Like you, I was sexually abused when I was a child. I was also weaker and smaller than other boys. I was painfully shy. I had a learning disorder (ADHD) and struggled a lot at school. From a young age I realised I was attracted to men and often had crushes on my classmates. I never felt like any of the other 'boys'. My single mother was a pretty open and engaged feminist as well, which in some ways was very good for me - but she never shied away from saying things like "men are pigs" "all men are bad", "men are trash" and those sorts of things to me while I was growing up. I felt, my whole life, like I was inherently wrong. Wrong for being a boy, wrong for not being like the other boys, wrong for not being straight. I used to cry myself to sleep at night wishing I was a girl - so I could be 'better' than just me and I could actually be happy.

For a lot of people, transitioning makes them happy. But for me it didn't make me any happier and it didn't address the root causes of my issues - my childhood traumas, my internalised homophobia and the way I was raised. I wasn't the 'wrong' gender. I wasn't the 'wrong' anything. I'm just me, and I was always okay. I wasn't a mistake. Other people just treated me like I was and I internalised it.

I would have liked teenage me to think about where their pain came from.