Hey, it's Transgender Day of Visibility later on this week!
So let's talk about why I really friggin' care about this holiday.
[intro music]
Hello I'm Jackson Bird and today we're talking about… gay stuff.
So as many of you know, I did not come out as transgender until I was 25.
Yes, I'm older than 25.
I'm in my late twenties.
Yes, I still look like a teenager.
Eternal trans baby face.
I just want you to hit me up when you find your first grey hair and I'm still using the
student discount.
Cha-ching.
Anyways, why did it take so long for me to come out and transition?
Well, the short answer is that I grew up in Texas in the 90s and had no idea that trans
men existed.
But the long answer is… well, first that the short answer is a lie.
I did know that trans men existed.
I just didn't think they could be gay.
And I thought that I might… be… gay… y'know, if I were… a man.
Spoiler warning: I'm not gay.
I'm what us intellectuals call… bisexual.
But again, growing up in Texas in the 90s, no matter how I felt inside, I was conditioned
to believe that I was a girl who liked boys.
And I did and I do like boys, but any thoughts of liking girls was pushed wayyyy deep down.
(slowmo voice) Deep down.
Even deeper down than my suspicions that I probably should've just been born a boy
to begin with.
That one I actually thought about quite a lot.
So, when I stumbled on an Oprah special one day after middle school about transgender
kids, my mind was blown.
Here were kids about my age who had been assigned female at birth, but whose parents were letting
them live as the boys they'd always known themselves to be.
Now that I think about it, if that counts, that was like the first time that I actually
saw myself reflected back in media.
And I remember spending the whole time watching it thinking about how it applied to me and
how I could talk to my mom about it and start living like those boys were.
But towards the end of the episode, Oprah asked one of the teenage boys if he liked
girls and he said yes.
Which made sense to me because he was a boy so of course he liked girls, but then I thought
about it as it applied to me annnnd this whole new revelation came crashing down aroun dme.
Because I did NOT like girls.
Well, maybe I did.
I probably did.
But I didn't WANT to.
Because the culture that I grew up in in Texas had me so scared to think about girls in that
way when I was also being told I was a girl that I was frankly disgusted and terrified
by the thought… even if liking girls would've made me "straight" as a trans boy, even
still, I couldn't get my brain to a place where it wasn't terrifying to think about
the idea of liking girls.
That's how deeply conditioned I was with homophobia.
PLUS, I really did like boys.
Like, really really liked boys.
And I didn't know if I could give up liking boys for the sake of getting to live as my
true self.
Even if all I thought about nearly every minute of every day as a pre-teen was this imaginary
world where I was a boy with a boyfriend.
Because apparently, according to this Oprah special I saw, trans boys like girls.
Oprah said it, so it had to be true.
I couldn't find any other examples of trans boys out there, and certainly not any of trans
men so I just continued on growing up believing that I alone had been born with this awful
curse of being both trans AND gay.
Like, as if that was some improbable combination that no one else in the world possessed.
And that it made me SO weird that I could never tell anyone, could never do anything
about it.
I just had to suck it up and live my life as a girl.
But, of course eventually I went to college and met real trans people and queer people
and took gender theory courses and I learned everything there is to know about gender and
sexual diversity including most importantly that trans people can be any sexual or romantic
orientation.
Trans people are just like cis people.
We can be gay, straight, bi, pan, ace, whatever.
Being trans does not negate any of that.
And of course by the time I learned that and started unpacking all of my own feelings around
gender with like the actual words and knowledge to go behind it…
I started realizing that I had liked girls that whole time.
(lip smack) Yep.
Coulda just non-issue if I had just realized that from the start.
But the thing that I really want to hammer home is that I learned what it meant to be
trans when I was eleven and I kept it locked up inside of me for over ten years because
I had been misinformed.
Because I'd grown up in a culture of homophobia and transphobia and zero education.
Because the few media representations I stumbled upon were my education and they weren't
accurate or useful representations.
I spent nearly half my life thinking I was a standalone freak because I'd never given
a reason to think otherwise.
So THAT is why media representation matters.
THAT is why getting sex and gender education in schools matters.
Those are both crucial places of learning for kids and we need so much more responsible
and respectful representation in both of them.
'Cause like listen, as sad as it is that I spent nearly half my life confused and lonely
when I could've been able to transition before puberty and like how rad would that have been
to have gotten to live the childhood I always dreamt of?
But my story is hardly distressing compared to the much worse depression, dysphoria, substance
abuse, bullying, violence, and suicide that happens to so many other trans and gender
nonconforming kids out there as a result of a lack of education and role models.
All of which is why I do what I do.
It's why I make these videos.
It's why I travel around the world as a public speaker on trans issues.
And it's why I have a podcast amplifying the voices of trans people.
What's that?
Podcast?
Uh yeah!
Transmission is back on the airwaves March 31st, Transgender Day of Visibility.
Because visibility friggin' MATTERS.
Alright?
I might launch season two of Transmission like a day earlier 'cause Transgender Day
of Visibility is a Saturday and Saturday is a weird launch day.
But follow Transmission on Facebook or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or
wherever you get your podcasts so you can hear it as soon as season two as soon as it
drops.
Also, you can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram to get updates on the podcast and
all my other work.
I'm gonna leave some more resources on Transgender Day of Visibility down in the description
box.
In the comments today, I want to know the first time you saw a POSITIVE representation
of a trans person in the media, in school, or in your life.
Whether you are cis or trans, leave your comment below.
I hope you all have a very happy Transgender Day of Visibility on Saturday.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see ya next time.
So while in the fourth grade we're not doing pieces specifically on being transgender,
we are giving them lots of space to explore gender roles, which gives lots of space for
that trans kid – and you know there's the trans kid in the class, if not that one class
then in the school – it gives them space to say, "hey I don't have to be this.
Or it's okay for me to not like everything from the gender box."
But it also teaches other kids to treat that kid well later on.
- Ah, that is so much what I keep saying that I want desperately is like this kind of education
from such a young age.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét