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

by Jackson Bird

If even my mom, my great defender and confidante, was embarrassed by my appearance, then what must everyone else think? How silly or pathetic must the rest of the world think I was? This little girl trying so hard, and failing, to look like a boy.

Not to mention the fact that an Adam Sandler movie was going to tell me a heck of a lot more about how most people actually feel about trans people than a soppy Oprah special about little kids.

I never did things by halves, after all. If this was who I had to be, then I was gonna do it better than anyone else by far.

Even if seeing fireworks with a girl wouldn’t have been exactly the outcome I was hoping for, at least it would be something definitive.

The object in my hands was so much lighter than I had expected it to be. Surely something with so much power should be heavier, more solid.

Even if I wasn’t out yet and would end up lying about why I cut my hair, I wasn’t letting this big moment go unreported on my YouTube channel.

But were those true, core qualities about me or qualities that had been allowed to flourish because I had grown up free of the restrictions put on boys?

In more lucid moments, I acknowledged how telling it was that I could only stomach being a woman if I could be the societally perfect image of one. On the other hand, I felt I would be happy being any kind of man.

his more general research on testosterone suggests that testosterone doesn’t cause aggression, though it might exaggerate what’s already there.

“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.”

In order to tell my YouTube followers, I had to be prepared for everyone I had ever met to potentially find out.

Journalist Laurie Penny describes a “nano-celebrity” as the level of niche stardom in which “you get recognized on the bus, but you still have to take the bus.”

Somebody once told me that there’s no fifteen minutes of fame anymore. Now, everyone is famous to fifteen people.

As many protestors of color have sagely pointed out, “It wasn’t about the water fountains then and it’s not about the bathrooms now.”

When I showed old YouTube videos of me presenting as a girl during the talk, I had to stop to explain it because people didn’t understand it was me. Especially for some of the attendees who weren’t as familiar with transgender people, it made a big impact.

He texted me on the day I posted my coming-out video and said, “Turns out you were the first guy I ever kissed!” It was one of the best coming-out responses I’ve ever received.

now, given a chance to brag, I couldn’t think of anything that sounded as impressive as a house someone had just bought for their new family with the steady income they were making from a job they could actually explain.