Transgender Children

April 30th, 2007 • 7 comments Transgender

This past week on 20/20, Barbara Walters interviewed transgender children and their families. I didn’t get to watch it since it was on at prime time and my family was home. My parents are still sensitive to me being trans, although my dad has told me that he accepts it, by my mom, however, refuses to accept it. I didn’t want to start anything by watching it, so I left it alone. But they have all the articles online.

Looking back over my childhood, I always felt like this, like I was in the wrong body. For a long time, I didn’t know what to think of myself. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my feelings and I had no idea that other people, that felt the exact same way, were out there.

“I can’t quite explain it. It was just a feeling of being not quite in my body,” Rebecca said. “When I was in kindergarten, I would tell people that when I grew up I wanted to be a boy. I didn’t want to be astronaut, or a teacher. I wanted to be a boy.”

I wish I could have had the courage to tell my family what I was going through, but then again, we’ve never been a close knit family. I don’t remember ever having a deep conversation with my parents about anything. They’ve always just let me be. I don’t think that they would have handled it differently then they did when I told them a few years ago though. I never really knew how to express how I felt to anyone.

How do you look at someone, right in the face, and tell them that everything they know about you is a total lie? And that their daughter, isn’t a daughter, but a son? The look on their faces, I still remember it, was a look of anger, but the look in their eyes, was a look of hurt. It wasn’t so much that they thought I was crazy, because they already had, or that they thought I was a freak, because they know that I’m not, but I turned their world upside down, and they don’t like it when the boat rocks.

Getting back to 20/20, there are some great articles about the interviews on the ABC website. Here are a few:

• A Boy in a Girl’s Body
• Born With the Wrong Body
• What Is Gender Identity Disorder?
• Transgender Children: More Resources

You can also check out clips of the interviews on the 20/20 website.  There’s also a blog post on one of the ABC blogs with some excellent, and not so excellent comments.

I could have been Prom King!

April 28th, 2007 • 4 comments Transgender

If I were five years younger and went to Fresno High School.  But, I’m 23 and I don’t go to Fresno High School, so someone else is taking what could have been mine!  Just kidding.  In all seriousness though, this is pretty neat-o.

Administrators agreed to reverse a district protocol this week that limited males to compete for the title after Covarrubias was nominated by her classmates.

It’s really cool to see some progress being made.  It might only be Prom King, but at least it’s something.  I think this says a lot about how far we’ve already come, struggling to be considered “normal” and all.  There’s still a long way to go though, but a step in the right direction never hurt.

Binary Bathrooms

April 26th, 2007 • Transgender

I’m a moderator/member of a Trans group on MySpace, and one of the members made this animated short. This is how I feel, and I’m sure a lot of other trans people do as well.

Transmen at women’s college’s

April 19th, 2007 • Transgender

I was visiting a forum that I haven’t really had the time to visit and ran across a link to a Boston Globe article about how transmen are graduating from women’s colleges.  Transmen are people like me, FtM’s.  In any case, I’m no stranger to hearing about this kind of situation.  When I was watching Transgeneration, there was an FtM who went to an all women school and there was a bit of a trans community there. I

I’m becoming more and more comfortable about the fact that I’m FtM.  The more I become comfortable, the more people I want to tell.  But at the same time, I wouldn’t really feel safe coming out to more people in my area.  There isn’t really a great trans community here, if at all.  I know there’s a growing gay and lesbian community, and I know of a few crossdressers, but even so, it’s not the same.

It’s great to see more coverage of FtM communities, such as in the article.  The more exposure, the more people can get to know FtM’s and the more used to it they get, the better for me.

In addition, researchers believe that more young people than ever before are acting on those feelings. “It used to be that transitioning was a midlife process, but the Internet has changed a lot,” says Brett-Genny Janiczek Beemyn, one of the lead researchers in the UMass-Penn State study. “With the click of a mouse, more and more young people can find others going through what they’re going through and have a stronger sense of themselves at a younger age.”

When I first told my parents how I was feeling and that I am trans, they blamed the internet for “corrupting” me; telling me that it was influencing me in a bad way.  I don’t blame them.  They wanted an excuse, they had one at their fingertips.  I was spending a lot of time online when I told them.  The internet opened up a whole new world for me.  I was able to find information and other people who were feeling the exact same way and suddenly, I didn’t feel so alone or weird, and dare I say, I didn’t feel like a freak.