Kyla, 18, Frankfurt, Germany (and Los Angeles, CA)

Kyla, 18, Frankfurt, Germany (and Los Angeles, CA)

Kyla

It took me a long time to find the words to express it, but I realized in elementary school that I was different from the other girls my age. I didn’t “fit in”: I was very much a tomboy and abhorred dresses and traditionally feminine clothing. I cut my hair short starting in the third grade. I also preferred to hang out with the boys, but in general, I didn’t have many friends.

I was very uncomfortable with my body growing up. I still am. I wore jackets and jeans constantly, from elementary school until late high school, even in the boiling California summers. But what was worse than my discomfort was not having the language to express why I felt so terrible all the time. Puberty in middle school was a horrible experience. I had so many moments of me standing in the mirror and hating the breasts and hips that reflected back at me. I also dreaded getting my period, and when I did end up getting it, I was devastated. I wondered why I didn’t share the thoughts that ran through the girls' minds on those Family Life videos-videos where the child actors were all ecstatic at finally being a "woman". This feeling of not fitting in, of not relating to traditionally female experiences carried with me most of my childhood and really stunted my ability to form deep relationships. I was too caught up in my self-loathing and anxiety.

I found comfort in masculinity. I have a relatively slim figure-depending on what I wear, strangers often mistake me for a boy, so the highlight of going out for dinner was often the waitress referring to me as Sir (I usually didn’t correct them).

I discovered the guide I needed online. The Internet gave me the language and resources to start exploring my identity when I was around 13. I remember seeing the definition of “transgender”-having a gender that differs from what one is assigned at birth-and feeling sudden relief at having found the reason for years and years of body dysphoria. Even the word “dysphoria”-I learned that through the Internet. In this way, the Internet and social media really gave me the language to understand and describe these negative feelings I had been experiencing as a nonbinary person.

I am an identical twin, and my twin is also nonbinary. I came to terms with my nonbinary gender identity before them, but we never seemed to need to have a conversation about our genders-we just knew that neither of us was cisgender. So technically I didn’t really “express” my gender to my twin, although they were the first person I expressed it to.

Outside of my twin, I have only disclosed my identity to good friends and a handful of acquaintances. All of my experiences have either been positive or neutral, although I am not officially "out"-nobody except for my best friends and twin use my preferred pronouns (they/them).

Expressing my gender identity to friends was terrifying, and it still is. Not only because I was afraid I was a fake, but also because being vulnerable was never an option for me growing up. I learned to keep my emotions and fears inside, and expressing my gender to others meant tearing down the walls I had built up around me. However, I knew that the majority of my friends would be nothing but loving and supportive, and once I had gathered the courage to reveal my thoughts to them, they were exactly that. I’ve received a lot of hugs.

Though I was exhilarated to have found the label “transgender” at the beginning of my freshman year, I quickly became overwhelmed with the implications of it. I knew that my gender was not cisgender, but it took me the entirety of high school to process what kind of gender that was-Male? Agender? Neutrois? I watched a lot of videos pertaining to FTM transgender people and struggled with the idea of being a trans-guy going so far as to read papers on types of top and sex reassignment surgery before settling on nonbinary instead.

What I feared the most during this self-exploration was that maybe I was making it all up. Maybe I was a cisgender girl after all who was just looking for attention. One of the first steps to accepting being nonbinary was realizing that a. my experiences are not made up and b. am I not using them for attention. The reality is, gender-nonconforming people aren’t looking for attention; we don’t get much attention in media or society, to begin with, and if we do, it’s often dehumanizing and violent.

Even after all these years, I’ve been very cautious to permanently label myself. Labels are labels, which means they, like my view of my gender in relation to myself, are continuously evolving. Just recently I reevaluated my gender from agender-what I had previously identified as up until early 2016-to transmasculine. 

Being nonbinary for me just means that I don’t feel like a woman, or as a man. I feel most comfortable in the space between the gender binary, a space where I’m allowed to construct my own ideas of gender and gender expression. That means I feel more masculine than feminine. For many, this is a hard concept to understand.

Being nonbinary also means I will never truly be accepted by society. It means that when a stranger asks me, “Are you a boy or a girl?”, I have to evaluate which option will keep me safest. I have situations where I say “boy”-for example when it’s an older man asking me at a train station- and situations where I say “girl”-when I enter the women’s toilet. I live with the knowledge that I will most likely fight for the rest of the life for my rights and the rights of nonbinary and transgender people like me, and that my needs will not be catered to like they are for cisgender people-in fact, many cisgender will be trying their hardest to ensure my needs are ignored and denied. This is a reality that comes along with being a nonbinary person.

The best way to understand what it means to be nonbinary is to completely step away from what you know about gender and sex and start from there. Once you realize that gender is fluid-that is, that gender has evolved over the thousands upon thousands of years in response to our environment, culture, and society-then it becomes easier to accept the fact that nonbinary people exist, and that many cultures have genders that differ from the Western two-gender system. Describing the nonbinary experience is difficult-it’s like trying to describe how women know that they are not a man and vice versa. This often means nonbinary and transgender people need to “find” the genders that our binary world has erased or denied.

Two major challenges have been being accepted by my loved ones and being my true self in public without being misgendered. The former is possible, but the latter is almost impossible because of the inherent gender binaries that exist in our society. Another challenge is the uncomfortable situations when strangers assume my gender or ask me about my gender. As a rule for my own safety, I lie. Because of this I also don’t speak up to defend myself in public; I haven’t gathered that kind of courage yet. That can make going through the day difficult.

Not being a part of the "binary" really opens your eyes up not only to how strongly we group each other off based on our gender and assigned sex, but also the strict emotional and social roles we are forced to perform.  These systems have been in place for so long that we believe they are inherent in our society. But in reality, many of these ideas aren’t true-we just don’t want to change them, for fear of altering a status quo that reaches back generations.

I’m a very non-confrontational person, so I’m often hesitant to speak up about my opinions or my identity. But I am here, and I want the same as everyone else-to be loved, to be accepted, to be comfortable in my own body, to be able to pee in a bathroom without someone looking at my chest to discern my gender-even if I may not express that in my day to day life.

My wishes-more acceptance of gender-nonconforming and transgender people and the LGBTQ community in general but I also hope I don’t have to become an adult in a world that’s destroyed by war and political and cultural divisions. Unfortunately, many people in lands like Afghanistan or Syria are already living in this world.

I’m scared by the violence and death and hate that has plagued the last decade. We’ve seen huge spikes in (anti-black) racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia. Not to mention radical, hatemongering political people/parties in countries around the world. We as a people need to rise up against these figures and push back-otherwise we’ll just be repeating history.

Besides my hopes for the world, I also have many personal goals. I want to fully transition. I want to be multilingual in German, Japanese, Spanish, Persian, and ASL. I also would love to publish a book or have my art displayed in an exhibit.