How a Normal Adolescent Experience Sent Me Into a Gender Identity Crisis
Misinterpreting my first crush led me down a path of confusion, medical anxiety, and a 12 year long detour into a trans identity—here’s what I wish I had known.
Here’s the story of how my first crush sent me into a trans tailspin:
When I was 12 years old, I experienced something that should have been a normal, even exciting part of growing up: my first crush. But instead of recognizing it for what it was, I spiraled into a deep confusion that ultimately led me to believe I was transgender. This wasn’t because I had any innate sense of being the opposite sex—it was because I was completely unprepared to understand my emotions, and the only explanations I could find led me down a path that I would later regret.
The Beginning of the Spiral
As my seventh grade year progressed, I overheard my classmates saying the word “crush” on an increasingly frequent basis. I had no clue what they were talking about, and I didn’t really care to ask them because I assumed it would be yet another silly peer group trend (like silly bandz, kendamas, and penny boards) which I did not find nearly as interesting as the brain tumor I was researching that week. After a trip to the grocery store, I walked past the beverages and saw an orange soda called “Crush”. I assumed my classmates were just really obsessed with the orange soda.
I tried the drink, it was mediocre and I assumed that my classmates were yet again obsessed with something which was thoroughly un-noteworthy. I would (years) later learn that this ‘crush’ they were obsessed with wasn’t an orange soda at all.
The most defining event in my pre-teen life started with a simple, fleeting moment in my seventh grade Arabic class. As we were exchanging worksheets, my hand accidentally brushed against the hand of my female classmate. She smiled at me kindly as I took the papers from her hand, and suddenly, my body reacted in a way I didn’t understand. I experienced odd symptoms: my heart raced, I began to perspire, I felt heat emanating from my body, and my stomach flipped in a way I had never felt before; it wasn’t like the feeling of waiting for the dentist to tell me whether he’d found a cavity- it was a pleasant feeling. Whenever I was paired with this girl for a group project, it felt as if my brain had just fallen out of my head, and no matter how much I studied the new vocab, when I attempted to speak to her, no words came out.
I wasn’t aware that these ‘symptoms’ I experienced in Arabic class were the typical physical responses to attraction. The concept of a ‘crush’ as not an orange soda, but as budding romantic attraction was completely foreign to me. Because of my difficulty interpreting my emotions and bodily sensations, I thought that any change in homeostasis automatically signaled that I was coming down with a disease which required urgent treatment.
So, being the hyper-analytical, medically obsessed kid that I was, I went straight to WebMD. The results? My symptoms indicated anything from the flu to an impending neurological disorder. I was convinced I was dying.
The Medical Rabbit Hole
My confusion soon took on a medical dimension. Since I had convinced myself that my bodily reactions to attraction were signs of an undiagnosed illness, I told my parents about my odd, unexplainable symptoms—but I left out the context. To me, the fact that it had happened in a specific moment with a specific classmate seemed irrelevant. My parents, to their credit, didn’t panic. They reassured me that I was probably fine, but to ease my concerns, they took me to the doctor. I remember getting an EKG and an asthma test. Both came back normal.
Instead of believing that I was healthy, I became more convinced than ever that something was seriously wrong. If the doctors couldn’t find an issue, it just meant that I had a rare, undiagnosed condition that was going to end my life. What I didn’t realize was that my only “condition” was being a clueless kid experiencing attraction for the first time.
The Fraught Saga of the Girls’ Locker Room
My odd symptoms only got worse as I began to take a new physical education course which required us to ‘dress down’ in gym clothes. As a little kid, I had no problem undressing in the womens’ locker room, but by the time I hit puberty, even so much as being fully clothed in the presence of girls disrobing became simultaneously the most exciting and the most dreaded part of my day.
My classmates chatted casually as they changed into their gym clothes, seemingly unfazed by the experience. But all over again, I felt the same odd 'symptoms' overcome my body. Whatever it was inside of me, really compelled me to look– but I didn’t want anyone to notice. To avoid any perception of impropriety, I made a habit of staring at my feet as I walked into the locker room, past the communal changing area, and swiftly into the stalls. Even on my way back out, I kept my eyes glued to the floor so as not to accidentally catch a glance at someone who wasn’t fully dressed.
