My trans awakening was very sudden and a bit later in life than I would have liked. Throughout my childhood and late adolescence and teenage years I never gave any thought into if I was transgender or not, it just never occurred to me. It’s not even from a general ignorance on the subject, My older sibling, Gabe, came out as nonbinary when I was 15 and informed me about the experiences they went through to come to that revelation. Being openly pan-sexual also lent itself to meeting peers in queer spaces that were trans or gender nonconforming, so I was by no means ignorant about the general concept. Even in the media the trans experience was being talked about more and more, from shows featuring trans characters that weren’t just a mocking stereotype to new shows like Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. What held me back from starting the path to my own trans gender journey was my already prevalent mental turmoil. Throughout the entirety of middle school and high school I struggled with extreme depression and anxiety. I didn’t have the time nor the overall mental capacity to give my gender identity any question.
Graduating from high school is the catalyst for my journey into becoming transgender. Once finished with high school, that stress no longer took up the entirety of my mental real estate. It started gradually in January of 2019. My days were completely free and open to just pondering life and ruminating on who I was as a person and who I wanted to be. I had always despised my reflection in a mirror, all I saw was an empty husk of a human, someone who couldn’t be recognized as myself. With all this newly found free time I started to give more thought into what I did want to look like. What I would want to see in the mirror staring back at me? For reasons that made no sense to me at the time, the train of thought always led back to wearing dresses and skirts, traditionally feminine clothing. It didn’t initially raise the alarm bells because I knew men could wear things like that, people like NBA star Russel Westbrook and Singer/Actor Jaden Smith had broken the mold by wearing dresses and skirts. I knew they weren’t lesser men for it. After all it’s just clothes right? However that’s not how I perceived it for myself, I didn’t want to just be some burly and scruffy dude in a dress. I couldn’t comprehend what it would be like to don those types of clothing. Around the start of February another blatant neon sign emerged that I wasn’t able to decipher, I kept having daydreams of looking like a woman and being treated as such. Now I normally never remember day dreams even to this day, but those dreams for some reason were in imprinted in my psyche. I was painfully unaware of what It all meant.
June of 2019 is when my world came to a halt, when I was finally able to connect the dots. In the time leading up to June, the desire to wear feminine clothing and the dreams where I was a woman became more and more prevalent in my daily experience. I even began regularly thinking about how nice it would be if I was one. The thought of being transgender had occurred to me, however I had dismissed it. Why? Because those people I had met and read about were transgender. I heard their stories and experiences, ones that were all too similar to mine. But that wasn’t me. Right? Surely I was comfortable being a man, I just wanted to wear dresses and dream of being a woman on a regular basis. Normal thoughts that all men totally have… It was as if my soul was flashing a giant neon sign in my brain telling me exactly what everything meant. I think the reason I couldn’t identify with the trans women I knew was because I had only ever know them as such. It felt hard to relate to someone who wasn’t a man describe their thought processes, regardless of the similarities. I had never actually seen a man describe themselves having the same thoughts. Then that fateful day happened. The day that I will never forget as long as I live. There was this podcast that I listened to on a regular basis called the Misfits Podcast. It featured YouTube personalities that I enjoyed greatly and looked up to in some small way. And on June 30th they released an episode which became the hour of audio that made my reality come crashing down. One of the hosts, Toby, came out on the podcast as a transgender woman. She shared all her experiences in the episode on how she realized she was trans. Her stories lined up damn near exactly to what I was going through. So here I was, finally witnessing a “man” describe his feelings. I now had someone I could compare myself to. After finishing the episode, it took me the same amount of time to realize I was trans as it had taken me to watch the episode. It hit me like a fucking bus. I had spent my entire life thinking I was a man, not even thinking being trans as a possibility. And in one hour it immediately changed.
The immediate aftermath was as tumultuous. I had no clue what to do at this point. Many questions swirled around in my mind, all seemingly unanswerable. I did know one thing, I HAD to tell someone. Keeping this bottled up would’ve probably given me a stroke. I had only one person I wanted to tell, my older sibling, Gabe. Once I finished my crying session after listening to the podcast, I went to their room to deliver the news. The very first thing Gabe did when I told them what was happening was hug me, I cried in their arms for a solid few minutes. I will forever be grateful to them for lending me their ears and giving me a shoulder to cry on. We then spent the next hour talking about what I was feeling and how I should proceed forwards. Given that Gabe had been through the whole process to becoming non binary years prior, they had some solid advice and knowledge to give to me. They even helped me decide on a new name that very same day, we decided that Jamie was the best choice. They are truly one of a kind.
