When Murray and Roxanne Evans found out that they were expecting a little girl in the summer of 1994, they were ecstatic.
Roxanne had been hoping – praying – for a girl since she found out that she was pregnant. A pageant girl herself, Roxie was hoping that she could dress her baby girl up in frilly dresses and coat her face in thick (but tasteful) makeup.
Murray had been hoping for a boy. He wanted someone he could go fishing with. Someone he could watch play football. He wanted the all American boy.
He thought that right up to the moment he saw his little girl on the ultrasound. She was perfect.
Samantha Rose Evans was born on June 5th, 1994. She was slightly underweight, but her parents thought she was perfect. Ten fingers, ten toes.
They took her home and began to dress her in the frilly pink dresses the family had received at the baby shower. Her room was pink on pink.
They had gone a little overboard, but what could they say? It was their first child.
All was well for three years, until Roxanne decided to enter little Samantha into a beauty pageant. Sam just wasn't having that. She cried when she was put in the dress. She cried when she was forced up onto the stage. She cried when her mother grabbed her by the arms to pull her off-stage.
That was the first sign.
They noticed a few things like it as she got older. She didn't like wearing pink. She didn't like any of the dolls her parents gave her. She wanted to play with the boys.
Murray shrugged it off. It was just a phase – she was a tomboy. Lots of girls were.
Just a phase.
That's what they thought until she was nine and took a pair of scissors to her long blonde hair. She chopped it all off until it was a sloppy mess at the top of her head.
When asked why she did it, she said that she wanted to look more like a boy.
Just a phase.
She hit puberty early – growing breasts around ten. She was mortified. She refused to wear a training bra – she refused to leave the house.
It was then that she decided to tell her parents what she had been trying to show them for years.
She was a boy.
She didn't feel like a boy. She was a boy. And she was trapped inside the rapidly changing body of a pre-pubescent girl.
She became he.
His name was Sam, not Samantha.
He never was a girl, and he never would be.
He would burn all pictures – all memories – of himself as a girl.
He would take hormones to block puberty, and conceal his menstrual cycle as best he could.
His father took it the hardest. He wanted an all American boy, just not that way. He couldn't handle the pressure – the shame of having a transsexual teenage boy.
So they sent him off to boarding school. Not that Sam cared – it was all boys, anyway.