Transgender or NOT Transgender l

When I was a very small child, I wanted to be a boy. I know that a lot of girls go through a tomboy stage, but mine was way more than that.  Before I even had entered kindergarten I asked everyone to call me Derek, after a strong and smart male character that I had seen in some 
movie. In first grade I was madly in love with my teacher - Sister Mary Thomas - who was a gentle and beautiful soul.  I may have joined the convent to be with her! In third grade I had a mad crush on the Rec tennis coach Candy. Looking back I know that she was gay, and I probably just wanted to be her. 
Maybe not surprisingly, much of my issue related to my feelings of being transgender(or in those days, just wanting to be a boy) were around the blatant discrepancy that I noticed at a very young age about how girls and boys were treated.It made no sense to me!  After all, I was way better than most of them in sports and could beat most of them up! Until a certain age......then estrogen hit - and talk about a mind trip!
Through most of my junior high days I was madly in love with my best friend TM, but dated boys - kind of - well everyone else was doing it! 
I remember that for about 1 or 2 years, although I played sports and had crushes on girls, I felt like I might just be "like the other girls". I had a serious boyfriend and even had some decent sexual experiences.  That didn't last long however - I was madly in love with my high school best friend, EB. Talk about tortured.........we both were, and dabbled just a bit sexually, but she was too afraid. 
I went on to college and there had my first full-fledged lesbian relationship with LF. We were both pretty butchy - because in the late 70s it wasn't cool to be in butch-fem relationships. It wasn't really a thing for lesbians to be feminine at all, and the only real way those dichotomies occurred were when women/lesbians actually were living as men.  I saw this a few times and and my radical lesbian feminist self thought - "who would want to be a man - yuck".  Different times.  

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