Sitting in a circle, with my closest cousins, playing clapping games, doing hair, and playing with dolls.. the world, and all that I know it is today, seizes to exist, and life is this new experience...

That is me at 5 years old... a little girl...doing what a lot of little girls do... except that there was one thing different... I wasn't a little girl at all...

My name is Lea, I was born a biological male, but with the gender identity of a biological female, and at 5 years old, I knew that it wasn't right. That what I felt inside wasn't what I looked like on the outside, and that something was clearly a miss.

For the longest time, I didn't really think about it, because, aside from my two brothers, no one really told me that the feelings I had, my mannerisms, and my behaviors were that of a girl.

"Shut up, and stop acting like a girl", my younger brother would say to me.."you're such a girl" my eldest brother would trail with, as they ganged up on me.. we argued alot, and over almost anything...it was me against them. All the way through my early life, they reminded me that I was different, and if it wasn't for them, I probably wouldn't have really noticed.

There were countless times where I felt shameful of my femininity because of them, shameful of my need to identify with the female gender, even at the youngest of ages. But it never became an issue with my parents, and none of my extended family ever brought it up as an issue. And so I was left, without pressures to conform to either gender, and not until I was in my early teens, did it begin to surface, and become something of a reality for me.

Growing up, and going to school in New Zealand was a difficult thing. Because New Zealand is a country that adopts the culture of the native people, which in this case, are my people, the Maori.
Maori culture is one that is heavily defined by gender. Women do one thing, men do another... and that is the way of it, and there is no straying from these "gender traditions".

I think because of these gender traditions, school for me was difficult. It presented challenges that I couldn't explain to anyone at the time, because I didn't even know what I was feeling... or what it meant. It still causes me some distress when I think about it now, but atleast I can now look back, and identify what I was going through, and gain from learning about the "misunderstood" childhood I lived.

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