Trans Positivity Interviews

What has been a joyful moment in your trans journey?

There’s been a lot of joyful moments actually. It’s hard to think of just one. One of the big ones was being able to work out and go to the gym for the first time in a way that felt fun and exciting and freeing and wasn’t just miserable and out of some sort of necessity. When I used to work out it was because of some kind of deep pain. I would feel really self conscious in the gym which would just make me not want to go. I think since transitioning, I go to the gym and it makes me feel cool, and like I have control over my body and what I want it to look like in a way I didn’t before. That goes hand in hand with fully recovering from anorexia and getting excited to gain muscle and gain weight, not just being ambivalent or indifferent to it, but actual excitement. That’s cool, and I never thought I would get to have that. Regardless of being transgender. That’s one of the big ones.

Probably also playing a sport for fun since I was like ten. I always hated sports and was so miserable. I tried seven or eight different sports growing up and I never had fun doing any of them. The first time I tried to do a sport again I fucking did rugby. I got to play a men’s sport on the men’s team. That was a really cool, out-of-body, remarkable experience even though I sucked at it. I didn’t really care. It wasn’t why I was doing it. But it brought me some of my best friends in the whole world so that’s been a joyful part of transitioning for me.

What is your favorite thing about being trans?

Maybe on the personal scale my favorite part is the self-actualization of it all. I spent my childhood and my teenage years being so lost about who I was in life and what I wanted out of life. I think being trans and transitioning...I’m not going to lie and say that that’s the whole picture, that I transitioned and it fixed it all...I think that’s stupid and it’s an unrealistic expectation.

It’s like when you’re doing a huge puzzle and you realize there’s this one corner piece you haven’t been able to find. You pick out all the corner pieces first and you only have three out of four of them. For me, transitioning kind of felt like I found this mangled, dusty, torn-up, you can’t even really see the picture on it, puzzle piece that my cat had dragged out of the box and played with and chewed up and maybe threw up with a hairball. I was able to clean it off and repair it and put it on the puzzle and finally I was able to put together all the other pieces that I had been waiting to assemble. It was the thing that propelled me forward with life.

That’s my favorite part of it: what being trans has allowed me to do with the rest of my life and with forming and goals that don’t seem ridiculous. It’s like for the first time in my life everything that I want to do actually feels tangible because if I was able to transition, what is it that I can’t do? It’s this medical miracle in a way.

Who is someone in your life who is supportive of you and your transness? What do they do to support you?

My mother and grandma are two people that have been very supportive of me and kind of above and beyond ways. I wasn’t able to get the healthcare that I really desperately needed in Ohio so my mom took time off of work and paid for flights and all of this shit to take me to get on testosterone in the state I was going to school in at the time because I only needed one parent’s consent to get on. There were no questions about it. It was one of the first things she was willing to do for me. She just kind of looked at me when I came out to her and said “So what do you need me to do? What do you want from me?”

So I told her and she didn’t waste any time with it. She took it really seriously. It felt cool to still be a child legally (I had been living on my own and caring for myself for a few years and it was a few months away from my eighteenth birthday). But it felt cool to still technically be a child and be taken seriously in a way that you never do when you’re a kid or a teen. And you feel all self-righteous and jaded about it. I got to put that feeling aside for the first time in my life. There’s something cool not even just being believed but being treated like a whole person when it comes to those things that I think is a special kind of support.

With my grandma, it’s been so cool because she’s so old. Most people, rightfully so, associate being so old with being really not with the transgender identity. But it just somehow immediately made sense to her. She reached out to a cousin of mine who works with trans kids in Los Angeles County as an endocrinologist and she started asking her all sorts of questions like “What is this like for those kids in your experience?” and “How does this feel for the kids?” and “What’s the difference that you see once they start getting the treatment that they ask for?” and my cousin was really helpful. And it was helpful that my grandma was like, “I’m not gonna make my grandkid take upon this burden to explain this to me.” And it’s not that I wouldn’t have or that I couldn’t have; it’s just that there was a kind of respect that she didn’t make me do that. She pieced everything together herself.

The last time I saw her, I’ve been almost three years on testosterone now and I went to see her for Thanksgiving and I was leaving her place and she hugged me and she looked at me and said, “This is the happiest I have ever seen you in my life. You just seem so much more confident now and so much more yourself. And I’m really proud of you.” And that’s something that always feels good to hear, no matter who you are. But in this context it was really special. It made me cry, of course. And I really value that.

There can be a lot of loss in transitioning especially in terms of family and connections that you had before you came out, or even before you take steps in your transition, whatever that may be for you as an individual. But I think that the people that you gain and the ways in which you gain them make it worth it.

My best friend in the entire world, Eden, when I was one year on testosterone, I came home from classes and they had baked me, from scratch, a three layer birthday cake that said “Happy one year on T.” There’s something about that that’s so beautiful. My own family doesn’t even bake me a cake on my birthday. That was so special because they were just there for me in every step of the journey.

And I think the same can be said for my boyfriend. They were the first person I met who had top surgery and the first person I knew in my real life to go on testosterone. I got to watch what every step of that process was like for them. I would ask them all these questions that are hard to find on the internet, or that people think are taboo, or inappropriate for kids to know about. Which is ridiculous. It was just really cool to have that and allow it to confirm that that’s what I wanted for myself too. There’s something really special about being loved and seen in all these ways with people that you can love and see in all the same ways. And I think that’s what makes having trans and queer and lesbian and gay chosen family so special and important in terms of support.