Experiences of trans and gender diverse young people

I really like being non-binary. And I really think it’s an important kind of valuable kind of position isn’t quite the right word, but kind of space to inhabit within the world and to kind of be able to like recognise that there’s quite a big community of non-binary people throughout the world, and also obviously throughout history. But having that kind of, having that kind of, for me it’s a bit of a chink of light coming through the horrible toxic restrictive and quite violent systems of kind of binary sex and gender that have been built around, around us by kind of white supremacist patriarchal society, clinging onto power, and I feel like it’s a place where I can be myself and be comfortable and try to look at the world differently, and understand how things can be different or could be changed and to imagine a more interesting future where all of these kind of binaries between all sorts of different categories and disciplines and areas of life, are less important. And kind of, that’s kind of like the utopian side of it, and that’s kind of, yeah that’s why I kind of identify with it I suppose. It kind of feels like a way that feels like it’s what I’ve, it was, I was like, ‘Oh this is a concept kind of feel at home in,’ after not having, not having a word for it for all that time to. Yeah and then I suppose in terms of making that be visible and how other people see me, is a slightly different prospect, which I think isn’t uncommon for a lot of people, I guess.

Well when you’re in lower school you kind of don’t really think about genders, you’re all just like out playing, but I think it was when I went into Year 3 and we started going to these swimming lessons, and obviously it was like wearing a different swimming costume and stuff like that. And that’s when everyone else kind of started to realise, and so did I. And I was like, “This isn’t really right, I don’t feel right.” And so I felt really insecure, and I just didn’t really like where I was at, and I got like worry and quite a lot of anxiety at that time, thinking like I don’t want to go swimming, and stuff like that. And then obviously because I noticed that, then that summer and stuff my Mum started making me wear school dresses in the summer time, and then I was just like, “Oh this is too much,” cos I really didn’t like it. So yeah, that went on for pretty much all of year 3, and then year 4 I said to Mum that I didn’t really feel comfortable, and so then we got me to get changed in the disabled toilet, and it was like a vest top as well, so it wasn’t just the swimming costume. And so, like little changes to help with it. And then so we got through year 4, and then I went into the middle school and I just told my Mum like, “I’m trans,” like basically. And we got on it from there.

Well, I kind of always knew that there was something a little bit off. I’m not really sure how to phrase it or how I’m supposed to talk about it if you think that there is something a little bit different about yourself, it’s not something that you can really summarise in words. It can be small things like in primary school. It was just not necessarily clicking that brilliantly with everyone else. It was a case of you were friends with everyone, but, at the same time, sometimes you felt like you were looking in through a box and that happens sometimes.

But, of course, as a kid, you don’t really know if it’s just like I don’t fit in or I don’t have friends. As a child, you don’t think, mmm…my gender’s weird, because you’re a kid and you don’t care about those things. You care about like comic books and stuff. You don’t actually care that much about whose a boy or whose a girl. But then as you grow up a little bit, it starts to hit you a bit more because everyone is starting to hit puberty and everyone is starting to change and people are just starting to just grow a bit different and that’s when you start to realise hey, I still don’t fit in or hey. My friends are all different to me and I don’t know why I always feel like I don’t fit in with them, which is a bit annoying. But they’re not really things you can bring up in conversation, especially if you’re like in year seven, because year seven’s are still kind of kids and at the sixth form we are looking back on year seven’s, I still think that they’re really small and so, if I talked about them, when I was in year seven like, even I think the future wouldn’t have believed myself. I would have just said, you are just a year seven, don’t worry and it gets easier.

It’s probably just because you’re going through a lot of change right now. So, for a while, I didn’t really address anything. It was just, hey, it’s all part of growing up and that’s okay to be told that, I think. It’s all right if you are confused because growing up from being a kid to like a teenager is wild in itself. I don’t think it would have been good, even if I’d tried to tackle it, because it would have probably ended up even worse than I am now [Laughs]. But as I settled into friendship groups and stuff like that. Stuff that doesn’t really matter, because I still don’t remember some of my friends from year seven. And, to be fair, I went to an all girls’ school which was entertaining to say the least in trying to figure out who I was. It’s only started to click from year seven to year eight and I think it really helped, ‘cos I had a close friend that I ended up in a relationship with for a while and I think they were experimenting with gender and what they thought was gender for a while. And I think apart, a couple of days before me they ended up saying, okay, guys, I think I’m trans and then when they did that, it kind of felt like a slap to the face for me, because I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a word for it now, I guess.’

