a fact about me is that i was an early bloomer who hit puberty in elementary school and was immediately, obnoxiously horny in ways that were uncomfortable for everyone because no one is prepared for an elementary schooler with b cups and a deep fascination with movies where people get tied up. another fact is that because i was considered smart for my age in the ways that mattered, i just accepted all this as a single package, the many ways that i was not really a child the way other children were children but was instead a miniature adult. i was technically a child, but not really, as far as i was concerned. it also did not occur to me until around high school that i was fat, because i instead considered myself to be sturdy, to be buff, to be built like a tank.
so somewhere around middle school i am noticing the ways in which i am Not Like Other Girls, the ways in which i am not what society says a girl is and the ways that things marketed to girls do not appeal to me. i don't know how other girls dealt with this, but i very rationally decided that i was only technically a girl, in the way that i was only technically a child. so i looked at the things that did appeal to me, and that i did enjoy, and reverse engineered my demographic to decide that on a practical and functional level i was a middle-aged man. i had also gotten really hornily into wolverine because of the first x-men movie, and ended up reading a lot of comics, so as you can imagine the comic book version of wolverine who is short and built like a tank and older than he looks despite being for all intents and purposes a middle aged man really had some appeal to me.
there are idiots who say shit about how tomboys would be considered trans these days or whatever, but i can assure you that was not what was happening here. by middle school i already had to special order bras and i was fine with that because of the many weird fetishes i was developing, none of which can be blamed on the internet because i hadn't found that shit yet and also to this day you would have a hard time finding anything similar to the things i wrote in my secret notebook and immediately destroyed. the fact that i was technically a girl was vital to all this. media where there was a big reveal that some cool dude had been a hot chick the whole time was my shit. weird feral beast people who turned out to be hot women once they took a bath? fuck yes. i would never have cut my hair because that would have ruined my chances to take off a helmet and reveal that i had girl hair. at no point did i think i was anything but a girl, it was just that i was functionally a middle-aged man, who was a girl.
what this means is that i still liked all the things i already liked, such as leather jackets and comic books and anime and old stand-up comedy, but i also did extensive research on the other things i felt i should like according to the demographic i had assigned myself. i watched vh1's 'i love the 70s' with the air of someone trying to hide their amnesia, even though my parents were children in the 70s. i got into the beatles. i tried to get into cars for a while before accepting that i only liked the vintage car aesthetic and couldn't be fucked to know actual car facts. i wore nothing but cargo shorts and aloha shirts for a while, which didn't really stand out that much because it was middle school. i bought a fedora and became a libertarian atheist. i made plans to buy a motorcycle (i could not ride a bike).
i gave up on it after a while because quite frankly my titty situation meant there was never really going to be a big reveal that i'd been a girl the whole time. it was pretty obvious even with the cargo shorts. also the older of a teen i was, the more likely it felt that i could maybe get laid, except i could tell that was never going to happen as long as i kept wearing cargo shorts. it took longer to give up the fedora because it was leather and i wore it with my leather jacket and fingerless gloves, which i convinced myself worked a lot better after i'd gone full high school goth. i lived in the desert so you can imagine how well that worked out for me, smell-wise.
anyway that's how my female socialization went, i don't think it was particularly successful tbqh
