Joyce's Story

Hi, my name is Joyce and I'm writing this for someone's site, and this is my history and things.

The childhood years:

I've always known my traits I just didn't know that they were female traits.  Things weren't genderized in our house so I wasn't told 'boys don't do that' or 'that's what girls do'.  I was taught by my mother that women could do anything a man could do and she told me about what she'd done for war work in the factories (W.W.II).

I knew in the early years that who I was wasn't accepted by others.  Either they could not put their finger on it in the early years, or else it wasn't developed enough in the early years to stand out as female.  How I was raised however did not X out me trying things and for some reason it seemed as if I gravitated towards some of the feminine things. Some of those I was allowed to do so I never thought of them as being wrong; such as wearing lilac perfume or women's pins for instance.

I don't remember having trouble with others until I started school. Before then I jumped rope with the girls (multi person type) just to do something with someone.  When I started school, I wasn't allowed to do that there, although I was allowed to do it back at home again.  I'd basically do whatever someone was doing in order to be with others, but there were things that I didn't understand so I gravitated away from those.

Some of the toys I was given were toys that would usually be given to a girl, but I didn't know that.  This was from the time I was born into later.  Some of them appear in pictures we had which apparently some of the relatives never saw.  I am wondering now if those relatives ever saw any of those home movies.  The stuff's all there, down to the tall Raggedy Ann doll sitting on a little kids chair (I think it was as tall as I was). But other then that and I never mentioned it.  I watched them like they were somebody else.   We had a black and white TV and those movies were in color so they were like a travelogue movie to me.  However, when I did family photos for my web site, I cropped some of the still pictures because I didn't want to show the dolls that were in the picture.  I was only putting mine on the web site because they'd asked me to and I could see no reason for assassinating my character at the same time so I cropped those.  By then I knew that most boys hadn't had dolls so I didn't want to mention it had ever been.  Either the relatives who saw those online hadn't seen the entire picture before to know what I'd cropped out, or else they'd seen them and didn't remember the rest of it was there.  It would've been SO easy to have just left the picture like it was, but I cropped them to cut out the background.

I was surprised once when I went to a guy friends house across the street and they didn't have any dolls.  My mother later told me if I went to someone's house and saw that they didn't have what I had to never say anything about it because maybe their parents didn't have enough money to buy them things and if I mentioned something like that it'd make them feel bad, so that's why I never mentioned anything like that again.  It wasn't until I was in some year of grade school before I found out that boys didn't usually have dolls because they didn't want them.  Kids will play with whatever you give them but eventually they will gravitate towards a certain type of toy, and stay there.

I tended to like the make believe toys better then the ones that really did something, because you could make believe it to do anything you wanted it to do.  Which reminds me, I've heard that the best toy a kid can have is a cardboard box, a way to cut holes in it, and something to draw on it with. Then they can make believe it to be anything they want it to be.

I think my dad could never understand why I'd want to make believe that I was in

a little car when I could be driving a real little car but there was a difference.  The real little car was something my dad made but I was afraid I'd damage it.  And I couldn't start it myself if it stopped.  The make believe box was mine, and I didn't have to worry about damaging it, and I didn't have to 'look where I was going' because it didn't actually go anyplace, and others could 'ride' with me cause it didn't matter.  Had the little car actually been an electric golf cart I might have used it more, but it had a 7-1/2 Hp spark plug engine in it and a gear shift, so it wasn't really a safe thing to drive around.  Not as safe as an electric would've been.  It could go where an electric wouldn't have, therefore my dad wanted me to drive it there, so I did, but I'd never go up those inclines when he wasn't telling me to do it.  Sometimes he'd want me to drive him around in it, to check out new places for me to go I guess since he found out I wouldn't go but on those paths he'd already told me was good to go on.  Maybe that came about when Coy and I was going up to Kenny's house up the hill, and it slid off the steep road and we couldn't get it back on.  My dad was mad about that so maybe after that I only went on what he pointed out to me as okay to drive on.  I also think he expected me to know how to 'do things' with cars that I would never have known at that age (nine).  I needed to develop some logic before I could know things like that and I didn't have much at that age.  My mother told me he'd tried to teach her how to drive once, but expected her to know things she couldn't have known so it didn't work for her either.  When I went to drivers school years later, I encouraged her to take it too and so she learned how to drive for the first time in her life at the age of 58.  And did very good with it too.  Eventually she would get home from the Laundromat quicker than I did.  She drove the speed of the person in front of her, and I drove a bit under the speed limit.  I'm just one of those people who'd make a better what- not then a what-not duster, that's all.  I just knew that if someone came down that road and ran the stop sign, I'd better be going slow before I got to it cause you couldn't see anyone coming down that road until you got to it.  And then that street up there had a stop sign so I wanted to make sure there was no one  coming before I crossed it.  And then that street had lots of side streets coming into it and I knew how people liked to run stop signs around here so I'd be going slow down it just in case someone did that.  I think my mother just drove like anyone else, and I don't think she worried about all of that, and she didn't have any trouble with it either.  Course that was more modern times and I was supposed to be doing childhood stuff here.

