THEIR Stories
CZ
Ken dolls gave me gender envy. I didn’t know what that was when I was 4, but I knew that Ken had a better wardrobe and looked cooler than Barbie. She was fun and all, but Ken had floral shirts and fun shorts, didn’t every kid want to be Ken?
No one told me what gender dysphoria was, so I thought everyone sat in class and imagined which girls they’d marry if they were a boy. When we learned about women who dressed as men to fight in the civil war, I thought “Well, obviously that’s what I would have done if I were born then.” No one told me that the other kids didn’t think that way.
Some people feel being born in the wrong body so strongly they can articulate it at a young age. That’s amazing, and takes immeasurable levels of emotional maturity. But some of us are, for lack of a better phrasing, too polite to say anything. It’s not that gender dysphoria didn’t bother me, but I was chugging along mostly ok. As long as no one forced me to wear any dresses, the discomfort of dysphoria seemed more manageable than trying to put that discomfort into words.
It seemed rude to say something, especially since I didn’t quite know what to say. “Excuse me, but I think there’s something weird here, I was daydreaming about traveling back in time and pretending to be a boy so I can fight the Confederates” is not the kind of thing that makes you friends in the 4th grade.
Growing up, I knew I liked girls. I was ok at faking crushes on boys, but I had deep, barely acknowledgeable crushes on female classmates and one memorable student teacher. I was 16, 17 and trying to figure myself out. Gender wasn’t a big discussion point, and I liked girls, ergo, I was clearly a lesbian.
Over the years I would get called sir while out and about, and I’d be happy to let it go but my friends would get indignant on my behalf, and when someone corrected themselves to “ma’am”, that hurt 5,000x worse than hearing “sir” and I still couldn’t explain why.
It wasn’t until the pandemic that I allowed myself to think about what that meant. I’ve seen the phenomenon of people coming to terms with being trans during the pandemic “quarantrans” and it’s not inaccurate. Almost every time I went out wearing a mask, I got called sir. And when I didn’t, I felt…disappointed.
It took a long time and a lot of therapy to identify what that meant. For as long as I could remember, it was like I had a door inside my head. And I knew deep down there were answers to questions I didn’t know I had waiting for me behind the door. But I also knew opening the door was a one-way street, because once it was opened it could never be closed.
But I did open it, and it was like the world shifted to being in focus in a whole new way. I spent a lot of time in a nebulous space where I didn’t know how to put words to what my gender meant to me. I had spent 40 years identifying as female, and 25 years as a lesbian-those identities were and are part of the foundation of who I am. So I explored what gender really meant to me, and when I discovered the term transmasculine it was like finding a shirt that finally fit me perfectly.
Non-binary transmasculine fits for me because it allows all the parts of me to coexist; the teenage lesbian, my parents oldest child, my brother's big sibling, the person who is and will always be “mom” to my son, and the adult standing in the middle of the Old Navy looking longingly at men’s plaid shirts and dreaming of having half the style of their Ken dolls from childhood. All of these are me, and I am finally aligning, body and soul.
Sarah
Since I was young, I had always known something was not quite right. Despite an otherwise ordinary and loving childhood, I had always felt a deep boiling mixture of uncomfortability, unease and discomfort. Well before I would learn the now common place terms like “Transgender” or “Gender Dysphoria”, I struggled with an internal feeling of otherness and shame. All while being unable to fully vocalize or understand the root cause of my pain, due to a distinct lack of understanding and missing necessary vocabulary.
By the time my body started to undergo an unwanted puberty, the pain and dysphoria I felt came to focus more on the physical. Particularly the differences between my own body and others who I would envy, questioning why I felt the way I did despite society telling me over and over to be proud of my body as it grows and changes through puberty. Eventually, I grew more numb to the these feelings, both out of protection and to help blend in with my peers and not alienate myself. While in high school I would play the role of a typical teenage boy, participating in team sports, hanging out with groups of guys and burying my mysterious dysphoria with talks of music, girls and video games.
Recognizing the uncomfortability I felt in that role, I used the opportunity of leaving for a distant University to be more open with myself and others. I explored my sexuality, grew out my hair, shaved away unwanted body hair and embraced a more feminine version of myself, while still maintaining a male identity. For a while I felt freer, like I was releasing pressure but had still yet to accept my own transness or even explore the idea of transitioning. After being openly queer to friends at school for over a year, I started to come out to family as well. By this point, I finally accepted that I was a woman, and then everything started to click and make more sense. I had solved the puzzle of 20 years of internal struggle, but was paralyzed by the fear of the coming external struggle.
So I started to come out. In March of 2022, I first came out to close friends, hoping to find answers on how to move forward. Then, the courage to talk to family and finally be fully out after several more months and the end to my last semester of my junior year. In this process, I started to build a support structure for my transition and even discovered community in the other queer students and groups of my University. The following summer I would live socially out, except for my new job until I felt comfortable. After my first Pride (Philly Pride), a legal name change and a hormone therapy consultation, I came out at work too. Now there was no where left that I would allow myself to be scared back into the closet. I became unashamedly myself and did not dare concede my identity or pride to anyone. By the end of the summer I truly was myself, I am and had become Sarah and it was the first time I felt at ease in my life. Indifference and nihilism gave way to infinite optimism, ambition and for once genuine happiness.
Being trans does not make you confused, it doesn't make you weak, it doesn’t destroy your body, nor endanger others. Being trans allows you to liberate your soul and reclaim happiness, happiness which starts with acceptance and is nurtured with support.