The Schoolyard

While the Raptor offered an escape from the house, there was no escaping the institution of the school.

I was at a new school in Baviaanspoort, and I hoped, with the desperate optimism of a lonely child, that this time would be different. I hoped that the open skies of the farm prison might mean open minds.

I was wrong. A platoon of seven-year-olds now enforced the policing that began in my father’s house.

The schoolyard is the first place where a child learns that “difference” is a punishable offense. I naturally gravitated toward the girls. Their games made sense to me; their gentleness felt like a common language. But the gender apartheid of the playground was strictly enforced.

The boys noticed my defect immediately. I wasn’t hard enough. I wasn’t loud enough. I was too attached to my mother. The labels were applied with the swift brutality of a court sentence: Moffie. Faggot. Fatty. Mamma’s boy.

Moffie is a weaponized word in Afrikaans. It doesn’t just mean gay; in the context of 1980s South Africa, it implied a traitor to the cause of masculinity. In a militarized society preparing for war on the border, to be soft was to be useless to the state.

I was seven years old, and I was already a traitor.

The policing wasn’t just verbal; it was physical. I remember a break time during a game of ‘Brandball’, a violent variation of tag played with a tennis ball. I was trying to make myself invisible on the edge of the field, but invisibility is a magnet for bullies.

The ball hit me hard between the shoulder blades, stinging like a whip. I stumbled and fell into the red dust of the playground. Before I could scramble up, a knee pressed into my spine, pinning me to the earth.

It was a boy named Danie. He leaned down, his weight crushing the air from my lungs, his breath hot against my ear.

“Stay down, moffie,” he whispered. “Dirt is where you belong.”

The physical pain was sharp, but the shame was a heavy, suffocating blanket. I lay there in the dirt long after he had run off, realizing that the playground was not a place of play. It was a hunting ground, and I was the prey.

The Tantrum

The stress of this constant persecution manifested in rage. I didn’t have the language to articulate my dysphoria or my loneliness. So, I spoke in the only language the system seemed to understand: violence.

One day in class, the pressure valve burst. The teacher was droning on, the other kids were snickering, and the noise in my head became a roar.

I stood up. I picked up my wooden school desk and threw it.

The crash silenced the room. I didn’t stop there. I grabbed my chair and banged it against the floor, a small riot of one against the silence of the classroom. I was screaming, but not with words. I was screaming with the raw, chaotic energy of a creature caught in a trap.

The system’s response was to pathologize me. Instead of looking at the toxic environment, the bullying, the rigid gender roles, the pressure of the panopticon, the school and my parents decided the problem was inside me.

I was labeled as “erratic.”

I was sent to a child psychologist. In the medical view, I was a defective machine requiring adjustment. I sat in her office, surrounded by toys meant to lure the truth out of children. She asked me questions about my feelings, about my anger.

“Why did you throw the desk, Dawie?”

I looked at her, and I said nothing. I knew the rules of this world. Adults were all connected. The teacher spoke to the principal, the principal spoke to the Colonel, and the psychologist spoke to my parents. If I told her the truth; I wish I were a girl, I hate being a boy; she would report me. I knew that my father’s solution to “deviance” was the strap.

So, I kept my mouth shut. Everyone said I was “shy.” I wasn’t shy; I was guarding a fortress.

The Zone of Exception

My actual therapy happened behind a locked door, enabled by the structural hypocrisy of the state.

While my father enforced the rigid morality of the Dutch Reformed Church within the walls of our home, he and my mother harbored a secret. In the Calvinist worldview, gambling was a sin. Yet, my parents developed a deep love for casinos.

In the 1980s, gambling was illegal in “white” South Africa, confined to the “homelands”, puppet states created to segregate Black people. These areas served as zones of exception, where the laws of God and State were temporarily suspended.

Their hypocrisy was my liberation.

The moment the sound of their car engine faded down the street, the house transformed. It was no longer the Colonel’s quarters; it was my sanctuary. I ran to my mother’s bedroom.

By the age of eight, I was an expert thief of femininity. I knew precisely which drawers held the silky treasures I craved. I discovered a wig, a relic of 1970s fashion, and pulled it over my short, boyish hair. I slipped into her dresses.

