What am i? 

It's easy.It didn’t really effect me until I was 12, well, not effect me effect me.I knew who I was, I just didn’t know what I was. I remember the long corridor I had to walk down in year 7, my form room was next to year 11’s that year. My first few weeks were fine, I didn’t have many friends but I did still have a few that came with me from primary school. But after a few weeks they slowly started to leave me. I felt people talking about me, then people began looking uncomfortable when I was around. What had I done? I’d spend my evening lying awake replaying over my day in my head. Why was everyone else making friends by as soon as people learned by name they would they avoid speaking to me again? Why did my best friend ignore me every time he was with his new friends? Why? What had I done? Then that day came, walking down that long corridor when a year 11, A large boy with short ginger hair and a bit of flap jack hanging from the side of his mouth asked me a question that would plague me for the rest of my high school years…. “Oi you, are you a boy or a girl?” Are you a boy or a girl? I walked away as fast as I could because I had no reply to the question he just asked. Was I a boy or a girl? Back then I didn’t really look like anything, Short chubby shapeless figure, cheek length shaggy brown hair. I wore men’s trousers, I’d always worn boy clothes, I was a “tom boy”. So it was ok, I’d out grow it just like asthma one day. Every year they’d tell me that, but every year I’d feel more and more like a boy. The rest of that day I didn’t listen, for rest of that month I didn’t listen. I was like a ghost, but instead of scaring people I scared of everything and everyone around me. Everyone who noticed me seemed to ask me that question now and in P.E I was forced into the showers so I wouldn’t perv on the other girls…. If only being called a dyke could have fixed the problems, I had. I was a boy, inside, I knew that, in my dreams I was that. But in real life I wasn’t… to be asked a question daily but never sure on the answer to give. To be bullied by being told you look how you want to be seen but being forced to correct them because of the shell you where given at birth. Inside I knew what I was, I’d always known what I was. From being 4 telling my parent I was going to cut my boobs off but now stood here looking at them growing in the mirror in front of me. What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this? I didn’t really talk to anyone again after that. I just made myself sick instead, I didn’t want to die or anything, not yet anyway. I was just so sad, sad not knowing who I was. I didn’t want to be the person I was born to be, I wanted to be the person who I wanted to. I’d come down with a cold and managed to get some time off school to recover, but as I started to get better again I knew that I’d have to go back to school and leave the safety of my bed. So I stopped eating, I stopped drinking, I stopped doing to the bathroom. I just lay in bed and did nothing because it was all I wanted to do. I was safe here. Nobody would be hurt me here and as weeks passed I did indeed get sicker. After about 2 weeks I was taken to the GP who then sent me to hospital. There I lay in a bed on a ward surround by sick children. Here I was safe, they would never send a sick child back to school and here is where I intended to stay from as long as I could. I was in for about a week before my younger brother was brought in too, he was close to going into a coma with a blood sugar of 29. Within hours he was put in an ambulance and taken to Manchester’s children’s hospital. It was at this moment where I realised how selfish I was being. Yes I was sad but I wasn’t dying. I wasn’t dying like my younger brother. So whilst he was away I began to force myself to get better. I cried and kicked and screamed but I forced myself to get better. I even lost the feeling in my legs at one point, but I couldn’t let my mind win. I had to get better and get back to normal. There was more important things to deal with right now. After 2 weeks I returned to school after around 2 months off sick. I had no friends so nobody missed me. I just kept to myself and did what I had to do, ignoring everything and everyone around me. It my way of surviving. The internet had become my save place now, chat rooms and online games. Here I could be whoever I wanted to be, here I could be the boy that I felt inside. Here is where Elmo was born. Elmo was everything that I was but wasn’t at the same time. He was me, he looked like me, sounded like me, but he was just a he not a she. Elmo allowed me to be happy and have friends, friends who I would spend hours talking to, friends who would listen and want to hang out in real life not just on the internet. Friends I would meet up with and be the boy I wanted to be because they didn’t know any different. To them I’d always been this way. Girls where interested in my now, which is something I never excepted. It’s something I never thought about before. To be honest I just thought I’d be alone forever, I knew I didn’t like boy but I also knew nothing about being gay. I just thought if you where a boy you liked girls and visa versa the other way. But Elmo was a boy… so does that mean I can like girls? Can Elmo like girls? Was that too much? Having friends is one thing but dating girls is another. Not in real life anyway. That’s when I met my first girlfriend, a girl who i’d met online, just a little online thing, just someone I was very friendly with. I had no intentions of falling in love with her, I just wanted to tell my friends I had a girlfriend. We where together over a year before we met in person. Everything was very innocent, nothing more than hand holding. But it was all getting to much, it was all becoming to real and Elmo my second life was becoming my real life. So one night a few weeks after we last saw each other I rang her crying. “what wrong?” she said “I have to tell you something…. But you have to promise me you wont think any different of me. I’m still me, I will always be me….” “Elmo what wrong?” “……I’m… I’m… a girl.. But I’m not! I’m a boy… I’m me… but I’m not…. BUT IM GETTING FIXED!” I’m getting fixed? Why did I say that? I didn’t even know if I could be fixed. I didn’t even know what was wrong with me. I just knew that I didn’t want to loose her. I’d been Elmo for about 3 years now and this was the first I’d ever thought to research what was wrong with me… I’d always been too scared to even say it out loud before tonight never mind type it into a google. “im a girl… but I feel like a boy” That’s when they word transgender made an appetence in my life. Transgender, when a person is born in the wrong body. Transgender…. I’m Transgender…..

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