Unbound
One of the complicated things about being an elder Millennial trans guy is that my perspective of trans youth is so different from what youth are actually experiencing today.
And one of the limitations it has caused me is a complicated feeling about medical transition care for people under 18.
Before someone comes in to flame me for being anti-youth care, I’m not. But for awhile I had struggled to see what was so wrong with the position of “well why can’t youth just wait until they’re 18 to make decisions like that?”
It took a video creator pointing something out that I’d never really considered before.
Why should young people not be able to choose which puberty they should go through if they’re going to have one or the other anyway?
In adulthood we spend so much time undoing all the damage our “natural” puberty did to our bodies, some of which can’t be fully undone.
Why should trans youth not get the chance to be happy earlier in life?
My blind spot is this: growing up in the 90s/early 2000s, none of what is available today was a remote possibility for me. The knowledge that being trans was a thing wasn’t available to me. Even when I discovered that trans men were a thing in my late 20s, I didn’t know anything about how HRT worked. It wasn’t until I followed a bunch of trans guys on instagram during the pandemic and saw their before and after photos that I learned, oh wow, trans men can actually grow beards and look as male as any cis guy. If I took T I wouldn’t have to be a non-passing androgynous person forever as the best possible “compromise” with my body. Only then did I transition.
And so it’s very hard for me to put myself in the shoes of trans youth today because not only was transitioning even socially not possible when I was their age, it wasn’t even known.
And if you don’t know what you’re missing, it can’t be that painful.
Even so, there were signs. “Shawn” was a name I gave myself when I was in 3rd grade. Given it was the first syllable of my deadname (although I’ve anglicized the spelling in my adulthood), I successfully passed it off as a nickname. Even for me it didn’t necessarily have any relation to gender, as I didn’t have any context to understand that anyway. I asked my parents and teachers (I didn’t have any friends) to call me that, and they did. It lasted about 3 days. The boys bullied me into gender compliance with “but that’s a boy’s name. You can’t have it because you’re not a boy.”
Something that has deeply and unexpectedly affected me has been the FDA’s recent targeting of companies that manufacture chest binders. Despite that none of them specifically market towards children, they are being harassed for such, and forced to either register their products as medical devices which can then be regulated, or essentially remove any references to gender dysphoria or trans people in their descriptions. It already hits hard when legal documents or medical care is targeted, but this is clothing. Binders are little more than somewhat stronger and fuller coverage compression sports bras that flatten chests and help guys pass before they have top surgery. Even cis men wear them for gynecomastia. They’re shapewear, not medical products. It harkens back to the anti-crossdressing laws of the 1960s and prior, where you couldn’t wear more than a handful of articles of clothing designated for “the opposite sex” in public.
I was always ashamed of my post puberty chest, even though it thankfully wasn’t very big. I wore big baggy hoodies and t shirts much of the time hoping it wouldn’t really be seen. Telling a child they can’t hide or diminish their breasts with shape wear, that the government can police what kind of under garments they wear, telling them their secondary sex characteristics must be on display, is just fucking sickening - especially a government run by pedophiles. Again, I didn’t have many choices, as most kids don’t, but this is still something that I can relate to in some way. And some of the companies targeted, all of which have a primarily trans customer base, are companies that I have purchased from as an adult. Most of them are small businesses run by trans or queer people. The FDA went out of its way to do targeted research to find trans-serving businesses and threaten them with asset seizure or disbanding.
To have been happy earlier in life. A phrase that reminds me how much of my life was stolen from me. How my youth was spent living as someone else, someone lost and confused and never being able to name it, and I’ll never get that youth back. And maybe the trans youth of today demanding access to transition is just a reminder of that pain and that loss that I don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe I’m jealous of them, and that jealousy and pain is blocking my understanding.
But was it less painful to not know? The youth today know what they are missing. I was numb and unaware.
September 5th, 2023, 9:00 AM. I sat on the exam chair at my top surgeon’s office for my 48 hour post op appointment. The nurse removed my surgical bandages and the feeling I had is something that human language will never be able to truly capture. The flatness of my chest was an animal instinct. A feeling of: this is the way my body should have always been. I suddenly felt like a child, remembering what it felt like to be 8 years old - the last time I’d had a chest this flat, 27 years prior. I felt like a little boy and the innocence of that feeling was devastating. I had been an early bloomer and my body would betray me very quickly. I didn’t realize the weight of the psychological pain that hung from my chest until it had been removed. Corrected.
While top surgeries today are extremely rarely performed on minors, usually ages 16 or 17, and certainly not at all when I was that age, it was still something I could have accessed much earlier, had I known. Had I known what that feeling would be. Instead, I was six weeks away from my 36th birthday before my body felt like it belonged to me.
Denying access to medical transition at a young age is one thing. Denying them underwear is absurd cruelty on top of it. And while I hesitate to ascribe misogyny to discrimination against trans boys/men, it’s the underlying factor. Girls are not permitted to own their bodies, even as minors. They must look and dress and present the way adults tell them to. Teens must display their budding sexual attractiveness. Transphobic parents always put the fertility of their “daughters” before any need for bodily autonomy, comfort, or self expression - what if my “daughter” removes her breasts and regrets it one day that she can’t feed her babies? Or, as my mother more or less directly expressed to me when I was 16, if she doesn’t look and present feminine or conventionally attractive, how is she going to get a boyfriend and eventually husband? If girls/women can “escape” misogyny by becoming boys/men, then how will misogyny be effective? What about all the cis girls/women who don’t get that same “privilege”? No, we must force our girls to remain girls, so that they can be good compliant little breeders for the patriarchal state. Just like their mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers before them.
As worried as I am about attacks on adult trans rights, attacks on trans youth affect me too. Because I was once a trans youth. And little 9 year old Shawn carries even more pain now that 30-something Shawn is able to tell him the words that name that pain. I wish I could tell him, as I did during the Biden years, that he’d be safe one day. Fact is, 38 year old Shawn isn’t so sure of that himself.
Are we ever really safe in this world?