When I was 11 I began getting a lot of attention from a boy in my class, he was quite an early bloomer and liked to talk to me about sex. I didn’t have much of a grasp about what was wrong with the situation, talking about sex was forbidden but intriguing so I chalked my discomfort up to the excitement I was supposed to feel when breaking the rules. The boy began telling me what he’d like to do to himself and asking me to do the same, he introduced me to porn that he had clearly been consuming a lot of. He tried to kiss me once at a school dance and I ran away crying, I knew that there was something wrong but I still couldn’t place the fact that it was him and not me.

After I came out as a lesbian at 12 years old these comments and conversations didn’t stop, in fact they escalated to touches and propositions. He started asking me for nude photos, he had told me that he’d kill himself if I didn’t send them. I didn't want to see him die so I sent him photos in increasingly compromising positions for a period of three or four months, I have no way of knowing if he still has them. He also began to touch me in places that I didn’t want him to and make cracks about how small I was (I was a very late bloomer). At this point I started identifying as trans, probably in part because of what he was doing to me.

I tried to cut this boy off just after I turned 13 because it was making me so uncomfortable but he pleaded with me and promised he’d change, it wasn’t long before his requests came back. He began pressuring me to go over to his house and I held him off for as long as I could, the first time I went he didn’t cause any trouble. I went back a second time and pressured me into sexual acts with him. At the time I didn’t realize what he had done and I sat in a sort of limbo, I cut him off for real two weeks later. I went to school with him for another year and I remember my senses being on high alert every time he walked into a room. I confronted him once about the grooming and eventual assault and he denied even remembering it stating that he was so depressed that he was self medicating, I don’t believe him. He reached out to me about a month later to tell me that he was trans and to ask me to help pick out his new name, it made me so uncomfortable but that didn’t seem to matter to him. He hasn’t stuck with his trans identity.

Since this incident I’ve desisted from being trans and am happy as a lesbian.