So I would say I came to identify as Trans because I think at that point in my life I was going through like quite a deep depression my mental health was probably in the worst place that it’s ever been and I was really struggling to like understand why. And I hadn’t really ever engaged in thinking about my own gender or thinking about my own presentation I kind of felt like I existed in, in like a nowhere kind of space and at that point in my life I started engaging with those kind of things, I met some Trans people as well which definitely helped my progression towards identifying how I identify now. And yeah I kind of took about a year or so to just kind of think through myself, confront a lot of like deep held feelings about myself internalised transphobia as well within myself towards myself and on the other side of that I came out as yeah non-binary/Trans masculine and I haven’t looked back.

What would you say non-binary means to you?

Non-binary means exist, to me means existing in a space that I don’t really care about gender I, well I care about in the sense of like if I’m mis-gendered it’s not a fun experience but in the sense that I don’t necessarily think that gender as a construct is something that works for me. I don’t necessarily think of gender as a construct is something that is helpful for society so for me my non-binary identity is both about myself and about how I feel on the gender spectrum but also about what I envision for society like I think that gender is a very unhelpful and often harmful idea that exists within our society and I believe in a society that doesn’t hold gender as a construct or gender norms as anything important or anything like anything to base society on. And that’s, that’s my kind of how do I even put it, how can I put it, that’s how I think a society should function and I know societies have functioned like that in the past but it’s kind of European westernised construct of gender has had massively harmful effects.

So I mean I think like most trans men and women I think it does start very early on, I think you have an inkling, you have a feeling, you feel a little bit different, (sorry that’s my dog) and I think you just, you just feel a little bit different, but I think the difference for me when I was about six years old my Dad actually came downstairs one morning to find me with a pair of scissors trying to cut off the member that I was unfortunately born with, so that was a huge, I think realisation for my whole family. But this is, you know, not too sure of my age but back in the nineties, so it really wasn’t heard of as much as it is now. So, I think you know we had meetings, I had to go to speak to psychologists, just to try and identify. They didn’t, they didn’t want me to be going through something deeper and, and worry for my, you know for my health. So I went and spoke with them and stuff, but it was very, I mean I kind of remember the meetings as well. It was kind of like there was a dolls house and they’d tell you like what member of these dolls do you think you are, and I’m like, ‘What, but I know what I am,’ but it’s hard to say at six years old what you should be, if that makes sense. So I think my family and I were really, really you know clued up on it quite straightaway, but they didn’t diagnose me with trans, gender dysphoria or anything like that at the time. I guess because it was a lot less heard of, and because they didn’t think that it, it was that, because I could identify what gender I was, and so they just put it down to maybe being you know a flamboyant gay boy that I would grow up to be, and it was left at that really.

But my whole life I’ve always, always not felt right, you know? Going to weddings and having to wear a male fitted suit, I mean I’m not built like a man anyway, you know I’m 5’6’ and got no broad in me at all, you know, so these suit’s looked ridiculous and I felt ridiculous in them, so I think it kind of progressed more and more and more as I got older but I guess it wasn’t until I went through a serious incident that kind of made me have to start from scratch, so to kind of think actually let’s have a look at life, and even though I loved it, I loved being a gay man, I would not burn my pictures from before, I would not hide it from my past, I loved, I loved that era of my life. It just wasn’t the era that I, you know it just wasn’t the way I should have been. But I just wasn’t very sure, I didn’t even understand it. And because I didn’t look into it I just thought I was a very flamboyant feminine boy, even though not feeling right, even being an effeminate boy and being a part of the LGBT community, and them accepting me as a you know a feminine boy it still didn’t quite feel a hundred per cent. But I lived life to the full and still loved everything about it. But yeah the incident happened, I was set on fire like well nine years ago now I think, eight years ago.

And it, I think I laid in my bed and I just thought I’ve got to piece my life completely back together again, and I think when you see how strong your body is, and see that actually even the, the craziest of things can’t bring you down, that’s when you start to look within yourself completely. And I think it was time for me to you know express myself the, the proper way and acknowledge that I, you know the things that I’d felt always, were fine. And then it, it was just down to finding information. I had no idea you could have gender reassignment, like that was you know I remember being on my bed, and my granddad bought me this bubble bath, and at the bottom of the bottle there was a ring and this was like a bubble bath you know that had a fairy on top, you know I was never neglected to feel the way that I should feel, and he came in and he gave me this, and he said, ‘Once you’ve used all the bubble bath you can get this ring, and when you’re in the bath, you wish for anything that you want.’ And I remember say, ‘Anything, like anything in the world?’ And he says, ‘Anything.’ I said, ‘What even to be a girl.’ And he was like, ‘Anything you want you can wish for.’ So, I think from that day on I, you know every night I’d fall asleep wishing I’d wake up in the female figure that I should have been. So it was only a matter of time I guess, and lack of information probably stopped me from pursuing it a lot earlier on.