I told my mom that I needed her to buy me multiple purple shirts and black pants (the mandatory uniform) so I could wear a new one every day for gym class and avoid the locker room. I was told that it was normal to feel awkward in a changing room, that everyone felt some degree of discomfort, but that we were all girls, so it didn’t matter. It didn’t seem plausible to me that everyone else felt the same way I did—because they acted like changing in front of each other was just another excuse for social interaction. Meanwhile, I felt a strong return of my initial 'symptoms' of attraction, and I didn’t know what to do with them. My mom reassured me that there was nothing to be concerned about—we were all girls, after all—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t belong there.
“Not Like the Other Girls:”
Most pre-teen girls revel in the rituals of femininity; of choosing outfits, begging their parents for make-up and getting into battles about wearing increasingly lower-cut and tighter clothing.
I wasn’t like the other girls. The biggest thorn in my side as a kid who was acclimating to life in a public school, was the fact that my new school didn’t have a uniform. The prospect of choosing my own clothes was exciting at first. But very quickly thereafter, I realized that I wanted to wear the same thing every day and couldn’t. Instead, I had to match clothes based on color, and had to acclimate to new textures and patterns that changed every day. I couldn’t stand it.
It wasn’t until I started watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show on YouTube that I got excited about the prospect of getting dressed in the morning. I thought Ellen was hilarious, charismatic, and well-dressed. I admired her confidence and the way she seemed so comfortable in herself. I was a theater kid who aspired to her level of fame and notoriety. When I saw Ellen’s formal style and stage presence, I knew I wanted to dress just like her.
Clearly, I didn’t get the memo that this was weird. Sure, my female peers were beginning to wear tight clothes and makeup, but I had no interest in achieving that aesthetic. Instead, I only wanted to dress like Ellen DeGeneres. It became clear to me that my desired style choice of something between a talk show host and a university professor was not a socially acceptable way for me to dress as a pre-teen girl. No one understood why I was so averse to wearing tight clothes, make-up and long hair (an unruly, heavy Jew fro, to be exact).
My obsession with Ellen DeGeneres developed alongside my intense intellectual interest in the gay rights movement. I knew what being gay meant—a man loving another man, or a woman loving another woman—but I didn’t see myself fitting into this framework because I didn’t know what it meant to fall in love. So instead, I just thought I was really out of place. I didn’t want to dress the way other girls genuinely enjoyed dressing themselves, and I had some weird mystery illness overcome my body whenever one of them smiled at me.
Avoidance and Social Shifts
After some time, I started noticing a pattern—my strange “symptoms” only seemed to occur when I was around girls. My solution? Avoid being too close to them. I began spending most of my time with boys, trying to blend in with them and distract myself from the feelings I didn’t understand. My new friend group spent our time pranking the teacher by making obnoxious whale noises whenever she turned her back (she wasn’t even overweight, we were just hellions). We weren’t just being disruptive for the sake of it—we had a tacit understanding that we were trying to elicit laughter from the girls in the class. Our strategy worked for my guy friends, who started getting attention from our female classmates. But I was getting ignored. It felt unfair. I was the lead prankster and none of the girls paid me much attention.
That’s when it hit me:
The reason I wasn’t getting the kind of attention from girls that my male friends were, was because I was a girl. This realization stung, and I didn’t know how to process it. Instead of questioning why I wanted that attention in the first place, I fixated on the idea that my sex was the problem.
Looking for Answers in the Wrong Places
Over a short time, my online content began shifting. Videos about gay and lesbian issues were replaced with content about transgender identities. I had heard of “sex changes” before but assumed they were something only men could undergo (unsuccessfully) to appear as women. On YouTube, I discovered female trans vloggers who documented their transformations from slightly older versions of me into full-grown men. They recorded their voices dropping as they injected testosterone, sharing how transition had saved their lives. I was fascinated and consumed as much as I could, obsessively learning everything about the process.
