I grew up in a very devout Christian family. The type of family that went to church every Sunday. The type of family that seemed to be the picture-perfect American Family. I was homeschooled and sheltered from the world until the 8th grade. I received the highest grades, and was quiet and always stayed out of trouble. I grew up with the same mentality that my parents told me to think, that all gay people are sinners and deserve to burn in Hell.
When I was in the 10th grade, 15 years old, my best friend, at the time, started to avoid me at school and on the bus. I noticed she had started spending a lot of time with another girl from our grade and they had started hugging each other bye when they left for different classes. When I confronted her about her strange behavior she started crying and saying, "I know how you feel about this. I know that you hate people like this. I just didn't want to lose my best friend." As she sat there crying I couldn't help but think, "What kind of Christian am I if my best friend is scared to talk to me because of my religious beliefs? How can I be a loving and kind Christian when my best friend is scared I will shun her for loving someone else?"
After that encounter, and assuring her that I would never try to hurt her for loving someone, I decided to become more open-minded about LGBT people. I had finally realized that queer people are indeed people too and they deserved to be treated with love and respect just like everyone else, after all, it was not my place to judge them. I started talking to more queer people about their sexuality and began to realize that I too had crushes on girls. I just had never realized that feeling as being a crush.
Once I began to think that I might be a lesbian, I began doing extensive research on the LGBTQ community. I read articles and stories and even got on some chat groups to learn everything I could about what it meant to be queer. Over the summer I turned 16 and actually started talking to a girl online, named Amanda, whom I had a romantic relationship with. Amanda, however, turned out to be a catfish, a painful lesson for a lonely 16-year-old me who was trying to figure out her identity.
During my 11th grade year, I saw a girl walk past me in the halls. As she passed, I noticed that she had scars on her arms. Self-harm scars. The same type of scars that I had on my arms as well. To this day I can't tell you why, maybe because I know what it feels like to be alone and didn't want anyone else to feel that way, but I decided to message her on facebook. We became instant friends and it quickly turned into more than a friendship. On December 12, 2012, I asked this girl to by my girlfriend and received my first kiss. We were fairly open with our relationship at school, despite often being unfairly punished by a teacher, who hated the idea of two girls dating. We were still very happy.
A few months later, however, my father, Roger, found a note from my girlfriend in my room. When I got home from school that he flew into a rage, throwing things at me, screaming at me and smacking me around. He screamed at me that I would never be a boy, at the time I was confused about this as I didn't want to be a boy I had just fallen in love with another girl. He dragged me down to the basement where he threw a bible as hard as he could at my face. He told me to open it up to Leviticus 18 and read the passage out loud, making me start again each time I stopped reading because I was crying. When I finished, he told me that I was disgusting, an abomination, a sinner, and if I choose to continue sinning I was going to spend all of eternity burning in Hell.
After this, he dragged me into the car and forced me to tell him where my girlfriend lived. When we got there he barged into their house to tell her parents the sin we were committing and to keep us away from each other. I do not know what exactly was said, as I was made to stay in the truck, but I do know that he was seething when he came back out and muttering how they all deserved to burn in hell for not believing him.
I was put on lockdown after this, only able to go to school, work, and church. My parents forced me to break up with my girlfriend and even went as far as to go to the school to try to make them switch our classes and keep us from talking to each other in the halls.
During this time, I continued researching the queer community, especially since Roger had put the idea of being a boy in my mind. I eventually came across the term transgender, which is a term for someone who identifies as a different gender than the one they were assigned to at birth. This meant that there were people out there who were born in female bodies and told their entire lives that they were female, but in fact, they had male brains. The more stories about transgender men that I read the more convinced I became that I was indeed a boy. All the different things I did as a kid suddenly started making sense. Finally, I had a term to explain the way I felt, and I wasn't alone. Also during this time, I was kept on suicide watch at school and attempted 2 times.
During the spring of 2013, just a few months after finding that note in my bedroom, my mother, Rhena, bought me new clothes. Extremely girly clothes, the type of clothes that I would never wear. She forced me to try them on for her and because the shirt hung off the shoulder she saw the scars on my shoulders that I had been hiding for months. She grabbed my arm tightly and screamed at me, "What is this? Did you do this?" When it became apparent that I had, she grabbed a wooden spoon and told me, "You want something that will hurt, I'll give you something that will hurt." She beat me until I fell into a ball on the floor crying.
When Roger got home they made me turn over my phone, and when they went through it they discovered a text message where I had told my friend that my parents were forcing me to be someone I wasn't and that I was still in love with the girl I had dated. When they discovered this, Roger grabbed a leather belt and said, "I'm not going to have a faggot as a daughter" and beat me until I blacked out.
A month later they had shipped me off from North Carolina and all I had ever known to Georgia, where my grandmother lived. I spent my senior year living with my grandmother in a new town, forced to go to church 4 times a week, attending all the services and choir, bell choir, volunteering, and anything else I could do at the church. I started dressing in the clothes they picked out for me and wearing make up every single day, trying my best to be the person they wanted me to be. The only way for me to attempt this though was to spend every day struggling with an Eating Disorder, self-harm, high on over the counter pills, and I tried to commit suicide 3 more times.
When I graduated high school, my grandmother kicked me out of her house knowing that I was dating another girl in town. So I started rooming with a cousin of mine, Tamera, and I told her that I had a girlfriend. She shocked me by laughing and saying "I knew it!" when I told her. She then explained that when my parents had suddenly sent me to live in Georgia they refused to tell any of the other family why they were making me move, only telling them that I had gotten into some bad things in North Carolina that I needed to get away from. A lot of my family simply assumed that meant that I had started doing a lot of drugs and moved to get sober, but some of my family guessed that the real reason they had made me move was because I was gay.
After this I decided to stop hiding who I am and I came out as a Transgender man, and started dressing and cutting my hair how I wanted to.
Because I lived in a different state and rarely saw my parents in person, I decided to talk to Rhena over the phone, to try to repair my relationship with my family.
At Christmas time in 2015 however, my parents came to Georgia to visit. When they saw that I was indeed transitioning from male to female, Roger refused to acknowledge me and Rhena pulled me to the side. She told me that I was sinning and I needed to choose a different path if I wanted to stay with this family. When I asked her if she was making me choose between being myself or being a part of the family, she said "No. I just can't believe that you would choose to do this and walk away from the family. "
Since then I have medically started transitioning by beginning HRT, hormone replacement therapy, which means I inject myself with a shot of testosterone every week. I have legally changed my entire name rejecting the female name that had plagued me my whole life and the last name of the family that had rejected me.
My family may have disowned me for being Queer, but I have never been happier in my life than when I was finally able to be myself. Now I may not have a biological family or even a legal family, but I have joined a much stronger family, the entire queer community.
Never again will I have to pretend to be someone I'm not and I will always stand up against hate towards the LGBTQ community and educate people on what it means to be LGBTQ.
The biggest thing I believe that people forget isn't all the terminology or what gender partner someone has in their bed or what genitalia people have in their pants. LGBTQ people are people, who have feelings, and deserve to be treated with kindness and respect just like any other human being. We have overcome a lot to be here. I have over come a lot to be here, and to be able to tell my story.
