The First Time I Was A Girl

Written by Mykal Alder June

The first time I was a girl, I was in red. I look good in red. My best friend Crissee had this amazing, ridiculous fire engine red vinyl corset ballgown — retiring wallflower that she is — and I was hanging out in her dorm trying it on at her behest.

It wasn’t just Crissee and I, no, it was her roommates and friends as well, Carrie, Scotti, Melissa… and me. One thing I had picked up on in my years and years of always being the one boy hanging out with a gang of girls is we are ever one mere lengthy pause away from someone saying “Hey June, Let Us Dress You Up!” We adore a makeover so away we go.

I’m sitting on Crissee’s bed, Bobcat Village, Milledgeville, Georgia, feeling like a particularly demure tomato in this dress and an octopus of lipsticks and eyeliners and hair clips are coming at me, and then when the tentacles recede, something is different.

There is a photo of this moment: me, seated in a fiery red vinyl gown, the women surrounding me smiling for the camera, but me looking aside, giving Olivier with my beatific, 20 year old profile. The arch of my nose drawing attention to painted lips and strong shoulders. Melissa and I were dating at the time, and I noted her reaction as my posture, my demeanor shifted. My voice carrying a little further, standing prouder than I ever had. She was surprised. I was surprised. I wish I could say that I learned something about myself that night, but learning means retention and the incredible lift I felt swishing around that dormitory and posing for pictures and staring at myself in the mirror… all that washed off with the blush and sagged along with my shapeless blue jeans and I forgot.

OH. I FORGOT! That was NOT the first time I was a girl! No, okay so… summer vacations, we spent weeks at my Lola’s house, my siblings, my cousins, and I. A tribe of little brown kids, trampling around the living room, riding blankets down the shag carpeted stairs, picking up sticks, leaves, and rocks in the Western Michigan woods that surrounded the house at the end of a winding dirt road.

So my cousin Nicole and I were SUPPOSED to be taking a nap upstairs, but jumping on the bed is more fun so we were doing that, and I thought “hey June let’s dress you up!” and tied a blanket around my waist and draped another over my head so that like my beloved cousins, I too could have long beautiful hair and Nicole called me Jasmine and we jumped and giggled together until Lola came in and admonished us “Hoy! You are supposed to be na-PEENG. Naman!”

But I hadn’t woken up yet. Not then, not in that ball gown, not at the theater department banquet I — did I mention I majored in Theater? The theater banquet I attended in makeup with my gorgeous 20 year old jawline and flirting with absolutely EVERYONE including planting a big kiss on my friend Jessie’s scruffy face leading my girlfriend to later ask me “So like… are you gay now?” and having to explain to her that I’m just super comfortable with myself like this.

That conversation is one I would push into the deep recesses of my memory until about two decades later.

I have rarely felt at home anywhere. My family moved from Michigan to Conyers when I was nine, leaving behind my tribe of little brown cousins to be a Yankee in the South. Just dark enough to stand out from the white kids at school and in my neighborhood. A brainy sensitive kid who had never touched a football before cresting the doors of a middle school that borrowed its Bulldog mascot from everyone’s beloved UGA. The scholarship-losing college dropout. The monolingual immigrant’s kid. The one boy hanging out with a gang of girls.

And then over a dozen or so years here in Atlanta, I found my people. I crept into rehearsal rooms and black boxes to cover theater as an arts reporter, getting my hit of the backstage life just enough to where I could be like “ahh! I missed this! Okay that’s enough.” I found my barroom poets and shoved them onstage at literary events that felt more like punk shows than any of the actual punk shows I played. And the more and more I embedded myself in the culture in this city, the more this city felt like home. The more I felt I belonged, at last, anywhere.

And then 2020 happened.

Two years. Two years of isolation. Living in bone-deep fear of the air I was breathing, fearing for my family, my child. With little to fill the time but introspection. And dressing my Animal Crossing character in cute dresses and shoes. I remember talking about that on TikTok and someone just commenting with an egg emoji… and I had to look up what that meant! BRAND new, moving on. I started playing with gender IRL. Bought a skirt, bought some lipstick, got my friend Gina to give me a full face and walk me through what she was doing. And the first time I was a girl, I hid my Maybelline under an N-95, wore a black skirt and stood in front of the stage at the Variety watching Julien Baker and even in that VERY queer-friendly environment, I felt like I wanted to disappear into the walls, I was so self-conscious.

But as presenting openly, VISIBLY queer became easier, I started to remember. I remembered the ball gown. I remembered how much I’ve always felt so much more myself and at ease around women and artists and queer folks. I remembered jumping on the bed with Nicole. Being cut off from all of the external mechanisms I had set up to get that sense of belonging, I was forced to look inside and remember that I USED TO be a happy, rambunctious, extroverted, HORNY little long-haired freak and I just FORGOT over the course of twenty years of aDULthOoD. And I only remembered when I was forced to look inside myself and that is where I found her. That’s where I found the courage… on a spring morning to tell my wife of fifteen years that I intended to start HRT. It was like throwing a bomb into the middle of my life. I’m living alone, we’re co-parenting, I’m on antidepressants and in therapy and becoming the person I am because honestly, the first time I was a girl didn’t happen in college, it didn’t happen at Lola’s house, it didn’t happen when I popped my first estradiol or even when I pushed my first progesterone capsule up my ass. I have been a glorious mess of a weirdo girl this entire fucking time. I only needed to remember.