Jeremy's Letter to His Parents

— -- Dear Mum and Dad,

This is one of those stream of consciousness things that I write in the wee hours of the morning when I'm tired and unable to sleep. I was probably crying when I wrote it, but don't think that the tears blurring my eyes were blurring my judgement as well. I mean every word I say here. I hope you can read this and…I don't know. Understand? Speak? Know? Just to know will be enough. So…here it goes:

When I was very young, I would play imaginary games with all my friends. They would all be girls, and I would be a boy. Around this same age, I would always tell people that I wished I were male. I could never give solid reasons for it. I just said things like "better opportunities" or "more interesting." I didn't know why myself either, so it's not like I was hiding anything. I just wanted to be a boy.

I still do.

I still don't know why.

"Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are," said Kurt Cobain. I'm sick of wanting to be someone else. I feel as though I'm wasting the life I've been given. I want to be grateful for all that I have, and yet I feel as though I can't truly appreciate it unless I'm the person I feel inside.

So who is the person inside me?

He's almost exactly like me. He's funny and smart. He likes to read and write. He's obstinate and argumentative. He likes movies and plays and music. Maybe he isn't as self-confident as he could be, and maybe his self-image isn't as flattering as it should be, but it's understandable, isn't it? After all, he's trapped in the body of a 14-year-old girl, and that can't be healthy.

What am I? I ask myself this all the time. Right now what I believe myself to be is an FtM, or a female-to-male transsexual. A male identifying individual. A boy in a girl's body.

That's what I think I am. That's what I believe I am, but I may be wrong. Gender and sexuality are such strange things. They're not really things that can be defined, but we've tried as hard as we can to separate ourselves into groups, haven't we? Male and female. Straight and gay. Maybe it's something to do with my chromosomes, or some traumatic experience I had when I was very young. What I think I know is: