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Trans Children Have Always Been Here
As legal efforts to eliminate trans youth ramp up, we must remember that being trans has always been part of childhood
I came out to my husband as nonbinary on my 38th birthday. It was, by anyone’s standards, a late transition, delayed in part because I’d spent more than a year privately agonizing about whether to do it. So many of the trans stories I’d heard from the media were about rejection, divorce, the loss of family. I had a loving marriage and a three-year-old; I was terrified of being single again or losing my relationship with my child.
I thought I would have to blow up my entire adult life in order to transition, and that thought alone was almost enough to stop me. The only way to avoid that fear would have been to build a trans life for myself before adulthood hit. That, in turn, would only be possible if I’d begun seriously exploring my gender the first time the question presented itself — which, for the record, was before preschool. At three years old, I believed myself to be a boy, and it was a shock to learn other people thought differently. At 13, I gave myself a buzz cut and refused to wear girls’ clothing or makeup. At 16, I ran off into the woods with other teenagers and secretly used a male name and pronouns for myself whenever we were together; some of those kids would also go on to transition in adulthood, and they used their chosen names with me, too. At 20, having met adult trans men at college, I told my boyfriend that I might want to try some new pronouns or a more comfortable way of presenting.
That boyfriend, let’s say, did not respond well. I could have transitioned at many points throughout my life, but each time something stopped me: corrected by adults, shamed by classmates, rejected by partners, just plain convinced of my own craziness by a culture that contained no images of people like me. Even the specific kind of transition I needed wasn’t clear until a few years ago, when images of nonbinary trans people became more visible in the mainstream. I tell you this not to issue invites to the pity party — my husband and I are more in love than ever, and the kid is just fine, thank you — but because trans children have become such a flashpoint that people tend to forget we’ve always been here. You just…
