Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (18 page)

I want to go to college so that I can go to med school so that I can help people so that I can do good stuff. Wanting to do good would not be something that would come easily to me if my parents worked in the corporate world.

They do wear suits. Well, my dad has to wear a uniform. He has this line of shirts in his closet and they are all exactly the same. There are about a dozen of them, uniform shirts. And he has to wear a specific shade of blue tie. Are you serious? I don’t get that whole uniform thing. In some situations, sure, like, if you’re in a marching band. Whatever. He’s cool about it.

Then there’s my brother. I have one brother, a year younger than me. More about him later.

Whenever that nerd/regular split started happening, I was definitely, definitely on the nerd side. I wore knit pants, like yoga pants, cargos, and cords. I don’t remember much about that. It wasn’t important to me.

I was a girly kid. Really. I liked Barbies. I was a very, very oblivious girl. I was naive and very much into my own little bubble of fantasy books and that kind of stuff.

In preschool, I tried to teach the other kids how to draw because I thought I could draw better than they could. That continued into kindergarten and first grade.

In fourth grade, we had to read out loud from an English textbook, and I never followed along because they were reading slow and I was reading fast in my head. I was pissed off when the teacher called on me.

I didn’t wear jeans until the fourth grade, and when I did wear jeans, I tried to tuck my T-shirt into my jeans. Nerdy.

My cousins would look at the way I dressed and say, “You’re weird.”

“Yeah, okay.” They’ve been saying that since forever, so I have a history of being weird.

Fifth grade, I was the only kid in my class who actually liked our teacher ’cause he was big on writing and I was big on writing. Everyone else was annoyed about that.

When I was thirteen, I told my parents I was a lesbian. We were leaving for church and were sort of late. We go to a Unitarian Universalist church, so it’s not like some big praying thing. I said, “Mom, Dad, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What? We have to leave.”

“I’m a lesbian.”

“Okay, now get into the car.”

That’s a pretty chill thing because they were both in theater and know people who are gay. My brother’s piano teacher is gay. And my dad’s sister, who lives in Oregon, is gay, so big, stinking deal. They said that they had to come to terms with it, but it wasn’t a huge thing.

In the seventh and eighth grades, I went through a bunch of phases trying to figure out where I fit in. What sort of niche could I find in this horrible middle-school world?

I hung out with a group of girls, semi-preppy, popular kids. They were not my people. In the seventh grade, the bubble popped. Bubbles don’t pop all at once when we’re talking about metaphorical bubbles. I don’t think I saw things differently until the end of seventh grade.

One day at lunch, I didn’t sit at the table with the girls. It wasn’t something I thought about and thought about and thought about. It started out as a whim. I sat at another table, Noah’s table, instead. He became a good friend. I’m president of GSA, he’s vice president, and we’re going to the gay prom as friends.

I don’t remember how the girls reacted when I changed friends. They may have tried to give me flak, but I was, whatever. I’m not known for listening to people when they try to say bad stuff about me. Screw you. I don’t
have
to hang out with you. They probably thought I was crazy, anyway.

It wasn’t until eighth grade that any significant changes set in. I started to not be oblivious. I started thinking — really thinking about the world around me. I went through an ultra fem phase. I had hair down to my belly button — long and straight. It was nice hair, so I just wore it down. Sometimes I tucked it behind my ears.

Then I had a tomboy phase in which I would braid my hair back and keep it out of my face. I had a short goth phase, where I’d wear a lot of black, heavy eyeliner. That was fun.

And then, that April, I cut my hair. I went from belly button–length hair to a pixie cut. I was so happy that day. I said, “Whoa, this is awesome. This is something new.” It looked awesome.

The reason I got my haircut was not because I wanted to look like a boy. During spring break I went to Florida to visit my grandma. I would go into the ocean and then spend half an hour in the shower with conditioner trying to untangle my hair. After that I was, “I am done with this mess. It needs to go!” So when I got back home, I got a pixie cut. It was pretty cool.

By this point, even I would have thought I was crazy. Not just with the hair. I was a weird kid.

