Trans men live childhoods and adolescents with a rage flowing through their bodies: the world doesn’t match up to their gender. They don dresses, but don’t like them. They don lipstick, but don’t feel it fits. The mascara a girlfriend splays onto their eyebrows feels unholy. Middle school dances are crushingly awkward. How are we supposed to swing our hips to prom kings when we feel those hips are destined for women?

In college we hear something about testosterone. The drug is in syrupy form–in a small vial that marks milliliters, milligrams, or something of the sort. We message a doctor. We email them. They refer us to a therapist. The therapist is a woman in her mid forties–she mainly treats suburban housewives pleasuring their C-level husbands in coastal cities. We are not like these housewives. We are soldiers to our gender.

We slowly tell our friends of being trans. Some nod their heads, others writhe in confusion. Yet more dump us as friends–they think we’re too gauche, too out there, perhaps we rebel against the Islam that brought up their youth. So we meet them in a Yale lecture hall, and they shun us. They tell us to walk away, and leave it at that.

But we like the testosterone flowing through our veins. It makes us feel like more of ourselves. Our voices deepen–gradually, over time. The octaves we once sung in a soprano choir now make us altos at heart. Our choir members look around, confused. The gyms we barely frequented become daily companions in reflecting newfound manhood. The attendants there notice our presence.

Our entrance into transness leaves us beholden to a slew of terms we once never knew–FTM, AMAB (assigned male at birth), AFAB (assigned female at birth), trans trenders, and then we make fun of terms like transsexualism–now outdated–replaced by the nomenclature of gender nonconforming. Nonbinary folk are now NBs, We see NBs at cafes and in support groups called Beyond the Binary. They feel like they are something in between man and woman, so some trans deride them, but ultimately see that they are okay.

We graduate college. By this point, our bodies are fully male: legs thick, biceps thick, triceps waiting to be loved. Voices conferring utterly men stature over the phone to ATT representatives and DMV offices. We have an SSN. The number of the SSN stays the same but the name behind it changes after we’ve gone to a county court to get our nicknames turned into something real.

We live in coastal cities or other more welcoming enclaves in the South. Texas hosts Ausin. Georgia hosts Atlanta. Florida has Orlando or MIami, laden with coke fiends and Cubans secretly in favor of Castro.

We turn into the workforce. The trans military men and women face a reckoning with Trump. They may have to abandon their paycheck and leave the force entirely. But new court judgments are trying to rail in their favor. The outcomes are uncertain. Trans bartenders serve daiquiris and rums and Cokes at tiki bars in Los Angeles. They dance around gay men serving the same drinks. Some of these gay men want to sleep with them, others see them as friends, and yet more secretly deride their transness.

We get raises at jobs. We join trans man meetups in DC. Yet we find that some other trans men make fun of us. They call us too feminine, too weird. So we learn that our community can be flawed in more ways than one. Some of us are not American enough. We grew up in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Russia, Jordan, the children of diplomats and military attaches. We don’t seem like other trans men. We got Ivy League degrees that transform us into high caliber writers. We write abstract poetry and hope for the best, earning just a few cents in between.

But despite these differences, we rally some more. Rally around the trans flag. A pink and blue flag that was once upheld at the Stonewall Riots, where black trans women led a crusade against cops meaning us unwell. Those cops should rot in hell, we think.

Those of us who choose to join the CIA are at odds with an agency that used to spy on black people. Will they spy on us? Is a thought that races through our mind.

On platforms like Grindr and Tinder, we meet discrimination. Women who showed interest in us then flag us for being frauds of impostors. So our Tinder accounts get suspended for a bit, until the Tinder staff reviews our case and reinstates us with new parameters to follow. Men on Grindr chase after our hole–the feminine hole in between our legs. Yet most of us don’t want this hole to appear–we want a stick there instead.

So because we want a stick, we pursue bottom surgeries at expensive hospitals like Johns Hopkins or clinics in New York and Texas. These surgeries are expensive–they usually cost $50,000 out of pocket. So we take out medical debt and loans to slowly pay these doctors back. And usually, the surgeries come with two or three or four separate surgeries at that. So we freak out. We take drugs like Xanax to numb our anxiety. But then once they are done, we feel better about ourselves. We liked our bodies even more. So our self esteem rises. We feel a newfound sense of self worth. We can sleep with romantic partners in a more honest fashion. Our boundaries become more respected.

But then we go back to our hometown and spend Thanksgiving with an uncle who flaunts Trump, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk at every turn. He feels like DOGE is a good thing–layign off federal workers who we once knew as friends. Moreover, Joe Rogan goes on tirades against trans women on his podcast–he sees them as lesser than, a nuisance to the MMA cause. Their bodies are too masculine, there’s too much testosterone in them to be competing in men’s sports. So Joe goes on even more angry rants–he makes fun of the sticks between their legs. Trans women want to kill themselves as a result.

And at this Thanksgiving dinner, there’s an aunt who doesn’t like our lives. We avoid this aunt by drinking eight beers and two glasses of wine. We wake up in our childhood room hungover and depressed. The only thing that will alleviate this depression is spending time with friends outside of “family”. This bygone notion of family that hurts us, and not mends our spirits.

We try to find girlfriends and wives. Some of us settle on well meaning queer women who want the best for us–who have beautiful souls. We marry them. We adopt trans youth who got kicked out of their families. We ourselves enroll in trade school or grad programs that advance our career. As our marriage takes full force, we get implanted in a company or nonprofit with a transphobic boss. And the cycle to cleanse ourselves of haters gets enacted again. Avoid eye contact with the transphobe, Don’t engage with him. Even file a report to HR. These are the platitudes that we mutter in silence. If we complain too much about our lives to loved ones we run the risk of alienating them. Our loved ones want us not to suffer, but when our suffering becomes too much we can be a burden on those around us.

So we choose not to be a burden. We use laser removal to dampen the top surgery scars on our chest. We might even get facial masculinization surgery to get a squarer jaw. These fillers make us look good. And then we look alright.. And we’re dressing well. And we’ve hopped over the dozen or so hurdles I just enumerated. And we become even more trans.

Biden gets elected into office. Then after the gruelling Trump years, another progressive becomes president. These are only dreams for now, but they can very well happen. We press an ironed linen button down to our chest. We wear khakis. We give a public speech on trans rights. We network with more trans activists. We go to conferences. We then support trans youth–youth who are being bullied, perhaps relentlessly, in schools not fit for their true identity.

We make the most of what it means to be trans. And in doing so, we lift others up. We become de facto soldiers in a fight to have society love us some more.

Because that day will come–when society doesn’t see us as monsters, but as other brethren just yearning to survive.

 

Isaac Amend is a transgender man and writer based in Washington D.C. His work has appeared in the Yale Daily News, the Washington Blade, The Advocate, Streetlight Magazine, Unleash Lit, and Brevity. In 2017, he starred in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary, hosted by Katie Couric. He serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. His author’s portfolio is here: www.isaacamend.com and you can catch him on Instagram at: @isaacamend