From Ignorance to Trans Acceptance

In another world I might have had my first trans friend in my late 20’s. I have thought off and on of writing this post for a couple of years now but quite honestly it does not put me in a positive light and every time I contemplated writing this story, I found something else to concentrate on. It was writing about my memories of the Transformers fandom that finally pushed me over the hurdle to write this.

In the mid to late 90’s I had a friend group bound by our love of Transformers. These were people who had started out as pen pals and evolved into friends that I emailed daily, called, and even traveled to visit a few times. If you had asked me then, I would have anticipated we would be friends the rest of our lives. In a way I can’t explain, I felt a level of being somehow seen and understood in a way that I can’t explain. I’ve struggled with making new friends so much of my life but in that case it just worked for some inexplicable reason.

I’m not going to go into a lot more depth about the peop[e involved for their own privacy. I suspect in the unlikely chance they would ever stumble over this essay they would recognize themselves already. But we hit a bump in the road that was 99% my own immaturity possibly with a little helping of bottled up rage from my own closeted life. Not for the last time in my life I felt left out and instead of saying that to the people involved, I burned my bridges spectacularly.

Within about a year of having severed ties, I heard from friends that we still had in common then that one of those friends had come out as trans. And all these years later I feel guilty that on hearing the news I said that I was glad that I had cut ties because it was just too weird for me. Despite being deeply in the closet myself, I still had friends in my life who had come out as gay. And not understanding what it really meant to be trans I said to the friend who told me the news that I did not understand why they needed to transition instead of just being gay. I have no idea that any of what I said ever made it back to them but I still feel very ignorant for having said it to at all.

In the years that followed, I’d run across random people in the world who were trans. I would eventually have friends who were trans. After coming to know trans people, some briefly and others as friends, the ignorance started to melt away. The initial feelings of discomfort simply faded with time. And this was still before I had come out as queer myself.

It’s not even that I would claim deep understanding of what it must feel like to be a trans person. Basic empathy alone should be enough, but the shared queer experience should certainly provide an inside track. Part of why I’m writing this is to simply say that if you’re open to it, you can grow beyond that initial ignorant level of discomfort. I wish it had happened in my case much longer ago. I don’t have any deep secret to share, just get to know people you don’t “understand.”

I find it fascinating how frequently people in my life turned out to be some flavor of the LGBTQ+ going back to friends I made as a toddler. It does make me think there’s some sort of internal recognition even when no one is flashing any rainbows or telling you their life story. And it makes me wonder if part of that long ago connection wasn’t somehow at the root of the inexplicable ease I had connecting with them.

Considering the volume of queer friends that were part of my life all these years I’m not lamenting the loss as anything like “maybe I’d have come out sooner.” That was an internal journey that although helped by people I knew was deeper than that. I just regret that I didn’t work harder to save a friendship that would have undoubtedly sped up my journey from ignorance to trans acceptance.

I wrote this essay for two reasons. The first is to show that we can all, if willing, learn to accept people for themselves, in whatever form that takes. I regret that my first reaction was what it was but I’m glad that I was never so closed off that I was unwilling to open my mind and heart to experiences other than my own. People can change if they are open to it.

And the second reason I’m writing this is as an apology. Although unlikely, if the people involved ever stumble across this essay I’m sorry that the only way I knew to handle feeling excluded was to blow it all up. Your friendship was worth talking it out but I didn’t know how then.