I Was a Transgender Youth — A Real Look into Gender-Affirming Care for Minors
“Do whatever you want, but keep it away from our children.”
This is the mantra I have been hearing, with ever-increasing velocity, for the past 10 years. I hear this from strangers on Facebook, faceless antagonists trolling the Reddit forums, distant family members, and in recent days, political figures with massive platforms and wide-reaching influence. The lives, stories, and rights of the transgender community are up for debate at the largest possible scale — what used to be Republican talking points in narrow-reaching press releases are now earnest discussions both in many states’ House of Representatives, as well as the houses of everyday Americans. One of these groups debates legislating transgender people out of their right to medical transition, and the other debates whether they should be ostracized out of polite society. It seems there’s no winning for trans folks.
Every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to throw their two cents into the ring, with those against transgender rights to medical care bemoaning their perceived censorship, and the so-called “indoctrination” that is taking place by public school teachers, sneaky or misguided parents, and twisted left-wing doctors looking to tap into the cash cow that is underage gender transition. Sounds totally legit.
So, when I speak out against this anti-trans rhetoric, it is not uncommon to be labeled a ‘groomer’, or accused of supporting child genital mutilation — both of which could not be further from the truth. Some of these accusations are blatant in their intentions — to discredit me before I have a chance to address my own perspective, making me out to be predatory, or confused, so that anyone reading our exchange who may be on the fence will know not to take anything I say seriously. It’s a very common tactic, and one I’m sure many outspoken users are intimately familiar with.
Other comments, admittedly tug on my heartstrings. Older family members of trans teens insist their mental woes must have been caused by their indoctrination to the ‘woke gender ideology’, and worry it may lead down an even darker path. Those who hear the horrors spewed by Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and others like them of irreversible hormone therapies and surgeries performed on children will naturally be horrified.
It wasn’t like this back in their day, when the punishments for gender non-conformity were far more detrimental, leaving any sort of deviance out of the question. To them, trans boys are simply tomboys, or depressed young girls going through a phase, and trans girls are gay boys, or boys who get off on the idea of performative womanhood (something they call autogynephilia).
The arguments are carefully constructed; they are designed this way to appeal to the ignorance of older generations — you know, those who are prone to believing every little thing they read on the internet, with no real-world experience interacting with a genuine LGBT+ person. Their only concept being the scary, shadowy caricature of a bulky man wearing a dress and a wig peddled to them by far-right propagandists.
I am very openly trans online, and have been since 2014. Yeah, I was trans before it was cool. As of writing this blog post, I am currently 22 years old — putting me at 13 when I initially began my transition. So, what did all of those years look like?
Before I get into my journey as a transgender youth — into adulthood — I do think it would serve us all well to keep in consideration that social norms and the world as a whole have changed exponentially in the past decade, and not all of my experiences during adolescence will be applicable to the transgender youth of today. As well, everyone’s situation is going to be different, regardless of our country’s shifting sociopolitical state.
The first twelve years of my life pre-transition were not plagued by dysphoria and confusion the way one often hears during recounts of trans people’s stories. In truth, I was more genderfluid than anything else. I displayed quite ‘tomboyish’ behaviors, but also enjoyed expressing my femininity through makeup, colorful, flowery clothes, and long, blonde hair which flowed in waves all the way down to my butt. That being said, I never fit perfectly into either box of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine.’ It wasn’t something I or anyone else around me really paid any heed to, aside from the usual misogynistic diatribes when I did or said something that was considered unladylike. This, I would later discover, is because I was autistic — something which commonly manifests in childhood through gender nonconformity — but that is a story for another day.
At 12 years old, I started to feel dissociated from my female identity, brought on by a major trauma that left me questioning my personal identity as a whole. Of course, being 12, I didn’t have the knowledge or language to understand my own psychology and how that reflected through my inevitable life choices. But in my limited life experience, I concluded that I must be a trans male, and proceeded to come out of the closet the following summer at 13 years old.
Phase One of My Transition: Gender Expression
What followed was a social transition, made easier by the fact that I switched schools frequently as a child. I cut my hair, changed my name, and built a whole new wardrobe for myself. I had no established sense of style as a male (to be honest, men’s clothing largely sucks), so I felt awkward and uncomfortable in my skin for a great deal of time during my first school year living as a boy.
What’s more, I dealt with a lot of bullying and harassment. Fellow students were approaching me on such a frequent basis asking me whether I was a boy or a girl that I quickly lost count. Some would even exchange money with friends based on my answer, and others would look me in the face and say, “No, you’re not a boy. You’re a girl.” I always wondered why they felt the need to ask if they seemed to already know the answer. There were several occasions in which peers would approach me and say some variation of the previous line, unprompted. It was incredibly humiliating and painful at first, but over time it stung a less and less. At 13, I taught myself to numb myself from others’ hateful words.
