Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (17 page)

My name is Cameron. My birth name is totally irrelevant. Honestly.

I started questioning my gender around my fourteenth birthday. And I probably started questioning the gender system around that time too. My first thought was that I was gender queer. Gender queer is not part of the gender binary, meaning somebody that’s strictly a boy or strictly a girl.

Recently I began to feel comfortable saying that the gender system does not work because it really does not work for me. That’s when I started defining myself as outside a gender system that society dictates.

Some people don’t understand this. To them I just say, “I’m a boy; call me
he.
” But I like to be recognized as not a boy and not a girl. I’m gender queer, gender fluid, and gender other.

As you can see, I think about this a lot. It’s a pretty big part of my life. It’s what sets me apart from the rest of the world. Since gender is everywhere in society, I’ve tried to understand it more profoundly. Why do girls wear pink? Why do boys wear blue? How does this whole gender system work?

When I started questioning my own gender, I realized that the notion of gender as commonly accepted wasn’t a hundred percent true. And then, when I met other trans people and started reading trans literature, I realized that it
really
isn’t true. Everybody can be everything. The best way to describe it is with pictures.

I’m from a town in Westchester County, New York, called Ossining. That’s not one of the rich, white Westchester towns you hear about. It’s really diverse, which is awesome. When I was in middle school, we moved to a village that’s part Ossining and part its own thing. I’m still in Ossining school district, which is good because I hate the village part. It’s really Waspy. I don’t like being in the rich, white part of Westchester. It makes me uncomfortable.

My parents both majored in theater in college. My mom was studying to be an actress, and my dad was going to do lighting and build sets, a tech person. When my parents were in their mid-to-late twenties, they were living in Queens. There was a manhole fire right in front of their apartment. My dad brought the firefighters coffee. He started talking with them because he’s a very social person.

The firefighters said that the entrance exam for the fire department was coming up and that you had to be under twenty-nine to take it. So he took the exam, became a firefighter, and now he’s a battalion chief in New York City.

My mom is a social worker. She works with hospice. She helps dying people and their families. My mom has gotten to a place of understanding about trans people and parents of trans people so that she can help other parents accept their kids. Because she is a social worker, she already has the experience talking to families about things. But I like to think that part of her understanding is because of me — I’ve been able to explain things to her in a way she can understand. My mom is very cool.

So my parents don’t have nine-to-five jobs. I think it’s kind of interesting that both of them work for nonprofits. I think that not working for profit has affected their parenting and their life perspective. And it’s helped me understand why you don’t need to work for profit to be someone awesome. It’s part of the
money isn’t everything
thing.