I knew I was a girl when I was six. I didn't have the word 'trans.' I didn't have any words. I just had a certainty — quiet, persistent, terrifying — that the body I was in was wrong, and the life I was being handed was someone else's. I buried that certainty for thirty-six years.
When I finally transitioned at forty-two, I was prepared for a lot of things. The bureaucracy. The medical appointments. The conversations with family that ranged from awkward to devastating. The slow, uneven process of hormones reshaping a body that had spent four decades running on the wrong fuel. What I wasn't prepared for was the grief. Not dysphoria — I'd lived with that my whole life. Grief. A specific, acute grief for the girl I never got to be.
I'm not just learning to be a woman. I'm learning to be the child I was never allowed to know existed.
The Things I Never Got to Do
People think transitioning is about the big things: names, pronouns, hormones, surgery. And it is. But it's also about the thousands of small things that make up a gendered childhood. The sleepover I was never invited to because I was 'a boy.' The dress I couldn't wear to the school dance. The hair I couldn't grow long. The dolls I couldn't ask for. The friendships with girls that were always policed, always suspect, always carrying the implication that my interest wasn't friendship but something else. I wasn't interested in girls the way they assumed. I was interested in being one.
Now, at forty-four, I am doing some of those things for the first time. I bought a stuffed unicorn last month — bright pink, glittery, completely ridiculous — and I cried in the car afterward. Not because I was embarrassed. Because I was forty-four years old and I'd never let myself have something like that. Because the six-year-old who wanted it had been waiting in the dark for thirty-eight years, and I'd finally opened the door.
The Double Grief
There's a particular cruelty to being trans and experiencing age dysphoria or reclamation. It's not just that you missed a childhood. It's that you missed a childhood in the right gender. You had a childhood — technically — but it was someone else's. A boy's childhood. A performance. And now, as an adult, you're doing two things simultaneously: learning to be a woman and learning to be the child you never were. The grief is doubled. You grieve the years you spent in the wrong body. And you grieve the years you spent not being a child at all.
What Reclamation Actually Looks Like
For me, reclaiming my denied girlhood has been a mix of the profound and the absurdly mundane. I bought the unicorn. I've started a collection of picture books I would have loved as a little girl — the ones with horses and princesses and girls who save themselves. I let my voice go higher when I'm feeling small, and I've stopped correcting it. I have pajamas with stars on them. I watch animated movies and let myself cry at the endings. I am, in my forties, doing the emotional work of a six-year-old, a ten-year-old, a thirteen-year-old — all the ages I missed, all at once.
Some people in my life don't understand. They think I should be focused on 'adult' transition milestones. And I am doing those things. But the stuffed unicorn matters too. The picture books matter. The permission to be soft, to be small, to be a girl who's still learning how to be a girl — that matters as much as any legal document. Maybe more.
To the Trans Adult Reading This
The grief is real. The childhood you didn't get is a real loss, and nobody needs to validate it for it to count. That pull toward softness, toward toys, toward experiences that feel 'too young' — that's not regression. That's reclamation. That's the child you were, finally getting permission to exist in the right body, the right clothes, the right life. It's never too late to be the kid you should have been. The timeline is a suggestion. The gender is yours. The childhood, even the belated one, belongs to you.
— A reader of The Unadulting Society
About The Unadulting Society
The Unadulting Society is a collective of writers, advocates, and lived-experience experts exploring what adulthood looks like when you reject the milestone factory and build a life that actually fits. We publish community voices alongside our regular contributors. If you have a story to share, we'd love to hear from you.
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