What am I? My brain tells me I am a boy but my body tells me I am a girl. I’ve known since I was seven that I was a boy. I didn’t ask to be this way. Why can’t I be like other kids? Why can’t I be normal? Society tells me I am a girl. I have learned through painful struggles that the truth of who I am is not what physical gender I am, but what my brain tells me who I am. Society keeps telling me I’m wrong.
I am a human being who just wants to be happy, nothing more and nothing less. My brain is my inner self, reality and truth. I want to bring my brain’s gender identity and my physical gender together.
The Republican controlled state I live in won’t let me forget my physical gender. The politicians made laws that prevent me from joining my human body and my inner identity into a single gender. They want me to stay as my birth gender and continue my mental suffering and pain until I’m 18 years old. Hopefully, I can survive that long? They don’t care that this internal struggle is making me suicidal.
To protect my inner being, I’ve become detached from reality, so I am not trapped in its negativity. This is my world anytime I leave my parent’s house. I only feel safe at home. I only leave our home when I go to school. The few friends I have only know a little about the internal struggles and depression I go through on a daily basis, but they don’t feel my pain.
Why are these Christian politicians making me continue this deadly daily struggle in my brain. Some days I win, other days I just barely hang in there. One of these days, I will probably kill myself to end this painful inner battle? Does Jesus understand who I am? If so, why doesn’t he help me win these internal and external struggles?
All I want is to be happy and enjoy this world that my parent’s keep telling me is out there. At school and elsewhere, people give me weird stares because of the way I dress to hide my breasts. At school, I don’t use the bathrooms. These people don’t know me, so why do they hate me? Why is the only love I see and feel is from my parents? If I survive until I am 18, I will move to California where I will be allowed to begin my medical transition into a male body.
Currently, only 23 states allow transgender youths to undergo age-appropriate gender affirming medical treatments. Twenty states are preventing transgender youths from accessing medically necessary and safe health care that is backed by decades of research and supported by every major medical association representing over 1.3 million US doctors (hrc.org).
I hope I have been able to give you readers some insight into what transgender youths struggle with every day of their lives. I left out the discrimination, physical, personal and social media harassment they suffer through on a daily basis.
If I remember correctly from my studies, there was a psychologist by the name John Money who did this nature vs nurture experiment on a child: David Reimer.
Quick recap: David was born along with his brother (twins), had problems with (possibly underdeveloped phallus), parents took David to a doctor and doctor botched the procedure. John Money stepped in, and used this botched procedure as a “experiment” to change and alter David’s sex to a female and called her Brenda. Money wanted to demonstrate that if sex can be operationally changed, the subject will eventually behave congruent with their sex and express that as their gender identity: This experiment failed as Brenda (David) felt different and wanted to play and do boy things and sports and all. Brenda was confused about her gender expression and eventually discovered why she felt that way: different.
To sum it up, nature decides the biological operative and it’s imperative as its priority over nuture.
The understandings and works of intersex based on this research is still relevant today and should be read by many to those who might feel lost or confused about their sex and gender identity.
For reference, I hold a degree in psychology: one of the fields of my studies.
RIP, David!!
Tom Laurent expressed his view by inviting us to be in the mind of a child who’s brain feels oppositional to their birth gender. The anguish and the risk of self harm as a result made evident. It is astonishing to me that manipulative politicians use kids as a way to get votes! Any philosophy, political party, or religion that attacks people for their sexual identity is heading down a dark corridor. America, especially now, needs to be a beacon of light on a planet at mortal risk and champion human rights.
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