Shawn (he/they)

Gender today is feeling kind of ridiculous because it’s hot. I walked outside and I wanted to just be topless.

I went to a couple events recently and was like oh I’ll wear my binder and decided against it because it’s too hot, I can’t breathe. I hate it, I just wanna be topless! When it’s cooler out there’s certain things you can wear to camouflage, in the summer it’s just all out there so you get what you get. And you might not like what you get. But it’s here, so. 

The beginning of my gender exploration looked very much like trying to figure out my style and what I wanted to look like. It was a bit rough because that was the time that I was mainly paying a lot of attention to what people wanted, what they cared about, what they deemed acceptable. Well, partially, because I was also wearing bowties. And who was wearing bowties unless you were like, going to the club. So in that sense, it wasn’t conforming, but just not trying to be too out there. Even though I don’t know what that would have meant for me at that time. Because I was definitely one of those that you looked at like, oh no yeah, that’s a gay. That’s a whole lesbian right there.

I’ve always leaned toward more masculine things. Give me all the men’s things. I didn’t want nobody’s Barbie dolls. I had action figures, I remember specifically it was Max Steel at the time, I had like five of those. I loved Legos. Even my mom said she knew early that I was going to be gay or whatever, since I was like four years old. So I definitely had support, which I’m sure made a huge difference. But neither one of us knew where we were gonna end up. So it was me starting off as like, SuperLesbian. And then for a while I had my alter ego, Shawn. Which I didn’t know was the real me fighting to get out. So I was using that with people I could, who I felt safe using that with. I always stress, even before transitioning, the importance of names. I hate when names are not capitalized, when they’re not pronounced correctly. A name is important because it belongs to that person, and when you’re transitioning you get to choose a name, and there’s power in that. There’s power in a name.

And then social media came around. And at first I didn’t see enough representation of transness and blackness mixed. It was transness and very heavily white. Like ridiculously white. And ridiculously skinny. And that was not me, I was more heavyset, so that’s not what I looked like and I figured oh, well I can’t fit into that, so I guess we’re not gonna do that. Until the representation came, and I was like…fuck that, I’m just gonna do it. If it’s gonna make me comfortable, we’re just gonna do it.

When I was in high school, freshman year, I started going to a group called GLOBE (Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered). And there were people from all over the spectrum there. There was one person specifically, who has since passed away. And that was probably the first person I knew who transitioned, and I was like oh, this is easier than I thought? More accessible than I thought? Like this can be a possibility for me? Is that even for me? I think so, it might be, let’s try it out. So I started socially transitioning, going by Shawn in those spaces, and wearing more stuff that felt more like me, deepening my voice at times (before T). I started T in 2022. Before that, I probably thought about it for at least a decade. I had heard of Callen Lorde, and I made an appointment, which was actually really easy. I was a little apprehensive because I knew that in order to get HRT, sometimes people have to go through a lot of hoops to get psychological evals and stuff like that. And so I was discouraged knowing that might be the process. But I didn’t have to do any of that. I spoke to the doctor, he was like what do YOU want to do? What do you want to be, what do you want to look like, are you looking to do shots, gels, whatever. I was like, okay cool man! I felt like a kid in a candy store. It was as easy as just having a conversation and being able to make that choice for myself. Someone knowledgeable asking me what the hell I want. At a place that was built for people like me to go.

And that was another thing I was apprehensive about, the shots. And every week I cringe. But it just speaks to the commitment of, this is who I want to be, and if this is what it takes to be that person, I’m gonna do it. And I’m making that commitment every week I decide to step back up. Power up.