Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (20 page)

Life goal: be part of the revolution! It’s on my bucket list — I don’t have a bucket list, but if I did, revolution would be on it. High up! Definitely high up!

I want to be a doctor. I will find a queer organization and work with queer kids and prescribe hormones to trans kids. It’s going to be cool.

We have so much potential. Together we have the potential for dynamic change. A revolution. I hope a revolution happens. And I want to be in it.

I think
potential
is a good thing to end on because it’s happy. It’s about the future. I’m looking forward to my future. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and not just the big stuff, little things too. Having a driver’s license. Turning twenty-one. Going to college. Making new friends.

Who I meet in college will have a huge effect on who I am and what I do and how I interact with the world. Will I really end up going to med school? Where will I live? What will my world be like? There’s no way to predict what’s going to happen. I guess that’s the thing I’m actively trying to do — not predict what’s going to happen.

Life’s an adventure. It really is an adventure.

How can I explain myself to someone normal? I’m hard to explain. Usually I don’t like to use labels, but if I did, I would say I was gender queer, gender neutral, or simply queer. Intersex is another way I can identify myself. Intersex means that I’m both male and female. It means I’m neither male nor female; I’m a whole different gender, a third gender, so to speak, part of the transgender umbrella.

My birth certificate says I’m female. I guess I looked female when I was born. I thought you follow whatever’s on your birth certificate. But maybe that isn’t always true.

Everyone always said I was weird, so that’s how I considered myself. That’s ’cause I was called a freak in middle school. And weird. A weird freak!

I was taller and broader than most girls. I looked like a girl — but not exactly like a girl. I acted like a boy, but I wasn’t a boy. When people became more sexual, around eighth grade, everyone assumed I was gay or lesbian.

I want people to use the pronouns
them
and
they
when referring to me because I consider myself both male and female. Since most people don’t understand that, I just tell them to use
he.
For years I was
she,
so it’s time to switch. I don’t like being a girl. I gave it a run. It didn’t work.

I never wanted to be a pretty girl, or even a pretty girl with a touch of boy. I thought of myself as just a kid. I’d sleep, eat breakfast, and go to school, draw something on the chalkboard, go back home, eat, sleep, and repeat. I never thought,
Oh, I’m pretty today,
or
Oh, I want to look like a boy today.
I don’t recall anything like that.

I had an image in my head about how my body’s supposed to look. I wanted to look androgynous, in between, as if you can’t tell that I have male or female genitalia. It’s a nice image. When people say I look male or female, it messes up my head.

I was born in New York City. My mom is Italian and French, and my dad is German, some other European nationality, and some indigenous tribe in Chile. But both are from Chile. At home, we speak English and Spanish.

According to my parents, it took four years to have me because they didn’t really like each other. They were fighting a lot. They said that those four years were living hell. My mom was forced to marry my father by her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother met my father, thought he was a good, decent guy, and said, “Oh, you should meet my daughter and marry her.” They married, spent four years in hell, and then they had me. A year later, they had my brother, Jova. I think he’s straight because he’s totally homophobic.

Even though my dad worked, my mom complained that he didn’t do anything. I don’t know what he does to this day. Me and my father don’t talk that much. He has worked the same job forever. My mom used to work, but after she had me, she stopped.

My parents told me that I didn’t speak until I was seven. As a kid, I didn’t speak at all. Most of the time, I just pointed. I started making sounds when I was around six or five. My guess is it was because the two languages confused me. I was going to a school where everyone spoke English. My dad said we had to speak English at home, not only to improve me but also to improve my parents’ English.

They loved speaking English. The problem was my grandmother never learned the language. One moment they spoke English; the next moment they had to speak Spanish.

Before preschool I did everything in my house. I was always alone. Even with my brother living in the same house, in the same room, I was a solitary kid. I used my imagination a lot. I thought of my toys as a way to see what I was thinking. Let’s say I had a movie in my head and wanted to see it visually. I guess when you’re a kid you need to see things visually. You need to know it’s real. Like, to pretend two knights fighting, I’d use two dolls or two action figures to enact what I had imagined. But I wasn’t comfortable doing that in front of people. I needed to be alone to do that.

I didn’t like preschool, but I felt good about being five. Five is my favorite number because it reminds me of the time when I wasn’t forced to think of myself as a girl or a boy. I was neutral. I didn’t have to explain myself. I wasn’t depressed. I never got into fights and I never had arguments with my family. I could go into my room and play with my toys and no one bothered me. Is it normal for a kid to do that? I don’t know.

There’s a major difference between being in your room playing with your toys and being in a room full of kids and playing with your toys. In preschool, like, if I had a toy, other kids might try to take it away from me. For me, that was an invasion of my privacy.

I had short hair, and my mom dressed me in shirts and pants. When I think about myself back then, I looked neutral. Sometimes I had a sweater with a horse on it. I don’t remember wearing pink or bows in my hair — maybe I did when I was a baby, but that doesn’t matter.

Then, later on, when they started separating kids according to sex, that really started to bug me. I got in trouble a lot. One time, when I was six, I was playing basketball with the guys in the school yard. We were in two teams, the shirts versus the skins. I was in the skins. So when all the guys took their shirts off, I took my shirt off too. I didn’t think anything of it. One of the recess guards pulled me away and yelled at me. I didn’t know what happened. By the end of the school day, my teacher was talking to my mother. My mother dragged me all the way back to our apartment, all the while saying mean things to me. I think she hit me twice. I just remember her screaming at me, and she said it in Spanish, which I personally believe hurts even more than when it is said in English.

“¿Por qué haces esto a mí?”
(Why do you do this to me?)
“No hacer cosas estúpidas.”
(Don’t do stupid things.)
“La gente va a pensar que tu eres rara.”
(People will think you are weird.)

I felt terrible. Then my dad came home, and obviously my mom told him, because he screamed at me too. All that just because I took my shirt off? I didn’t know I shouldn’t!

I guess when you’re born a girl people assume you know that you’re a girl. Period! My parents bought me Barbie dolls and my brother action figures. I liked them both — I really did. One side of me wanted the Barbies, but the other side wanted the action figures. Because I couldn’t play with action figures, I took off the heads of my Barbie dolls. I pulled them apart. I liked them both, and they forced me to one side, like, I had to only play with dolls.

I never talked about my feelings, even when I was a kid. It’s not that I didn’t trust my family. It’s just I didn’t feel comfortable talking to them about anything. It was a gut feeling. I mean, I’d say “hi” to my mom, and I’d say, “I love you,” because that’s what she expected to hear. I respected her. She’s a nice woman. We had some tough times together that I’ll tell you about, but she’s not completely bad. There are times when I mean it when I say, “I love you,” and there are times when I say it because she wants to hear it.