Since childhood, I felt like a boy, but everyone around me used to think that I was a ‘tomboy’. Whenever they treated me like a girl, I despised it. I used to wear my dad’s shirt, trousers, shoes, tie, his watch around my wrist and pretended in front of the mirror that I was going to the office. But things started changing as soon as puberty hit me at the age of thirteen.
I was expecting changes in my body that would make me look more like a man, but I was turning into a female. I fell into depression when I got my first period; I thought that I’d die—because the discomfort (i.e., gender dysphoria) was too much for me to handle. Even though I felt like a boy, I never had any feelings for girls. I loved men, and I still do.
I also liked to dress up and apply makeup, but whenever I did that, I felt more like a man. A feminine man basically. As I grew up, my dysphoria grew with me, and I never had a chance to express my identity due to my conservative household. At the age of 18, I had a mental breakdown, followed by a wave of dysphoria and decided to be and accept myself as a trans man. But being myself wasn’t that easy, whenever I tried to join the trans men’s community, they harassed me based on my sexual orientation, and would call me a girl and say that I was faking it (i.e., I’m not a trans man).
Those two years were challenging for me; I doubted my identity at that time, and on top of it, getting discriminated due to my sexual orientation. I was harassed to such an extent that I pretended to date girls to whom I wasn’t attracted to in any way—just so that everyone could accept me as a man.
It took me years to accept myself, and finally, on 3rd June 2020 (Pride Month), I officially came out as gay on Instagram. I still am getting heavily discriminated on the basis of my sexuality and my feminity. But it doesn’t matter anymore since I know I’m a man, and I’m extremely proud of it. All I wanna say is that men are men regardless of their sexuality and being effeminate. Feminity is beyond the gender binary. Never forget to be yourself!