Last week I introduced our June series Stories of Pride, announcing that this week I would be bringing to you my friend Kylie’s story of transitioning into a woman.
Kylie points out every trans experience is different and how the people in a trans person’s life handles their transition is also not one size fits all.
She says, “I know people close to me who cried themselves to sleep as children wishing they’d been born differently, people who knew for certain who they wanted to be as teens.”
But for Kylie, the realization of who she was came later in life.
“I was the most repressed person in the world, nothing hit me until my mid to late 30s. I never liked the way I felt when I looked in the mirror, I loathed wearing suits to work, but I had no idea why. Even in 2016, when I experienced the euphoria of publicly dressing femme for an event and realized I was more comfortable in femme clothing, I didn’t realize that it was because I was trans,” Kylie remembers, adding, “It still took me years to start using “she” and “her” and “Kylie.”
Coming Out
Kylie was raised in a very Christian household. Her mother became a Christian at a very young age, her faith growing stronger every year, while her father came to know the Lord much later in life and after living, by his own admission, a life not always very well acquainted with the straight and narrow.
Given this context, coming out to her family was not an easy task for Kylie.
She explains, “The most shocking thing to me was being fully rejected by my parents. My coworkers were way more supportive than I expected. Other family members like my grandmother and my sister were nothing but wonderful. Some friends gradually faded away, others grew closer.”
Throughout the emotional upheaval of transitioning, Kylie had her wife by her side until one day she said she realized her transitioning had turned her into a vastly changed person.
“My wife and I worked through a lot and eventually divorced, more because I grew into such a wildly different person over time than because of my transition. My kids were always and remain absolutely awesome,” Kylie says.
Knowing she was really a woman inside, was different from actually living her life as a woman every day and Kylie says there were things she had to learn. She says the first time she came out as publicly femme was at work—an experience that was both euphoric and simultaneously anxiety inducing for Kylie.
“Not only was I intensely terrified of everything, fully breaking into a sweat if I so much as went into a clothing store and looked at scarves and being half-convinced that every truck I crossed the street in front of was going to gun it and run me down, but the first place I came out and presented femme publicly after my first time was work. I was learning and developing my sense of style and stumbling through all of these changes with an audience of dozens and I was an absolute mess. The euphoria of the experience fortunately carried me through a lot of discomfort and uncertainty, and after a couple years I was able to transfer to a new location and get a fresh start once I figured myself out a little more,” Kylie says.
Being authentic
Kylie says she thinks the reason it took her so long to truly see and understand herself came from growing up without a lack of openly queer influence and support.
“I think part of why it took me so long to discover myself was that I grew up in a place and time where I had literally no visible, out queer people to experience or connect to,” Kylie says, though she points out that doesn’t mean the queer weren’t there.
She explains, “There’s this great statistic about how the percentage of left-handed people tripled between 1900 and 1960, and it really parallels public trans existence. It’s not that more people were born left-handed, it’s that they eventually stopped beating left-handedness out of kids in schools. In some of those ways, things are better now than they’ve been for most of the last hundred years. But it’s also become politically expedient in America to make trans people a target for eradication, and we have to deal with constant, increasing legal and social pressure to deny our healthcare, remove our housing and employment protections, and erase us from public existence.”
When it comes to erasure, Kylie is quick to highlight that trans people have always existed, and no people group in history has managed to stamp them out.
“As long as humanity has existed, trans people have existed. We were in Egypt 3,000 years ago, in ancient Greece, in medieval Europe, in Mesopotamia. There’s about three million of us in the United States. We struggle every day, often cut off from support, from families or homes or jobs or even safe places to pee. We can’t be suppressed and we’ll never be erased. When someone discovers how bright and brilliant life can be, she’ll fight a hundred times harder for that life. We deserve the right to flourish. We deserve the right to live,” Kylie defends.
She says the road to transition is tough and at times has been lonely, but through it she has found something more valuable than money can buy or emotional holes blackmailed love can fill—her true sense of self and the confidence to live it authentically. She describes her life after transitioning as being an infinite world of difference from the alien-feeling one she left behind.
“I never realized what it could be like to know myself, love myself, care about myself until I found my path. The first thirty-plus years of my life feel like they’re behind this wall of fog, like I wasn’t even there, and now I have this exuberance, this excitement for life that’s brought me so many things. I have so much love in my life, and I have so much more to give when it comes to my partners, my friends, my coworkers, my community,” Kylie says.
Offering Advice
Kylie says she knows opening the door to transitioning can very well be one of the most terrifying planks of wood someone may ever stare down, but she says choosing to pry that door open and walk through it will produce rewards untold for someone struggling to live life as the wrong gender.
“It will change your world. You will be just as surprised by the people who scorn and abandon you as you will be by the people who show up to love and support you. But no matter what happens, it is worth it. I lost a lot of things along the way, but I’ve gained so much, not just friends and loved ones, but the vibrant experience of feeling fully alive, excited every day, knowing what it is to really smile, finally feeling truly present in my own life. Everyone deserves that and it’s worth any cost,” Kylie says.