I’ve never been one for putting my thoughts down, although I’ve always known I should and now, after much procrastination and good intentions its time to start. So, I figure I might as well just start from the beginning. Just don’t judge my mutilation of the English language.

Until puberty, everything was just fine. I was a happy child, good family and friends, had a serious lego addiction, my bike and a love of computers. Perfectly normal for your average growing boy.

The only problem was that’s where the average boy stopped.

All my close friends were girls, I found their company and interests far more in tune with what felt natural to me, and secretly I wished I was one of them. I feel at this point it has to be said that I was never your stereotypical transsexual child, dressing up, wearing make up and declaring myself female at the earliest opportunity.

Now, at the time it simply wasn’t much of an issue, next to riding my bike, hours spent making lego trains and passing notes to my girlfriend who lived in the house behind mine, gender just wasn’t important. I was happy with my world, my circle of friends and my interests. I was me.

Then in my last year of junior school we moved to a different area and had to start a new school an nothing seemed to fit any more. I had lost my circle of friends and found it almost impossible to make new ones. The relationships I had forged in primary school and that accepted me for who I was without question were gone, now I truly understood that I was different.

The natural draw I felt to play with girls met with rejection, on the surface I was a boy, and as we all know, boys are smelly and eat worms.

Befriending boys was slightly less difficult, being a worm eater on the surface is enough to get you past the first hurdle, but it doesn’t take long to discover you have very little in common. I tried so hard to try and fit in, I struggled at sports, joined a football club because someone I wanted to be friends with played, and spent hours standing in goal, cold, wet and muddy.

(For what its worth, I still don’t understand sport.)

It was also very obvious to most of the boys that I didn’t fit, and thats when the bullying started.

By the time I started comprehensive school, I had found a small group of friends with enough similar interests to allow friendship, George Lucas has my eternal gratitude for Star Wars, if it wasn’t for the dolls, I think I would have been very lonely. For the first time in my life, my circle of friends was almost exclusively male, geeky, video gaming, comic book reading, table top role playing indoor boys, but boys all the same.

The exception was a friends sister who I felt very close to.