From a piece by Spencer Bergstedt that was published in the Stranger‘s Queer Issue back in 1999:
Growing up trans filled me with a never-ending envy. I envied boys running around shirtless in summer, whizzing standing up, playing shirts-and-skins basketball, being told they could accomplish anything, not being expected to do housecleaning or cooking. And I envied their hard muscles and narrow hips. As I entered my teen years, I envied my peers their easy laughter, their increasing height, the deepening of their voices, the emergence of facial and body hair, the way girls looked at them and flirted and teased. I envied the men I saw around me even more, for their solidness, their masculinity, the rumble of their voices, their beards and body hair, their sexuality. I wished I could have those things.
And I envied their cocks—something they had that I couldn’t grow no matter how hard I wished. And I envied their chests, which lacked the one absolute marker of my sex: breasts.
In my later teen years, I found that I could live pretty successfully as a dyke. My envy of men eased as I discovered that my masculinity-in-female-form was attractive to some women. I could move through parts of the world with some degree of acceptance, even if others were closed to me. There were people who valued that gender expression, and it buoyed me for a time.
But it was never enough.
Read the whole piece here.