Content note: Childhood bullying, homophobia, threats of violence and quoted slurs. For me, it started at three. I remember being in kindergarten. Outside, there was a wooden playground with turrets, bridges, swings and a slide. On sunny days, the teachers would attach this red and yellow fabric to the wooden frame to make an extra slide.
I couldn’t wait to go down it. Then another boy stopped me. “You can’t go on this slide. It’s a boys’ slide, and you’re a girl.” I remember being confused and upset. I didn’t understand why being mistaken for a girl meant I wasn’t allowed on the slide.
I didn’t even understand that I was doing anything differently. I was three years old, and somebody had already decided I wasn’t being a boy properly. A friend came over and told him to leave me alone. He didn’t. That boy gave me shit throughout school.
He was the first person to call me a fag. He kept turning up Kindergarten. School. Scouts. Every time I found somewhere I wanted to be, there he fucking was. At Scouts, he rallied some of the other boys to pick on me too. I don’t know what I ever did to make him choose me.
As an adult, I’d still love to know. I never told my parents. I expected my dad to brush it off, and I worried I might get in trouble myself. Even when I was the one who needed help. So I quit Scouts. I moved schools and gave taekwondo a go. My cousin did it, and I think I wanted to learn how to defend myself.
At first, I liked it. I was paired with an older buddy who was a few belts above me. Then my childhood flamboyance started showing up in my routines. Apparently, I wasn’t punching things like a proper little man. I hate violence, actually. I’ll avoid anything physically violent if I can.
You don’t have to be aggressive or masculine to belong in martial arts, but nobody seemed to have told those boys. That sports hall was where I first got called a poofter. I still remember the smell of the place. I quit at yellow belt. They knew before I did At intermediate, older kids started asking: “Are you GAY?!” I didn’t know what gay meant at eleven going on twelve.
I knew how they said it, though. That’s the strange thing about growing up queer. Sometimes other people name you before you’ve had a chance to discover yourself. They watch how you move. How you speak. What you like. Then they turn it into an accusation. By the time you start wondering who you are, you’ve already heard what people think of it.
You’re trying to work out whether the thing they’ve been punishing you for might actually be true. Even now, I don’t think I’m necessarily 100 per cent gay. “Gay” was a label I was given at twelve, and it stuck. I’m allowed to keep figuring that out.
So is anyone else. Even my paper run At fifteen, I had a paper run. The boy from kindergarten lived at the end of it. Twice a week, I rode my bicycle past his house. On Wednesday evenings, I could usually get the pamphlets into the letterbox without trouble. On Saturday mornings, he and his sister would sometimes be out on the deck.
If they saw me coming, they’d come down to the roadside. “Fag.” “Homo.” Then they started throwing things. Once, they stopped me and tried to warp the front wheel of my bike. I managed to get away before they could. I was trying to deliver fucking pamphlets.
He was one of the reasons I left my first primary school for a Catholic one. When I finally got to a non-religious college, I thought I might escape all of it. He was there too. Fuck. All the places I learned to hide I managed to avoid him in most classes. I liked music, art and maths.
He liked sport. PE and swimming were where I got the brunt of it. Homo. Fag. Poof. Batty boy. I did whatever I could to get out of PE. When I couldn’t, there were the changing rooms. I spent lunch breaks hiding in the library or leaving the school grounds to avoid getting beaten up.
A couple of times, I almost did get a hiding. Mostly, I managed to avoid it. Then my Oma died. I was fourteen and decided to get a buzz cut. When I went back to school after the funeral, a girl told me I looked “handicapped”. That became the joke for a while.
My hair grew back. They moved on. I still remember it. By sixth form, most people knew me as “the gay guy”. I went to the ball dressed like the cowboy from the Village People, for fuck’s sake. There I was, still finding ways to be myself. I also had a crush on the trolley boy at the supermarket where I worked.
He didn’t like me. Or pretended not to. We were boyfriends by the time I was twenty. Funny how things turn out. My mouth sometimes At seventeen and eighteen, I went to parties where older dudes wanted to start shit with me. My girlfriends had my back and made sure I didn’t get punched in the face.
