Dear Transgender Youth
By: Kravitz M.
Tags: Nonbinary, Identity, Transgender, Creative Non Fiction, LGBTQ

Image credit: @star-plasma, Tumblr

Pay attention to your body — you’ll need it for the debate. You, unfortunately, are the debate. You’re likely painfully aware of this already. This reality has probably attended a few of your birthday parties by now. Your zipper will clamor for the chance to introduce itself to strangers before your vocal cords can, but if you can help it, they should both say the same thing: I am not what you think I am.

I want to say congratulations. I also want to say I’m sorry, and good luck, and thank you, and I’m so proud of you, and so much more. Only so many words exist, though. I’m so stuffed with ideas of what to tell you that they clog my mind’s drain. No one can be sure of anything, but I’m sure you know that feeling.

I don’t know your name. I do know things about you that possibly no one else does. I know things you wish you didn’t have to and things you wish your family did, but you hide from them. You may not even realize this letter’s for you yet. I believe embracing one’s transness is currently one of the most dangerous — thus, rewarding — methods of loving oneself. However, no forms of love willingly seal themselves in a voicebox, so this letter, while for you, cannot be about you. It’s about me, sprinkled with assumptions about you. I apologize again because I know how deeply assumptions can plague us, but it’s as close to you as I can get. Maybe you needed this letter; maybe you didn’t. I can only hope that our experiences and aspirations overlap enough so that I can tell you “you’re welcome” by the end of this and not be a liar.

Your birth was many things. It was an emergence, an emergency, a preamble, and the destruction of the freedom of namelessness. In your first breaths, every witness snuck their classifications into your lungs. They expected you to learn your assigned lessons until you no longer had to think about them, every day descending into clockwork. Time slowed here for you.

At some point, you felt as if you were trespassing in public bathrooms. You wished for your hair to crawl down your back or slice itself off. The way people talked about you began to sting. You resisted skirts. You struggled in derby shoes. Even when fully clothed, you felt exposed. It all felt wrong for some reason, but you knew everything technically fit you. While everything carried on according to plan, something was off-script. So what was the issue? Your current reality wasn’t what you wanted.

But it wasn’t truly your “reality,” was it? No, it was everyone else’s fantasy. Every stranger who’s assumed incorrectly of you pretends to live in a world where everything is straightforward, where they know things about others that they don’t. You pretended to entertain their illusion, either out of safety or simply because you couldn’t be bothered to burst bubbles. It may have taken years to notice the world coercing you into fulfilling a role you never chose. It may have taken just a few hours of web surfing on a whim. It may have been nothing more than a split second where you unwittingly snapped everything you thought was permanently locked. The outcome, nonetheless, is the same, and it’s in your hands now, pulsing. Your only true self is the one you forge.

This newfound awareness is both rejuvenating and life-threatening.

For me, the personal path to self-discovery was rather gradual and linear. I never had a stage of outright denial. While I don’t have contact with the majority of my family, the very select few that I came out to were welcome to it and supported me. While my gender is possibly the only thing my mother respects about me, I’ll take what I can get.

I felt safe enough to come out to my high school teachers as both agender and then later as a man, and they accommodated my new names (it’s hard to find one that perfectly fits the first time!) and pronouns without a second thought. My classmates, for the most part, treated it as no big deal. It was relieving. It was freeing. It was also an incredibly rare success, which saddens me, but I’m grateful. I know how brutally others — possibly even you, though I hope not — have it. If I weren’t living in New York City, I’m almost sure that what I have now would be nothing more than a pipe dream as I count dust bunnies in the closet.

That said, I still get reality checks. Some stain boxes with blood, some verbally maim me and defend it by claiming brutal honesty, and others start with hashtags. I’ve known transgender men with bound chests and full-grown beards who’ve been misgendered even then. This isn’t to discourage you if you wish to transition yourself, nor is it a warning that people will know your secret no matter what you do. That isn’t true. Plus, even some cisgender people occasionally get interrogated by strangers who, for whatever reason, refuse to believe they’re cisgender. Ignorant minds think whatever they want. Such is life. Try not to beat yourself up if someone foolishly tries to recreate you. It is not, nor will it ever be your fault.

Assuming you haven’t had this occur already, someone will demand that you prove how real you are. I’m going to tell you right now that you can’t, and you don’t have to. Gender, at its very core, is a mental and spiritual experience. It’s a bit like consciousness. The only viable evidence is your own existence, and it’s as beautiful and natural and frustrating and undefinable as love. If they don’t believe you, then nothing you say will change that, and you’ll have to accept this and invest your energy elsewhere. You shouldn’t be a topic of discourse. If God doesn’t need to prove his existence to his children, then neither do you. You are already a miracle. You’re allowed to just be. There are infinite ways to do so, and there’s always room for another.

