PERSONAL ESSAY
Stories Gave Me the Hope I Needed to Find My Inner Trans Man
I have faith that you are going to have a beautiful life, too
My high school English teacher once explained that hope was an essential element of any true tragedy. It’s the human part of any story. The example given was that Romeo and Juliet’s deaths wouldn’t have been compelling had the audience not believed it was possible for both to survive. Even knowing that this was a famous tragedy, it was easy to get lost in the moment while reading, to focus on the possibility that the apothecary’s clever solution could work, allowing the lovers to live happily ever after. However a story ends, we need that hope to care and remain invested in it.
Hope is based on evidence that we actively seek out to allow for the possibility of something we desperately need to be true. In the absence of available evidence that we can find to support some existential truth, many of us rely on faith. Faith is something we believe in from the very core of our being, even if we have no formal evidence to prove it, because we cannot move forward without that belief. Finding hope or faith in the absence of having our most basic needs met is a survival skill. We need to believe that there is something wonderful waiting for us in our futures.
As a people, we need one or the other to help us believe that we deserve to exist in a world that too often tells us we should disappear. Not only do we deserve to exist, but we deserve to be loved, cared for, held as individuals and as a people. We deserve to thrive, to create, to build, to live life authentically on our terms. Hope or faith in our future is part of what makes us human. It is a source of the resilience that keeps us going each day.
I received a comment recently that absolutely broke my heart. I’ve read it several times, struggling to know how to answer. Amelia Unchained left this comment on my writing about Testosterone and sex.
“This is an intriguing realm of enquriy (sic) for outsiders like me. Your experiences seem diametrically different to mine, but I was never particularly geared up for that stuff anyway. I wasn’t wanted, and if you’re not wanted, there’s no point in taunting oneself with the utterly unattainable.
I've altered my regimen in order to eliminate the need for androgen blockades. I wish I'd discovered these when I was around 12 or 13, because then I'd have had the headspace to examine things and also, I would have some self-esteem left, simply because it was not knocked back for every single instance of my ever having a crush.
I'm hoping that my estradiol intake becomes effective enough to crush every single last vestige of attraction and desire from my consciousness.
Obviously, groomed to be a failure at such a young age was guaranteed to leave me dipping out.
Luckily, I think I have found other fascinations and interests to divert my attentions and to take (some) of the sting out of being siloed as a loser in all this.”
Amelia is not alone in our community in expressing this feeling of despair and loneliness. This reflects the messaging that we receive constantly in the media. In turn, I’ve been told over and over by so many that they were afraid to come out of the closet out of fear that they would lose love or never find it. Throughout much of my life, I’ve had a similar fear that I couldn’t be loved as my true self, though I submerged who I was so deeply that I couldn’t even define that person inside who I was afraid might not be loved.
In the absence of faith in my own lovability, I constructed another identity that I believed society would accept. That imaginary person grew up using my deadname and did a great job pretending to be alive. What happened to that person wasn’t a real tragedy in the absence of hope or even faith. There isn’t much of a story there. You can’t fear death if you aren’t really alive. A few months ago, I had a funeral for that old self and worked to move on from the grief of everything lost as I moved into a more authentic state of being.
That closure was part of what I needed to celebrate everything that I’ve found. I now have new family, new friends, and an abundance of love that can finally truly be felt because it’s received and offered through the real me. Reviewing the evidence, it is possible to be loved as a trans person. It is possible to rebuild a life.
It was a collection of stories that gave me enough hope to see who I really was underneath the shell that I had created seeking some imitation of love and approval. I realized I was trans while reading a book called Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity. I saw myself reflected in all of these stories that told the truths about me that I could never put into words. In turn, reading stories of many cis parents like Rita Malone, who love their trans children despite the hardships of a world that judges them unfairly for their acceptance, helps to understand the love that my people deserve to receive from family. Reading and listening to the stories of cis people like Leonora Watkins, who support their trans spouses, helps me to see the understanding that my readers deserve to be receiving from their partners.
Stories give hope, so I want to share mine. I’m a trans man in a loving marriage with a trans woman. Being openly ourselves contributes to our ability to understand and support each other. As a polyamorous couple, we’ve each experienced love from other people as well. Being openly transgender doesn’t mean that we can’t be loved. On the contrary, it means that we can share enough of ourselves to receive authentic love.
The writer bell hooks said, “To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients-care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication,” (all about love, p. 7). Coming out as trans allowed me to complete this equation of love so I could receive and give that love to my partners. It allowed me to receive recognition and to learn how to be truly honest in ways I’d never experienced before.
If you’re in the closet or if you haven’t yet found love as an out-of-the-closet trans person, I hope my story and the stories I’ve linked to give you hope that you can experience all of this and more. If that still feels out of reach, I wish with all of my being that you can find the faith to believe, despite what may feel like an absence of evidence in your life so far, that you can find this for yourself.
It isn’t easy to rebuild a life, to construct a more authentic existence, but I have hope that you can do it. Where does my evidence come from, allowing me to find this hope? It comes from my own life and from all of the stories I’ve come across. I have faith that there are good things out there for you to find, that you can be loved and have a wonderful life, even if I’ve never met you, a stranger who is reading these words right now, to gather the evidence to hope. I cannot know what is in store for you personally, but I have faith that you will be okay, that you will be loved, that you are going to have a beautiful life full of all of the magic that you deserve to find.
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This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, “LGBTQ Hope and Joy Are Antidotes to Fear”.