For a few hours, Dawie, the moffie, the disappointment, ceased to exist. I played out elaborate fantasies where I was a female spy saving the world, or a mermaid transforming between worlds. For those few hours, I felt a profound euphoria.

But the clock was always ticking. The sound of the car returning was the bell that ended the round. Panic would set in. I would tear off the clothes, frantic to wipe away the traces of the “ghost” I had allowed to manifest.

I realized then that I could be happy, but only in secret. My joy was contraband.

The Missile

If the closet was where I expressed my truth, the rugby field was where I buried it.

In the South African educational system of the 1980s, rugby was not merely a sport; it was a liturgy. It was the training ground for the nation’s soldiers, a place where the aggression required to maintain the state was cultivated and celebrated. For a boy labeled moffie and sissy, the rugby field should have been a place of terror.

Instead, I turned it into a theater of camouflage.

I realized early on that the bullies who tormented me for my softness respected only one thing: force. I couldn’t change my internal nature; I knew I was a girl, but I could weaponize my external body. I decided to play rugby not because I loved the game, but because I needed an alibi.

I played with a terrifying, suicidal intensity. I was not large, but I possessed a secret weapon: a total lack of self-preservation. When an opponent ran at me, I didn’t brace for impact; I launched myself into it.

I became a missile. I adopted a motto that became my shield: The bigger they are, the harder they fall. I targeted the biggest boys on the opposing teams, throwing my body into their knees, their waists, their chests. I wasn’t tackling to stop them; I was tackling to feel the shockwave.

This was my introduction to the distinction between Clean Pain and Dirty Pain.

Dirty Pain was the psychological toxicity of my daily life. It was the shame of the labels. It was the confusing, suffocating experience of dysphoria. It was a pain that festered, invisible and shameful.

Clean Pain was the impact of a shoulder against a hip bone. It was the taste of blood in the mouth after a high tackle. It was the bruising that bloomed on my skin like dark flowers the next morning. This pain was honest. It was localized. It was loud enough to drown out the voice in my head that whispered, I hate myself, I wish I were dead.

For the eighty minutes of a match, the physical violence silenced the psychological violence.

The strategy worked. The schoolyard’s social hierarchy shifted. The same boys who mocked my gentle nature in the classroom cheered for me on the field. I gained their respect, not by being myself, but by performing a hyper-violent version of the masculinity they idolized.

The Prayer of the Mistake

The pressure to be a “man” was not just a social demand; it was a spiritual crisis.

My parents taught me about God from a young age. We were in the Dutch Reformed Church, a theology that emphasized order, obedience, and the absolute sovereignty of the Father. In this worldview, everything had its place, and anything outside its place was a sin.

I felt the contradiction in my soul. I stole from my mother, I lied to my father, and I felt I was deceiving the world. The guilt was crushing.

One Sunday, after we got home from church, the weight of my double life became too heavy to carry. I locked myself in my room. I was desperate for a solution that didn’t involve the strap or the doctors. I turned to the only authority higher than the Colonel.

I knelt beside my bed, tears streaming down my face, and I made my first desperate bargain with the Divine.

“Liewe Jesus, hoekom is ek anders? Ek is nie ‘n seuntjie nie. Ek is ‘n dogtertjie. Maak asseblief hierdie groot fout reg. Ek haat myself. Ek wens ek was nooit gebore nie. Ek wens ek was dood.”

(“Dear Jesus, why am I different? I’m not a little boy. I’m a little girl. Please fix this big mistake. I hate myself. I wish I were never born. I wish I were dead.”)

I was trying to use faith to cure my identity. I was begging God to enforce the binary that my body rejected. I wanted Him to align my soul with my anatomy, or my anatomy with my soul. I didn’t care which, as long as the pain stopped.

I waited for a feeling, a sign, a transformation. I waited for the “mistake” to be corrected.

But the room remained silent. My body remained the same.

The silence of God was devastating. It confirmed my deepest fear: that I wasn’t just a disappointment to my father, but an error in creation. If even God wouldn’t fix me, then I was truly alone.

The First Suicide Attempt

It was this spiritual abandonment that led me to the knife.

