Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (23 page)

Around my sophomore year, I bumped into one of my old middle-school friends. She wasn’t actually a friend; I knew her because we sat next to each other in math class and she lived in my neighborhood. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who I also knew, and she wanted to talk about it to me. She said I was a nice person to talk to because I was, like, nonbiased.

At that time, everyone saw me as a girl, and she did too. In a weird way, I understand both girls and guys — as much as I don’t want to admit it. Anyway, she started to get into the sexual stuff. That didn’t bother me. I thought,
She’s just a teenager; she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

According to her, she was bisexual. One time she decided to kiss me. I thought, she’s a human being and she just wanted some kind of physical affection. I was trying to be a friend. I didn’t feel anything. I was just helping out a friend.

For some reason, she decided to tell her ex-boyfriend about the kiss. Then her ex-boyfriend decided to tell one of his friends. His friends had an Xbox. He went on a chat room and told people what he heard. One of the people in the chat room was my brother. Instead of going directly to me about it, my brother went directly to my parents.

That kiss didn’t mean anything to me. I never saw it as a big deal. It was just kissing. I didn’t want sex — that was the
last
thing I wanted. In a simple sense, it was a person helping another person through physical affection. That’s how I viewed it, but other people viewed it as something different. They saw
Girl Kissing Girl
!

My parents called me into their room and said “We heard about this. Is it true?”

I automatically lied ’cause I knew they wouldn’t approve. “That’s a lie! People make shit up.”

Then I called the girl, and I asked why she thought it was okay to talk about this. I asked her to please lie for me because I knew how my parents were. Then I called everyone who knew about this: her ex-boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend’s friends, my brother, and my brother’s friend. Eleven people. Nobody would lie for me. Here were people who said they were my friends but wouldn’t lie for me.

My mom made me come to her room and stand in the corner. Then she brought each person in to tell her what happened. I had to watch and listen. As each one told her what he heard, I tried not to cry. I thought that was the strong thing to do. I had to hear this story eleven times. I was never given the chance to speak. My parents always said that they were my support system. But they didn’t support me at all.

Finally, my mom said that what I did was wrong, that girls weren’t supposed to kiss girls. I said, “You see what I don’t see? I don’t see myself as a girl.”

As punishment, my computer and my cell phone were taken away. I had a strict curfew. When I finished school, I had to be home a half hour later. They thought the books I bought influenced how I acted, so they took them away from me.

I felt terrible. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t feel that anyone understood me. I started to physically hurt myself. I started to cut. I heard that lots of people do this and it wasn’t a big deal, so I tried to do even more. I started to burn myself.

I was always depressed, but by this point I got even more depressed. I stopped going to school. My brother and I weren’t communicating. He was always home. I was always home. We stayed in separate rooms. My brother was fighting with my parents all the time. I guess you can say he had anger issues. One of his therapists called Child Services. They came to the house every two weeks to check if we were eating well and this and that. According to this social worker, I was suffering from emotional neglect and my brother was suffering from educational neglect. It’s a funny way to say it, but that’s how they said it.

My mom wasn’t very happy about this. When they came over and checked everything, she thought they treated her like a criminal, that she was not treating her kids well. She said, “You must think I’m a bad mother.” I personally don’t remember how we responded to that.

I thought,
Why am I depressed? I have everything good. I have a family. I have food. I have a house. I go to a good school.
I couldn’t explain to Child Services why I was depressed. So I said to myself,
I’ll just shut up because I’m just going to create more problems and no one’s ever going to understand what I’m going through.

Even though I had no desire to protect my family or anything like that, I just shut up and went along. I went with the flow, thinking,
Things will work out.

I attempted suicide twice. The first time, I had a knife but I couldn’t use it. I was really close to doing it, and I would have done it, but then something in my head said,
I would spill a lot of blood in the bathroom. And then my parents are going to yap at me even after I’m dead. That’s another problem I don’t need.
So I got myself out of it. But still, I felt unsatisfied.

