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

by Jackson Bird

Trans Man: Someone who was assigned female at birth but is male. Note the space between “trans” and “man,” indicating that “trans” is an adjective. Trans men are men, even without the adjective. They are not a separate category of “transmen.” Trans Woman: Someone who was assigned male at birth but is female. Note the space between “trans” and “woman,” indicating that “trans” is an adjective. Trans women are women, even without the adjective. They are not a separate category of “transwomen.”

Clothes shouldn’t have a gender, in my opinion. To quote comedian Eddie Izzard when confronted about the clothes he was wearing during an interview: “They’re not women’s clothes or men’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I bought them.”

In the constant cycle of content creation there is a pressure to be consistently posting. I realized early on that if I held myself to a standard of perfection for every video, I would never complete any of them. I have had to learn to let things go. I tell myself that my videos, my writing, anything I’m producing is not just the content itself but also a snapshot of who I was in that moment. It’s frozen in time, a portrait of all my beliefs, interests, shortcomings, and bad haircuts from that exact moment.

So having been exposed to all these new people and new ideas about sexuality in college, I became pretty certain not only that there were more choices than just gay and straight, but that all sexual orientations were just a hoax invented by The Man. I was hesitant to slap an identity on myself, but philosophically I believed all humans were sexually fluid, so I must be too. We should just be who we are, man. What even are “labels”? It turns out this is not the way you should answer the question “Are you bi?” to an inebriated girl at a party with whom you have no interest in making out. She’ll take it as a yes and cut you off halfway through your Carl Jung quotes by sticking her tongue down your throat.

“If our world is riddled with male violence, the core problem isn’t that testosterone can often increase levels of aggression. The problem is the frequency with which we reward aggression.”