I kind of, I had no idea that this was like this was me. And I, ‘cos I didn’t really yeah, I never really sort of explored or experimented like with myself. And then like so I did, I did my four years. I did my time there. Then I came to [city] and for postgrads, maths. I had like the last year before I realised I was trans. I was like 21 and I was having a lovely time in [city]. I had friends all of a sudden I was studying and it was fun. And that was like the yeah, that was like the last year [laughs] of kind of just believing myself to be like a sort of oh you know queer, bi guy, whatever. And then, that summer like it was so corny and I like I read the Danish Girl which is this novel about very loosely based on a true story of a transwoman from Copenhagen in like the 1930s. It was kind of like, as I was reading it all these doors were kind of crashing open in my mind [laughs] and I was like, shit, shit.

This is, yeah, this is like and then there was this sudden urge, this need to like I don’t know, live as a woman, become a woman try and, you know, do everything I can to get away from maleness, ‘cos all of this kind of sort of, I suppose, yeah, over the years I’ve never really thought about, there’d been moments when I’ve been like, I’m done with gender. I don’t, I don’t care about gender and there was me, you know, being like a feminist in university and getting really into that. And these were kind of, I think, subconsciously ways for me to syphon off my kind of feminine identity being like, oh yeah, well I have this, I have that and that, you know. And then, yeah, so I have been transitioning some 20, 25 tomorrow. I have been transitioning for two years now. And yeah, I kind of went all hell for leather, at first like I kind of ‘cos I, ‘cos the things I had no idea I was trans beforehand. I hadn’t had any years of like secretly cross-dressing or trying make-up or blah, blah, blah, whatever. I was at this position of being completely socialised male and now trying to bring myself over to the other side and just shed myself of all of the toxic masculinity I didn’t even realise I had and I don’t know just learn this whole new way of being and it was really messy like trying to find out how to present myself and months of getting very consistently misgendered at the start. Yeah, it was pretty miserable. But then I kind of—I don’t know why I started going to a lot of support groups and yeah, just meeting other trans people. The important thing for me was having role models, having kind of people that it can be like okay, well, I don’t pass, but neither does she and she’s really cool and so it’s okay. Just kind of things, almost like that and meeting other trans people and realising that, you know, rich diversity that exists and because when I first realised I was trans, I was just like the first thing I looked up and I think a lot of people have this is like, well, there’s no point in even trying and if I'm like not gonna be able to pass. The first thing I looked up on YouTube, which is, which is stupid because later on in your transition you realise that you don’t have to and well a lot of people, for a lot of people it remains important, it’s important for me, to some extent, but I don’t know. At the start it just feels like so important. So, the first thing I looked up on YouTube was like voice feminisation and then there was all these videos of these like obvious trans girls from like even like ten years ago when the landscape was so different when it was all about blending in and passing and like just assumed that if you wanna transition then you want to work on your voice and like, whatever [laughs].

I think I first properly came to terms with it when I was 20 because my friends were quite confused about Ruby Rose’s character in Orange is the New Black or not her character actually but the actual actress. They, I think identify as gender fluid. My friend didn’t really understand it. The conversation felt like to me that she was kind of discredited like the friend was discrediting Ruby Rose’s gender identity and that is when we really got started talking about gender and she kind of confronted me on the fact it sounded like I was very uncomfortable being a woman. I was like, this is accurate. Obviously, I’d had thoughts about being unhappy being a female before, but not really ever considered myself anything other than because the research you do as a young person is very horrifying, especially if you are like 13, 14 which is when I think I first started having these thoughts and actually realising that you could be transgender and there were like surgeries and treatments and you could socially be accepted as a different gender than the one you were born as. It’s a very scary place because the only like kind of resources in terms of like fiction and facts is these kind of like horrible images of like surgeries and being social outcasts and you know, this kind of thing. I’d already, like I’d always kind of pushed the idea away again. Yeah, when I was 20 I kind of realised that that was the case for me and I was more unhappy pretending to be female than whatever consequences I would have living as a male.

I think it was, it was realising then and sort of, and the internet. You know even at 28 the internet was a huge, huge, it was massive for me, and I, you know I was involved with transmasculine YouTube for a long time, because it was realising that the, they didn’t have, there wasn’t just that one narrative. For me the idea of being born in the wrong body isn’t something that fits. Like I wasn’t born in the wrong body, I was born in my body. I just am not comfortable with certain aspects of it. And so for me it was hearing other people’s stories, and, and I remember it was, I think it was Skyla Kergil who’s a transmasculine YouTuber, and I remember him talking about his experiences and there was something in it that just, and it clicked, and it clicked in that same way that, that the way that I know that an idea is a good idea when I’ve had it, the way that you know that something’s going to be delicious when you eat it. There was something kind of inherent that just went, ‘Oh, okay it’s that.’ And so yeah that, that was, I guess it took me a long, I kind of had to go past it and then double back and be like, ‘Oh hang on a minute. This actually does apply to me.’

