It's all in the initials - Who Am I? (part 5)

Ok so here is where I’m edging closer to darkness. Now I’m going to preface that I love my family and have actually cleared up this issue, but here are my unfiltered thoughts.

As you may have noticed, my initials are DW. Now I think most of you might remember the PBS show Arthur, and that he had a little sister called DW. Anyways let’s just say that I was around 5 years old. So here’s the traumatic childhood experience. My mom and brother tease me about having the same initials as the girl on the stupid PBS show. I’m a little kid and easily upset and offended. I tell them to stop but they don’t. Little did they know that in that moment I was deeply scarred. I’m trying to be a boy as best as I can even though I’m not as good as it as my older brother. And all I’m hearing is that as hard as I’m trying I’m still like a girl and that’s something to laugh about. Oh and why in this situation am I like a girl? Because my freaking name. You fucking gave me the initials DW. I had no say in the matter. Even linguistically my first name has only one rare female counterpart. So you’re telling me that because this fictional character goes by her initials that makes my initials feminine. That’s just stupid bullying. But wait, here’s the kicker than makes it so much worse. I don’t think they knew I overheard or that I was old enough to understand, but a while back I heard them say how my mom wanted one boy and then one girl. So as the little son who’s pretty damn good at counting, let’s see my brother came first. One boy, check. Then came me, oh fuck, I’m not a girl. Are you saying you want me to be a girl or that you would rather have a girl than me. So I was a mistake? Not like a oops where did that baby come from or a bastard/love child. Nope. They wanted another child, they just didn’t want me because I was the wrong gender. So you can see how that can screw with a five-year-old struggle to be a real boy and the potential (and eventually realized) psychological repercussions those careless but very sharp words were. Maybe the worst part, the part that made it all too real, was that they picked out a name for the her that wasn’t me. Abigail. It made me feel like I killed me twin sister in the womb. Like I killed this Abigail. Except she was never there. It was just me. DW. So for the longest time I resented being called by my initials even when all the guys in high school went through a phase were they called each other by their initials. (So another way I wasn’t able to be one of the guys.)

So let this being a warning, a cautionary tale if you will, that you should be careful what you say to or in front of your child at ages that you think they won’t remember because maybe they won’t but what if they do. And as you can see I took something that might have been small for my parents, but it was freaking the biggest bombshell of my little lifetime. And I think I did an ok job at explaining why I was insulted in being called a girl. It was screwing with my gender identity. It wasn’t this patriarchal dictation that being like a girl is bad thing. Totally a feminist here. And I think I’ll keep saying this, but girls are freaking awesome. And this whole story came back to me recently because this BuzzFeed article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed: 23 Times D.W. Was The Realist Bitch Who Ever Lived And I am now completely proud to be have been compared to this little girl from a PBS show.