On the Road to Self Discovery: Arya’s Journey

“Back in the day I didn’t really like having photos taken of me. Now I love being in front of the camera.”

By Solynka Dumas, Adele Jackson-Gibson and Jenna Reyes

Arya is a twenty-one-year old woman who loves to play video games and is passionate about mechanical engineering. She is smart and articulate with a quirky sense of humor. On the surface she looks like a typical college student. You would never guess that just a year ago she was an awkward boy that abhorred physical contact, had trouble looking people in the eye and spoke with a slight stutter.

Arya was given the name “Mihai” at birth.

Now that she has transitioned, seeing and hearing her old name makes her uncomfortable. “It’s not the name I identify with anymore and it feels very jarring when someone uses that to relate to me,” she said.

“In Aragon there’s this character who undergoes a slow transition from being human to being more elf-like [and] more “feminized.”- Arya on the origin of her name

Arya’s daily hormones.

Arya must take two pills for the rest of her life in order to maintain her testosterone levels close to zero and her estrogen levels high enough to continue developing into a woman. At this stage of her transition, her body is going through the same changes as a young girl going through puberty.

Arya has two vibrators, an older model and its newer version.

Since she started discovering her sexuality, Arya never used her penis like most little boys normally would. She would instead rub herself over her underwear and later, when moving to the States, started using vibrators on her penis. “I never used the traditional fab fab motion,” she said. “I always used my penis like a clitoris.”

Behind Arya is the transgender flag. “The blue represents ‘baby boys’ the pink represents ‘baby girls’ and the white represents the intersex and those who don’t fit into the cultural perspective.”

Today Arya proudly identifies as gender-queer. She sports pro-fem buttons on her purse and recently got a tattoo of the universal transgender symbol on her arm.

“I didn’t start wearing dresses until deep on into my transition. I was always afraid of the man in a dress look and the harassment that would come with that.”

On October 11th was National Coming Out Day. Initially Arya wanted to come out on that day but she couldn’t wait any longer and came out as trans over the summer. “I was never a boy. I was assigned male at birth. I was always female,”concluded Arya, and it was time to let people know.