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read this first

Emily-Rose asked me something for a project she's working on :
"I want to illustrate the association of growing up in a "girly way" as a girl and experiencing troubles and dark mental places."

The question was
"[…] how did you experienced girlhood ? It could be about your approach to pink and feminity, of being a girl, of the troubles that you had etc..."

here's my response

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girlhood

For me, girlhood is both an impossible wish and nostalgia for something I never really experienced.

2 fast 2 furious le film

22 years ago, I was born a boy and raised a boy. I’ve always loved cars, guns and legos and for most of my childhood that was it. But for the past years, there has been some issues about that, and it’s an indescribably slow process so it’s hard to put words onto it. By issues I mean questions and challenges in my mind. At some point I have no memory of, pastel pink started being my absolutely favorite color. Little by little, my adolescence started being heavily influenced by cute, pink, soft, definitly feminine aesthetics, and feminine fictional characters like Lou by Julien Neel, the main characters of Life is Strange, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline from Adventure Time, the girls from K-On, and just a lot of anime girls who looked cute or cool. I’ve never really liked the style or design of “male heroes”, neither their personality, but I’ve always been really drawn to girls, what they do and how they do it. And at some point I started to wonder if I just really liked them or if I actually wanted to be them. Girlhood slowly started taking place in my life through internet media, cartoons and video games, it was very visual, not yet a feeling disrupting my identity.

Lou c'est pas que une BD c'est aussi un dessin animé et un film sorti en 2014 and it's French

Around 2014 I started making music on my computer, and at some point I decided that my artist name would be different from my actual username, and it would be “Girlfriend.” I think that this choice was very revealing of both my attraction towards girlhood and the solitude I felt - and still feel to this day, quite frankly. Growing with an almost totally absent father figure surely didn’t help me growing into a stable and confident boy, and my mother was also very emotionally distant (I don’t blame her; she’s been raised very harshly, and she has made everything in her power to make it better for us, and I actually had a happy childhood.) So I found comfort and inspiration in girls online and in girl friends I had during highschool. I guess I really wanted a girlfriend too, but I also kinda wanted to be one, and that’s why I named myself that and choose to make art under this alias. It spoke to me.

Music was itself a huge influence in my vision of gender and my belonging to girlhood. It happens that all my favorite musicians are transgender women who even are about the same age as me! I’m talking about two of my favorite artists EVER, Jane Remover, and April Harper Grey (also known as underscores), who are insanely talented musicians and DJs with various aliases and genres they operate in. Hyperpop, the umbrella genre for most of my favorite artists, regroups a lot of talented trans women like Laura Les from 100 gecs, Sophie Xeon, Alejandra Ghersi (Arca), Fraxiom, Angel Prost from the Frost Children, Devi McCallion (Girls Rituals), Catherine Egbert (saoirse dream), Thanas... I also really like Hatsune Miku. I like them all in a way that… I wanna be like them. I want to sing and perform and act girly and be feminine and pretty and confident. And at some later point in my adolescence I started seriously questioning my sexuality, which also raised serious questions about my own gender. In the end, am I a girl? No. I’m genderfluid: most of the time I’m a quiet and fragile boy, but GOD sometimes I just really want to be a girl.

April Harper Grey a.k.a. underscores a.k.a. real popstar, cosplaying virtual popstar hatsune miku!!!!!

Sometimes I just really want to have always been a girl, and it makes me sad and nostalgic. If you’d let me reset my life, choose all my traits, I’d be a girl. 100%. I want to be taught girly things. I want to have girl friends, girl talks, girls nights, girly clothes. I’d love to have the body of a girl. I’m probably heavily biased by media and my experiences but that’s how I feel. Sometimes I even wonder if I should transition. I’ve already chosen my name: I’d be Charlotte. Sometimes I’m very very sad that I couldn’t experience girlhood for most of my life, and that I can hardly experience it now because I’ve never been taught how! Above all I’ve been taught to be a boy and I can really hardly change that. It’s a lot of cognitive distortions to handle. Sometimes it’s fine, but there’s always some gender dysphoria in the back of my mind. My boy's name makes me uncomfortable, so I find it hard to identify myself in a way that suits me. I wish I was a girl, I wish I knew how to be girly, and make it accepted by my relatives, but it will never be like that, or at least that’s what I believe for now. For now I’m mostly satisfied with being a young white man anyway, purely because it’s really, really, really comfortable not to change, and even though it’s not who I truly want to be. Because of that, I really like seeing people actually express their true selves online. The femboy phenomena is thriving on the internet and I think it’s cool to see that many boys like me want to be girly and have the dedication to be who they truly are, against stereotypes and societal norms. Most generally I’m glad the LGBTQ+ community is thriving and I hope people will be more open-minded as time goes.

In the end, I grew up with a loving home and family, at least I have that. And for now, I just wish that one day I’ll have the energy to be my true self, in my body and spirit.

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so yeah that's it bye