One afternoon, I sat on the bus home from school. Some kids tried to talk to me. “Leave me alone,” I told them. “I am going to kill myself because I hate myself.”

When I got home, I didn’t go to the TV. I went to the kitchen. I grabbed a knife. I went to my room and locked the door behind me.

I sat on my bed, crying so hard I could barely see, the cold blade pressing against my wrist. I was eight years old. I didn’t want to hurt anyone; I just wanted the noise in my head to stop. I wanted to escape the body that had betrayed me and the world that refused to see me. I had accepted the state’s verdict: that a boy like me was a mistake, a life that did not matter and should be erased.

Then, the banging started.

“Open this door or else!”

My father was home. He didn’t ask if I was okay. He didn’t ask why I was crying. He demanded entry.

I refused. He broke the door down.

I expected him to hold me. I expected him to ask what was wrong, to be the father who protects his child from pain. Instead, he pushed me, pulled me, and screamed me into submission.

“The Van Zyl family cannot afford any more scandals!” he shouted.

In that moment, the hierarchy was made clear. My pain was secondary to the family’s reputation. My life was secondary to the Colonel’s standing. I wasn’t a child in crisis; I was a liability.

He didn’t hit me that day. The violence was psychological. He taught me that my despair was an inconvenience to the state.

I put the knife away. I dried my tears. I realized that if I couldn’t die, I would have to become the best actor the world had ever seen. I would survive this war, even if I had to kill the girl inside me to do it.

The Care Economy and the Canine Guard

If the suicide attempt was a confrontation with the power of the state to dictate who must die, then my survival depended on finding a different kind of power. I didn’t know the words then, but I was instinctively searching for the logic of care.

In the world of the Colonel, value was measured by force. You mattered if you could march, shoot, or tackle. But at age eight, the same year I held a knife to my wrist, I discovered a different way to use my hands.

I began to watch my father cook. It was one of the few times he wasn’t the Colonel; he was a creator. One afternoon, famished after school and tired of the microwave’s cold efficiency, I decided to make dinner. I didn’t want to conquer anything; I wanted to nourish.

I chose ground beef on toast, a humble meal, but to me, it was a culinary expedition. I spent two hours peeling potatoes, terrified the knife would slip and betray my incompetence. I sweated in the kitchen, performing the invisible, life-sustaining labor that society usually relegated to women.

When my father came home, I braced for the critique. I expected him to ask why I wasn’t doing homework or playing outside like a “real boy.”

Instead, he looked at the meal. He tasted it. And he was impressed.

“Good job,” he said. He even cooked fried eggs to go with it, joining me in the labor.

For a brief moment, the binary cracked. He valued my competence more than my gender performance. In that kitchen, I realized that labor could be an act of love, not just an act of war.

But if the kitchen offered a momentary truce, the outside world remained hostile. Humans, teachers, cousins, peers, had proven unsafe. They were agents of the panopticon, constantly watching and judging.

So, I expanded my Survival Wing to include those who did not judge: animals.

My parents bought a dog, a Fox Terrier cross, which I named Junior. In a life defined by conditional love, Junior offered the radical politics of unconditional loyalty.

We were inseparable. He slept on my bed, guarding my dreams. He walked me to the bus stop in the morning and was there, tail wagging, when I returned. He didn’t care about my gender. He didn’t care that I was “soft.” To him, I was simply his human.

One afternoon, the violence of the world found me on the street. A massive German Shepherd escaped from a neighbor’s yard and charged at me. I felt the heavy paws hit my back, the hot breath of aggression on my neck. I was small, terrified, and defenseless.

Then, a blur of white and brown. Junior, a fraction of the size of the attacker, launched himself at the German Shepherd. It was Dawie against Goliath. He fought with a ferocity that defied the laws of physics, driving the larger dog away.

I scrambled to safety, my heart racing. Moments later, Junior trotted back to me, unharmed, looking for a hug. I caught him, burying my face in his fur.

In that embrace, I learned a lesson that would sustain me for decades: when human institutions fail to protect you, when the school and the family and the state turn their backs, kinship can be found elsewhere. Junior was the first member of my chosen family. He taught me that I was worth protecting, even if the world said I wasn’t.