For a while now I’ve been grappling with Peyton being a boy while I bathe him or change his diaper. At four, he doesn’t quite have the full ability of bathing himself, and he is not fully potty trained. If there is ever a time when my brain is utterly confused by Peyton being a boy, it is during diapering and bathing. It has nothing to do with my acceptance of him but with my brain. We are so conditioned to thinking that a vagina=girl and a penis=boy. This we learn from so very early on. And it stays with us for our entire lives, well, for the most part it does.

It is during these times that I have to consciously think about who Peyton is. He is not that little girl that he once was, instead he is a boy. And while washing him up my brain can’t match his vagina to what he looks like and who he is. He is essentially a boy in the wrong body. This is no longer the case just for him, but also for me. I’m not sure when that changed and I fully realized that he is in the wrong physical body but I have realized it. I wonder if this is how it was for him? I wonder if he suddenly woke up one day and realized how very wrong things were and that he had to fix them… That is an odd realization to make and not one that I knew I had made until writing this. It’s kind of enlightening in a sense. Does that mean that I now fully accept him as a boy and before I only thought I did? Wow, so many questions… I don’t even think that there are any answers here. And now that I’ve realized that he is a boy, do I run off and change his name? Does it mean that I will be so much more open to him taking medication to suppress his body from changing into that of a little girl? Does it mean that in the future I will be more supportive of him when and if he decides to change his physical body? This is kind of crazy. I’m pretty sure my brain has literally flipped a switch from before to now. Maybe he helped that to happen because of the way he talks about himself when he was a girl. It’s like that was a past life and now he is leading a different one…