I was molested from age eleven to age thirteen and a half by my older brother. The summer I turned twelve, he raped me.
He was sixteen, four and a half years older than me and trying to grow a mustache. At twelve, I had a better mustache than him and began pointing that out every single time he was preening in the mirror and checking out how full his 'stache was.
He always reacted like a kicked puppy, probably for reasons he didn't really understand.
When I got to be sixteen -- coincidentally the same age I began menstruating -- and stopped finding it funny that my mustache was better than his, I began tweezing it to remove it. (I got through half of it on the first try and then stopped.)
By all accounts, I was quite beautiful in my youth and I have had people say things to me like "You're so feminine, I can't imagine you doing sports."
(Me internally: I did gymnastics for a time and never played organized baseball like you, but did play stick ball in the street with neighbor kids.)
I mostly have never worn makeup. In my youth, I had high color with very pale porcelain fine skin, dark hair, relatively bright red lips and rosy cheeks.
I didn't need foundation to cover flaws in my skin and I had people ask me "What color lipstick are you wearing in that photo?" when I had none on. Once my sister was putting lavender eye shadow on me and going "I see no difference at all. I've done NOTHING here. Your eyelids just naturally look this color."
So I trended towards lip gloss, mascara and use of a lash curler if I bothered to do ANYTHING.
That doesn't mean I didn't work at looking good. I did. I spent quite a LOT of time on things like reshaping my eyebrows, hair removal, making sure I had a good haircut, finding hair products that my finicky hair played well with, shopping for clothes, etc.
I don't care what you were born with, beautiful women work at it.
I used to be 5'9" tall. Unlike most of my female relatives, I never learned to sew, knit or crochet. Over the years, I got a lot of guff about being "too butch" or somehow not girly enough.
I also didn't OWN a single pair of pants until age seven and got my first pair of jeans at age twelve. My sister got her first pair of jeans at age SEVENTEEN probably because her high school classmates were joking about taking up a collection to buy her a pair.
No, our parents weren't extreme religious conservatives like one classmate of mine forbidden from wearing pants. They were just old and old fashioned and GIRLS wore skirts, dresses and shorts.
I was an extremely athletic kid who climbed trees and played on monkey bars etc. I was much more athletic than either my sister or brother.
My mom sewed a lot of my clothes and all my extremely girly girl little dresses had matching or coordinating shorts because I was ALLOWED to do cartwheels and hang upside down on the monkey bars and sit in the splits in the sand so long as my ruffled panties didn't show.
My mom's mom's maiden name started with von. So my maternal grandmother came from a low level noble German family that sold the title long before I was ever a twinkle in anyone's eye and my mother was extremely picky about proper attire and proper ladylike behavior.
At some point, I had the epiphany that the ONLY people on planet Earth with expectations similar to my mother are British royals. If you want to know how my mom expected me to dress, you will only see those expectations in fashion pieces about British royals.
Somehow, this mostly applied to ME, her wild child with wild curls. In contrast, she actively aided and abetted my plainer sister in having an ongoing political battle with her high school over my sister's desire to wear shorts to school.
Georgia is hotter than hell and muggy. The school dress code allowed kids to wear shorts BUT stated they couldn't be "hot pants."
My sister was two inches shorter than me but had the exact same inseam measurements. She's ALL leg and when she's wears shorts or short skirts, it's a lot of bare skin and the legs go on forever so people perceive her as wearing shorter shorts and skirts than she's really wearing.
So the school kept calling my mom to bring her a change of clothes.
My mother got a copy of the dress code and it stated clearly that if there was a one inch cuff, it wasn't hot pants. So she began sewing outrageously eye catching shorts with matching vests (it was a thing in the seventies) and made short shorts with a one inch cuff.
I remember the hot pink shorts and vest.
Odds are good the school's REAL issue was that my sister had a face like Velma, long hair and a bod like Daphne and was one of the smartest kids in school, so they likely wanted her to dress and act like the nerdy Velma and not confuse the entire school with a plain-Jane, smart girl who had a bod and dressed better than anyone else in school. No being sexy on school time when you're supposed to be a giant ugly undatable NERD as punishment for being a smarty pants.
Anyway, I like to IMAGINE that in spite of being a cis gal, I have firsthand experience with a lot of the same issues trans gals have -- being tall, hairy, "ungirly" for a thousand reasons -- and ALSO have gotten a lot of feedback that I'm gorgeous, feminine, have taste etc.
So I feel highly qualified to say "Girl, ain't no big thing and ALL women go through this. Let me give you a few pointers from someone who has been there, done that and had it come out okay."
Trans community: Get off our lawn. You're not welcome here.
I should probably stop bothering to try.
Footnote
A version of the opening story for this piece was originally posted to r/traumatizethemback earlier today and PROMPTLY removed by mods. I have absolutely no idea why.
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