There will come a day, or many, where you question your accomplishments. You’ll worry if people who don’t even know you were right about you all along, that you’re merely playing dress-up with your skin. It’ll get in your head and constrict your spirit like clay sitting in an angry palm, a pearl too big for its oyster. “What if I am faking it?” you’ll cry in your head. (By the way, you’re almost guaranteed to misgender yourself by accident at least once. People drilled their previous designations into you for years; breaking any routine will take practice.) You’ll look in the mirror and mentally gouge your eyes out, searching for proof that this is not just a phase. Do you know what is a phase? Pain. It’ll pass. This dreadful feeling may come back again and again, but it’ll leave those times, too. Hell, even if it is a phase, who cares? Everything’s a phase if you think about it.

Even if you do wake up one day and think to yourself, this doesn’t feel like me anymore, that doesn’t mean you were ever living a lie. The truth just changed. You didn’t waste your time. You didn’t inconvenience the world. If you had a partner you loved with everything you had but eventually grew apart, is the life you built with them now meaningless just because it’s unfinished? Does it mean that you never loved them at all? No, it doesn’t.

Let’s say an artist begins a project and — despite having poured their heart into the paint buckets — decides after a while that they don’t like the idea anymore and they want to move on to something else. Was all that progress for naught? Was all that time wasted? Does it mean that they never created that piece? Does it make them a liar? No! That’d be ridiculous.

All experiences are ones to learn from, and you should look back on the ones that made you happy in the moment, so long as they didn’t hurt you. You’ll be okay. You’re allowed to change your mind if it ever comes to that. Being human is all about adapting.

I’ve suffered and recovered from countless episodes like these. I’d ask friends to deadname and misgender me sometimes just to “make sure” it still made me uncomfortable. Imposter syndrome happens to everyone. Nobody thinks they’re enough, and this is the most miserable lie anyone can teach us. Even as I was beginning my testosterone injections, I was anxious — and this was something I’ve fantasized about for years! I was determined to get them. It’s what forced me to keep living. I didn’t want to die while neglecting what my body ached for so earnestly. I couldn’t.

But as I got closer to obtaining my first shot, tangibly close, second thoughts began to creep up on me again like bashful ghosts. Who could blame them? Some parts of what I was signing myself up for would be permanent. It was a big decision. I wondered if I should wait. Y’know, as if I hadn’t already been waiting for long enough. I thought about if what I wanted was worth it or if I was making a mistake.

And then I said, “fuck it,” and signed the consent form.

I was excited. I was nervous. At some point, you realize that nervousness is just excitement that’s a bit more careful than usual, the same way that fear is just your body’s way of preparing for courage.

Remember how I said there are infinite ways to be human? There are also countless ways to be transgender! Your experiences might be just like mine, but most likely they won’t. You may want bottom surgery or no surgeries at all. You may enjoy your birth name enough to keep it. Your name may be the only thing you decide to change about yourself. You might go on hormones for just a few changes you’re looking for and then stop. You could choose to go by multiple names, more than one set of pronouns, rotate your labels like your wardrobe.

You might feel male and female at the same time, or just one depending on the day, or neither, or something else. You might declare your transness from the rooftops, or never disclose it unless asked. Perhaps not even then. You might comfortably align with your new gender norms or actively subvert them with reckless abandon. You may hate the fact that you’re trans, you may love it, or you may not care. All of these are okay. No way of being is greater or lesser than any other. They just are.

I can’t begin to imagine how different my life would’ve turned out if I was cisgender, or even if I stayed closeted for longer than I did. My transness has touched absolutely every corner of my life, and it’ll continue to do so until I die. What does that mean for you and your transness? Nothing. It’s as important or as insignificant to your life story as you decide it is. Regardless of your relationship with it, your transness will — especially due to our current political environment — be an integral part of who you are as a person. But remember: you are a person first.

To be transgender is to figure out what you want from yourself, to regulate your reality, to curate the most comfortable version of yourself. Yes, you are transgender, and that’s unlikely to change, but before anything else — and I absolutely cannot stress this enough — you are human. You deserve to be treated as such. Never forget this. Never let anybody tell you otherwise. Ever. Please. Promise me this. You are human! Everything else is secondary.

Living as a marginalized individual of any kind is exceptionally difficult. Even when you’re proud as a lion, people will want your head mounted on their wall. Even when you feel as if you’re on top of the world, the world still hates you. And it hates you personally. And it hates you passionately, as grim of a recognition as that may be. Self-love as retaliation is good. Self-acceptance is essential. You must learn how to survive first before you can truly live.

The world will try to convince you that you’re on fire. When this happens, pretend your ears burnt themselves off so that you can’t hear them, because this is a lie. You don’t need to escape yourself. They were the ones who lit the match and tried to slip it into your hair like a bobby pin. When the system’s steel grip tries to strangle you, grip its hands and breathe. When it complains that your lungs disrupt the “order” which it demands of its people, live disobediently. Live. Apologize to nobody for what you can’t control. Don’t let anybody drown you out.

One more thing — make sure your fly is up. Now, remember your vocal cords? Those butterfly nets for your voice? Do you know how vital they are? Take a deep breath, and use your cords to repeat after me: I am breathing. I am breathing. I am breathing whether the world wants me to or not.