Back to childhood, to me a make-believe car was safer and that's why I'd opt for that instead.  It makes sense to me but I'm not sure everyone would see it in the same way.  However, I'm not talking to the public here, I'm talking to maybe others who've been in the same place.  You're dad wanted you to do things you didn't really want to but you did them to please him, but given a choice you'd have done entirely different things.  The car was fine, and eventually I got into running it faster, but unless I was being taken someplace in the family car, I was either on foot, in a wagon, or on a bicycle so I wasn't much used to traveling fast on my own.  So seeing me drive around in the little car might be like seeing someone unsure of themselves drive anything else.  It had power, I knew that, and it could get into trouble (get stuck someplace) if you didn't watch it.  On the other hand, a make believe car didn't do anything, so that's why I still liked that sometimes, even with having a real little car.

So my childhood had a good deal of gender mixing in it.  I had dolls and other things and one thing I wanted was a little playhouse (it turned out to be vinyl for use over a card table) but me and my little girlfriend played in it when we were the age that two could get under a card table and have room left to move around.  And I always liked doll houses for some reason.  So we played dolls together just as if I was one of them and I never knew when I was a kid that boys weren't supposed to like to play dolls.  I found that out years later.  There were a lot of those kinds of things.  I also remember when I was 'head high to a table top' that I wanted to grow up to be a fairy.  I know, strange thought I suppose.  However, it was another thing to never mention after I heard an alternate meaning for the word "fairy".  My thoughts on some of my things back then is that taken separately, each might not mean anything, but taken together, they all point in a certain direction, so you either ignore your past or you look into it.  When I found out some of those things were what boys would've been made fun of for having, I never mentioned those again.

When I was pre-school I only remember dressing once.  My mother had an old dress she'd put on me when I was bad and since kids think universally, I thought that everyone who was bad would have to wear such an awful thing therefore I didn't ever want to go outside in it.  It was too big and too old fashioned looking for me to want to wear it.  I think it was actually for someone teen sized.  I think it was her way of making me stay inside the house.   I did stay inside but not because it was a dress, but because I thought that everyone who was bad would be made to do that, therefore it'd be like appearing with a dunces cap on, so of course I didn't want anyone to see me in that.  Besides which, it wasn't anything that anyone would want to be caught dead in (regardless of your gender).  It was not cute like a kids dress should be; it was long and made of a dark blue plaid and it was reminded me of a dress from a former decade, and I was seeing it in the 50's.  Nothing my mother wore was THAT ugly.  I'd rather wear a smart looking pair of pants than an ugly dress or a dress that's wrong for the weather.  For here we'd need a dress with lead weights in the hem but knowing this wind, it'd probably raise the hem up anyway, and slam the weights into my head and knock me out with them.  So when the wind blows here, I don't wear a dress here, and the wind blows here 95% of the time.  I'd be nice to live someplace where the wind was normal.  Most anyplace is normal.  If your town doesn't have street signs with the lettering sand blasted off of them, then you probably have normal wind.

