Read Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out for Free Online Page B

that I wished I had been born a girl, but I knew it would never happen. If it did happen, I’d worry about passing. “I don’t want people wondering what I am. I don’t want to get hurt. So I’m definitely not going to do anything about it.” And she was, like, “Okay.”
    But always in the back of my mind, I wished I was a girl.

    In my eleventh-grade year, I went with my class on a boys’ retreat. On the retreat we all had to admit something, or say something we needed help with from God, because, after all, it was a Catholic retreat. I told everybody that I just want acceptance from everyone because I’m gay. By that time, I knew I wanted to be a woman, but I said that I was a gay boy because it was easier. The room was silent. I was so nervous. It was the first time I actually came out to people that I was different.
    I think that’s why some of the boys later had trouble understanding my transition. In my eleventh-grade year, I said I was gay, and in my senior year, I said that I was a girl.
    I learned about transgender people when my brother Jonathan was dating a boy named Renee. No, I take that back. I learned about it when my brother started cross-dressing. He would dress up in women’s clothes. He put on a wig and filled up bags with rice and put them in a bra. He went out in seven-inch stilettos and really short shorts. I found it really weird. We would play photo shoots in my house when my mom and dad were gone. This was when we were in our teens. I was about sixteen. He was seventeen.
    He’s not a cross-dresser now. I think he was trying to figure himself out too. He went from acting very straight, to very feminine, to cross-dressing, to straight-acting again. That was his process.
    I asked him, “Could I look like a girl too?” My brother said, “No, you could never look like a girl.”
    “Let me try.” I went into the bathroom and put on everything he put on. I looked in the mirror and thought I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I became Christina. I walked out of the bathroom to show my brother.
    I just felt so, so indescribable. I was happy. Here I was, sixteen, still in high school, and feeling great.
    He said, “You don’t look like a girl. I really don’t think you can pass as a girl.”
    “Well, I think I do.”
    There came a time when I had to take everything off. That really, really hurt. It was sad to see Christina go away.
    My brother was dating a boy whose mother was transgender. He said, “My boyfriend’s mom is transgender. She dresses like a girl and everything. She has the boobs and the hair and the body.” When he showed me a picture of her, I was like, Wow, it is actually possible to change into a woman.
    I can’t remember exactly when I did it, but one day I typed
transsexual
into Google.
Transsexual
is another way of saying transgender. The site said, “When a man or a woman, or vice versa, feels that they were born in the wrong body, and they want to be the opposite sex.” And there were a whole list of things, like, if you want to wear women’s clothes, if you wish you were born a woman — I can’t really remember everything exactly — but if you are these things, then you’re transgender. This connected with me.
    I thought,
Maybe it’s possible that I can do this.
But I wasn’t sure how to take the leap forward, especially because my mom still thought I was straight. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I didn’t want her to start going crazy or emotionally disown me. She didn’t disown my brother, but it kind of, like, felt that he was disowned. It did.
    My dad didn’t care. He’s a very accepting, very open person. When Jonathan came out to my mom, she said, “Don’t you dare tell your father! He’s going to flip out.”
    My brother was, like, “I told dad before I told you! And
he
took it way better than you ever did.” My mom was really surprised. I mean, I’m telling you, nobody had a clue about Jonathan.
    I saw another counselor, a