Imagining herself a girl, forced to be a boy

A fortnight ago my inner girl told me that she is a girl. It was an important revelation. Until then, I always called her "my child" so as not to assign her a specific gender, but from then on I call her "my girl", or, in German, "mein Mädchen", and the truth is that she smiles from ear to ear when I do it. In general, since she has told me that she is a girl, and since I have told her that this is fine, and that I love her all the same, she seems to have more energy and a better mood. She plays more, she's happier, and she really enjoys watching episodes of Pipi Longstocking with me. Especially in the third episode, when Pipí defends a boy who is being bullied by six other boys, my girl was very happy, and she imagined that Pipí would have defended her too.

But it's not all happiness, neither for my girl, nor for me. With this new revelation I have to rewrite my gender history again, and this is a painful process. I ask myself, at what point did I forget that I felt like a girl, at what point did I stop feeling like a girl - another thing I stopped feeling - and accept that I was a boy? And my girl also continues to feel the pain of not being able to live who she was, the pain of having to hide her identity and live as a boy.

One day my girl drew herself as a boy, in my parents' hands, crying, and imagining that she had killed her parents so that she could happily be a girl, with braids like Pipi. These are the days when my girl cries when I connect with her, although she still smiles from ear to ear when I call her "mein Mädchen" ("my girl"). These are the moments when she feels very lonely, not understood and not loved. These are the moments when I also feel this pain of my girl, and I get sad and often have to cry as well.

Since yesterday afternoon my girl is again suffering from this pain, and she has drawn herself with her parents cutting off her braids, in a boy's underwear and with her red dress that she loves so much thrown away. And again she cries, and I cry too.

For me, it is still a very painful process to accept that I felt like a girl, but that I was never able to express it, live it or talk about it. It is a very open wound at the moment, which is added to many others. And many questions come to me about how I had lived through it for so many years. I was a girl. And, in my adolescence, was I a girl? Or had I already buried these feelings, and accepted that I was a boy? I don't know.

However, with all this, I am not rethinking my current identity, which is still genderqueer, or, non-binary. Although I was a girl in my childhood, and I don't know for how long, this does not mean that I am now a woman, having discovered my identity as a girl. I am non-binary. I am genderqueer. And, with all my struggles with and against my imposed masculinity it makes a lot of sense to break out of gender binarism, to free myself from this oppression. At the same time, it is perhaps not surprising that my gender expression has moved closer to what is socially called feminine, and that I have "achieved" a certain cis-passing as a woman without wanting to. But this is another matter.