I Am a Girl!

Every 13-year-old girl dreams of that nice, but hard-to-get, boy. And Joppe is no different, consulting her friend on how to ask Brian out. But just how should she tell him that she was born a boy?

From a very early age, Joppe - then still called Jop - liked to wear dresses and wigs and play with Barbie dolls. Jop also preferred to be addressed as a "she" rather than a "he." Halfway through the last year of elementary school, she decided to ask her classmates to consider her a girl from then on. All things considered, this went remarkably smoothly: "From that moment on, I just started getting changed with the girls." At her new school, she preempted problems by telling everyone right away. "It really isn't a huge problem", she says. "It doesn't dominate your life, although you are confronted by it every day." Nevertheless, this brave teenager won't let anything stop her. Sometimes, she secretly looks at her girlfriends' bodies and feels a little envious. "I want female curves too, damn it!"

With a striking amount of self-confidence, Joppe explains how puberty blockers and female hormones work and how she copes with her emotions.