What follows is a largely unedited mess. The product of hastily dredging memories half intentionally buried and half simply left long enough undisturbed to be made hazy and disorganized under the heavy dust of time. I doubt that my small contribution to Julia Serano’s proposed action will do much to move the needle for anyone. I don’t really expect that these remains of a person who never really was will be coherent to anyone other than me. But I’m tired of not trying. And maybe someone will see something here that will nudge them to help make things better for kids who are growing up today. What I hope for now, more than anything, is that the experiences described below will remain relics of a dead era. We cannot go back.
The first hints that things were beginning to go sideways for me started sometime in the 3rd or 4th grade. Before then, most of my friends had been girls. I’d spent hours along the river that ran through my backyard with girls from my neighborhood, exploring the wooded area along its banks and making believe we could stay there among the deer and waterfowl forever. We climbed through the low, spreading branches of the mulberry tree and pretend to be squirrels or ran through the yard, arms outstretched, yearning to be able to fly like the wood ducks. Years have faded the memories, but not the joy of those uncountable imaginary lives we lived in my backyard in those earliest of my recollected summers.
By 3rd and 4th grade though, I’d changed schools and ties with the neighborhood girls had dissolved in the way that ties between children often do when routines are disrupted.
Things are more solidly gendered by then. If I’d never changed schools, perhaps I’d have stayed friends with the girls I’d known before. The girls I’d played with before we were old enough to note that society expected us to be each other’s “other.” I may be naive to think that the inertia of those early friendships could have hoped to hold against the pull of early ’90s Midwestern social mores, but the lure of the “what if” continues to tug on a string some three decades long.
But “what if” is not what was and by the 4th grade my friends were boys.
I hadn’t intended for this to be the case, I’d simply learnt, quickly, that it was the only option. Though an attempt to ingratiate myself with a girl (whom I very much admired and would have given anything to be like) by reading the same books as she did was brushed off with slightly confused gracefulness by the girl herself, the response from boys in my class was rather less graceful. There was no excuse for a boy to read a “girls’ book” and admitting that I’d liked “Ten Kids, No Pets” took some time to recover from socially.
It did not take many of these instances to learn two things that would follow me for decades. First, that friendships with girls were simply not permitted to me. Second, this prohibition would be enforced, not by girls, who seemed more confused by my clumsy attempts at befriending them than anything else, but by boys.
Boys in my first and second grade classes hadn’t cared much that I preferred watching “Jem” to “G.I. Joe” and “Ninja Turtles” but the boys in my sixth grade class absolutely cared about such things. I brought my Sherlock Holmes books to school to read (and enjoy) in public, but at home, in my own time, I read “The Secret Garden” and watched a BBC Playhouse VHS of it so many times that I very nearly wore the tape out. I’d have given anything to have been able to be Mary Lennox wandering the grounds of Misselthwaite Manor, Meg Murry tesser-ing through the universe of “A Wrinkle in Time,” or Claudia Kincaid, exploring the Met and having an adventure worthy of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s mixed-up files, instead of who I was.
I’d have given almost as much to have felt safe enough to admit that to anyone, but I knew better than that by then. In Ohio, in 1992, one didn’t admit such things. Not if one was expected to be a boy.
All of this I learned, all of this I figured out, without ever knowing another queer person. The Catholic school I attended at the time didn’t even admit that queer people existed. No television shows of the time brought up even the faintest whiff of trans people. At least, none that I was allowed to watch when I was ten.
I didn’t learn that a person could be trans until a couple of years later when my mother convinced my father that the family needed access to one of the most powerful research tools available. An encyclopaedia.
The precise combination of events that first brought me to the World Book entry on what was then termed “transsexualism” is lost to me. I suspect that it was at least partially (and utterly unintentionally) due to a friend who brought over a copy of “Discover” magazine to share an article by Jared Diamond with me. My friend certainly could not have known how much of a revelation it was for me to realize how little it actually took to change something I’d previously thought was immutable, but the memory of that article looms large in my mind. It led me to the library’s card catalog and, eventually, a paper by Steven Jay Gould that further drove home a terrible truth: The tiniest of chemical differences could have sent me down an entirely different developmental path. But for an infinitesimal quirk of chemistry, I could have been who I knew I should have been.