Anyway, back to childhood and THAT dress, one day when I went to my girlfriends house (same age as I was I think) she had a new little playhouse in her back yard that I think her dad made it for her, and her friends were there and they said that only girls could go into it.  So I went home, found that old dress, put it on and put on some lipstick (which is all my mother had; she didn't wear any makeup but lipstick) and went back as "grandma" so I could play in the little house too.  As to why I choose the word "grandma" I think that reflected upon what I thought the dress made me look like since it was very old fashioned for that year. Anyway, I heard my mother calling me so I had to go back home, and she didn't like my 'attire' so I had to change back and take off the lipstick and then I could go back, and I did, and I went back as 'grandpa' that time and told them that

"grandma' wasn't feeling good".  I did not get punished for dressing up as 'grandma', I just got told that my dad would've not liked to have seen that cause there was one time when he'd dressed up like a girl for a Halloween party and almost got 'taken' by someone who thought he was real, so that's the reason she told me that he wouldn't have wanted to see that, so I didn't do that again for that reason alone.  As you can see, at an early age I was interested in pleasing others which I have since found out is an unusual trait for boys.  However, it is not an unusual trait for girls.  When you put a girl into the role of a boy and tell her she must live like them for awhile, she could do it but she wouldn't enjoy it.  Seen as a male, I was doomed from the beginning since I did not think or react like a boy

should have, and so I was seen as strange and different by others.  However, when I was younger at least, I was accepted by the girls as normal, until everyone got older and then I wasn't accepted by anybody, until I began to use 'the mask' but that comes later, and that wasn't real acceptance anyway.  Actually, the way I look at acceptance is that I am just accepted for RIGHT now.  Sure enough, I go to talking along and mentioned that I did yarn crafts, and I'd be out of THAT circle as 'a pansy' or something.  Or else I'd be in a 'politically correct' group and I'd mention that I was a life member of the NRA, and they'd throw me out of that.  One group I was in was opposed to Govt. workers, and that's what I did for a living, so I dropped out of that before I got thrown out.  So in later years I took to stating everything that ever was just to PRE-throw myself out, so I wouldn't think that I'd found acceptance only to find that one of my things in the past would change their opinions on me and get me thrown out later.  However, for some reason, after I transitioned it seemed to be different.  It was like no matter WHAT I'd done in my past or WHERE I'd been, it was all fine.  So I went to a local meeting where there was known to be war opposers (like who'd be for a war anyway, right) and brought yellow ribbon if anyone wanted any.  That was just to wish our troops back home safe, probably patterned after the old song, "Tie a yellow ribbon".  Anyway, I am off track again.

Before I was in third grade, for some reason I'd want to put a shirt around my waist and tie the arms in back like an apron but I've never figured out why I wanted to do that; I just remember doing it, so I don't know if that constitutes as a form of dressing or not.  I did it because then what I saw, looked right and that's all I know about it. I just know that after that one time, I didn't put on that grandma dress again, and it was also banished as a punishment so I suppose it went by the way of the winds, figuratively speaking.

Early Teens:

The next time I remember dressing was when I was age 11.  We were living in an eight foot wide by thirty foot long trailer and this particular one had a room over a room at the end.  Two steps to the right down into my room, and then four or five steps to the left up to my parents room, so my parents mattress was on a raised up piece that was actually the ceiling of my room, and the two low things over my bed and on the other side of my room were the bottom of the walk-ways around my parents bed upstairs.  If you went upstairs and went around the bed to the other side, just beyond the head of the bed was a door (you'd be standing up at that point) and it went into a little storage compartment with the ceiling of it even with the ceiling in the bedroom but it was only about two feet high in there, and that's where my parents had boxes of things stored.  So one day when I had nothing to do (lots of days like that around there because no kids to play with) I discovered some fem wear in there and that's what I began wearing.  I took it with me into the woods (we lived at the edge of the woods) and put it on out there.  I have no idea why I did that, just that I did it.  To me it was interesting.  Other than that and I wouldn't know why.

