+Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _y_, _z_)](/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg) because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine.
+
+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 was new 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 actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—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); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. 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 used to 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.