By that point though, it was 1996 or 1997, I was somewhere between 14 and 15, and I was still in Ohio.
I was stuck.
We had internet by then and, after figuring things out from the articles and the papers and the family encyclopaedia, I did the best I could to find out more. There were a surprising number of resources available for someone in my position. AOL bulletin boards for trans people taught me what a person might expect if they were lucky enough to somehow obtain a prescription for HRT (both trans femme and trans masc) and when those changes might first manifest. Posts on message boards taught me how to tell if your psychiatrist was simply stringing you along with no intent of ever helping. Posts on other message boards explained that many psychologists still based their recommendations for HRT or surgery on whether they personally were sexually attracted to their patient and advised that it was safest to err on the side of high femme to ensure conformity with the (usually male) psychologist’s idea of what a woman was supposed to desire.
Posts everywhere talked about the “real life experience” requirement that seemed nearly universal at the time. Trans people were expected spend at least a year, sometimes two, trying to “function in society as the desired gender” (a task almost universally defined, for trans femmes at least, as trying to present high femme and in conformity with the desires of the male gaze at all times) without HRT and without surgeries in order to obtain access to HRT or surgical options. For many, this “real life experience” amounted to being violently assaulted at least once.
Looking back, I don’t blame myself for deciding that it was safer to stay in the closet and withdraw from the world as much as I could. It was in many ways a rational choice.
By college I’d resolved to live with the hand I’d been dealt and I retreated into myself. In four years of undergrad I made no lasting friends on campus, attended no parties, and had done little beyond study, read, and sleep. What was the point of interacting with others, after all, when I had to filter every action to ensure that I did not deviate from social expectations? Why meet people if I knew that I could never show them myself? When I knew that I could never be anything but a character who, fundamentally, was not me?
For most of my existence, that was all I thought my life could ever be. A Potemkin village of a man.
Maintaining the facade was easy enough. Until it wasn’t. Until a friend one day asked why the only positive things I ever said about masculinity involved the social utility of being perceived as a man. Why were the only good things I could ever name about masculinity purely pragmatic? Didn’t I like it?
I don’t know if it was something about the day that they asked, but in that moment I was simply too tired to lie anymore. I broke.
In the 2.5 years since then I have met more new people than in the 2 decades before. I’ve been out of the house more than in the 10 years before. I’ve come off of antidepressants.
I’ve been happier than I have been since the days of climbing the mulberry tree in my childhood backyard.
Sometimes I look back and think about the years I lost. More than a quarter century of hiding who I am when I could have been myself and been involved in a vibrant and loving community.
No child deserves to go through what I did. No-one should have to deny their nature to conform to society. We cannot go back to the way it used to be. We will not go back to the way it was.
At a moment when this community has a target painted on its back, we need to make sure that our Representatives, our Senators, and all our elected officials know how important it is to stand up for the rights of everyone to be themselves. We cannot quietly allow transgender kids to be forced into conformity with the expectations we have for cisgender kids. We cannot allow transgender children to be legislatively forced into the closet I spend three decades in. No-one deserves that.
Find your legislators. Call them. Let them know that selling out trans children and LGBTQ+ rights will harm them in the next primary. Let them know that it’s a matter of standing up for basic human dignity and that you will not accept politicians who throw the queer community to the wolves in the name of political expediency.
Trans children will always be trans. Blinding them to the existence of other trans people will not prevent them from being trans children. Being blind to the existence of other trans people didn’t stop me from being trans. It only condemned me to a withdrawn and solitary existence. Today’s children deserve better. They deserve to know that they aren’t the only one. To know that they can be themselves. Most of all they deserve to know that they are loved as they are, whether they conform or not.