She tugs at the skirt uncomfortably. “Why must I wear this polyester prison?”
I laugh.
“It’s tradition,” Mia says with overwhelming authority. “You know that, Kelly—you’ve read the Hillcrest Cheerleading Handbook and Bylaws.”
“Every night before bed!” Kelly says, saluting our captain.
Here’s my least favorite tradition: wearing our cheerleading outfits on the first day of school. And game day. And Flag Day and Arbor Day and . . . you get the picture.
It’s the standard-issue cheerleading outfit, complete with an aggressively pleated skirt (short but long enough not to scandalize) and a sleeveless top with HILLCREST stitched across the chest. We have five different cheer outfits, all with varying patterns in our school colors: black, silver, and the brightest red that the eye can register. These getups are crazy stiff and starchy. No kidding, the instructions on the care tag reads: Machine wash cold. Dry by pounding against a rock until the rock breaks.
“Girls!” Mia yells into a megaphone. “Get your ass to class!”
Finally, into the air-conditioning.
PONY, 8:51 A.M.
After ten minutes of confused wandering, I find my locker. This school is supersize. Four separate corridors—that look exactly the same—and some twisty hallways that lead you nowhere. My last school, about a hundred miles away, was probably half this size.
I enter the combination, the locker opens, and—for the first time this morning—I take a deep breath. I unload the binders out of my backpack, then pull up my schedule on my phone.
I’m zooming in on the school map when a kid knocks into me with brute force—he must have been running. His body hits me like a brick wall, but I manage to stay on my feet. My phone goes sliding across the floor, stopping against the trash can.
Instead of bolting, the kid runs over and fetches my phone, wiping it on his jeans as he returns. Before heading off, he hands me the phone back and says, “Sorry, man.”
Man.
Growing up, I wanted to play outside in rock piles with the boys, get dirty, and collect baseball cards. I hated dresses and refused to wear them. Girls made me nervous. I was called a tomboy, which I secretly liked. I pretended that my name was Tom Boy.
Adults mistook me for a boy often. I liked it, but my mom did not. It would embarrass the hell out of her. “She’s a girl,” my mom would say, and they would apologize, and I would want to disappear. When she wasn’t around, I didn’t correct anyone. I went along with it.
Then I hit puberty, and my world crumbled. I knew I was a boy, but I kept turning more into a girl. My chest, my face, my voice. My body was revolting against me and developing without my consent. I didn’t understand my feelings and had no words to describe them. I couldn’t muster the courage to talk to anyone. Not even my sister.
Fast-forward to 2015, the summer before I started eighth grade. I was growing more depressed and uncomfortable by the day. I’d tried to be a girl and do girl things, but it never felt right. It felt like pretending. Or acting.
That all changed the day the Vanity Fair issue introducing Caitlyn Jenner to the world dropped. Jenner—gold-medal-winning reality-TV star, married to Kris Kardashian—came out as transgender. Her very public transition from male to female changed my life. I had heard about transgender people (kind of—Texas is behind), but I didn’t fully understand what it meant to be transgender.
My parents wouldn’t stop talking about Caitlyn at dinner that night. They were leveled. To them, it was inconceivable that a famous Great Olympian, the very definition of a Man, would “turn” into a woman. “He was on the damn Wheaties box!” Dad said.
My sister, only two years older than me but already an old soul, got pissed and tried to educate them about pronouns—they kept using him and his for Caitlyn—but it didn’t work. She eventually got frustrated at my parents’ stubbornness and stomped off to her room. The idea of transitioning gender didn’t compute in my parents’ old-fashioned brains. To them, it made no sense.
But to me, it made perfect sense. I ran up to my room after dinner and googled articles and blogs about transgender topics until I got to the end of the internet. Everything clicked into place. After so many confusing years, I finally knew the reason for my discomfort. I was transgender. I could change, and I was no longer alone. It was unbelievably exciting and absolutely terrifying.
Maybe I’d always known deep down, I just hadn’t been ready to seriously think about transitioning until Caitlyn Jenner. She’s not the perfect trans icon—I can’t unsee her in that red Make America Great Again ball cap—but her level of fame and bravery for coming out under intense scrutiny raised awareness for trans people and cleared the way for more visibility.
When it comes to my feelings, I’m a slow-moving ship. I carried my secret for almost two years before gathering the courage to come out to my friends and family. Two weeks into my sophomore year, I announced my transition in a short email that I wrote and rewrote for a month. Not exactly a Vanity Fair–worthy reveal, but big news for me.
When I finally hit Send on the email revealing my truth, I had a full-blown panic attack. I felt vulnerable, exposed, with no control over what people would think of me. I cocooned myself into my bedspread and tried to clear my head.
My sister was the first to respond, in a very sweet text: OMG! YOU ARE MY HERO. I love u, Brother.
Brother.
My parents didn’t greet me as warmly when they came into my room later that night. My mom sat on the edge of the bed, her back stiff. “How long have you felt this way?” she asked.
“All my life,” I answered. I kept my head down, trying to avoid eye contact with Dad as he paced the room.
“Did something happen to you when you were little?” he asked, trying to find blame.
“No,” I said.
“What if you change your mind, dear?” Mom asked.
“I won’t.”
Then my dad laughed, this horrible venomous laugh that still makes me sick when I think of it. I wanted to say more—I always do. When it comes to trying to explain myself, it’s a tangled mess.
My gut had been right: it’d been better to send an email and let my parents have a little time to process my transition—new name, pronouns, and bathroom—without me there. If I had sat them down, I’m not sure I could have handled their first reaction. And we hugged when they left my room.
I don’t remember sleeping that night. I was too busy tossing and turning, regretting, and imagining all my friends reading the email and laughing at me. Calling each other and laughing together. Forwarding the email to the entire school, and everyone laughing at once. It was awful.
I finally drifted off around five a.m. and woke up to ten emails with lots of heart emojis. Friends and family started calling, and even a few cards arrived in my mailbox (old-school). I was shocked by the response; I didn’t think there would be so much support and love. It made everything easier. I felt loved by the people around me, no matter what.
Cue the movie-makeover montage: Throwing out girl clothes, buying boy clothes. New socks, new underwear. Tons of push-ups. Visiting a doctor. Meeting friends at the LGBTQIA Center. More push-ups. Starting puberty blocking medication until I’m old enough to take testosterone. Even more push-ups.