After my dad died when I was 13, my dad's second cousin Mildred came out to see us and she had nail polish with her so I tried some of it on my toenails.  My mother saw it later and scolded me about it; not because I'd used it but because I'd used something that wasn't mine to use.  Later on, (different month) when my mother and I got a chance to go into town (we lived in the country) with a friend, we ended up at a second hand store and I saw a pair of women's green pants that I wanted, and my mother bought them for me, and I ended up wearing them all over the place out there in the country.  I knew they were women's pants because they zipped up in the back.  Anyway, that was okay with her.  My grandma eventually came out there and asked my mother to come and live with her, so eventually I was sent on ahead (2000 miles alone on a train when I was 13) and lived at my grandma's house until my mother got the little trailer and some other things sold.  My red books didn't make it there.  I think she sold them with the other stuff she sold.  I would've liked to have kept those even if they were kid books.  Some of my stuff did make it through though and I still have those things.  Even if I don't read a book I'd like to have kept it.  I ended up having my Electricity book and some other kid-orientated books from when I was little, as well as my etch-a-sketch from when I was eight.  I finally gave that to the Goodwill one time when I was going through some things here, but I was over the age of 20 by that time.  I kept my old books that weren't sold though.  I doubt they'd be collectors items though, cause they've been 'well read'.  In other words they have wear and tear on them.  Collectors items have to be in 'pristine' shape and I don't think I have anything in pristine shape.  It's in one piece, and I tried to take as good of care of it as I could, but they weren't made to last forever.  The old fan may have been.  My parents bought it when I was eight and I still have it and I still use it.

Anyway, when my mother arrived at my grandma's I remember having trouble with others with the green pants.  Either I'd had them before she came out or else she brought them with her when she came, but I don't remember anything about them until she was there so I think she must've brought them with her.  All I remember is that I went to wearing them around there and my relatives went off the deep end with telling me to not wear them.  I couldn't' figure out why, but they had 'other strange ideas' about things so I figured that was just another strange idea. I had no idea why there'd be anything wrong with them over anything else but for some reason there was, so that was my first taste of what I wanted to wear as having opposition to it.  So I couldn't wear them and that was that.  All that I was told by my mother was that it was "not a good idea" and it was never explained as to why.  The only way I could wear anything fem around there, was to go past an second hand store in that town, and that's where I found a nifty green and brown dress suit, which reminded me of Annie Oakly when I had it on. But I could never buy it cause I never had that much money.  It was C&W style if you wonder what I am meaning.  I've seemed to like that style for some reason.  This notion of 'slim and sleek' dress lines isn't "me" at all, but show me something C&W style, and I'll probably like it just fine.  Six shooters with white handles would top it off but I'd not be looking to go that far with it.  This outfit included the shirt, the skirt and the vest.  Yes, it had a vest with pointy bottoms if you've seen those.  I was there more than once so I remember it rather well.

Back to the green pants, I didn't know the why of that until I began to know more about 'the world' and how things usually worked in it, and then I knew why.  When I knew how things usually worked, I wondered how I could have done ANY of 'those things' back then in the apparently 'scatter brained' way I did them in.  In other words, when I was dressing or wearing stuff, or trying it on in a second hand store, it was as if I was the only person in the store, and I'd think nothing of coming out of the little dressing room to look at myself in the only full length mirror in the place.

However, by the time I knew all of that, I was here, and learning how to do embroidery from my mother.  And later I'd go to Penneys or Rhodes and get a yarn picture kit to make.  To me, the two were totally unrelated. One was something to wear, and the other was something to do for a hobby, so I never saw a relationship between the two.  There actually isn't but like I said before, taken separately each might not mean anything, but taken together, they point a certain direction.  By the time I was doing yarn pictures I don't think I bought dresses at the 2nd hand store anymore, if indeed it was still there.  When they closed it down, they turned that building into a back door theater, which is a place you couldn't pay me to go inside of.  None of 'em, anywhere.

Basically put, I liked the safe things, and I didn't like anything that wasn't safe.

Supposedly, it is in a child's hard-wired circuitry for boys to like things where they can exhibit power, and where they take risks.  However, it seems that the hard-wired circuitry of girls is to be more humanitarian and not liking to take risks.  This is young kids by default, not older kids.  After the young kid stage, they can go any direction they want to, but I am meaning by default from what I've SEEN.  The books tell it that way too, so I tend to believe them.  Once someone has gotten close to teenage, things may tend to 'flatten out' with such distinctions.

I see nothing wrong with either way, unless it is expected for all males to be like the boy-trend and unless it is expected for all females to be like the girl-trend.  However, many of the expectations I have seen placed on either the male or the female population, do NOT seem to me to be ANYTHING like what I have actually seen; they seem more to be what one would imagine GIRLS AND BOYS to be like.  In other words, those expectations sound to me like what one would expect of KIDS, rather than adults.  So I rated some of those expectations as if they had been uttered by fools, and totally ignored them and went my own way.  Where nobody could see me of course.  If others could see me, I 'played the game' 'to keep the buggers off'.

