#transcendingself

[transcending-self]

Chloe, 20, Cork, Ireland. Transgender woman. 

1. I think I was about 6 or 7 when I first understood that my gender mattered. I remember going shopping with my mom and my sister in our local toy store for babies and trying to make it as obvious as possible that we weren't buying the dolls for ourselves, we would say loudly 'I wonder if Chloe would like this one.' We were afraid we would meet a child in one of our classes or meet a family friend and have to explain that we played with a toy that was by default gendered a ''girls'' toy. It wasn't until my teenage years that I fully felt uncomfortable with my gender and it took me until I was 19 to fully realize that something had to change for me to feel comfortable in myself.

2-After coming out I had huge diaspora and struggled hugely leaving the house and speaking when I was out in public. There were moments where I would feel like I was doing the right thing and moments I thought I was going crazy. Gradually, over time, I started to feel the benefits of being true to myself. Everything felt natural to me, the clothes fitted my body better, my hair getting longer suited me more. I have started growing more as a person.  

5. My mother is my biggest support, she has been there through the good and the bad days. Some family members have struggled, but most are trying which is all I ask. My friends were the least phased when I came out and quickly adjusted to the new name and pronouns.

6. The biggest challenge I have faced has probably been the public scrutiny, hateful comments, misgendering, hateful videos being made of myself and my sister (she has a transgender older sister).  Living in a body that you feel doesn't fully belong to you yet, is extremely painful, but dealing with people who think you are disgusting and sick is mentally draining.

7. I am perfectly imperfect and proud.

8. I hope someday I can have a family and be an unconditionally loving mother, just like mine has been to me.

9. We are equal members of society and deserve the same respect as anyone else.

11. What has been the hardest?

Losing family. The depression. Daily anxiety. misgendering in the workplace. The abuse.

12. I understand that my gender does not define me or who I am. I refuse to let gender roles and female/male privilege control me. We have used gender for centuries to overpower each other and use our gender as an excuse to get out of doing things that we would prefer not to do. Your gender should not be affected in the workplace, in society, in bathrooms, in relationships. Your gender is your own personal identity.

[transcending-self]

Jay and Rosie, 5, (twins), Luton, England. Transgender boy and cisgender girl. Part 1

1. I think I had a feeling from quite early on that this was something we needed to pay attention to. I tried to talk to my husband about it when Jay was 3 and a bit, but the conversation did not go well. I had started to feel that this wasn’t going to go anywhere and we had to actually deal with it, it was around this time I did what I do best and threw myself wholeheartedly into educating myself! My husband struggled in part due to his faith, and also because he felt Jay was too young to make a decision about something like this, that we might be encouraging gender confusion if we avoided telling him he was a girl. I felt like this wasn’t a decision for Jay, any more than our cisgender daughter Rosie ‘decided’ she was a girl. My husband is slow to process things, but in the end agreed to do some reading when Jay had just turned 4, and had a real lightbulb moment whilst looking through The Transgender Child (by Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper). Jay says he has always known.

2. At what age did you or your child first express that to someone? How did that feel? How did you know to trust this?

Around 2.5yrs old, the twins were both starting to talk more and had begun identifying / separating themselves and other people out by their gender. We assumed he was a tomboy and thought it was cute that he liked Batman, etc. We’ve always tried to be fairly gender neutral with toys and clothes, not wanting societal expectations around gender to restrict their individuality or choices. But then he continued to say he was a boy – he became increasingly distressed at people calling him a girl and using female pronouns. He said he was a boy with the same certainty as his sister said she was a girl. I didn’t want to trust it in a way because that meant committing to starting that journey, exposing our family to judgement from others. We are already a family who doesn’t follow the mainstream in some ways and I knew this might be seen as something we had ‘encouraged’ with our parenting approach. In the end though you have no choice, you have to just follow where your child leads and remember that their emotional wellbeing is more important than other people’s misconceptions, and more important than your own pride or discomfort. We’ve always wanted our children to be able to feel good about themselves, one of the reasons we home educate is to give them that space to explore who they are – without the pressure to conform and fit in.

Photo by Annie Tritt

[transcending-self]

Jay and Rosie,5,(twins), Luton, England. Transgender boy and Cisgender girl. Part 2. 

3.How did you or your child express it? Can you recount that experience?

Mostly it would come up when he was addressed with female pronouns, from around 3.5 he started correcting people and we would pretend to laugh it off, telling people to just go with it. He asked to only wear boys clothes soon after his 4 th birthday – the feminist in me was a little jarred by my kid thinking there are ‘boys’ clothes and ‘girls’ clothes after all of my attempts to raise them thinking otherwise haha! But he wanted to be perceived as male, so off to the shops we went. Then one day when Jay was almost 4.5 we were in the car and he said out of the blue “Mummy, can you ask people to stop calling me ‘she’ and ‘her’ now, it makes me sad.” This was the real turning point, we had to make a decision to support him and to change pronouns, up until then it was ‘just’ clothes and he was ‘just’ a tomboyish girl. At that stage he hadn’t mentioned a name change, so we had an awkward (for me! Jay was overjoyed at us using ‘he’ and ‘him’!) a few months of using his birth name alongside male pronouns. Then in May this year he asked why we had called him Lily; we explained that when I was pregnant and the doctors looked into my tummy to check the babies were okay, that they told us we were having two girls, so we chose names that are usually given to girls and that went together – Rose and Lily. We told him Lily could be a boy’s name because he was a boy, but he decided he would like a name which would be seen as a boy’s name, and settled on Jay (J for John, like daddy’s name).

4. Jay says he is so happy to be addressed using his male name and pronouns, sometimes he gets a little sad at being misgendered (he has long hair) but mostly he is happy to just correct people and carry on. He loves knowing that people who are important to him see him as male, and absolutely beams when those he loves most use male orientated terms of endearment. He will sometimes seek reassurance from me that everyone in our lives definitely knows he’s a boy, and when I confirm again that they do, I can see how happy that makes him.

5. Almost everyone has been supportive, including some people who admit they don’t understand but want to fully support us anyway. The main area we felt we were lacking in support was from our church. We would have liked to have been given the opportunity to try and educate them, and feel that had we been able to do so there were people who were open to hearing us out. But unfortunately the leadership –whilst mixed in opinions – overall, decided that the best they could do was avoid pronoun use at all. We felt after 3 years at this church and with friendships involved, this didn’t go far enough, and that we should have been able to address the church as a whole to give people the chance to ask questions and learn about our situation. We gave the leadership an ultimatum – we would leave if Jay couldn’t be supported fully – and so in the end we had to move to a different church. Not long after that, Jay requested his name be changed from his birth name to Jay, and our new church community embraced his chosen name with so much love and acceptance. Some of our family have struggled to get their heads around the idea but wouldn’t want to upset Jay, so are trying to be supportive. Our network of friends has been incredibly accepting and almost everyone we know uses his correct name and pronouns without any slip ups – including all of the children, who have taken it in their stride!

Photo by Annie Tritt

[transcending-self]

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Jay and Rosie, 5, (twins). Luton,  England. Transgender boy and cisgender girl