These trans men spoke about their younger years, and it felt like they were telling my life story. They described their pre-transition selves, not as masculine lesbians but as men who had yet to understand that they were in fact trapped inside of female bodies. They ritualistically wrapped bandages around their breasts, demonstrating how they flattened them using formal products from 'Underworks.' They called their breasts "sacks of fat" or tumors they planned to remove. Month by month, one by one, they posted vlogs about their top surgeries.
One of these trans influencers said something that really stuck with me as a 12 year old girl:
“In the past, trans men had to settle for being butch lesbians. But now we have the technology to live as our true selves- as straight men.”
I still didn’t know that many of my feelings were just me developing attraction to girls. I still didn’t have the language to explain what I was feeling, but my analytical mind kept searching for an answer. I was 12. I hadn’t lived my adulthood as a lesbian, I couldn’t even admit to myself that I was one because I still didn’t know that ‘crush’ wasn’t just an orange soda in the supermarket.
Yet I had already been imbued with the message that being a masculine lesbian was an unacceptable way to live; that it was a recipe for loneliness, for being perpetually misunderstood both by men and by women. The more I tried to make sense of it, the more my discomfort seemed to point to the idea that maybe I wasn’t actually a girl at all.
Hearing this sentiment repeated over and over again by women in their early twenties, made my desire to dress like Ellen DeGeneres evolve into something else—a desire to not be a freakazoid lesbian. I already thought that if I were a boy, I would get attention from the girls in my class and could wear the clothes I wanted without it being socially unacceptable. But now, I was presented with an option that would allow me to live a frictionless life as a man. I could change nothing about myself or my behavior, if only I could just change my body. I began to feel that what was wrong with me was my female body. From that moment on, I began planning my future—not as a ‘weird girl,’ but as a confident man.
The Trans Kids Narrative and the Suicide Myth
As I flitted between these women’s vlogs, I also watched the few available documentaries about "trans kids," where gender-nonconforming children as young as five were being allowed to live as the opposite sex. In these documentaries, there would always be a gender doctor discussing the necessity of early intervention as a way to ensure better 'passability' in the future. They explained that preventing puberty was essential to saving the lives of these children from their own impending suicides. The parents of these kids echoed this sentiment, as did the female vloggers whose journeys I had begun to follow.
I became convinced that I too would be doomed to suicide if I was not allowed to transition, and the thought of my parents saying "no" terrified me. I thought I was in a race against time and against my own biology: I had already been in puberty for a few years, and desperate to ensure better aesthetic outcomes for myself, I began researching ways to stunt my breast growth without my parents' knowledge or consent. I came across the notion that if I bound my breasts from a young age, I might be able to keep them from growing larger and could opt for the less invasive 'keyhole' top surgery, which would allow me to avoid living with two big scars across my chest and to pass as a man better.
The gender doctors who appeared in the "trans kid" documentaries exalted breast binding as a safe and life-saving way for girls to align their gender identities with their bodies until they were able to afford 'top surgeries.' So I began obsessively squashing my breasts, rib cage and lungs– and only stopped about a decade later under exceedingly traumatic circumstances.
I Thought I Was Trans—Until War Showed Me the Truth
As a 25-year-old who spent half of her life in the process of a gender transition, and who has subsequently disembarked from the trans train, I often find myself in the center of contentious debates about the "trans kid" phenomenon.
The Trans Coming Out, Internet Surveillance, and Rebellion
By this point, I felt that I urgently needed to tell my parents that I was trapped in my female body and needed to transition. My parents were savvy enough to call BS on that immediately. They told me it was “just a phase” I was going through. For me, my feelings were real and distressing– and I didn’t think they would ever resolve. Though I never used the suicide threat as blackmail to compel their consent, my parents were growing increasingly worried about me and my hyperfixation on transgenderism. They weren’t affirming my sudden claims of being trans, but they also weren’t entirely sure how to help me. In a panicked attempt to control the situation, they installed spyware on my iPad, which rendered the internet functionally inaccessible. What they didn’t realize was that their attempt to keep me from finding trans-related content only made me more determined to seek it out.
I found ways around their restrictions. I started spending hours at the school library, devouring books and online articles about gender identity. Everything I read reinforced the idea that my feelings of being “different” and uncomfortable in my body meant I was actually a boy. The idea was intoxicating—it offered me an explanation, a way out of the discomfort I had been feeling for so long. I was determined to ensure that the hope I had found in transition, would never be “just a phase.”