I am not sure that those who find that who they are is the gender opposite of what they've been told their sex is, would be okay in a society which did NOT stress gender- aligning.  That is because one 'male trend' is to 'meet you and up you one' so no matter how 'flat' the playing field was to begin with, there'd be one male who'd 'take charge' and then another who'd be seeking to 'one up him' and take charge himself.  As far as I can tell, that is a survival instinct built into the male brain. Unfortunately, it is ALSO a survival instinct that I have learned, and I learned it just well enough to make it work, however I didn't do it with working malice, however in the days of the kings, it WAS done with malice. Because of that trait is why someone would endeavor to take over a land and run it as their king, and why another would endeavor to take it over from him, and set them self up as the new king. That's the same thing; no different at all.  It's a "see you and raise you one" kind of thing, just before the new king slew the old king in battle.  Although what I learned wasn't on that scale, it's been with us forever and it's easy to see anytime you see two kids trying to 'one up' each other.  I never had any desire to go that way, I just found that I had to in order to 'keep the buggers off', and it worked.  It kept the buggers off.

When we were living here, a new place and no relatives about, I thought that I should try to make a good go of it, and when things started to look like they might run the way they had other places, I decided to TRY to fit-in.  The only way I could imagine how to do that was to copy others who were around me as so to seem like one of them, which is fine in a way but it's not fine Christian wise if you get my meaning.  So I eventually learned to copy others to fit-in.

See, I was born Intersexed, which used to be called Hermaphrodite but they didn't like the H word because it conjured up strange ideas of a sexual half-and-half being, so they came up with the word Intersexed instead.  Whatever we have or don't have, it isn't half-and-half the way the other word makes it sound.

However, that 'meet you and raise you one' attitude may be my ONLY male trait, if indeed it is a REAL trait.  I developed it for survival but since it did not exist before I was 15, I wonder if it's real at all.  I also wonder if because I am not trying to live as a male now, if that will now fade away?  It was a part of my survival, and anytime I noticed anyone who seemed as if they were trying to 'take me over' (in other words, unload their 'I'm better than you' onto me), I'd meet them and raise them one, and scare the everlivin (whatever) out of them in the process because to me that kind of an attitude on their part, was the kind of attitude to crush, and somehow it worked.  However, those were the teenage years when it was uncustomary for anyone to carry any kind of a weapon.  They might have but I hardly ever saw one. I'd say that my teenage days here would've be aliken to someone age seven to ten  nowadays.  Whatever you'd not expect a seven to ten year old to have, we didn't have either.  If I was the same person coming here for the first time, and back in the teen years again, I think I'd just see if I could hitch a ride back to Illinois; I wouldn't even bother messing with 'this stuff' out here.  Most of it is so trivial that I just can't understand why everyone gets so worried over it.  Someone is a young teen with a car, and they cruise the streets beating their radio, and are offended if someone turns them in for breaking the noise ordinance.  Back east, nobody could play anything that loud, anytime, ever.  It wasn't allowed to do even ONCE, and here these people are doing it all night long and then get all bent out of shape because the new noise ordinance prohibits them from doing it at night.  Gee, what are the on about anyway?  They can distribute the peace all day long they just can't do it at night.  And everyone wonders why I want OUT of this nut hole?

People were better monitored back there therefore it seemed to me to be a more logical place to live.  However, that was a different place from where I'd had trouble with the green pants at.  Relatives there too but I didn't live there until later.

If I was going to 'see you and raise you one' the same way today living as a teen, I'd need a rocket launcher I think.  Back then all I needed was my anger at the suggestion that someone was going to 'take me over', and my looks.  These days I don't think it would work.  However, after I was in my mid-20's I didn't have to use that survival thing very much because by then I didn't look like a teen anymore.  In the adult world, you had all kinds of people from all kinds of places and backgrounds, and they were all ages.  As a teen, we were all close to one another in ages and we all lived in the same neighborhood, and our backgrounds weren't all the different (for those who'd lived there awhile that is).  So whatever you did out of school had to agree with your image in school, so whenever I was out of the house, I used the survival thing.  When I say "high school" it doesn't reflect anything on the school I went to, since I thought it was the BEST school I'd ever went to and we'd moved around a lot, about 15 times by the time I was 15, so I'd been to a bunch of different schools.  However, when I say "high school" I am referring to an age; so you know what was going on at the time.

