"I Thought My 10-Year-Old Boyfriend Was Going To Propose - Then He Told Me He Was Trans"

It was 3am and I had been drinking a lot; two reasons I was pressing my boyfriend of 10 years on why he hadn't proposed yet. We were strong and happy, and we loved each other madly, so his reluctance seemed ridiculous when I was sober, let alone drunk. I suspect it was my incessant questioning that finally blew a fuse in his brain, because that's when he told me his secret.

When I woke up, he was gone. I looked at his WhatsApp status like it was a sick relative's heart monitor. As soon as I saw "online", I called him and asked him to come home. Talk. To answer the questions I had scribbled illegibly on a half-folded sheet of A4 paper.

He walked through the door and sat down, his face obscured by the fear. "What were you trying to tell me?" I asked hopefully, all too aware of how different things can be when alcohol no longer shapes your every thought. on the floor. "I just don't identify with being a man," he said. My throat thickens. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I knew this person better than anyone in the world, but there was no way I could reconcile it with the words that came out of his mouth.

"Well, that do you identify yourself?" I begged, panicked.

"I don't know - like, non-binary, or..." Oh my God, what was he about to say? "... trans." The word flooded my body with surreal disbelief.

I was already sure, cold and emphatic: it was done. We were done. "But why?" he implored.

"Because I can't be… I don't want to be with a woman." It surprised me how obvious that fact was, as everything else was suddenly underwater.

"But I don't know how far it will go yet," he said. "I don't know anything yet. Except our relationship is more important than my sex. »

My questions were redundant. Their purpose was to establish where we go from here, but in the private theater of my mind, the curtains were closing at every turn. Soon my sister was outside. I tried to explain why I asked him to pick me up and why I had a suitcase. She knew something was wrong, of course, but she had no idea to the extent.

"He...He...thinks that 'He could be... years old.' I couldn't get it out of my mouth.

"What? What are you saying, Feebs?"

"He thinks he might be trans." We stood in the dark, rain-paved street and wept. Her tears soaked my shoulder, and mine soaked hers. We returned to her house. I sat in silence, numb, watching the rain blur the brake lights in front of me as she continued to sob - for me, for him, and I guess for the future brother-in-law she had just lost.< /p>

For a week in January, she held my hand every night as I stared at the ceiling, watching her alarm clock announce the time in a dazzling sequence of oblongs : 0h10. 2h36. 3:30. 5:05 a.m. 6:16 a.m. The second stroke of 7am I went in the shower just so I could cry in peace.

My new therapist was a tall woman with a kind face that I couldn't not decipher the accent. She worked in a light-flooded conservatory, which seemed logical given the endless dark trauma she extracted from people's lives. I reversed the story chaotically. "He was so friendly when I was on my period," I shouted. “He would practically run to the store to buy me ibuprofen or tampons. Is it because he wished he had his period?" His answer was reassuringly rational. "If he was jealous of you, it would have manifested in anger, not out of kindness. He was nice to you because he loved you and didn't like to see you suffer. I realize now that I was focusing on the trivial in order to avoid the hard truth: that the person that my world revolved around was disappearing, and I was just stuck here, waiting for her to go.

Immediately gender was all around of me, screaming in my face. Forms asking me if I'm a man, a woman or if I prefer not to say anything. How many times had he dared to tick off something other than "masculine"? Each time I was using a public restroom, I was wondering if he wanted to use the women's restroom.Munroe Bergdorf made history by becoming the first transgender woman to f on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine. Did he buy a copy? The trans flag emoji popped up every time I typed the word "trans" on WhatsApp (142 times a day). It was both the most shocking and flippant thing of my life. I polled women everywhere, like one in five people might be trans. Then there were the subtle ones, borderline...