Why did I start hating being a man in the first place?

A while ago I made a post entitled Why did I want to be a girl in the first place? where I attempted to explore some of the possible causes for my female mental gender identity.  I've been thinking a lot about what my counselor has been saying.  She keeps saying that she sees that somehow I've associated female things as being good and male things as being bad, and she wants to track down why I associate maleness with being bad.  That never really seemed to match up to me even though I had some poor examples of maleness in my life that would seem to justify my hating my maleness with not wanting to grow up to be like them.

Recently, I've realized how to put together the right order of how these things have played out in my mind.  Before it was not clear, but it is very clear now.  My desire to be female has nothing to do with me hating being a man.  My transgender characteristics did not come as a consequence of me hating my maleness, but my hating my maleness came as a consequence of my transgender issues.

It's funny, but I've always known this, but I just wasn't able to accept it before--I wasn't able to accept me before.  I was always searching for a way to fix myself.  I kept believing that my being trans was because there was something wrong with me, now I realize that it's the exact opposite, the things that were wrong with me were a result of me being trans.

I've always felt uncomfortable with being a boy in some way or another, but I didn't hate it (dislike things about it yes, but hate no) until I started into my teenage years--in fact I think I even liked some things about it before my teenage years.

So what lead to me hating being male?  Who I was lead to it--nearly every bit of who I was and who I am.

I don't mean to sound conceited, but I was a really cute little boy and my mom dressed me up in really cute clothes.  My cuteness however did not match the stereotypical standard for male cuteness and older kids at school would ask me in a mocking tone "Are you a boy or a girl?"

At an early age I realized that the things I loved to do were 'girl' things.  Things 'girls do' not things 'boys do.'  I couldn't were dresses or dress pretty at all because I wasn't a girl.  I loved to play with Barbie dolls with my friends that were girls, but when people found out they made fun of me because 'girls like to play with Barbies.'

I had a beautiful voice when I was a kid and I loved to sing, but people would make fun of me (even my own brothers) and say "you sound like a girl!" 

People would see my fingernails and say, "You have girl fingernails!"  I remember getting so upset that people kept telling me that that I clipped them so short my finger tips bled... but it didn't matter how short I clipped them they still told me I had "girl fingernails."

People often told me that if I had long hair I would look like a girl.  I remember when my mother and sister were looking through an old photo album they stumbled across a picture of my mother when she was about 12 (the same age I was at the time).  I sister pushed my bangs back out of my face and said, "You look exactly like her" and I did.

My childhood friends were mostly girls, but they abandoned me because I wasn't a girl (yeah, one of them even told me that directly after she got a new friend that was a girl) and I guess at that age girls played with girls and boys played with boys.... I didn't much like playing with most boys and I didn't much like how or what most boys wanted to play, but I was forced to either play with them or have no friends.

All my life people have told me that I have "girl hands" people have told me that I was skinny "like a girl."  That I threw "like a girl" that I talked, looked at my fingernails, played sports, etc. "like a girl." or "You have girl eyelashes" or "You have girl eyes."

Nearly every time people said 'boys are like this girls are like that' the boy stereotype was so far from the truth if applied to me but the girl stereotype was right on.

My previous post was completely off target--I didn't want to be a girl!  I wanted to be me, but no one would let me be me because I wasn't a girl!  I couldn't be myself because I was a boy.

I hated it when people told me "you do [this or that] like a girl" or "boys don't do [this or that thing you want to do] only girls do that" or 'you shouldn't look like the way you do because only girls look like that' or 'you shouldn't talk the way you do because only girls talk like that' or 'you shouldn't eat so politely like you do because girls eat like that', and I couldn't even cry or express my feelings because even doing so meant that I cried 'like a girl' and the list goes on!  People even made fun of the way I used the toilet... I didn't know you could pee in a urinal wrong, but people even made fun of me for that!  I eventually abandoned using urinals whenever a stall was available because I became way to self conscious to pee where anyone could see me doing it... yeah and people even made fun of me for that.   I didn't want to be a girl I just wanted to be me!  I JUST WANTED TO BE MYSELF!

But I learned to hate myself.  I didn't want people to think that I was 'like a girl' so I studied up and did everything I could do to 'pass' as a guy.  Not only did I clip my fingernails so short my fingers bled, I cut my hair really short, I wore baggy clothes (even though I've always hated baggy clothes), even before my voice changed I started speaking in an unnaturally low voice and I mumbled so people wouldn't say I sounded like a girl anymore.  Every time I heard someone say 'girls do this thing like that and boys do this things like this.' I would consciously try to do the thing in the 'boy' way.

I remember I started walking kind of like a duck waddling back and forth with my feet out turned because I was afraid people would say I walked like a girl.  I remember changing things as stupid as how I looked at my fingernails.  I even pretended to like hard rock music for a while because I was sick of my friends making fun of the 'girly' music I liked to listen to.

I remember one time at a church service project one of the kids in my church was talking with some other boys about whether any of us would make good looking girls.  He went through each of them and concluded that they would all be ugly girls then last of all he said that I would make a good looking girl, but my voice was all wrong (this was both after my voice changed and after I decided to speak in a very unnaturally low tone).

I hated the fact that I couldn't be me without being made fun of because I was a boy, but if I was a girl I could be everything I wanted to be, I could be everything I was, I could do everything I liked to do, and I could even be how I looked (post puberty anyway) without anyone thinking twice about it.

I started to hate being a man because in my mind being a man meant I had to strip myself of all my feminine qualities, but without these qualities I was left to be an empty shell.  I felt like I had to kill the 'girl inside me' and replace her with a 'man' that was how a 'man should be' but I never really had a good idea of what a 'man should be' anyway.  So I did my best to construct a fake person--a 'manly' person and I found the few things that were manly that I liked enough to pretend that they were an integral part of my life and I made them my life--computers, electronics, and science.

How could I love being something I wasn't?  I wasn't 'a man' by societies definition--everything about my life told me that I wasn't what they told me a man was.  I didn't like anything about being how a man 'should' be and I hated that if I was 'a man' I couldn't be myself--so how could I not hate being a man?  You can never love being something you are not.

I hated myself not because of my maleness (as my counselor thought) but I hated myself because of my femaleness--and I could not be myself because I was male.  How would it have been even remotely possible for me to love the social construct of the male gender if it was the very thing that was ruining my life and making me hate being myself?

I don't know exactly how I survived that dark depressing time of my life where I hated myself, but during that time I learned to build a wall in my brain and I put all my feminine qualities on the other side of that wall and lived an empty shell of a life trying to fill the emptiness with godly things--with scriptures, prayers, missionary work, and service.

Now I realize that God does not want us to strip ourselves of our good wholesome characteristics whether they be 'male' or 'female' and just serve him as empty vessels--It's not that God wants us to rid ourselves of personality and character, but he wants us to serve him as filled vessels--vessels filled with personality, character, uniqueness and love.  God doesn't care about stereotypes and I firmly believe that God possesses all good characteristics whether they be thought of in our culture as masculine or feminine--if it is good it is of God.

I now realize that I have to accept myself even if no one else does.  I have to be myself even if no one else things I should be.   I'm learning to love my naturally feminine qualities and I'm learning that I never should have let the world convince me to hate myself because of them.

It still hurts when people make fun of me, but it is better to be hurt by someone else that it is to be hurt by yourself--and I'm not going to hurt myself anymore.