The truth I’d rather not tell is my mother gave birth to one son and one daughter. My mom named me Kristin which loosely translates to being a follower of Christ, something that my family could get behind. My mom has a picture of 3-year-old me taken at a JCPenney portrait studio. My long, curly brown hair flows down the front of my black velvet dress. In the picture, my child fingers are interlocked, resting on a podium prop. I’m wearing a gold ring and a gold necklace that reads DAUGHTER in cursive lettering. With blush on my cheeks and a smile full of baby teeth, I sat tall, proud to be mommy’s little girl.
Two years later, I started kindergarten at a private, Catholic school. I don’t remember having any friends and I don’t remember that bothering me. But I do remember my first crush, Miss M. She had red hair and wore glasses like me. She was tall and pretty and the love interest in the diary my mom found. Mom telling me I couldn’t like Miss M that way didn’t change how I felt about her. When Miss M was the lunch monitor, I’d find reasons to talk to her, asking her to open my string cheese or for help pushing the straw through my Capri Sun. When I learned one of my classmates had been privately tutored at Miss M’s home, I intentionally misspelled words on my spelling tests, hoping to get after-school attention.
Once I graduated into the middle school building, I’d only see Miss M during church services. My attraction towards her or girls my age didn’t change. But my feelings about being a girl did. I didn’t like being forced to wear a skirt or skorts while boys ran freely in their pants or shorts. I didn’t like having long hair or bangs. I remember watching the boys use the drinking fountain water to make their hair spiky and wishing I could do the same.
When I was 10 years old, my mom left me alone at our hair salon for my usual haircut—trimming the bangs and cutting off my dead ends. I somehow convinced my hair stylist to shave the underside of my ponytail into what would now be called an undercut. When my mom returned, she snapped at the woman for trusting a child and then snapped at me for pretending not to know any better.
In the summer of 6th grade, puberty changed everything. Most of the boys got stronger. Most of them grew taller. Some of them grew facial hair. And then there was me, hiding behind bulky sweatshirts, sentenced to wearing monthly maxi pads and shopping with my mom for training bras at JCPenney’s. I could no longer hide my breasts as I catapulted away from flat-chested kid to D-cup preteen. Boys started showing interest in me for the first time. But I didn’t want them. I wanted to be them. I wanted to represent whatever being a boy represented. At the time, I didn’t have the words to explain why I never felt like the 3-year-old little girl in that JCPenney portrait.
During my senior year of high school, my best friend and I came out to each other while lying on her mom’s living room floor. I said I was bi-sexual. It felt safer, less permanent, even if it wasn’t the complete truth. I did feel freer after that confession, but I wasn’t ready to tell the rest of the world. On the night of my high school graduation, after I returned home from an 18+ gay bar, my mom woke my dad and my brother, forcing me to confess the secret I’d held onto so tightly. In a matter of days, my mom outed me to the rest of our family too.
I started college later that year and did things like join the gay/straight alliance and minor in women’s studies. A year later, at 19, I met J. She was a card-carrying lesbian who played hockey in high school and wore men’s dockers at work. She was taller than me and broader, which made me feel safe. J could build things like the Christmas holiday display at work and change things like her car’s oil. As our relationship progressed, a new set of fears crept up. What was sex with a woman like? Who’s the giver and who’s the receiver? Was I a top or a bottom? I didn’t know back then how much of the binary I lived within. It never crossed my mind that there could be an overlap in identities.
I knew right away I wasn’t a bottom. (Sorry J for kicking you in the face). Sex with a woman wasn’t like I imagined it would be. Something still didn’t feel right. I realized that while I was attracted to women, I was never meant to be one.
Three years later, I met Em in law school, and she helped me come out for the second time in my life. Em taught me that gender is fluid. Realizing I was trans was like hitting the snooze button one too many times. I couldn’t waste any more time.
I treated my gender transition like a grocery checklist, starting with staple items.
Find a therapist. Get a referral letter.
Find a doctor. Start hormone replacement therapy.
File court documents. Get legal name change.
Update everyday identity documents.
I moved on to the exotic items.
Find a surgeon. Get double mastectomy with reconstruction.
File court documents. Get legal gender marker change.