But this harassment also escalated beyond words in many cases. If questioners weren’t satisfied with my answer, or wanted to verify that I was, in fact, a real trans, they would reach out and grope me on the breasts, or the genitals. People I didn’t even know, who had heard about me through the rumor mill around school, or had seen me in the halls and were unable to comprehend what exactly they were looking at, were putting their hands on my body and laughing in my face. When I reported this sexual harassment — which I did, a handful of times — I was told by my guidance counselor to grope them back, which wasn’t helpful.
I also faced much harassment from teachers and faculty, who would purposely address me by my hyper-feminine birth name in front of the entire class, refer to me as a girl, or draw comparisons between their lessons and my trans status. This is just one of many examples of what people mean when they say ‘Protect trans kids.’ They are far more likely to be harassed by their cisgender peers — and ADULTS — than the other way around.
In an exquisite display of irony, I once had a debate teacher who led a highly personal debate with our entire class over whether I was a boy or a girl when I was late to class one day. When I entered the room, everyone who had been bent over their desks taking a quiz shifted their eyes upwards to stare at me. Their gazes followed me all the way to my seat, and continued to steal sneaky glances throughout the duration of the class. It wasn’t until after the bell rang that two of my friends told me the teacher had announced to the whole class that I was a girl, and half of the students had laughed and made fun of me. No one stood up for me, and the teacher received no consequences. I was, however, groped and verbally harassed several times that day by students who were part of the debate that morning.
I thankfully only spent one full year at that school, after which I entered my high school years, where I was able to pass much more discreetly. All around me, though, I was hearing my classmates discussing the infamous bathroom bills that had drawn attention at the national level, and here even more transphobic rhetoric grew and festered. But I was able to slip in and out of the men’s room undetected and unquestioned, though I technically was not supposed to per school policy.
At 14 years old, I started seeing a gender-affirming therapist in Dallas, and was enrolled in a gender care program called Genecis at the Dallas Children’s Hospital. Through my therapist, I was placed into a group therapy consisting of fellow transgender kids around my age, where I met some wonderful people for whom I still care deeply today. There, I got to know of the very uniqe experiences and feelings we shared as transgender youth transitioning during a very politically polarizing time.
Left and right, I was watching all of us go down the path of receiving gender-affirming medical care through the Genecis program and the subsequent mental health improvements that followed. None of us went too far into detail about the personal suffering we felt around our body dysphoria, as it was a deeply intimate issue, but we discussed at great length the social stigma we faced during our lives outside of therapy. One thing we all had in common is that we were harassed on a nearly daily basis, ostracized within our schools, social circles, and even our very own families. In fact, the unaccepting family members were the biggest cause of mental distress and suffering amongst us. While we all faced bullying and discrimination at school, whether we had accepting families at home was a mixed bag. One thing was clear, however: Those of us who had accepting families, and access to gender-affirming medical care, were the most optimistic and well-adjusted in the room.
Within our group, who were all moving through the steps of the Genecis program, only members 15+ were being approved for hormone-replacement therapy (HRT), and even then it was heavily conditional on the person’s individual mental and physical situation. Several of us were already far into puberty and requested to be started on HRT, while others were still fairly underdeveloped and were instead placed on puberty blockers, which delayed further pubescent development until the they were old enough and informed enough to make the next decision. I, at 15 years old and 8 years into puberty, belonged to the former group.
Phase Two of My Transition: HRT
I was approved to start HRT after 10 months of bi-weekly therapy appointments, monthly labs, physicals, and mental health assessments, and four letters of recommendations from three different medical professionals. Needless to say, it was not as hasty as a process as some naysayers might make it out to be; not to mention that I had already been living as a male for 2.5 years at that point. It’s not much in the grand scheme of things, but in adolescence it certainly was.
My initial dosage was .13mL by subdermal injection, which is incredibly low compared to starting dosages for my adult counterparts. I wasn’t happy about this at the time, but I can appreciate it now, as it gave me time to adjust to the changes and be absolutely sure they were what I wanted.
Being on testosterone boosted my mental health almost instantaneously. It could have been due to the placebo effect, but who can be sure? Either way — over the next year, the only major changes I experienced were an improvement in mood, cessation of my menstrual cycle, a deepened voice, and hot flashes. My god, the hot flashes. These persisted well past my early teen years and into my adulthood, and they are awful.
Though I didn’t know the reason for it at the time, I had great difficulty keeping track of my prescriptions and injecting on a consistent schedule. I now know that this was due to my neurodivergency, which causes struggles maintaining focus and organization. During that time in my life, though, I was moving around a lot between family members, and only a few of them had any investment in helping me stay on track with my hormone treatment. By the time I was 18, I had stopped and started the treatments several times, and when I moved out to live on my own I was unable to stay on top of it at all. I was too old to be part of the Genecis system, and I had no health insurance so finding another clinic was not an option.