The second time, I gave hints to my social worker that I wanted to do something. He called my parents, worried that something might happen.

I still don’t know why I picked up that phone. I guess it was an automatic reaction. The phone rings, you pick it up.

The social worker, John, wanted to send me to the hospital, and I kinda agreed with him. “I think I really need to go to the hospital,” I told him.

To tell you the truth, as terrible as it sounds, that hospital gave me one of the best times of my life. I was still depressed, and I had to be on medication. But I was away from my parents. I was away from everyone. I wore hospital clothes, so people couldn’t tell what sex I was.

The doctors did a physical examination. They said I had an abnormality on my genitalia because I had taken drugs or steroids. “I don’t do drugs,” I told them. “You can give me a tox screen. I don’t do drugs or drink alcohol.”

They sort of ignored that and said I have severe depression. At one point, they said I had a schizoid personality disorder. Those doctors weren’t agreeing. And it wasn’t just one doctor; it was a series of doctors. Each of them had a different opinion. From what I saw, they didn’t communicate with each other much. It’s like I got twenty different answers every day.

I made friends with two people. There was a girl in the emergency room. She said, “You don’t look so well.”

“I’m depressed.”

“I cannot tell what you are,” she said.

“I guess you can say that I’m queer.”

“Oh, that’s cool, because I’m a dyke.”

That made me laugh.

The other person I made friends with was this guy named Thomas. He was a lot older than me. But I don’t mind talking to older people. We talked about intellectual stuff, the arts. It was very cool. He used to be a doctor, and now he was a patient in the ward.

There were kids there too. Girls with eating disorders, guys with anger issues, teenagers with cutting problems. I was simply the weird one.

Sometimes my parents visited. I didn’t want them there. I didn’t want to think about the outside world where no one would ever understand who I was. My father still believed I was just going through a phase, teenage mood swings that got extreme for some reason. He never tried to understand.

My mom was disappointed. She never imagined that her kids would be in this type of situation. I guess when stuff like this happens, parents ask, “What did we do wrong?” I don’t think it had anything to do with them.

After a month, I got out. It was May, near the end of the school year, so I decided not to go back to school. I didn’t flunk out per se, but I had to make up the year.

I fell into a deeper depression, and in August I went back to the hospital. This time I was diagnosed gender dysphoria. I think that’s how they diagnose transgender people. Transsexuals. It’s like, if you’re physically one hundred percent one sex but you think you’re the other sex, then you have this.

I continued to research “intersex” in the limited access I had to the hospital library. That’s when I learned about hormone therapy. I considered myself gender queer intersex, but I thought hormones would get me closer to my ideal self. It’s very difficult to explain. I mean, although I was both male and female, people still saw me as female. Maybe it was because I had breasts or my voice wasn’t masculine enough. I just wanted people to accept me as me. I thought that hormone therapy would help me become my ideal self.

Before I could get male hormones, I had to go to therapy sessions. I had to explain everything about myself. Even today, right here, I struggle talking about how I feel. I’m trying to be comfortable about myself. Now I’m getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t want to go to school, but I forced myself just to get that diploma. I was still playing in the orchestra. I enjoyed that, but the other students didn’t consider me a musician. I FYed everyone.

I was exhausted.

My average was 70 compared to when I started with a 93. But I graduated, and that’s it.

I didn’t want to go to graduation, but I had to. My mom and her friend were there. My dad was at my brother’s graduation, which was held that morning, and then he came over to mine. After my name was called, he left. I was pissed.

After graduation, I heard my mom fighting with him on the phone. He didn’t stay because he wanted to go back home and watch a soccer game between Argentina and Chile. If you’re supposed to be a parent, you’re supposed to be there for the whole graduation and not just leave for a stupid soccer game. This is not being a parent. This is not being a father. So I’m pissed. I did a lot of things to respect him, but he didn’t do this one thing for his kid.