Find a surgeon. Get a total hysterectomy.
I circled back to the forgotten items.
Update social security card.
Update birth certificate.
Update passport.
Like pulling from the “last chance” section of a clearance aisle, I added items I hadn’t considered:
Do a full internet scan looking for mention of old identity.
Scrub old identity from search engines.
I am not saying my way of transitioning was the only way or even the way to transition. My checklists were ways I found peace in an otherwise foreign body, ways I created ease when re-entering the workforce, ways I cultivated safety when entering the men’s locker room or bathrooms. I know that gender roles are archaic. I know that being a man doesn’t mean what we’re taught it means. I know that LGBTQIA+ people are still seen as second-class citizens in many places. I know my legal gender varies from state to state. In California, I am legally male. In Tennessee, I am legally female.
I know I have privilege because of my lighter skin and blue eyes. I can easily skirt through society as a cisgender, white male. I am not well read in LGBTQIA+ history. I am not up to date with the most current hate legislation. I don’t know the names of current activists or hashtags for any new movements. I am not a model trans man.
When I think of model trans men, I think of those brave enough to share their stories on social media, brave enough to ignore the comments that say go kill yourself or you will always be a woman. When I think of model trans men, I think of those proudly wearing pink, blue, and white, the colors of the trans flag. I think of those who march in rallies, holding signs that say, “Protect Trans Kids.” I think of those who use their preferred bathroom regardless of how their outsides appear to the rest of the world. I was never that brave.
My physical changes were visible to those who knew me before. For those who hadn’t known me, visibility turned to invisibility as I blended into the straight, white, cisgender world. My own insecurities whispered in my head as if I was wearing a permanent headset, taking cues from this incessant voice. Am I manly enough? Is my voice deep enough? Are my shoulders broad enough? Am I supposed to sit with my legs uncrossed? Stand with a wider stance? Learn to spit phlegm? Do I need to learn to like beer? Do I need to wear loose-fitting jeans and baseball caps? Settling into heteronormativity felt deceptive to me. I wasn’t like these other straight, white, biological men. I didn’t feel the way I’d thought I’d feel once my outsides started to match my insides. What kind of man was I? What kind of man would I become?
The battle for authenticity didn’t end when I transitioned. If anything, I realized authenticity is less about how I come across to the world, and more about how I come across to myself. Am I kind? Am I living with integrity? Am I standing by my values?
I’ve done fake activism, resharing posts that didn’t out me. Posts like “Ally in your corner.” I did the bare minimum when changing my Facebook banner to something celebrating diversity. But I was never brave enough to come out and say, “I’m celebrating me. I’m diversity.”
I wish I could say transitioning unfastened the shame I held around my body. I wish I could say reconstructing my chest, having a deeper voice, and hairier legs made me feel like less of a fraud. I wish I could say I learned to love this newest version of me. But I didn’t. I still hesitated to take my shirt off in front of others. I still disassociated when my partners pulled my boxer briefs down. I still struggled feeling at home in this body, a body that felt more like two halves, demarcated at the waistline.
Learning to love my body in a world that says my body shouldn’t exist is like applying aloe vera to a sunburn. These things take time. I hope to someday love my body unapologetically. I want to love these legs that carried me at my heaviest and my thinnest. I want to love my stomach that provided insulation, warmth, and in its own way, comfort. I want to love the incision scars under my pectoral muscles and their smoothness against my fingertips. I want to love all the parts of me I’m convinced aren’t lovable. But these things take time.
It’s been fifteen years since Em led me down a rabbit hole of YouTubers documenting their transitions from female to male. Fifteen years since I waited nervously in a Massachusetts clinic for my first testosterone injection. Fifteen years since my voice cracked at Thanksgiving dinner prompting my mother to ask me to leave her house for good. Fifteen years of learning to accept the ways my new life cost me my old one.
My grandma once asked me how I knew I was born in the wrong body. I told her it was like shoving your foot into a shoe that’s half a size too small. The shoes can be perfectly good shoes and look shiny to everyone else. But it isn’t about how shiny the shoes look to others. It’s about how the shoes feel to the person wearing them. I tried to force my feet into shoes that were too small for a good portion of my life. Eventually, I learned to wear shoes that fit.
