Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir)

by Jackson Bird

While there may be some incidents my family and I can point to in hindsight as clues about my gender, none of it was so clear when it was happening. Yes, I felt different growing up, but as far as I knew it could’ve been just as much because I was a total dork as it was because I was kind of boyish. Maybe I looked at the boys in my class with envy, but I never felt for certain like I should have been one of them, only that I sometimes wished I were.

No matter how much weight I lost, my hips still protruded in a way that made me feel awkward. My body was supposed to be straight up and down, no curves. Why didn’t it get that? Why did it insist on growing hips and thick thighs that made everything I wanted to wear look form-fitting? I just couldn’t feel right in my body.

This is a broad generalization, but it can often be easier for transmasculine people to pass in society as men than for transfeminine people to pass in society as women—depending on who you are and what your transition journey is like. This is partially because testosterone is a helluva drug that can give some transmasculine people far more drastic, visible changes than hormone replacement therapy usually does for transfeminine people. Even without hormones, some female-assigned-at-birth people find it easier to pass as—albeit substantially younger—men in society than male-assigned-at-birth people find it to pass as women. This is important to keep in mind when you consider how many people assigned female at birth successfully lived quiet, mostly unrecorded lives as men throughout history,* while people assigned male at birth who attempted to live as women or even just dared to don feminine clothing were more often ostracized, arrested, harassed, and worse. Western society writ large is much more willing to accept what they see as a woman being masculine than what they see as a man being feminine.

There’s a moment in a deleted scene from Miss Congeniality when Sandra Bullock’s character, a disheveled, mannish FBI agent who later has to go undercover as a beauty queen, is asked by her dad if she’s a lesbian. She guffaws with her trademark snort and says, “I wish.” I completely understood what she meant. Falling masculine of center as a woman who’s attracted to men was complicated. I didn’t feel free to dress in the boyish ways I wanted because I didn’t think any straight man would ever be attracted to me if I looked like that. Attraction or not, everyone would assume I was a lesbian. Like Sandra Bullock’s character, I couldn’t help feeling like life might have made more sense if I were wholly and exclusively attracted to women.

The nuances between the terms sex and gender had me considering the implications of all these revelations for my own life. If all these things—sex, gender, and sexual orientation—were disparate parts of a person’s whole, could it be true that it was possible to be a person who was assigned female at birth, who was mostly attracted to guys, but who also felt more like a guy herself? At the very least, these discoveries had led me to new terms I could try googling in conjunction with how I felt and a growing confidence that, whatever I was, there were probably a few other people like me out there in the world.

At orientation on one of our first days in Amsterdam, where we students from schools all across the United States were meeting for the first time, I saw more butch lesbians than I had ever seen before—–and I thought they were all trans guys. I knew what butch lesbian meant, but I had never met someone who identified that way before, especially not someone my age. I had a vague idea of the stereotypical middle-aged butch with a crew cut, wearing a white tank top and motorcycle boots—but these women at orientation had faux hawks and wore stylish sweaters and fitted jeans. I envied their wardrobes, their haircuts, and their effortless confidence in their masculine femininity. I really didn’t know that it was possible to be a woman and look like that. I think had I been exposed to more masculine-presenting women from an earlier age, I would’ve felt more freedom to experiment with my own presentation and maybe even not feel so much fear around possibly liking girls.

You should start referring to someone by whatever name and pronouns they affirm when they ask you to do so, not when you decide to. You don’t need to wait until a certain procedure has happened to begin calling someone by their chosen name and pronouns. Respect their choices and let them tell you how they identify. Don’t force an identity on them or act like it’s such hard work or a favor you’re doing for them. If we can change the pronouns we use for people’s pets as soon as we’re corrected or memorize all the different names of Pokémon when they evolve, I think we can make the same effort for the people in our lives.

