Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (26 page)

At the time, I still identified as gay. I never liked using the word lesbian because it implies female. If anyone ever asked me, I’d say I was gay, not lesbian. I was on the verge of questioning my gender when I was cast in the part. It kinda allowed me to question more.

During a rehearsal, the playwright came up to me and said, “So I heard you were questioning stuff. Do you want to talk about it?”

And I was, like, “
Yes!
That would be awesome!”

I could talk to Samuel, but I didn’t really. The playwright became a role model for me. I had had role models in the past, but I always felt a sense of competition because they were male-bodied and I wasn’t. With him it was like, “Whoa, this is a male person who isn’t male-bodied, and I can really, really relate to you.”

My family was okay with me being gay, but trans was a different issue for them. I think a lot of it was because they had no experience with it. My mom said, “I’m going to be an okay-onboard mom, and you’re going to be a lesbian. I’m okay with that.”

So it was, “Stop everything. I have a girlfriend! Yay!”

I really, really liked this girl. She was cute, she was funny, she was intelligent, and all that stuff. She was someone I had known since sixth grade. We had always been grouped together because we were the quiet, intelligent people. It wasn’t like a slick kind of friendship. We were incredibly awkward. She was even shyer than I was. She almost never said anything. And she would never talk about things that involved emotions. When I finally got up the nerve to tell her I liked her, her response was just, “Okay, I kinda figured.”

Maybe a month later, I found out that she liked me too.

The awkwardness got even worse when we started dating. When I look back on it now, I clench up. It was very, very awkward. A lot of silences, stuff like that. But even so, I was totally elated. I thought about her the entire summer. It’s hard to concentrate on being trans when you have a girlfriend.

I felt it was just too awkward. It wasn’t a bad breakup. It was, like, this is awkward and we should probably stop torturing ourselves.

Once the school year started, I was thinking about the trans thing again. It’s weird. I was quite convinced I was trans in sixth grade, but because of my mom’s reaction, I took her word for it that I wasn’t. I put it from my mind.

I slowly started to rediscover my gender in eighth grade. So there were two separate processes — sixth grade and eighth grade — a double discovery process. When I came out to my mom this second time, we talked about my taking hormones because that was what I wanted to do.

I was a lot more nervous coming out to my dad than I was with my mom. My dad’s generally less accepting, I guess.

Three years earlier, when I came out to him as gay, I had thought about how to do it a lot. I was really stressed about it, and I ended up deliberately coming out to him at the worst time. He was angry with my older sister, who had come home late and hadn’t called, and the dinner was burned, and my sister was on the verge of tears, and he was yelling, and while all this stuff was happening, I said, “Hey, Dad, I’m gay!” I figured it couldn’t get any worse so I should just say it. Everything got very quiet. He was just like, “Uh, okay.” It got tense. It was tense before, and now it was very tense.

Personally I was a lot more relieved when I said it. Once you get over that initial hurdle of saying the words, “I’m ‘fill-in-the-blank,’” it’s generally easier. I don’t remember too much about what happened afterward. I don’t think there was a lot of talking, just tense silence. A couple of weeks later, he gave me a book by Ellen DeGeneres. He said, “Here’s this book. She’s a lesbian,” and he walked away. It was a good book; she’s a very funny lady.

A couple of weeks after coming out trans to my mom, I came out to my dad. He was dropping me and my older sister off at school; I got out of the car and was about to shut the door . . . .

“Dad, I’m trans.”

“Well, okay.”

“Okay, bye,” and I shut the door and ran off.

We didn’t really talk about it until a couple of days later. There was more explaining about what that meant. Everyone knows what gay is. Nobody knew what trans is.

I explained that “I’m mentally male and I would like it if you use male pronouns and stuff.” He wasn’t dubious like my mom was, but he didn’t think it was . . . well . . . he thought it was a phase and was waiting for it to go away.

My parents were definitely worried about health issues. My mom especially was worried about health risks involved with taking hormones because she was unsure about the process.

Some had more trouble than others. I didn’t find it offensive because it was understandable. I was messed up in my head about it too. I’d screw up. I’d refer to myself, saying, “Oh,
she’s
doing something about something.” Wait a minute! I’m supposed to be using male pronouns. I identify as male now.

It took about a year to convince my mom to use male pronouns. My dad was pretty against it until a couple of months ago. My dad still calls my hormones steroids rather than T, which I asked him not to do. He messes up with pronouns a lot and doesn’t apologize for it. He uses my birth name a lot. But I don’t actually care. It’s definitely better than before. Now everything was out in the open.

The opportunity to go onstage kind of melded me together. I am definitely less shy now than I used to be. I try to keep some of the energy I have onstage offstage. I’m still most comfortable onstage.

I remember standing backstage, about to go on with my monologue, being soooo, so scared. As soon as it ended, I was utterly, utterly elated. It’s the best feeling to be onstage and do something you love and do it well.

Opening night was great. It was only topped by the night after, which was when my friends came. The house was sold out. It was a great audience. They were laughing, crying all over the place. I remember feeling very proud to be doing that play before my friends. I was definitely introducing transgender to them.

It was thrilling, quite thrilling.

So here we are, a pack of
Homo sapiens
thinking that we know whether a person is female or male. Now that I’ve spent a few years researching and talking with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, I am confident saying that male/female is not the only way to describe gender. The people I’ve come to know and love in the course of writing and photographing this book have helped me better understand the fluidity of gender and sex.

This lesson for me also reinforces what I’ve been writing about for years: once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves.

The basic plan for
Beyond Magenta
was to write and photograph a narrative nonfiction book about sex and alienation, two universal themes that have interacted in life, literature, and art since forever. The focus was to explore basic characteristics of sexuality, especially watershed periods when young people recognize or begin to acknowledge their sexual and gender identities. The book was going to be about boys who realize that they are girls and girls who realize that they are boys. As you can see, this vision changed as I learned more.