, I began to relearn how to talk to guys (in a non-romantic setting, without the help of an article from Seventeen), but it still feels intimidating sometimes. Going to a boarding school hasn’t made things easy.
My closest friends are boarders, and every time I want to hang out with them I have to go to one of two heavily gendered dorms. There was a year when the school encouraged us to call them “Hess” and “Goodrich” as opposed to the “girls’ dorm” and the “boys’ dorm” respectively, but it hasn’t worked out very well. Even I slip up sometimes.
I still don’t know what the rules are for me in the dorms. Am I allowed to go into a dorm room in Hess and be able to close the door behind me? What about Goodrich? Am I allowed to be in Hess Commons unattended? The strong gender division of the dorms gives me an overwhelming amount of anxiety. The boys’ side and the girls’ side of the playground have returned, and it’s even more of a nightmare than before. Once again I am standing in the middle alone. I have no idea where to go, and no one knows where to put me.
My friends and I have talked about who I would room with if I were a boarder. In an ideal situation, I would want to be in a suite with two of my close friends who are cisgender (straight) girls and another one of my close friends who is a cisgender (gay) guy so there would be an even number of girls and guys in the room. If I couldn’t have this arrangement, I would just live in a single. Rooming with only guys would make me feel uncomfortable, rooming with only girls would make me feel dysphoric, and rooming with only trans people would make it feel too much like an obligatory set-up that could potentially out people.
Words can’t describe how happy I would be if we had gender-neutral housing at Springs. As a trans person, it would make my life so much easier. Even if we don’t make the entirety of Goodrich and Hess gender-neutral, it would help if there were an option for parents to sign a form and give their child permission to be in a gender-neutral dorm room.
I have learned many practical life skills while at Springs, but it’s a shame that I haven’t officially learned one of the most important ones: how to interact with all individuals on a human level despite the differences we may have.