+Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."
+
+Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.
+
+Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_ when it came out in 2007.
+
+Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
+
+(This attempted nickname-change turned out to be a terrible idea for several reasons: first, my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); second, I found it incredibly psychologically stressful for some people to know me by one name, and people I knew before to know me by another, and I didn't have the guts to nag people in the latter group to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; third, the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly didn't hold up in practice because my real first initial (not _M._; this blog is under a pen name) is a high-Scrabble-score letter that begins one high-frequency boy name (top 200 in the [1990 Census list](https://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/1990_census/1990_census_namefiles.html)), and no high-frequency girl names (the most popular candidates trailing my ugly boy-name in frequency by an order of magnitude). But it was the _principle!_)
+
+Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)
+
+Or how one of the [little song-fragments I would write in my head](/tag/music/) went—
+
+> _Sometimes I sigh because I'll never get rich
+> And there's no magic so I can't be a witch
+> And that I must enjoy the scorn of the world
+> Just 'cause I'm butch and I'm a tranny girl_
+
+Or the time I felt proud when my Normal American Girl coworker at the supermarket in 'aught-nine said that she had assumed I was gay. (I'm not, but the fact that Normal American Girl thought so meant that I was successfully unmasculine.)
+
+And so on _et cetera ad infinitum_. This has been a very persistent _thing_ for me.