I wish my parents had understood that their surveillance didn’t make me question my beliefs—it only made me double down. Shutting off my internet access only for me to get it somewhere else, only caused me to engage in my identity exploration more sneakily. What I really needed was guidance through my feelings. Instead of limiting what I could read, I would have benefitted more from discussions about what I was reading, with guidance on how to think critically about it.
Conclusion
Looking back, I can see that my first crush wasn’t just a moment of adolescent discovery—it was the catalyst for my descent into gender confusion. If I had known then what I know now, I would have realized that my feelings were completely normal, that attraction manifests in strange and sometimes overwhelming ways, and that there was nothing wrong with me. But I didn’t know that. And because I didn’t, I latched onto the only explanation I could find.
For parents, the lesson here isn’t just about non-affirmation. It’s about understanding. If my parents had helped me process my feelings instead of reacting with panic, if they had encouraged me to explore my emotions rather than simply trying to control my access to information, I might have realized the truth much sooner. I do not fault them for the way they handled the situation, because their impulse to not affirm was the correct one and because any parent in a similar situation would have reacted with panic. My parents’ approach to get me to divest from my gender transition, though extreme, is the ultimate reason I emerged from a 12 year long trans identity with less bodily damage than I could have. To them, I am endlessly grateful for their unwavering persistence to not affirm even after I became a legal adult.
Many of the kids who declare transgender identities around adolescence have a number of autistic traits, not the least of which is high intelligence and low emotional literacy. Kids like the one I was usually struggle to identify the sensations coming from their bodies correctly, to interpret these as emotions and to communicate these with adults. The trans explanation gives these kids a framework by which to convey complex emotions which they are often too immature to describe in their own words. I believe this is precisely the reason that they latch on so intensely to a framework which describes their emotions for them, albeit one which is based entirely on unprovable claims which are worded so broadly that they apply to nearly every insecure, autistic or gay teenager.
Ultimately, my confusion surrounding my first crush didn’t mean I was trans—it meant I was human. But it took me half of my lifetime, multiple wars, and permanent damage to my body as a result of a decade of breast binding, for me to see that. Yes, it could have been worse. But no, I didn't get out of my gender questioning experience unscathed just because my parents refused to affirm me. I hope this slice of my experience can give parents a window into the minds of their gender confused children.
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Breast Binding, Genital Tucking, & the Lie of ‘Safe Gender Affirmation’.
Following Trump’s Executive Order suspending the use of federal funding for “Gender Affirming Care” for young people under the age of 19, interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries will become less easily accessible to young people. While this Executive Order has the immense potential to spare many youngsters fr…
My daughter, too, went silent and laid low her last years at home so we’d think the “phase” had passed and not try to talk to her. She made it very clear she wasn’t going to discuss her feelings with us. It’s so painful to be systematically shut out of a child’s life when you’ve had such a previously good relationship. If your kid gets into drugs or alcohol or an eating disorder or addiction, the rest of the world doesn’t rush to affirm them. I struggled with an eating disorder as a teen. Imagine if others had said to me, “You’re absolutely correct, you ARE fat. The problem isn’t in your mind. The problem REALLY is this fat body you’re in. Here are all the ways you can avoid eating. Here are the best methods for purging. Yayyy you! You’re on the right track. Now let’s get insurance to cover that liposuction, pay for your laxatives, and unquestionably affirm your “right” to be skinny!!! It’s complete insanity. And yet the majority of the population just goes along, or much more dangerously, pushes for that kind of reasoning. In a sane world, we compassionately send those who are hurting for help getting out of the deep, dark, rabbit hole. In our current world, we watch the pitchers of destruction wind up the ball and send these vulnerable kids hurling forward at light speed into the abyss. And the people cheer.
“In the past, trans men had to settle for being butch lesbians. But now we have the technology to live as our true selves- as straight men.” —Quote from an influencer
One thing I wish liberals understood — who are uncritically supportive of all things trans because they think it’s kind and compassionate — is that they are unwittingly supporting the medicalization of homosexuality.
Thank you for this brilliant essay.