Five-year-old Cynnie was flourishing in Kindergarten. She was bright, curious and intuitive, and was never afraid to play outdoors with the other children. She'd always played with her brother and his friends on the farm, but Kindergarten was different. For the first time in her life, children were being separated into 'boys' and 'girls' (whatever that meant) so that they could play gender-appropriate games, and she was quite naturally placed in the 'girls' category and told to play with the other girls.
The problem was: she soon realised that girls played differently to her, and she had no idea of how to do what they did. Girls were lovely, no question - but they were a weird, alien species and Cynnie didn't know how to relate to them. Girls played with each other in very strange ways. Everything they did seemed to be about talking and relationships, and poor Cynnie had no idea how to do what they were doing. She wanted to play with objects; building, climbing, running, making, exploring… but the girls wanted to play 'pretend' with their toys, pretending that each toy was a member of a family and imitating the social relationships around them. It was very puzzling to Cynnie - it seemed really weird to her that everyone should think that she was like these girls, but it became obvious that she was expected to be like them. Everyone was telling her that she was a girl, so she must've be a girl and she was supposed to be able to figure out how to do girly things, wasn't she?
But no matter how she tried, she just couldn't figure it out. As Cynnie headed towards her sixth birthday, she realised to her growing horror that the grown-ups around her were grouping her with the wrong people. She realised that she was much more comfortable playing with the boys with their rough-and-tumble games; and that girls' social play was boring, alien and downright perplexing to her. She needed to fix this. She needed to stop the grown-ups from forcing her to play with the wrong kids. So she went to her mother for help.
"What do you mean, you're really a boy?" asked Winona. It was hard for her to understand why her gorgeous little girl, who just a couple of months ago had been perfectly content to wear the pretty dresses she'd bought for her, would suddenly refuse to wear anything but her brother's hand-me-downs.
"I mean I know I'm a boy and I want you to call me by a boy's name. I don't like that yucky girl's name you call me. I want you to call me Bob!" cried Cynnie, tears of frustration streaking down her cheeks.
"Don't be ridiculous!" yelled Winona. "Look at yourself - you're obviously a girl! You have girl parts so that means you're a girl! You don't know what you're talking about."
"But Mommy, I don't know how to be a girl! Girls are weird and they talk funny. I don't like playing with them. I want to play with cars and guns and build forts and stuff. I don't want to play 'pretend' and 'dress-up' like those silly girls!".
"Shut up!" said Winona. "You're wrong. Just wrong! I don't get you. You're a girl and that's all there is to it. You just need to get on with it and learn how to be a proper little girl. Just like God made you!"
Cynnie cried herself to sleep that night. Why couldn't Mommy understand? Why did Mommy yell at her for telling the truth? Could it be that Cynnie really was wrong about herself? She was just a little kid: maybe her Mommy was right? Mommy must know best, right?
She realised she had no choice. If Mommy wasn't going to help her… indeed, if Mommy was going to shout at her and punish her for saying that she's really a boy, Cynnie couldn't dare risk telling anyone else. She'd have to keep that secret locked tightly inside, and try to figure out how to be a girl. She was very clever. She'd figure out a way to be a girl. She had to.
A/N: The more astute amongst you will notice the beginning of a real-life trend amongst transgender people in this chapter: whenever we refer to ourselves as children, most of us never say things like 'when I was a boy' or 'when I was a girl'. Instead, we tend to use gender-neutral terms such as 'when I was a kid'. Cynnie was never really a girl, and she wasn't allowed to be a boy - so thinking of herself as either a 'boy' or 'girl' doesn't really fit.