I think the central paradox of my childhood was that I knew I wasn't fitting in, and I got a lot of shit for it, so I tried harder and harder to fit in better, but my idea of how to do that was to “be yourself”.
So what happened was that I acted even more like a trans kid—like one of the girls—which led to even more unexpected reactions from other people, which led to me feeling even more desperate about not fitting in.
I was too naïve to understand that all my impulses were wrong because of gender (and likely ADHD too). The more I did the right thing, the more confusing my world got. The solution was causing the problem, but I had no way to understand that. All I had was an intuited solution to an incomprehensible problem, and the only thing it did was to make things even worse.