My experiences with transgendered people

by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren (Newborn Monarch emerging)
[CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

I've been thinking more and more lately about transgendered people, and not that there needs to be another article about transpeople written by a white, cisgendered woman, but I don't care I'm writing this article anyway.

Thus far in my life, I've known (or knowingly known) a few transgendered people, and I want to tell you about two of them.  The first was a girl in several of my classes my freshman year of high school.  Her name was Kay*.  At birth her parents named her Will*, but I never knew her as such.  She was always Kay, and she was always beautiful.  She displayed this "easy" femininity that I could never hope to perform.  Always made up, always perfect, you know?  When I first met her I didn't know that she was trans.  She was just this pretty, quiet girl who sat by herself in science.  A classmate who had known her from before her transition was the one to tell everyone about her, and she became an oddity.  This was the mid-90s and I'm not sure that "transgender" was even a word back then.  I know it wasn't in our vocabulary.

Now my freshman year I attended an art school.  This was before my parents moved us out to the suburbs and better schools, academically speaking, though diversity-wise my inner city art school kicked my suburban school's ass.  The school I attended freshman year was full of the districts misfits: artsy kids, anti-establishment types, homosexuals, et cetera, et cetera.  It was a pretty progressive school, everybody was fairly accepting of everybody else.  Or, at least, that was my experience.  I do know that we had less violence and more communication among the different races and sexualities than then other schools in the district.  But looking back now, and thinking of Kay, I think she must have been terribly lonely.

She was isolated, you see, and though I don't think she suffered from any overt bullying, I also don't think that she had many friends.  I could be wrong.  I didn't know her well.  But I never saw her with a group.  She was always alone, sitting quietly along the wall, never raising a hand to answer a teacher's question, never gossiping with the rest of us, or acting out, or just being the goofy teenager that she was.  I look back and I think that I should have reached out, made her my friend, but the thought never occurred to me.  Kay was someone we tittered about if we thought of her at all.  "Did you know she used to be a boy?" 

Oddly enough, or not, as the case may be, I never really thought of her as anything but a girl.

A couple of years later, after our move to the Kansas suburbs, one of my brother's friends briefly dated Kay.  This caused a small scandal among my brother's other friends, and more tittering, but the relationship didn't last more than a few months, and was more about the fluidity of my brother's friend's sexuality than anything else.  He'd go on to date people of all genders before settling down with a wife and happily (as far as I know) raising a family.

But Kay . . . I don't know what became of her.  I think about her sometimes and I wonder.  I hope she's survived and is happy and successful.  In the, gods!, 18 years since I graduated high school, and 21 since my freshman year, I've lost so many friends to suicide.  If I'm counting on appendages, I'm down to my toes now.  My fingers are all used up.  And I know that suicide rates among transgendered people are astronomical.  So I hope that she's okay.

The second transgendered person that I known, I knew for several years before his transition.  In other words, I met him when he was still her.  Let's call him Mike*.

Mike and I were hired at the bookstore on the same day, back when Mike was Lisa*.  He seemed happy enough.  We became kind of friends, work friends, and saw each other four or five times a week for maybe three years before he quit and moved away to finish school.  At that point we were Facebook friends, so when he made the transition I was notified and had a couple years warning before I saw him again.  This time as a man.

Now, I don't know how Mike feels about this, but in my head there is a fairly strong delineation between Mike and Lisa—no matter that they're the same person.  For instance, I worked with Lisa not Mike.  When I tell stories about work, if the person who emerged as Mike is in them, I have to pause, because I catch myself thinking in terms of Lisa.  You know, using female-gendered pronouns and his old, misgendered name.  I have no problem with thinking of Mike in the now, or Mike in the future, but I can't quite seem to retroactively reconcile Mike with Lisa of the past.  It's all "Lisa did this.  Lisa did that (in years past)." then "Mike did this or that (recently).  Mike is doing this.  Mike will do that."  I wonder sometimes if he does the same thing, or if he has always thought of himself as Mike and now he simply matches the way he's always been?  Or maybe somewhere in-between?

I do remember the first time I saw Mike after his transition.  I was walking on campus from one of the libraries to the building that housed my next class.  I had some time to kill, and was thinking about just sitting on the floor outside my classroom to read or maybe take a nap.  I ended up going to the same school Mike did, though he graduated a few years ahead of me.  I had heard that he still did things on campus, worked or volunteered for the school in some way, but I never expected to see him.  So it was something of a shock when I ran into him that day.

I recognized him almost immediately, and yet, somehow, didn't.  Like he both was and was not the person that I once knew.  He looked good.  That boy is a handsome lad.  And it's not that I was expecting him to look bad or anything, it's just that I didn't really know what to expect.  I don't think I expected him to look quite so right.  Right in a way that Lisa never did, though I didn't realize it until just that moment.  He looked happy and comfortable and satisfied with his life in a very male sort of way.  I don't know quite how to explain it.  He just looked right.

We chatted a bit about inconsequential things, a little bit about his transition, and then went our separate ways.  Him to do whatever he was doing on campus, and me to class.  The meeting left me with the sense of the profound that I still can't really articulate, but it changed me in ways I'm sure I haven't discovered yet.

I don't know that I'm really articulating this right, and I don't know that there's really a point to this story.  But both these people in different ways affected me, affect me still.  And maybe not because of them, I am and always have been socially progressive after all, but I think it's important to see transgendered people as, well, people.  Too often I think we boil down people to concepts and boogeymen, and that only hurts us all.  I don't want to get political here, that's just not my style, I just wanted to share some stories of some people I once knew.  That's all.

*All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people I'm writing about.