I'm Just Drawn This Way: Teen Finds Gender Identity Through Art

Featured on npr.org

I was 8 or 9 years old when I moved from a rural town in Oregon to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was one of seven moves my family made during my elementary years. The culture shock of moving from country to city hit me hard. I stuck out at my new school. It was hard to make friends with my new classmates. My parents argued often. So I spent a lot of time doing my own thing, trying not to think too hard about the rapid changes happening to my life.

This is when I started drawing.

My interest in drawing started as a way to deal with my feelings. To the rest of the world, I was a girl. But even then I knew that didn't quite fit.

I was a young kid with a changing family, moving from city to city, and drawing gave me a distraction. When I felt lonely, homesick or just bored, I drew my imaginary friends and characters from my favorite games. It was hard to make friends when my family moved so much. So I took characters out of computer games, books and movies, and imagined them like they were there hanging out with me.

Even when I did spend time with other kids, I felt out of place. In middle school, it became increasingly difficult to relate to girls from my class. So I mostly hung out with a group of guys who shared my interests in drawing, Internet culture and video games. I thought I fit in with them. But then, one day, I was talking to one of them over lunch and he said, "You know, it's weird that you're a girl and you hang out with us."

I was surprised. Then confused. Then hurt.

I felt bad in a way I couldn't describe yet. It wasn't fair. It didn't make sense. And it was one of the first moments I realized that my gender mattered to other people — that the way I experienced gender, as something more nuanced than just male or female, masculine or feminine, was not the way that other people thought about it.

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