There was evidence that given a free reign I generally conformed to the gender roles and habits of a boy of my era even if a number of interests such as a liking of dolls to look after and collect and a love of flowers were untypical, being supremely uncool for a boy of the nineteen seventies.
I also had a liking for wearing skirts and dresses not as a girl but rather as a more feminine boy - let's just come out and say "sissy" - in a dress and in today's language my gender - the social side aligned to sex - is wide than most and does fluctuate so really I'm more a feminine boy/sissy who is gender fluid even if I am happy with my biological make up.
While I was happy enough doing that, the influence of females such as my mother and "experts" in disability tended to lead to very passive, following risk adverse behaviour being encouraged and more boisterous play being kept away from that only made it harder to integrate into the social world.
That was the crazy thing I could be this rough and tough boy in some things but driven towards the world of girls play in others.
However you wrap it up a feminine/sissy boy like me needs to integrate both sides as we share one common body.
When it came to how I dressed - "presented" was not a word we used then I was always happy to wear the school uniform of a boy which in that era included a shirt, tie long socks, grey fairly short shorts and a matching jersey.
I loved my uniform as it was practical for what did as much as there were things I'd sooner of joined the girls with and had the option of wearing a skirt.
Unlike some people who see themselves as transexual, I never felt a sense of not want to or a need to be a girls so I never wanted present as if I were actually a girl.
It wasn't that I didn't feel like wear a girls uniform with a skirt or pinafore dress as much as I liked being a boy even if navigating it with all those feminine influences and the lack of total immersion into the social world of boys had its ups and downs.
I just needed to be me and able to wear dresses when I needed to let my feminine side go.
The only kind of intense dislike and uncomfortableness with being myself I ever experienced was more at high school as I much preferred to wear grey shorts and not long trousers and ankle socks that felt too short to do any good.
Part of that really in hindsight was the real problem - because of my disabilities I couldn't easily fit into the world of the teenager because they'd moved on from where I was by a good two years or more and I couldn't handle being that the child becoming a man because I was very much fourteen going on ten - a young child and a feminine sissy one at that.
Nevertheless, some saw that as a sign of uncomfortableness with gender roles and started to work around questioning what I "really" was and wasn't I actually a girl.
What I can now say is it was never really about gender roles, the dysphoria was more around becoming physically an adolescent male on a path to becoming a man when the person was a "Child within" and was only socially capable of the gender role of a ten year old child unable to cope with that world.
I just wanted to wear what suited me best as that sissy gurl I felt rather than become a female.
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