The other thing that bothered me about coming out as transgender was feeling like I would be upending some people’s lives, leaving a storm of shame and confusion in my midst. My family, mostly. I worried about my parents having to decide what to tell their friends who’ve always known them as having a daughter. There would be countless times they’d have to come out on my behalf. I thought about ex-boyfriends having an identity crisis over thinking that the “woman” they were attracted to is “now” a man. I thought about the people who told me they hoped their daughters would grow up to be strong, independent women like me and how I felt like I had failed them and feminism altogether by not being a woman at all. Most of these concerns were melodramatic, caused by my internalized shame about being transgender, but some do have a hint of truth to them. Coming out as trans can make people you know reexamine their own lives. They might think about how they too relate to gender and their identity. Many people I came out to responded by coming out to me in turn—as bisexual, as questioning their gender, or with some other revelation entirely. Seriously, I am filled with other people’s secrets now. I’m surprised my hair isn’t as big as Regina George’s.

Celebrate with them! While difficult, for many trans people this can also be an exciting time. Sharing in that excitement shows that you support them. Maybe even give them a little gift that affirms their gender—like makeup, a tie, a T-shirt with a gender binary–smashing phrase on it, or one of those miniature license plates featuring their name. When I came out, a friend gave me a set of cuff links with my new initials engraved on them, and I loved it to bits. Depending on your relationship and the person’s sense of humor, you can play into gender stereotypes a little bit. Greeting cards saying “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” can be funny and supportive. Nowadays greeting card companies are even making cards expressly for the purpose of congratulating people on coming out or starting their transitions. Heck, you could even throw them a gender-reveal party. Those become especially fun if the person is nonbinary. Pop balloons to reveal the gender. Whoops, they’re filled with water. They’re genderfluid! Time for a water balloon fight!

Sometimes people who are familiar and comfortable with gender nonconformity can have the most trouble understanding trans people, binary or not, who want to transition. I’ve known a few butch lesbians, drag queens, and androgynous-presenting cis people, for example, who are comfortable in their assigned genders and struggle at first to understand why others might need to transition—why they can’t be comfortable just wearing different clothes or being that gender part-time. No one is wrong here. It’s just that there are so many ways to be so many different genders, and it can be difficult to understand something you haven’t experienced.

People say they were absolutely sure about their gender and need to transition because that helps underscore the point that being trans isn’t a choice, which it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a difficult thing to parse out and accept about yourself. Maybe there are a few people out there who truly were absolutely certain that they were Grade A Certifiably 100 Percent Transgender and needed to physically transition right away, but I think most of us have a fair amount of doubt. We feel like we’re not man enough. Not woman enough. Even not trans enough. It takes an incredible amount of soul-searching and self-reflection to figure out the best way forward, and then to face having to defend that path over and over again to every person in your life.

The thing is, it takes very little attention on the internet to gain both fans and detractors. Somebody once told me that there’s no fifteen minutes of fame anymore. Now, everyone is famous to fifteen people. I’ve always been of the opinion that, for anyone in any position of influence, you should conduct yourself with the humility of not being famous at all, but with the integrity and responsibility of a megastar.

I asked my friend to tattoo a small dagger on the back of my right ankle, on my Achilles tendon. I’m not generally a fan of violence, but I think of a dagger as a defensive weapon, a small knife one would keep just in case of danger; the kind of weapon Peter Pan had versus Captain Hook’s sabers and cannonballs. I put the dagger on the back of my ankle so that, even on my Achilles tendon, the one place Achilles was unprotected, I am now protected. Even in my weakest spot, I can defend myself and rise to the challenge. I’m invincible. Not because I’m foolhardy, but because I choose to stand up and face my fears, head-on.

The important thing to remember is that it’s very likely that, at least on some level, the trans person in question has always felt like the gender they are. It wasn’t something “new” that they “changed” once they came out and shared with everyone. When I think about my childhood, it feels more true to my experience to think of myself as having been a little boy, even though most people saw me as a little girl. By referring to a person the way they identify now, even when talking about the past, you’re validating their gender and recognizing that they didn’t just “change” genders when they decided to tell the world about it.