I sat there stunned. What did he say? I had been seeing this particular counselor to help me deal with my gender dysphoria for the past year. We discussed the fact that I was transgender. He knew I had wanted to be a woman for as long as I could remember. His initial response had been to pray harder. Trust God more. Was I reading my bible enough? Today was different. After a year of not making any progress, it was time to turn the shame tactics up to eleven. I can still hear his words today, “Imagine yourself after transition. You’d look like a man in a dress. You would be an ugly woman,” he said with a laugh. Then he told me how I would be too fat, too tall, too ugly to pass. The same horrible thoughts that had been kicking around in my own head for decades, all in a vain effort to stop me from doing the one thing that would actually help me, transition.
In spite of the gains trans people have made in recent years the barriers to transition are still many. We have lived in a culture that has long painted trans people as dangerous or deviant. We lack protections against job and housing discrimination, even in some states that have protections for LGB people. Just to change my name I need two doctor’s notes, four pieces of identification, and background checks from both the state and federal governments. Imagine if you had to do that when you got married? Every year conservative legislatures across this country try to pass more and more restrictive bills on where trans people can play sports, where we can go to the bathroom and when our children can get the help they need for a happy life. All of this is an effort to make transition harder, to make the task of becoming who we say we are, as difficult as possible. I transitioned more than four years ago and only just this past month got permission to change my name and gender marker on my birth certificate. We live in a culture that does not want us to change, that does not celebrate the diversity and breadth of life that trans and non-binary lives represent. Yet the biggest barrier to my own transition was not these smaller injustices, it was the fear and doubt I had in my own head.
Being told I was not pretty enough to transition left a scar, one that I can still feel today. When I receive a compliment for an outfit or for how I look I can feel the edges of that scar and the feeling that I am somehow inferior to other women. Before transitioning I had a list, a very long list, of reasons why I could never, ever come out. These reasons ran the whole gamut from God would hate me to my family would abandon me. I thought I would never find love, that I would be shunned and friendless and die alone. At the top of that list was all the ways I thought I could never pass as a woman. I was too ugly, fat, tall, and bald to be happy. All of which were complete nonsense. Everything I just listed turned out to be a complete and total lie! Transition felt scary and foreign to me, and I had no one to tell me otherwise. This is what I mean when I talk about there being a barrier to transition. When a transgender person or one of our non-binary siblings comes out, we do so despite the objections of the society around us and in spite of the voices and doubts inside our own heads.
We are told it is wrong to be different. That it is not natural to live as the people we know ourselves to be. We learn to be ashamed of who we are, we try to hide parts of ourselves and try to fit inside the box’s society has crafted for us. Each and every trans and non-binary person has had to break out of that box in an effort to live true and authentic lives. My siblings have had to look into the eyes of hate, stare down their own negativity, work through the trauma of their past to become themselves. They have had to face both their doubts and the objections of those around them in their struggle to be free. They have realized that on the other side of transition and coming out is a life worth having. A life that they have earned. A life they have fought for. A life they should be proud of.
Trans and non-binary people need to be given the space and the grace to find out the answer of who we are and how we should live our lives for ourselves. No board of doctors, or panel of judges can tell us otherwise, we know who we are. We have overcome so much to be ourselves. We have fought so hard to be here. What does life look like on the other side of transition? There is life here. Pride is here. Happiness, strength, and peace can be found here. There is light where darkness and negativity once ruled. There is hope on the other side. Trans people are people. People who just want to live their best lives in the only way they can. Trans is joy. Trans is pride. Trans is what it means to be alive. To be trans is to be fearfully and wonderfully made. To be trans is to be beautiful.