Transitioning Out:
By MILO SMEDLEY
Opinions Editor
Being raised as a woman has definitely helped and hurt my life experiences as a trans-masc person. Experiencing life both ways has also taught me many different rules about conducting myself. This has of course also been heavily influenced by my race as well. Before I transitioned, there was the long and infectious feeling of wrong. I didn’t even really feel aware of it until middle school. When you’re a child, everything seems the same between you and the others. Everything seems fine until you realize that you aren’t necessarily the same. You are a girl (apparently), whatever that means. The universe seems to scream at you to exist in one way. As of writing this, it is trans day of visibility. Not many trans folks look like me, so it is important to be out for those who can’t. I have become one of the people I wished I could have seen as a kid. Being trans is not only about withstanding the awful emotions, but it’s also about realizing how much better things could possibly be. Many experiences of mine are what I’d call “trans-specific” to me. Discovering the words to describe what you were feeling, and of course, finding out that not everyone feels like that? Some people feel like, “Ah yes this works.” Being myself can be broken into many different parts, but the first thing that people will see and judge me on is what they can see first. The world is dangerous for people like me, regardless of whichever part of me they see. Eventually, my brain just came to an impasse. Do I want to risk my own life, in one I despise, or risk it in a life that I feel was my own and would feel proud in? Transness to me is another part of myself that I’ve come to understand and love.
Transitioning In:
By CJ GRACE
Staff Writer
The first time I told someone I wanted to be a girl, I still wasn’t fully capable of using a toilet. At that age, you aren’t fully aware of the kind of weight a statement like that holds. You just think, “I don’t like what I came with, I’ve still got the receipt and I want to exchange it,” but I still remember my dad yelling in my face that it wasn’t right, and that I should want to be a manly man instead. That’s the story of gender variation for countless people, completely bypassing the chance to explore or question because you’re expected to immediately go all the way to your designated end of the gender spectrum before you’ve been given the chance to see anything ahead of it.
I had forgotten about that experience until recently, even after I began transitioning, but it’s far from the only experience of its kind. I still remember the first time I saw a trans person on a magazine, probably no later than five or six years old, and the horrified explanation I received about who Chaz Bono was, or the massive, bordering on obnoxious heels that every character I ever drew wore when I was still in the thick of my Elton John hyperfixation. Even by the time I’d gotten to high school, there were times I felt my sister’s dress, cast off to the bathroom floor, calling me to try it on “just to see if it sparked anything in me.”
Being trans isn’t a choice, or even necessarily an option. This is who we are from the basest level of our psyches, a hand reaching out to guide the stray lamb back to the herd we don’t remember wandering off from. There are those who insist that we are insidious, or that something is evil about the act of transition itself, but nothing is more beautiful, more truly satisfying, than finally having these unique, isolated experiences all line up in your head and understanding who you were always meant to be.
