Tori Baker, Contributing Writer
First things first: this is not a tirade about passing or people who choose not to take hormone replacement therapy or just didn’t find out early that they were trans.
I do not have malice towards those who transitioned later than me.
Self discovery happens at varied rates and I find the concept of endlessly circling the drain about “trutrans” to be insufferable and worse, often bigoted. This is a conversation about attitude.
I was a trans kid. I transitioned socially at 14 and medically at 15 and it changed my life, as taking cross-sex hormones tends to do for anyone.
Taking HRT as a minor gave me an option that I still have not reckoned with on a personal level. I can choose to go stealth and never think about being someone’s “trans friend” ever again.
However, I have not taken that option because I believe it is more important to be politically active and by presenting as trans, I am given more opportunities to help other trans people.
But I have the option.
This is an option I would not have had if I had waited three years. I would have had to sit and watch my body be made masculine, unable to do anything about it, watching my peers go through puberties that did not fundamentally hurt them to the point of psychological anguish.
This is not a hypothetical. In most discussions of trans youth I hear, I am the hypothetical, the extreme option juxtaposed against the sensible reality of waiting until 18.
I meet what feels like a baffling number of trans classmates at VCU who say, “Oh, my parents are supportive, but they wanted me to wait until I was 18 to start medically transitioning” and it kills me.
It kills me that this act, which is already traumatizing enough to go through, is treated as ideologically neutral.
Dysphoria is one thing when it is a passive layer over your life. It is another when you know what it is.
I hate this overwhelming subconscious acceptance amongst VCU’s students and teachers that it is fine to make a kid who knows wait. I hate when I hear a teacher whose classes I enjoy say that a child could not have possibly figured themselves out that early.
I do not want this to be an acceptable loss.
I do not want this reality that gave me a feeling of peace in my own bones to be something brushed off as an edge case.
I want it to be standard. I want it to be something so average that people do not have to think about it.