How A Good Friend Changed My Life

I was on my way to meet some friends at a restaurant in Baltimore when I got a call from one of the people I was meeting. It was Ryan, one of my best friends. I was running late and he wanted to make sure I was still on my way, “I should be there sometime in the next 10 minutes.” I told him. The next question Ryan asked me was one that he had asked me before. With some discomfort in his voice, he asked, “Who’s coming tonight?” He was asking if I was going to show up in “boy mode” or “girl mode”.

I had come out to Ryan a few months earlier, and was in early transition. It was the part of my life that many trans people refer to as “living part-time”. I came to un-lovingly call it “the gray space.” It meant time spent changing gender presentations between male and female sometimes multiple times a day. Depending on what I was doing or where I was coming from any given night, I may have been wearing male work clothes, or a fun, patterned dress. Ryan never knew who he was going to get.

“I didn’t have a preference for who I was getting, it was just the stress of not knowing.”

The thing nobody tells you is that when you transition, to some extent those closest to you end up transitioning too. It’s not exactly like coming out as gay. Being transgender can cause a fundamental change in the relationships we have with our cisgender friends and family. In my case, my parents lost a son, but gained a daughter. Some of my friends found themselves in similarly trying to understand how to interact with me now that I looked and acted so differently.

Before I came out to him, I was one of Ryan’s ‘guy friends’. We spent a lot of time together, we worked at the same company, and we shared many of the same interests. Ryan is naturally friendly with everyone but when we first met, something clicked and we became fast friends. Seeing me transition had been hard on Ryan, but he never let on that he was having a difficult time seeing me change.

The thing nobody tells you is that when you transition, to some extent those closest to you end up transitioning too.

When someone you thought was your ‘guy friend’ goes through a gender transition, it’s possible for them to become what Kevin Arnold from The Wonder Years called, ‘a friend-who’s-a-girl’ (distinctly NOT a ‘girl friend’). I was becoming a member of the ‘other team’. A still trusted friend, however, placed into a different category . I was becoming the Winnie Cooper.

Emily: “What did you think when I came out to you?”

Ryan: “Until you came out, I didn’t know anyone who was transgender. I knew it was a thing. Intellectually I knew ‘I should support this’, but it was challenging.”

When I talk about Ryan, I call him my “Russo” — a reference to Jenny Boylan’s New York Times bestseller, “She’s Not There”. In the book, Russo is Jenny’s old friend, Richard Russo, a close personal friend who helped see Jenny all the way through her transition. Ryan is dependable, smart, and he’s always been the kind of friend who I can trust to be honest with me, even if it hurts sometimes.

Emily: “Do you feel like you lost anything when I transitioned?”

Ryan: “I definitely lost a guy friend and picked up a girl friend.”

I’m the Winnie…

R: “We were never big into sports or anything…you’re more girly now.”

We both laugh. I’m sitting across from him in a professional-looking dress and half-sleeve cardigan and looking girly as ever. Ryan tries to get us back on topic,

R: “When we were at [your son’s] birthday party, you were talking to another girl at the party. It felt like you were almost playing up the girliness more than usual, because you’re not like that normally. It made me wonder if that’s really what you’re like, or if you were just feeling it out.”

I had spent a lot of time before I transitioned trying to convince my friends and family that very little would change about me. Looking back, I don’t know if I was trying to convince them of that, or myself. Ryan was accustomed to being around a person with a different attitude and outlook on life. He was used to a version of me who was often depressive, a friend who unbeknownst to all around her, was profoundly uncomfortable in ways few others understood.

R: “Your voice is different, and you look different but that one situation was almost like a different personality.”

E: “Did it make you uncomfortable?”

R: “It made me a little uncomfortable, yeah. It’s not consistent with the person I had always known.”

The way we change after transition is a lot like introducing a new person into the world. The people who I had pre-existing relationships with were (in some ways more than others) forced to understand someone they thought they knew well, differently.

It’s not a trans person’s fault for hiding these aspects of our personality from our closest friends; so often we do what we need to do for our own survival. Sometimes even when we think we know someone, they turn out to be unsupportive, or worse, outright hostile. Sometimes our friends can be the ones who end up hurting us the worst. Ryan wasn’t like that.

Then I get to the question he asked me that night in Baltimore,

E: “I remember a few times during my transition, if we were going to meet somewhere, you’d ask me, “who’s coming tonight?” You told me that question caused you some stress.”

R: “Yeah. That was the biggest stressor. I would get a lot of anxiety from that. I never knew who I was getting. I didn’t have a preference for who I was getting, it was just the stress of not knowing.”

Transition was one of the most trying times of my life. It’s a time that forces us to be more introspective about ourselves. It also tests the limits of those close to us to be understanding and to support us through something that isn’t easy to get through. It forces us to find ways to be better people, but it also forces those around us to show us where they stand and to be better themselves.

It’s not a trans person’s fault for hiding these aspects of our personality from our closest friends; so often we do what we need to do for our own survival

However, the decision to continue a friendship through a transition is almost entirely up to the individual friends of the person in transition. Nobody wants to lose their friends as they go through the process of transitioning, but so often we know what we stand to lose by coming out. We often require a lot of support as we make the changes we need to make, but there’s a certain satisfaction in being able to provide something so crucial to a person’s life as being their friend during transition.

R: “I can tell you, it was fascinating to watch [your transition]. Not many people get to experience a friend’s transition, and I was aware of that. It was an opportunity for me to see that whole process up close. I could see when you would work on your voice, or your walk. I was aware of you feeling it all out.”

I spent a lot of my life consciously or unconsciously searching for signs that the people in my life would be accepting of me if I told them the truth about my character. Fragments of a conversation might one day serve as evidence that a friend could be trusted with the information I would one day need to share.

R: “I think you going through your transition brought us closer together, anyway. To be able to be a part of it, I think it made our friendship even stronger.”

Our meeting that day was coming to a close. I stopped my recording and put my things back into my purse. As is customary, Ryan gave me a parting hug (something he had only started doing after I transitioned) and we went our separate ways.

True friends have a way of making difficult things seem more manageable. Without them, many of us don’t ever feel confident in making the crucial leap from one gender presentation to another. Having a friend whose commitment to maintaining some semblance of normality doesn’t waiver is one of the strongest things anyone has ever given to me.

And so if you ever find yourself in a situation where a friend has just come out to you, remember that we chose you. You are the person who we have decided is trustworthy enough to invest this deeply intimate part of our lives. How you react has the power to make or break the confidence we need to become the people we have to be. We are counting on you. Please don’t let us down.

EmilyMaxima is a freelance essayist with published works in MotherBoard, Upworthy.com & TheEstablishment.co. Follow her on twitter: @emilymaxima