I’m a Trans Teen in Texas — Politicians and Anti-Trans Bigots Cannot Erase Me

As I write this, it has been about a week since my 17th birthday. It feels weird to me. Six years ago, I came out as transgender, and four years ago I thought my life was over. Back then, I never dreamed of making it this far, of reaching my dream — accessing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), finally feeling excited for my future and the person I’m going to be. Now I’m almost an adult, and I’m about five months on testosterone. I still feel 13.

My gender story feels less typical than the ones I hear from other trans men, about how they’ve always felt like they were born in the wrong body, always preferred “male” toys, always hung out with other boys. I never felt like a boy as a child. I never felt like a girl either. I didn’t know what I was, but I also didn’t care. I had the privilege of being raised by left-leaning parents who didn’t push anything gendered on me. It wasn’t until school started that I began to feel different from my peers.

Before I figured it out, I assumed this feeling of discomfort meant I was gay. I came out, I tried to like girls, but it wasn’t me. I thought the reason I didn’t want to date men was because I was a lesbian, when I think really the reason was that I didn’t want to be a girlfriend.

Puberty was the last straw, and after connecting the dots, I socially transitioned in 6th grade. I changed my name and my pronouns, and it felt so great. I hadn’t felt that way about myself before — so certain about who I was and so proud of who I was. But it was 2019. Shortly afterwards, the COVID pandemic ramped up and we were all out of school, on our computers all day. It was a strange few years to be newly transitioned.

During online school, dysphoria had less of a grip on me, but going back to in-person learning in 8th grade was rough. The people at my school had known me for years as a girl — the weirdo lesbian artist freak. I just wanted to be seen as a boy. But no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. I became depressed. I didn’t like going out or going to the community pool, making new friends or even speaking out loud.

At age 14, I brought up testosterone to my parents for the first time. It was something I had wanted since the beginning of my transition. I would spend hours online watching “transition timelines,” snapshots of someone’s life from coming out to starting T and getting surgery. I saw the happiness that transition brought people. It felt so far off in the future, but close enough for me to wait for it. These trans adults gave me hope that one day I could be comfortable as myself.

But the atmosphere was different when we came back from quarantine. Yes, I had a sense from years prior that people didn’t understand me, but I had already made peace with that. It didn’t scare me. Post-COVID, though, there was a new hostility I could feel from people who knew I was trans, or found out or suspected. People I didn’t know felt comfortable telling me that they “liked my old name better.” They felt fine making horrible degrading jokes about me (or my transgender sisters, brothers, and others) to my face. But even with this growing hostility, accessing HRT felt like it was going fairly quickly. The question had been so scary to ask, but neither of my parents were upset at me. We went to my pediatrician and got more information about it. I was so hopeful for my future.

Then my mother started to express concerns about my father’s views on HRT. He was stalling, asking for more and more information, more and more meetings with doctors and therapists. This was tolerable. We had known about his medical anxieties, and this seemed no different from the times where he’d get scared about a procedure and bring a notepad to the doctor’s office to take notes. But unlike those times, his anxiety and need for control continued to grow. He didn’t stop asking and pressing and deliberating. He began to argue with my mom about HRT and detransition rates. He’d email videos and studies from anti-trans websites run by “concerned parents” who wanted to keep their “daughters” healthy. I didn’t know this would last as long as it has. Once he got sucked into anti-trans conspiracy, he never got better.

As our relationship became strained, I began to lose hope. It felt like the world had gotten tired of me and decided to take away the family support I had been lucky to have. Though initially he’d gendered me correctly, my dad began insisting on misgendering and deadnaming me. I felt so disgusting every time he tried to have a “discussion” with me about testosterone and he’d bring up fertility or vaginal atrophy as a talking point every time he’d assert to me that I am female, not male. I learned to shut up about the way I felt and came to terms with the reality of my situation: I was not going on testosterone.

My father’s ways of thinking didn’t even just affect our relationship — they also started to affect his relationship with my mom, which before this was relatively peaceful. I had always told friends my biological parents were “just like best friends,” but as he delved deeper into conspiracy, I saw the gap between them grow larger and larger. My mom tried so hard for me, deflecting pointed questions about my identity or mental health, reading the bullshit articles he’d email her constantly, trying so hard to come to an understanding with him, but nothing worked. In his head, he was trying to save me from my “crazy” mother, trying to keep me healthy and far away from doctors and even therapists, from “Big Pharma.” It was an intensely stressful time, but in the end I was able to access what I needed to care for myself, things I had only dreamed of having — therapy, medication, HRT. After everything that had happened, I also started choosing to stay with my dad less, which both excited me and saddened me. I miss the way my dad was, before I came out. Within the past year, I went from staying with him half the time, to seeing him once a week. And the thing is, it didn’t have to be that way.

Then lawmakers in our state began restricting health care too, based on the same propaganda that had done so much damage in my family. I got news of these things from my dad a lot of the time. He’d come to me and tell me about the new laws they were passing against me. If not, I’d hear about it on the radio in the car constantly. There was always something new happening to us. There was always a new death.

I still hear this crushing news all the time — it never stops. Right now, it’s the efforts by Republicans to bar Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, from using the women’s bathroom at the Capitol. Would they prefer her in the men’s bathroom? Obviously not. It’s not about restrooms. They don’t want us anywhere.

I get more angry than scared, though, because lawmakers and anti-trans activists use bullshit reasons to attack us, claiming they’re protecting women’s spaces. With that angle, they not only demean and exclude trans women, they erase trans men completely. I, like many trans people, have experienced my own version of what McBride is facing right now.

The restroom issue is such a small problem with an easy fix, and it isn’t just gender-neutral bathrooms. At school, people notice when you use a teacher’s restroom or a gender-neutral option, just like people noticed at my middle school — kids who then went on to harass me, teachers who used this as an excuse to pick on me. Gender-neutral bathrooms are not a sufficient accommodation. They’re a white flag, an “OK, whatever, take this.” The real fix is to actually address the bullying in the environment at school — or in Congress.

The day after the election, I was so dissociated all day. I felt defeated, utterly baffled that so much hope in the nation had been lost over the span of a single night. Amid all this, I would see a friend and ask, “How do you feel?” And they would answer, “About what?”

I realize now there is a whole other side of this country that hasn’t even felt a change from before the election to after. They feel safe, and I’m so envious.

My family situation has recently changed, which allowed me to start T. My dad knows and, thankfully, he can’t do anything about it. I can’t ever get back the years I lost to depression, to dysphoria, to anxiety. I can never take back the hospital stays, or the brain cells I probably lost drinking and smoking, or the scars. I can’t get rid of the anger either, and until this world is a safe one for me and other trans children, teens and adults — I won’t be able to. It’s okay to be angry, to show it and to utilize it.