My name came from one of those phases. I came up with a bunch of names to represent different parts of me because the name that I had been given wasn’t going to cover it. The name I chose to work with was Cameron — for tomboy me. So when tomboy-me became boy-me, I became Cameron.

I knew that I wanted a middle name that would work with my first name, but I had time to make that decision. At hippie camp, an academic summer camp at Skidmore College, there was a plaza that people had paid to put names on. And
Joel La Plume
was one of the names. “Joel?” Aha! Middle name!

It’s not, like, naming myself after Billy Joel or anything. It doesn’t have any significance. I almost wish that
Joel
was my first name because it’s a really cool name, but, like, whatever.

People who aren’t trans get stuck with names all the time and it’s not even that I don’t like Cameron. I love it. It’s gender neutral. It’s perfect.

A name doesn’t have to be perfect. A name isn’t even who you are. It’s like a variable in math. You call a number
x.
But
x
doesn’t determine what the number is. It’s something to refer to for a particular unknown,
x.
So my particular set of complex personality traits, and all that mush, is Cameron.

Most people go through traumatic stories about puberty, about how they hated it. Me? Not so much. I was happy when my breasts started growing. It was, like, whoa . . . my chest doesn’t go like this anymore when I look down at it. Whoa, it’s not a straight line anymore. It actually goes like this.

Whatever. I don’t have body issues. My body is a pretty nice one. It works.

My coming out trans story is kind of interesting. I was back at hippie camp. It was the summer after eighth grade. I was fourteen. I wasn’t too good at scheduling things back then, but I did know that after hippie camp, I’d spend two weeks at home, and then the whole family would go on vacation at the Jersey shore. I planned to come out during the two weeks at home.

There was a change of plans. We weren’t going to be home for two weeks; we were going to be home for one week. That wasn’t enough time to come out, get new clothes, and try to, like, not be a girl.

I had no clue what I was doing. I thought,
I can’t do this.
I debated whether I should stay in camp, change my coming-out schedule, or do something else. I couldn’t focus on the classes I was taking. My doodles were about being trans.

I talked to the camp director and told her I was trans. I didn’t want her to tell my parents because I needed to do that myself.

The camp director called my parents and said I needed to come home early but wouldn’t tell them why. That must have gotten them thinking.

My dad picked me up August 3, 2009, just before I started high school. Everything was fine as we drove home together. Then, out of the blue, he said, “Do you want an operation to change your sex?”

And I was, like, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I bit my lip and didn’t say anything.

Even if I had thought about surgery, I was not about to say, “No, I really don’t want it,” ’cause dad was not yet at a place where he could understand what
I
meant by trans.

Being trans is not something that is accurately portrayed in the media. So even if my dad had seen stories in the news, they would not have included trans theory; they would not be all encompassing. And since there are so many ways to be trans, and so much diversity within the trans community, he wouldn’t have any idea about who I was. No. Anything about me had to be communicated by me. And that would take time.

I’ve always been pretty decent about trying to explain things. They did their Internet research and I tried to answer their questions in a nonthreatening, non-alienating way. I tried to help my parents understand how much more comfortable hormones will make me. It really is a comfort thing. I emphasized that hormones will help with all the awkward moments in public when people misgender me. I don’t remember if I explained that to them exactly like that, but it was definitely a selling point.

I don’t remember even thinking about an operation back then. At that point, I thought that I’d come out, then get new clothes, and then start high school as Cameron — a boy.

After that, I wanted hormones and top surgery. I didn’t want bottom surgery because the options aren’t that great and it’s really not something I need. Like I said, I don’t have body issues. I’m not dysphoric.

A week before I started high school, my mom and I talked with the principal and with the social worker. My mom was worried about name calling and harassment. “Mom, it’s going to be okay,” I told her. I was right. But if my parents weren’t supporting me, most of the teachers wouldn’t have listened to me. My parents did support me, and the teachers listened.

The principal may have listened without my parents talking to him because he’s awesome. Mr. Mandel is the principal at Ossining High School and is the best principal ever. Mr. Mandel didn’t shy away from controversy or a dialogue the way a standard high-school principal might. A decade ago, when the current GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) advisor wanted to form the group, Mr. Mandel said, “Great idea. Yes, we should definitely do this.” Awesome.