I struggle too with many men and their inability to recognize their privilege and not make others feel responsible for their insecurities. Growing up in a household where I was abused daily, primarily by men, does not help me in feeling comfortable with or fond of the gender, let alone being a member of it. Honestly, I struggle with being a man, knowing what damage men can cause. Truth is, I try to love myself but really have a hard time being sympathetic toward myself. They see a confident, funny, and slightly mopey man who presumably has not had to work as hard as they have for anything. They don't see that I am a man who has done a ton of self-work that has allowed me to transition, stay alive, and be present despite the trauma. They don't see the past that leaves invisible scars. When people see me they only see the fact that I am a white, passing male. Most people aren't the kind of survivor I am. I can't seem to figure out how to interact with the world because I am a transgender man who grew up in a severely abusive household. It turns out nobody wants to hear boys cry, just for different reasons.Įvery day now I struggle with myself. How does my abusive past still affect my relationships? And why did it feel necessary to bury much of my past when I encountered transgender and queer people who guilted me for possessing male privilege, even though I am so much more than that one facet of myself? That second part was one of the biggest surprises I encountered when I finally escaped my awful home life into what I thought was the safe haven of queer and trans spaces. I talked about working full-time while in eighth grade, the 13-year-old skater boy I secretly dated and had phone sex with in middle school, how I was thrown into lockers and made fun of for being fat in high school, the first girl I fell in love with, the sexual assault I encountered, what South Carolina was really like, how my grandmother used to buy drugs from the people who once threw me into lockers, details of the assault that pushed me to finally run away, how I would snort Xanax and take shots of vodka to start my day when I lived with my parents, the things I did when I ran away from home for survival, when I started using meth my senior year, my art high school that saved my life, the punk house I lived in, the summer I spent in Atlantic City, the first time I felt like a man as an adult, and how I got to Asheville, where I recovered and met her.Īfter talking to my girlfriend, I felt clear on a lot, but two questions remained. I'd spared most everyone the details until now. With my girlfriend sitting beside me on the two-hour drive to the airport, I suddenly felt the rest of the story come spilling out. I visited my teenage haunts a few weeks ago for my 29th birthday. Today, I live and work in Brooklyn after doing activist organizing for years in North Carolina. After a particularly brutal physical assault at 16, I felt my only option was to run away from home.Īs a homeless youth, I came to embrace my identity as a queer, and later in life, as a trans man. Nothing improved, and our living situation only became worse my brothers followed in my father's abusive footsteps. He progressively became more violent and controlling. Plus now my parents, my siblings, my cat, and I were suddenly crammed into a hotel room in Myrtle Beach, S.C.įor the next five years, my father was around a lot. I knew enough by 10 years old not to say anything to my family about this. I was left in a female body unsure of why I couldn't stop staring at girls and thinking about kissing them. That first time I'd come out to him as transgender - even though I didn't know the word for it then - he'd shut me down, then humiliated me for coming out. Years before and right around the time I was coming to terms with the fact that I was queer, I'd tried to tell him I was really a boy. He had become involved at first to score cocaine for himself and my mother, but the situation progressed to the point that it seemed he needed to leave and take the whole family with him. My father, it seemed, had gotten in too deep with a small-time Italian Mafia gang. A few months before my 11th birthday, out of the blue, my parents, three siblings, and I had to up and move from New Jersey to South Carolina. I've thought a lot about when the exact point in my childhood was that life became unmanageable.
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