My Sister Wanted a Sister and Got Comforted. I Wanted a Brother and Got Called a Psychopath.

I don't remember crying. My parents remember it for me.

I'm sixteen and the only boy among six children. My sisters are fourteen, eleven, nine, eight, and five. According to family legend, when my parents first told me I was getting a sister, I cried — really cried, the kind that apparently revealed something alarming about my character. By the second announcement, I wasn't happy but I kept it together. By the third, my mother sat me down and told me there was something deeply wrong with me. She used the word psychopath. My father backed her up and told me to stop being a baby and act like a man.

I was a small child being told I was broken for wanting a brother.

I've thought about that word a lot over the years. Psychopath. It's a heavy thing to say to a kid, and heavier still when it keeps getting repeated as you get older, as if each year is further evidence of the original diagnosis. It wasn't said once in anger and forgotten. It became a kind of shorthand for who I am.

Here's what I actually wanted, at the root of it: someone to play with.

My parents had very fixed ideas about what boys did and what girls did, and those categories didn't overlap. Video games were for boys. Wrestling, climbing trees, football, hiking — for boys. Dolls, house, makeup, swimming for leisure — for girls. I don't know when these rules were installed in me, whether they came before my first sister was born or grew alongside her, but by the time I was old enough to notice them they felt like architecture. Just the way the house was built.

So when I got sisters, I got housemates I wasn't allowed to play with. Not because they didn't want to — I honestly don't know what they wanted, we were all so young — but because the activities were sorted by gender before anyone got a say. I wanted a brother because a brother, I understood, would be allowed to do the things I did. That was the whole of it. Not cruelty. Not selfishness. Just a child's simple math.

My parents have never accepted this explanation. In their version, my early unhappiness poisoned everything that came after. They tell me that if I hadn't been so resistant when my sisters were born, we'd be close today — that the distance between us is my fault, the consequence of feelings I had at age four or six or eight that I was never equipped to manage differently. The relationship I don't have with my sisters gets laid at my feet, and the rules that kept us from ever really knowing each other go unexamined.

I've learned to be quiet about all of it. Saying anything only confirms whatever they already think about me.

A few weeks ago, one of my mother's friends came over with her children. She's expecting her third, and found out the baby is a boy. Her five-year-old daughter had wanted a sister. The little girl was sad about it, the way children are sad about things — openly, without strategy.

My mother was wonderful with her. Patient and warm in a way I recognized but hadn't seen directed at me in a long time. She told the girl it was okay to feel disappointed. That wanting a sister was normal. That everything would be fine, and she'd love her new brother when he arrived. The child left looking reassured.

I sat with that for the rest of the afternoon. I turned it over carefully, trying to be fair, looking for the distinction I must have been missing. A girl wanting a sister: understandable, worth comforting, nothing to be ashamed of. A boy wanting a brother: evidence of psychological disorder. A thing to be corrected, then catalogued, then used against him for the next decade.

When her friend left, I asked my mother about it. Calmly, I thought. I asked her why one was normal and the other was not.

She yelled. When my father came home she told him, and he yelled too. They said I was being deliberately obtuse. That I should be a better man by now, and clearly I wasn't.

I'm sixteen. I have been hearing that I am not enough of a man since I was a small boy who cried about something almost every child has cried about at some point. I have been called a psychopath for a feeling that, when it lives in a little girl, gets met with kindness.

I'm not angry. I'm genuinely confused, and I think I have been for years.

So I'm asking, because no one has ever actually answered me: why is it different?