Transgendered Youth
“The doctor painted me pink when I wanted to be blue.” Danny Charles age 17, Growing Up Trans In Our Own Words.
I can’t even imagine, for real, what it would be like to be born the wrong gender. I think the word would be misgendered. My curiosity led me to read Growing Up Trans edited by Dr. Lindsay Herriot and Kate Fry. The book contains a series of poems and personal essays written by trans youth age 13-17. Although they are writing with their eye on the same theme, they couldn’t be more different. Like Dr. Lindsay Cavanaugh writes, “there is no single trans story.”
There are things to consider when transitioning from one gender to the next. So many things seem to have gender written all over them. For example, hair can be seen as having gender; long or short. Voice has a gender; high or deep. There is the decision to get boobs or get rid of boobs. The decision to undergo gender reassignment or not. What kind of clothes to wear.
When thinking of nonbinary, “the umbrella term for all genders other than female/male. Not every nonbinary person identifies as trans, and not all trans people identify as nonbinary,” (Growing Up Trans) I think back to the eighties when androgyny was the term thrown around. I definitely dressed androganously by wearing unisex clothing. Back then, it was sort of a big deal unlike today. In the eighties if you dressed androgynously you were usually considered gay. At least that was my experience. It wasn’t feminine to wear black combat boots. Today, we don’t think anything of it.
Do I think we’re taught to discriminate? Absolutely. I think we grow up in a world of judgement. Some of us, I believe, do learn that kindness and judgement don’t live in the same house. My parents were horribly judgmental. My father referred to all LBGTQ as faggots. And all faggots to him were worse than child molesters. He was very verbal about this and once when I was around the age of 13 he threatened to take a baseball bat to the neighbors down the street who he thought were LBGTQ. It’s ironic that I’m judging my father as I write this. I’m just glad that I hold kindness in my heart for LGBTQ.
Do I think we are taught to hate? Yes I do. I work in a library. I used to love to watch the kids in the children’s section play together. It was a natural thing. All sexes. All ethnicity. All ages. They did not see themselves as different. As kids grow, they grow apart from playing with each other. They grow suspicious and I believe if the parents or other adults they’re close to harbor hate and ill will for people, they will learn to hate.
I believe transgendered youth to be beautifully complicated people. Not all of us have to dive as deep as they do into discovering identity. The poetry and personal essays I read of their’s were amazingly mature for their age. Can you imagine being 13 and knowing you were pink and not blue? Or blue and not pink? The pain and sorrow these youth experience should be insurmountable yet they thrive, not without heartbreak, but they thrive. One of the youth in the book repeated in their poem as a mantra “I am still alive, I am still alive.” Please, I ask of you, learn to accept trans people. Learn to listen to trans people. Learn to be kind and loving toward trans people. This world is a good place but it could be an even better place.