I wasn’t always making their job easy. Once, at a bar in Lower Hutt, I was drunk and bumped into a woman, spilling her drink. I apologised, but she was pissed off. Then her boyfriend was in my face, ready to punch me. My friends dragged me outside and bundled me into a taxi.
I wound down the window and screamed: “Fuck you, you ’80s minge-fringe whore!” My mouth sometimes. I’m writing about what words can do, so I can hardly skip over that one. I’d been threatened, and I still chose to throw a degrading insult at her.
That part was mine. Then my sister told me a story Years later, a conversation with my sister brought all this back. Her teenager’s class had been asked to write down words they’d heard used to describe LGBTQIA+ people. The list included “pussy licker”, “transformer”, “rug muncher” and “lesbo”.
Then somebody wrote a racist slur, and the lesson got out of hand. The students got in trouble. I wasn’t in that classroom. I don’t know everything the teacher said or what happened afterwards. But hearing about it made me think about the words I’d grown up carrying.
Of course you need to stop students hurting each other. But if the lesson ends at “you’re in trouble”, what have they understood? Do they know why those words hurt? Do they understand the difference between describing somebody and making their identity the punchline?
And what about the kid sitting quietly in that room, wondering whether it’s safe to say anything about themselves? That conversation was why I started writing this. If someone tells you I never felt able to tell my parents what was happening. That’s the bit I keep coming back to.
If a kid tells you they’re being called names, take them seriously. Ask what happened and what would help them feel safer. Don’t make them prove whether the label is true before you care. They shouldn’t have to come out just to explain why they’re being bullied.
And please don’t tell them to walk differently, talk differently or make themselves less noticeable. Help them deal with the behaviour of the people hurting them. Involve someone who can help, and check back in. My friend on that playground did something very simple.
She told him to leave me alone. I remember her doing that too. I’m bigger now. The question hasn’t changed. The homophobia directed at me has lessened as an adult. I’m also six-foot-two and covered in tattoos now, so fewer people fuck with me. But a couple of years ago, I was walking home from the dog park in my Red Band gumboots and a black tracksuit when a car pulled over.
A woman leaned towards the open window and yelled: “Are you GAY?” I pulled out my AirPods. “What the fuck?” She laughed. The car sped off. All I managed was: “Fuck YOU!” In 2024, I was still being asked that question like it was an insult.
After all those years. Being bigger hadn’t made the question disappear. And I shouldn’t have needed to get bigger for people to leave me alone. Who gets to use the word? I’ve put “Fag” at the top of this article. It’s a word that was used against me, and I’m choosing to write about it on my terms.
That doesn’t mean every queer person wants to hear it. It doesn’t give someone else permission to call me one. People have different histories with these words. Some reclaim them. Some never want them near their lives again. You don’t get to decide that for somebody else.
If you’re unsure what someone is comfortable being called, ask. If they tell you to stop, fucking stop. The boy still gets to go on the slide When I talk about Wolfie now, I mean that earlier version of me, before the work that helped me understand how much of my life I’d spent trying to belong.
Woulf Ryder is who I’m becoming as I make more of those choices for myself. But I don’t want to turn Wolfie into someone I’m embarrassed by. He already had enough people doing that to him. EMDR helped me work through what I’d carried. Writing is giving me somewhere to talk about it.
And yes, the little boy they called a girl grew into a six-foot-two man wearing a wolf mask and taking up space. The mask doesn’t have to prove I’m masculine enough. I can be gentle and dominant. Flamboyant and masculine. Sexual and safe. I don’t have to kill the little boy on the playground to become the man I am now.
I get to protect him. Girl. Poofter. Homo. Gay. Fag. All those words people used before I had the chance to find my own. None of them can stop me from getting on the fucking slide now. Choose your words better. That’s my Woulf advice. Arwooo. 🐺 Privacy note: Names and some identifying details have been omitted or changed to protect privacy.
This is my account of my own experiences and memories, shared to educate, entertain and challenge stigma — not to invite anyone to identify or contact the people involved. Read next: Tip-toe — how I learned to make myself smaller, and what changed. 🐺