Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (16 page)

I was open about being gay, but I wasn’t open about being trans. To tell the truth, I didn’t know the word. I knew that I wanted to be a girl. I knew that I wanted to be popular. I knew that I wanted to be cute. But I wasn’t any of those things. I was actually pretty much a loser. I thought I was the only one in the world that was going through this. I didn’t know about hormones yet. I didn’t know what SRS was — sex reassignment surgery. I didn’t know what the procedure was.

I started reading and hearing about other people like me. I was actually jealous. I thought I was the only one feeling like this.
Hey, how the hell you feeling like that?
I was mad about that.

It was funny and stupid at the same time, but I really wanted to feel special.
How can you be feeling the same things I’m feeling?
And it made me really mad, like, I’m not special after all.

I was sent to a new placement center, in Pennsylvania, where I worked with a good therapist. I told her I wanted to be a girl. She was an excellent social worker, one of the best I had had so far. She told me to write everything I felt in a journal. I wrote down all my fantasies. I don’t think she wanted me to transition into girl; she wanted me to look inside myself, more than the outside of myself.

As I learned more, it made me feel sad, like I had a disorder. Transsexual. Even the name sounded weird to me. It was like I’m not born who I am; I have to transition to be who I am.

A lot of transgender girls feel that they look like a boy and they try to fix it. The thing is, real beauty comes from the inside. You could be the most passable trans woman ever. Real beauty from the inside! And that’s what the therapist was basically telling me.

But then, at sixteen, guess what happened? I started going through male puberty. My stomach started changing. My head structure started changing. My legs started changing. My face. My eyes. I started getting facial hair.

I thought,
What is going on? I’ve always looked like a woman.

The other kids were confused too. They looked at my face and asked, “What is this?”

“Oh, my God, I’m growing facial hair.”

They were laughing at me. They weren’t laughing at me to make fun of me. They knew I liked to be feminine.

I put Nair on my face. Stupid! It tells you on the bottle not to do it. But I put Nair on my face and it burnt me. Two weeks later, I noticed hair coming in, again, especially around my mustache.

I put Nair on again to remove it, but it started coming in stronger. I never had a full beard, but hairs were coming out all over and I was becoming more masculine.

What’s going on with me? When I wanted to be a man, I looked like a woman. Now, when I want to be a woman, I’m turning into a man. Why?

God really doesn’t like me.

I acted feminine ’cause I wanted to be a girl. I couldn’t picture myself as a guy. When I was with a guy, it wasn’t me being a guy with another guy. It was me being a girl with a guy. It was too confusing to tell everybody that, so the easiest thing to say was, “I’m gay.”

I think it must be difficult for trans men who like guys. Most gay guys don’t like vaginas. Have you ever seen an enlarged clitoris? It looks a little like a little penis. Most of the time gay guys aren’t interested in that.

The guys I’m interested in are down-lows, DLs. That’s somebody that says they are not gay but participates in gay activities, or are confused. Down-lows are basically gay guys still in the closet. They’re people who live double lives or deny they are gay. Those are the guys I went out with.

A lot of people say I’m a dyke. I guess that’s because I have feminine features but I wear guy clothes. I’m not ready to wear girl clothes yet. I live in a neighborhood that’s not too accepting. And a lot of people know me too well for me to transition fully.

A lot of older transgender people say it’s inside beauty that counts. And, you know, I usually agree with that. But we’re young. We look at the magazines and we want to look like that. I want to look like Mariah Carey. She’s black and white, just like me. I look up to her.

Transition starts when you feel that you’re a woman physically, mentally, and emotionally. You fantasize about it. You research it. You start wearing women’s clothes. Then you start looking into hormones. That’s really transitioning.

I’m taking transition step by step. I told some people: my aunt, my cousins. I told my good neighbor. My grandma knows. She prefers me being a guy. But she can’t change how I feel.

I’ve been on hormones for seven months. I think the hormones make me hungrier. Otherwise, I haven’t noticed a big change. Well, maybe my skin is softer; my muscles are very soft, very flabby. I always had big breasts, so that’s no change. I don’t get erections as much as I used to. I never did much, anyway, because I never really liked my penis. I have a lot of stretch marks — my whole butt is one big old fat stretch mark. I have stretch marks on my hips, my thighs. It’s terrible. I have to go to the gym. Actually, that’s the estrogen at work.

With hormones, my facial hair doesn’t grow back as fast as it used to. I had laser on my face — only four sessions and it worked pretty good.

Ever since I transitioned and accepted that I’m a girl, I’ve been attracted to girls. But they say that’s not weird ’cause gender has nothing to do with sexuality.

I want people to know what I went through. I want people going through the same thing to know they are not alone. Transition? Everyone goes through one kind of transition or another. We go through transitions every day. Except mine is maybe a little more extreme. I’m not at the end of my transition. I’m barely at the beginning.