For the next few months, nothing else really happened. Gabe was still the only person who knew that I was transgender. I was too scared to come out to anyone else for a while, I knew that most of the people in my life would be more than ok with me being trans. Due to severe anxiety, I just simply couldn’t bring myself to come out further. The only other person I was able to muster up the courage to tell after a while was my best friend, Diego. Him and I are about as close as two friends can be, he is an amazing person. Diego of course took the news very well and was extremely supportive of me and what I wanted to be in life. I will never take for granted how much I was able to trust him and Gabe. As the year came to a close, I had slowly come out to more and more people within my main circle of friends. Everyone I told was super supportive and nothing but nice and helpful. It was certainly beneficial that my friends and I grew up and lived in the SF Bay Area. I still hadn’t come out to my parents by this point and I wasn’t going to until years down the line. For reasons more complicated than I’m willing to go into. For a while this was my life, only out to my friends and others that were close to me. Progress beyond this wasn’t made until I had moved to the northern Sacramento Valley with some friends in the summer of 2020
The part of the Sacramento valley I moved to was over a hundred miles away from the bay area. I knew no one here besides the friends I moved with. In this new town I didn’t have to come out to anyone, I just introduced myself to people by my chosen name and pronouns. Except at my job, that was a bit more tricky. At this point in time I hadn’t gotten around to getting my name and gender. So when I applied to the job, it was under my original legal name and gender. I worked in a restaurant, a famously not chill environment. But because it is still California, my coworkers were all very liberal. The fear though was that in the scenario that they weren’t cool with my being trans, I would either quit or just deal with it on a 3-4 days a week basis. I certainly wasn’t quitting because I was broke and it was already hard enough to find a job in the middle of a pandemic. So for the first several months I kinda just gritted my teeth and coped. In January of 2021 I finally took that next step to becoming fully socially out, I came out to my job. The story is quite embarrassing honestly. One night after we had closed down the kitchen, it was just me and two of my fellow kitchen mates remaining in the whole restaurant; Andy and Jacob. Jacob is this 30 year old nerdy goofball of a dad, and Andy is about as butch as a lesbian can get. I went up to them right as we were all about to leave to go home and said, “hey, I would like to be called Jamie from now on…” That’s all I said, no explanation at all as to why I wanted to be called Jamie. They were cool with it, albeit a bit confused. I went straight home that night not realizing that I hadn’t actually explained anything else to them. This was immediately brought up to me the very next day when another fellow kitchen mate, Carlos, confronted me. Carlos is a great guy and wasn’t hostile in the slightest about it, he’s just an incredibly blunt person. When he cornered me he asked, “Yo, what’s up with the whole ‘Jamie’ thing?”. I was taken aback and the only response I could muster was, “oh you know…..”. To which he very swiftly responded, “No actually I don’t, in fact, none of us know.”. I was absolutely panicking at this point, by now the whole kitchen was staring at me waiting for a response and an answer. As I awkwardly stumbled through my answer I was able to convey to them that I was transgender. Thankfully they were totally cool with it. As uncomfortable and anxious the situation made me, it ultimately lifted a large weight off my chest. Now that my job knew and was cool with me being trans, I was completely out to everyone that knew me in this town
Once I changed my Instagram in early 2021 to having my new name, I was completely out. With only my parents still being in the dark. I told them later in the year, and they were cool so don’t worry. I will never take for granted how fortunate I am to have been raised in such a liberal state. I had the luxury of having pretty much zero hiccups in coming out, something very few people have had the fortune of. By April of 2021 I started taking estrogen hormone therapy. Honestly the best decision I’ve ever made. Followed only closely by getting my name and gender marker legally changed at the end of 2021. I in every way, both socially and legally, was the woman Jamie. That’s been my life up through present times. I’m living as who I want to be and it’s just fantastic. The only major hurdles left are voice training and getting gender reassignment surgery. The latter of which is gonna be a while out because that’s just how the system is unfortunately. There are days when I don’t feel feminine or womanly, but when I look at my name change certificate, my many pill bottles full of hormone medications, my closet full of dresses and cute blouses, the hair I’ve been so diligent in growing out and maintaining, I don’t see mistakes or regret, I see some of my most cherished possessions, the symbols of the change that I’ve taken over the last 4 years. It makes me proud of all I’ve done and I wouldn’t take any of it back because it is me, it is who I always wanted to be, I am being my true self.
This is my first true essay in a long long time, apologies if it reads weird
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