Maku knew from an early age that he wasn’t feeling good in a girl’s body
Fifteen-year-old Maku knew he wasn’t feeling good in a girl’s body from an early age. There’s one thing he can say for sure - he is not a girl and he doesn’t wish to be one. Nevertheless, everyone knows him as a girl and so they keep addressing him as such. However, Maku’s closest friends address him with masculine pronouns and some of them use neutral pronouns, with which he also sometimes identifies. Maku identifies as nonbinary and it was the theatre that made him first realize, that there is something different about him.
“Whenever we were dividing male and female roles, I always wanted to have the male ones. I’m not really sure how to describe this, but imagine that you, a female, were born into a man’s body, knowing you’re not a man. It’s like that. When someone addresses me as a girl, I get conflicted because I’m a boy, so why can’t they address me like that,” Maku explains.
“Sometimes I even wondered if the doctors in the hospital hadn’t done a surgery on me when I was just a baby to make me a girl. But with time I learned to accept myself, the internet helped me a lot in that aspect, since there’s a lot of information,” Maku adds.
Knowing that he is not alone was also one of the major factors that helped him to accept himself. Maku went to a festival in the summer of 2019 where he met some people. “At one point, there were around seven of us at the table. It turned out that six out of the seven people were LGBT+. I will admit, I was quite happy but also surprised,” Maku says.
His female friends in the choir were the first ones he told about being nonbinary. They took it really well, according to his words. Nevertheless, he is still waiting for the right time to come out to his parents, partly because he’s still quite young. “I think they will tell me to get it together at first, but hopefully, they’ll come to terms with it in the end. I might tell them in a year, or two, but probably not in the nearest future,” Maku says. Most importantly - he hopes to tell them himself rather than having them find out from someone else. Maku already went through a similar situation at his school in September of 2020.
“We were supposed to fill in a questionnaire about our biology lessons. They wanted to know our gender, among other things. Since I identified as nonbinary and the options were only female or male, I added the ‘nonbinary’ option to it,” Maku explains.
Next day, the chemistry teacher came to his class and said in front of everyone that someone ruined their questionnaire. She asked the one who did it to admit to it, because he wrote that he was bisexual and didn’t know his gender. “I got really red and then said it was me. The teacher said she would put in my correct gender - female. Then she asked me if I was just messing around. I told her yes, that it was just a stupid joke,” Maku continues his story placing a great emphasis on the word “stupid”.
Afterwards, Maku felt embarrassed, angry but mostly regretful. “I was sorry to know that adding my identity, according to the teacher’s words, ruined the questionnaire. Everyone just had to choose between female or male. Originally, I wanted it to be my coming out, but in the end, I just felt embarrassed,” Maku finishes his story, adding that no one really talks about LGBT+ at his school and that even after this incident, his teacher still uses female pronouns when addressing him.
“I talked about what happened with my classmate and I messaged about it to another friend who supported me. They said that the teacher didn’t have to bring it up in front of the whole class or she could have gone about it differently,” Maku describes his friends’ reactions.
Even though Maku meets with people who support him and are often in a similar situation, it’s not always easy for him. For example, he feels some of the obstacles when changing for the PE class. “I know I don’t want to be in a girl’s body, so I always hide in a corner and quickly change there. I would prefer it, if I could share the changing rooms with boys and play football together, but I can’t,” Maku describes his average day in school.
Maku is still waiting with public coming out, partly because he’s worried that he will lose some of his friends because of it. He would be much happier if people could just stop caring so much about what other people wear and do. “Part of society hasn't accepted us yet, which is really a pity. But I don’t feel as something less because of it, I learned to overcome it,” Maku finishes.
Author: Anna Pálová
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