*This is the fourth story of our Trans Visibility Series, which centers the lived experiences of trans and gender-expansive young people while connecting those stories to relevant research and data. Read the previous story in our series here, and learn more about this series or to submit your own story, click here.

Perv.

I was nine years old when I first heard that word. My dad, as if he had to carry all of masculinity on his shoulders, came into my room, my burgeoning transness focused on nothing but the bra I swiped from his girlfriend. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just knew that for some reason wearing a bra felt right.

In his eyes, I was a perv. Something any other young girl would have done was sexualized. Wracked with guilt, I suppressed.

Then it was reinforced by the media I consumed. Shrek 2 featured a scene where Pinocchio is wearing women’s underwear, played for laughs, implying that something was wrong with him, and by extension, me. I was a boy after all, right? Right.

Suppress, suppress, suppress.

“The media has encouraged [trans and gender diverse (TGD)] jokes by illustrating the TGD population as non-normative. [Trans women] specifically, face issues of misogyny, as demonstrated in these jokes,” a 2019 study says. “This has created a divide for TGD persons, both with their self-identities and with their relationships with their families.”

“However, the media also allows exposure to TGD persons, which is beneficial to those who are discovering their own identities.”

According to my father, I was a beautiful “specimen” of a man.

I felt a pull, though. I wanted, no, needed to feel like a woman. Like an addict, I would overconsume then purge. Stealing thongs, dresses, dainty shirts. When I had my own money, hundreds of dollars would flow into Amazon to stem my desire. Then came the shame. That long-strained Christian guilt, knowing in the deepest valleys of my selfhood that something was wrong with me. Then a few days would pass, and I’d dive straight into my closet again. Breast forms, bras, panties, and dresses would adorn my body, and for a few sharp moments, I wouldn’t hate myself.

Then a glance in the mirror. My mannish figure exaggerated by the tight-fitting clothes, and in a blink, the clothes torn from my body, stuffed in a duffel bag, and hidden in the back of my closet. Just as quickly, I find myself under the covers, crying myself to sleep.

Suppress.

There’s a time I think about often. It was like any other night, up way too late, playing video games with friends, but unlike other times, I was wearing women’s clothing, a loose corset, stockings, and a long skirt to be exact. I wasn’t the best at the game, but that specific night, something was different. I felt lighter, more focused, more at home. While I normally found my name populating the bottom of the leaderboard, that night, in my $17 Amazon corset, I was unstoppable, topping nearly every match.

My mind, while still not my own, was at least on loan.

Frequently, I wrack my brain, trying to drum up my childhood thoughts, rifling through my mom’s closet, searching for anything comfortably feminine. Her boots two sizes too big for my pre-pubescent feet, her dresses eating my lanky frame like fog, her panties offering me a sanctuary, a sanctuary I could keep to myself.

I don’t know why I did it, I just did. I felt like I needed to.

I also don’t know why I took those same clothes in a bag to a hidden cove in my neighborhood, quickly shed my boy clothing, and put them on. Like a religious act, or like a form of self-flagellation, what power did it have if I kept my secret hidden in my room? I wanted to feel the sky’s eyes on my skin.

I don’t know why. I just felt like I needed to.

I had an active imagination. Spurned by interest in magic, the mystical, and a wavering belief in God, I would practice spells, attempting to polymorph my masculinizing body into my female counterpart. I would pray to God every single night, begging, pleading to wake up the next morning in a body that loved me instead of poisoning me.

I’m an atheist now.

Instead of being seen, instead of being magically given a body that reflected me, I got to watch the life slowly drain from my eyes and molasses envelop my feet. I lost any connection to myself, to my identity. I thrifted pieces of personality from places that could maintain a semblance of masculinity without making me want to kill myself.

I still got close a couple of times.

Suppress.

I think about my high school sweetheart. A beautiful, thoughtful, intelligent woman. But I couldn’t let her in. I couldn’t admit to her how badly I dreamed of navigating the world like she does.

She left me.

Suppress.

Navigating the shadow is navigating your own biases and projections. What you impose on others is likely something you feel internally. I think about a group of trans women who booked out a hotel I worked at. I couldn’t look at them. Before the event, there was a sensitivity training. The spokeswoman delivering it was taller than me, with a voice as deep as mine. In my mind, in that moment, she was a joke.

I couldn’t be like that. I couldn’t be a freak.

Disgust.

There’s an online document called the Dysphoria Bible. It’s a collection of anecdotes, scientific literature, and wide descriptions of trans existence. The point of the document is to help people who are questioning their gender and help them feel seen and connected. I remember going end-to-end through every page dozens of times, relating to every described feeling.

“Long before I started questioning my gender, I had this idle fantasy where one of my best lady friends would walk up to me and say, ‘Give it up. You’re not fooling anyone,’” the Dysphoria Bible reads.

I still didn’t transition for another two years.

I spent the better part of my adulthood believing everything my family and the media had told me. I was a deviant, I was a perv. I was a freak with a fetish, so that’s why I locked away my manhood and took pleasure in wearing women’s clothing.

To go so far as to try and erase people like me from public life.

Then at home, I could hear the duffel bag calling my name. I felt sick to my stomach. No one could ever love something like me. But then, in came her. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

She was broken, just like me, in fact, maybe worse. I felt like I could be myself around her. Or maybe that was just the alcohol and the pandemic talking. The details are blurry.

The only person I ever alluded to my transness to was the aforementioned sweetheart. Accepting and open, but ignorant of my needs. Until I told her.

I was blunt with her. Open. I opened the duffel bag, like a boiling wound, giving her all she needed to control me. I told her I wanted to be a woman. She told me that I wasn’t one. I told her I wanted to be friends. She told me she wanted more. I told her that I couldn’t be what she wanted. She took things into her own hands. She threatened me. She said she would tell the sweetheart about our intimacy, about my deviancy. She had me however she wanted. She threatened me with the world, using my shame to control...

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