Ok so, it must have been around 2014. It was one of them things where it was just starting to be spoken about in the media, a little bit. At that point in time, I feel like I always knew because the word was being thrown around and there was a part of me that always avoided it. Obviously growing up there wasn't really much resources on it, but I think yeah 2014 was when it was starting to be spoken about in the media quite a lot. And yeah I remember just watching this, this clip of this guy just saying exactly how he felt and I was just literally like “Oh my god, this is actually me” and the fact that I started crying just told me at that point this is me and I need to do something about it.

In the period of time at university where I was sort of exploring my identity a little bit more, I came across a group of people that were sort of, you know identified under the LGBTQ spectrum, and were very kind of open about discussing how they were feeling.

And it wasn’t until I had a couple of conversations with those people, and started to kind of explore things a little bit more, you know I remember hearing somebody describe themselves as gender queer, and that was a term quite early on that I thought oh actually that, that might fit. Because I was, I’ve always been aware of this kind of, this dissonance, this disconnect between how I feel and how I want people to see me, and kind of the body that I’ve got, and I kind of grew up either having just the sense of apathy towards my body, which I know isn’t you know, with teenagers especially, isn’t, isn’t uncommon. Or I would have periods of time where I would actually feel quite a lot of distress around certain areas of my body and doing different things and being in certain social situations.

So when the words yeah gender queer was the first one, and then kind of when I explored term trans, and transgender more specifically, I started to realise that there were other ways of identifying, and I think, when I started to experiment with things, very much in a safe way, so I started off by wearing a binder, a couple of times a week, just in my room.

And I just kind of did it really, really slowly, and then I, then I would wear it out, and obviously nobody really kind of noticed specifically apart from a few close friends, and my partner at the time, who I kind of have conversations with, but they were very subtle changes, so I was aware I was taking it at my own pace, and then I kind of asked people to change the pronoun use, and then it wasn’t, I think it was a, I think that, that kind of happened over a period of probably about two years. Cos I was quite conscious, and I guess the media also is prone to telling people that when somebody realises that they’re trans it’s [clicks fingers] suddenly everything happens very quickly, and people make quick decisions and then regret them. And that was a rhetoric I think that I was very conscious of, and still to an extent am quite conscious of for different reasons.

I became really aware of how, how terrified I was of being a boy, basically. How boring I found it. How I didn’t find the aesthetics of masculinity, the socialisation of masculinity in any way appealing. There is some parts of it that I admire and enjoy and there are definitely some parts that I benefit from if I want to pass as masculine and move through society, as such. It’s just more that I, it’s this existential dread that isn’t necessarily connected to the idea of, being in the wrong body. It’s more that the trajectory of my body is concern and I want some it was just very odd, I think. I guess I’m getting more towards like transition stuff then I’m talking about how I figured out I was, I was trans. I think I came out as trans at the end of a long relationship where I assumed it was a heterosexual relationship between cis people and it ending meant that I was placed in this space where I could be slightly more honest about these things and develop a vocabulary to describe what I was experiencing slightly better. At the same time, I was making friends with other trans people and I just applied to go and study at [University] for a year. When I was there, I moved into like a queer commune and realised oh there a spaces where people specifically can develop their lives a bit better. It gives you an image of like potential futures, the whole idea of imagined futures is really important I think for queer people. But I just felt, I don't know, even in spaces like that it’s really difficult. I’m six foot three and I feel like I just physically and emotionally take up a huge amount of space. I think the earliest signs that I was trans or non-binary were probably when I was around 13, 14, 15 and I’d like, I’d like ask people to do my make-up or I’d like I don't know. I’d purposefully sort of like, this sounds stupid now, but sort of like twink up my clothing and just try and be the most effeminate boy possible. And looking back now, I really wish I’d acted on seeking some help medically then as opposed to doing it now, ‘cos now like I’m out of puberty. There are some things that like I’m dysphoric about that I know aren’t gonna change. Or if they do change, they’ll change in a way that I, I don't know, I want to, the reason I feel like non-binary is more specific is ‘cos like I don’t want to try and pass as a trans woman, I don’t think, I don’t think that would make me happy. I think there is a degree of social ambiguity of sexual ambiguity that I find quite uncomfortable as well. And I don't know, just saying the word out loud, just like saying, I don’t feel like a boy, but realising that I felt comfortable with they/them pronouns was a big thing as well. Just sitting thinking like this is oh like I can choose to do this, it’s exciting that I can chose to do this. Which sounds silly now, because like it’s such a small thing and I was worried that it was performative or annoying, but it’s not like if it feels right, it’s probably a signifier. That there’s something you want to change. So, when I did, I do feel a lot better. So that’s where I came to where I am now.