That wouldn’t end up posing an issue, however, as at 18 I became pregnant with my daughter (who is now nearing three years old), and that was the primary focus of my life until she was six months old. Then, I started testosterone again, piggybacking off the huge hormonal flux I experienced during and after pregnancy, and all of the side effects that had been reversed during that time came back at super strength. Now that I was an adult, I was started on the hormone at adult levels, and my body changed very rapidly. I grew a thick beard and thick hair all over my body, my voice deepened even more, and I unfortunately gained quite a bit of weight, as often happens with testosterone. Unlike the first time I started HRT, it didn’t alleviate any of my discomfort in myself.
This period of my life, from ages 19 to 21, were incredibly difficult and plagued with personal struggles I won’t get into here, but needless to say by the time I entered the next stage of my life, I was very depressed. I had been through immense trauma and knew I was reaching a breaking point. Just after my 21st birthday, after having been off of testosterone again for about 6 months, I vowed to improve my life.
I started attending therapy and taking antidepressents, which vastly improved my mental health and energy levels. I started spending most of my time outside, eventually getting back into fiction writing, a lifelong passion I had left on the backburner for too many years.
In January of this year, 2023, I was diagnosed as autistic and ADHD. At first, I was reeling. It was a struggle to make sense of it, as everything I’d known about autism before was tinted by societal stereotypes that had very loose relation to reality. But over the past seven months I have been engaging with content made by autistic creators, reading articles and books (I suggest ‘Unmasking Autism’ by Dr. Devon Price, which resonated with me deeply), and doing my best to understand my own autism and how it has made me into the person I am today.
You may be wondering what the hell this has to do with my gender, but I’ve come to find that the two actually seem to be intrinsically intertwined. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I never felt a real detachment from my own personal sense of femininity, but that I could not see myself ever identifying with womanhood as a whole. Manhood was more in line with what felt natural to me — indifference, stoicism, brashness, eccentricity. I know those things don’t sound like they should combine, but trust me, I made it work as a kid.
With masculinity, you have more freedom to explore. There are many acceptable ways to be a man in our society, and very few ways to be a woman. I like flowy dresses and makeup and flowery headbands, but I hate tenderness and vulnerability. I hate being an ass-kissing caretaker and living my life to appeal to others. As an adult, I know now that no woman should have to adhere to any of that if she doesn’t want to, but in my 13-year-old mind, I thought that I was doomed to a life of pretending to be someone I hated. I didn’t want to do that, so I pivoted. But I realize now that I went too far in the other extreme.
Being a man isn’t much better than being a woman; there is less condescension from men when you break gender roles than there is from women. With women, you get subtle quips from others about what you should be, and how you should perform femininity to appeal to the male gaze and make the people around you feel more comfortable. With men, you are openly mocked and questioned. Neither are great, but one certainly feels more threatening. Having lived on both sides of the fence, I have developed a strong sense of respect for trans women, who I’m sure have horror stories of cisgender men cornering them and questioning on their supposed ‘manhood’ — a redundant, toxic concept which should honestly be retired.
Phase Three of My Transition: The Transition Never Ends
Over the past several months I have been trying to embrace my beautiful androgyny; swinging back and forth across the gender spectrum like a rainbow pendulum. And honestly, it feels good. I feel free, like I’m existing above society’s petty little problems. This extra perspective can be exhilarating at times, but more often than not it’s frustrating. Not only is it painful to see basic rights being stripped from my trans family — medical care that I was so fortunate to have access to (regardless on whether or not it ended up being the right choice for me), but I also can’t help but pity all of the antagonists who are locking themselves up inside these invisible boxes, not realizing that it’s okay to come out. Wearing makeup doesn’t make you gay, Kyle! Just relax, it’s fine! And yes, Karen, you’re still allowed to be a tomboy.
So, am I a man? No.
Am I a woman? Definitely not.
Am I nonbinary? Well, I guess so! I think that label covers me pretty well. But I’m not worried about it anymore, because for me, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. I’m 22 years old, I’ve got my whole life to figure this crap out. For now I’m just going to wear whatever makes me feel happy — and you should, too.
Our concerns now should be on the transgender youth (and adults) whose rights are being questioned and threatened and taken away every single day. Given the intensity of my dysphoria in my early teen years, I really doubt I would have made it this far without the gender-affirming care I received from the Genecis program. It saddens me to know that trans kids in my home city don’t have access to the same opportunity I had not even 10 years ago.
Legislators have no business controlling what someone can and cannot do with their own bodies, as that closes the door for people with unique circumstances from getting a healthcare plan made specifically for their body. If they don’t like it, they can look away. But I shudder to imagine what I might have done to myself if I hadn’t had access to HRT, and to know that that is a reality for thousands of children in this country.
There’s not much else we can tell them aside from “Trust the science,” but they have made it clear that they have no intention of doing so. Perhaps it’s time to stop taking the safe route and start taking back our rights to our own bodies, with or without force. Parents have a responsibility to fight for their children, and this fight should start with them. “Vote them out” is clearly not an option anymore; we need to give them a stronger dose of medicine.
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