That doesn't mean I dropped the survival thing entirely after high school though.  There was another thing that I kept that I shouldn't have kept, and it was what I've called 'the mask'.  The best description of it is (and I keep trying to get the best description so this is another new one), 'a chameleon mindset'.  When I came into the presence of a group, the idea was to 'look like them' enough that they wouldn't know that I was different and that's where the chameleon part came in at.  I first did it on purpose but after a time, it worked so well that it became a way of life.  It would be aliken to a con man in a way, except in my case I thought of it as being "as crafty as a serpent but as guiltless as a dove" since it wasn't there for any 'con' reason.  I just used it to join in with a group so I wouldn't stand out as 'different', that's all.  I'd just hang back (like someone standing in a doorway) and 'gauge' them, until I got 'the feel' of each person and then I'd try to emulate bits of those personalities when I joined in with the group.  It'd never be natural, however if the group was the lunch room crowd at a job, and you didn't want to be branded as 'a loner' and you were there in 'male mode', it was useful for that.

However, when I was at a job that had lots of women at it, I usually sat with the girls, however, I could never figure out someone eating spaghetti and talking about their period at the same time.  But that was someone down the table.  I usually sat at the other end of the table and ate with Tina.  I liked Tina cause she was outspoken like I'd liked to have been.  However, every time I had tried my hand at being outspoken, it was beat down by someone so that's why I never went that direction.  If you are 'in the game' to please others, you'll never be outspoken.  That's just the way it works.  If you are 'in the game' for yourself, I don't know, since I've never tried that yet and here I am nearly age fifty.  For those who have been beat down a lot, they tend to NOT be outspoken and they tend to choose '2nd fiddle' on purpose just so they WON'T be beat down for trying for 1st fiddle.  To them, that is their way of living in peace with others; to never try for whatever anyone else wants, then they don't have to fight for that position.  There is a television preacher by the name of Joyce Meyer and she tells her audience that that way of being is like having more wish bone then back bone.  I know it's true but I can't change that and be at peace with others any more then I can change whether the wind blows or not.

I didn't have to use anything like that there, or at the next job.  In fact, I didn't have to use anything like that again until I was working with basically young people (teens and  young adults) in a temp job.  I took it as a temp job anyway.  Even after I'd been there for nine years I still called it a temp job.  When I was working there I had to deliver in my neighborhood area and beyond.  As far as I knew, my neighborhood was all right but it was the 'beyond' area that wasn't.  It reminded me of the very things I had first developed 'the mask' for therefore I eventually began to use it again.  That 'temp' job is a job I wish I'd never seen now since it was a waste of time and I almost went broke working there because of it's structure.  I believe it was a job set up for high turnover because they didn't do raises on that frequent of a basis so I'd never look at anything like it again for making a living.  It's a teens job, not an adults job.  That's all I can say about it.  However, I had to use the mask again while working for it just because of the area I had to deliver in.  When I ended up inside instead of delivering (had to do with a health reason) I found that much more preferable because I did not have to use much of a mask.  I still used one, but not much of one.  One day I tried an experiment and dropped the mask entirely.  Everyone began to ask me if I was gay and I couldn't figure out why.  I was the same person I'd ever been, I just wasn't 'playing the game' of fitting in.

Usually all the things I had to do EXTRA just to fit into a 'male role' wore pretty thin on me after awhile but I kept on doing them because I didn't know what else to do.  I did not know that I was any different than anyone else; I just thought that depending on what part of the country I was in at the time would determine if I was seen as different or not.  Apparently that is not true, for I had trouble here when seen in 'male mode' UNLESS I used the chameleon mindset, yet AFTER I transitioned I've NEVER had to use it again, AND I do just fine without it.  So that's why I transitioned when I did, so I would NOT have to use the mask and STILL get along okay.  Apparently who I am minus the mask, looks to others as female even though to me it just looks like the me that's always been.  I do not recognize it as female; I just recognize it as me.  It's taken me some research to find out that someone who is like I am, is the essence of female.  Minus that one trait that I think is now fading away.

Hugs,

Joy

joy_53@juno.com