I knew when I was younger that I never liked 'girl' things over 'boy' things. Sure, I had Barbie dolls, and I played with them all the time, but I also had a marble set, toy cars, and toy robots that occupied a majority of my time because there's more replay value in a marble set than a new outfit for Barbie.
 

Sometime in early elementary school, I was talking to my friends on the playground. They were excited about cotillion, which was foreign to me, so I asked them to explain. When they told me, I raised an eyebrow; I couldn't imagine how they could possibly be excited to learn proper manners and the difference between seven-bajillion-zillion different kinds of forks, spoons, and knives. And dancing? Boring. "Why anyone would want to do that?" was expelled from my mouth before I could stop myself, and they all just stared at me like I was insane. We quickly moved on from the subject. Sometime later, I was talking to one of the 'valley girls', the prissy girls that wore makeup and had the pink shirts and skirts that were really short, even though they were only 8 years old. As we talked, I asked what was appealing about wearing makeup and being snooty. She shrugged, "I act like this for fun." She didn't actually care about looking nice, but she put on a show. I didn't understand why someone would do that. I certainly wasn't going to lie about who I was to get attention. Especially not by showing off that I was a girl. When a girl at my middle school shaved her head on the premise that she was lesbian, my mom told me, "I think she's too young to be deciding her sexuality," but my immediate thought was, "What about heterosexuals?" Who asks them, "When did you decide to like the opposite gender?" I had constant thoughts about gender and its associated stereotypes. I wanted to break the binary, more than I already did, so that's what I started to do.
 

I began wearing, and still continue to wear, loose black t-shirts and baggy pants, I have short hair and nothing, in terms of product or accessories, ever touches it. I wear this clothing because it's comfortable, but also because it blurs the line of my gender. Breaking this binary became a larger and larger part of my life. I'm not offended when the waiter calls me "sir". Why should I be offended to be male? Why is being female offensive to men? It isn't. (But it's more than that; I also love the faces they make when I tell them what I want in an obviously female voice.)
 

In elementary school, I didn't like being called a female. On the 'tests' to see if you were truly a boy or girl based on how you showed your nails or something else stupid like that, I would hate when I got "Yup, you're a true girl" and learned the tricks to always get "You're actually a boy." I didn't like being categorized by something as trivial as gender, and as I grew older gender issues became more complex, so I asked bigger questions, like how people could love someone based on whether they were male or female. That idea of choosing based on body parts didn't make sense to me. So I stopped doing it: I stopped judging people based on gender. I look at every person in the same light regardless of gender. I get to know someone before I start judging. How else would one know that the prissy girls going to cotillion might actually play Dungeons and Dragons, or that the MVP soccer player might go home and watch Dance Moms after practice?