We Name Ourselves

Shortly before the Supreme Court published its opinion in U.S. v. Skrmetti—allowing Tennessee’s ban on hormone therapies for transgender youth—I was reading through the personal archives of Bay Area poet and activist Camille Moran. Years ago, I came across a brief essay she had written (for a journal from the early 1990s by and for survivors of psychiatric abuse) titled “Why A Transgendered Woman Calls For Psychiatry’s Destruction.” In thunderous prose, Moran details how in her 1950s childhood “I called myself a girl but the world called me a faggot,” leading psychiatrists to institutionalize her and subject her to “the terror of electroshock“ and other abusive forms of “treatment” then typical for the queer, the neurotic, the different. Moran had “my bones broken, my body drugged and raped. I was not raised as a gender but as a bug of a child to be smashed.” The essay then soars into a defiant scream for self-determination:

“Transsexuals are born into the book of labels. We may be genetic but we are not genetically defective sub-human creatures. By the very nature of our difference, the independence of our alien spirituality, and the passion of the power of our will, we are a threat to the ruling delusions of the mental death profession.

No one has our permission to debate the validity of our existence, to define our reality, to dismiss our pain, and to name us. We name ourselves.

Moran’s papers from the 1990s—essays, poems, zines, notes, and more—detail a lengthy effort to push back against the abuses of mental health patients and pathologization of transsexual people under what was then diagnosed as “gender identity disorder.” As I’ve written about before, the ongoing debates about access to medical transitions are impossible to untangle from the psychiatric state’s history of denying trans people autonomy over our own body until every other route had been tried, up to and including the violent forms of conversion therapy generations of people like Moran endured. This is very different than how trans people and our health care are frequently portrayed, not as acts of self-determination but as inventions of the medical field. Moran’s forceful writings are a balm to that naive conception, re-centering trans people’s own experiences and making explicit the violent terms of our erasure.

“Psychiatric oppression is still very much part of queer history for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender children and youth.,” she testified to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 1995:

“If they survive the ultimate indoctrination of self-hatred, they may still be automatic throwaways, susceptible to suicide and having unsafe sex, and they may have been subjected to some psychiatric drugs that may be immunosuppressant. Any child would be lost in a world where denial of their experience is as wide as the sea. Any young person is confused when living in that space without language to describe what you are in your heart and mind and feelings and dreams is the true sky, and the image of your soul the world wants to force on you is the real delusion.”

In a 1997 essay titled “The Gay Eunuch Society,” Moran describes a meeting with queer youth following that year’s Pride parade. “I am not an educated role model,” she admits, “I have run after pain like a revolving stone. So I wonder what someone like me has to offer young queers that will illuminate the brilliant hope on their beautiful faces and nourish a profound sense of the power of the holiness of their gay existence.”

The first transgender kids I met were at a support group at the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania in the middle of the last decade. By that time, I had reduced my own transness to a daily medication and the occasional inconvenience, enjoying my ability to disappear into basic twentysomething white girlhood. I did not have or really even want any connection to a broader “LGBTQ community” and, as far as I knew, there hardly was one in the rusted streets of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I did not watch Drag Race, I did not enjoy parades, and I found (still find) tabletop role-playing games tedious. But I had interviewed the center’s new director for a local alt weekly and she suggested I contact center organizers who led a twice-weekly support group for families of queer kids, most of whom were some kind of transgender.

My first impression was how fluent they were in vocabulary I had barely learned—not just words like cisgender and nonbinary but demigender, neopronouns, and other topics of fierce debate on Tumblr. It was the oldest I had ever felt. My immediate internal reaction to some of them was an ugly jealousy at the support of their parents, their early access to medical transitions, and their conquest of their natal puberties. It was as if I had brutally carved my life out of misshapen and knotty limestone while they were given rich, malleable clay to mould into any shape they’d like. Having grown up poor and in the shadow of my parents’ addictions (and their paired deaths when I was in high school), I had felt this envy before toward those who grew up rich, well-loved, or even just well-fed.

Sitting and listening to them and their parents, however, the potential of these young people overwhelmed my selfish pangs of regret, bitterness, and envy. Soon, I realized, with my job and my domesticated appearance, why center staff often introduced me to nervous parents of trans kids or sent me to local PFLAG chapters—I represented a future for their kids that was at least halfway stable and not dominated by statistics about homelessness, drugs, and sex work. I would volunteer with the center and help them set up a separate group for “new adults”—college-age trans people struggling with the transition to independence. Newly free from their parents’ legal yoke, most of the older group were just beginning their transitions and fighting to make a life for themselves in a rural rust belt city where graffiti from local KKK chapters was not hard to spot. Unlike the kids with early support, these young people were fighting to find jobs, housing, or any place to sleep that wasn’t a car or the street. I helped the new adults with name changes and cooked them dinners in the center’s backroom kitchen, enjoying the sense of having a purpose and noticing how it silenced the thrum of difference I felt everywhere else.

In the decade since—having soon applied for and received a job in Washington, DC for a national transgender rights advocacy organization—I have met hundreds of transgender children. I have worked with their parents to prep them for sharing their experience with school boards, statehouses, courtrooms, Congress, human rights commissions, and many, many reporters. I have sat with them while their parents told stories of hope and fear in equal measure, wept as they related stories of harassment, alienation, and suicide attempts preceding their access to medical care.

I know it sounds trite, but I remember every one of them. The 10-year-old who wanted to be a supermodel, an astronaut, and president when she grew up. The high school junior already taking college classes in robotics at his local community college. The 14-year-old cheerleader who only looked up from her jewel-cased smartphone to make clear how mortified and bored she was by her mother’s pride in her. The rugged son of a tattooed single mom, Stetson high on his head and eager to show off his first car (a used pickup truck older than he was). The tween at their first pride parade, cheering on shelter dogs in rainbow tutus from the local ASPCA while their grandmother just looked on, confused but trying. The whimsigothic teenager in flowing skirts and hand-drawn Sharpie tattoos, dreaming of fleeing her small town for an art school on the East Coast. The 15-year-old polymath who wanted nothing more than to lead the brass section of her school’s band, who responded to my question about what instrument she played with a proud smile and the word “yes.”

Then there are the ones I only read about in court filings and news reports, reduced to their lowest and most vulnerable moment. The girl in Virginia whose high school teachers left her on the gym bleachers during a mass shooting drill while her classmates were ordered to hide in the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms. The girl in Oklahoma forced to flee the only home she’d ever known after a local parent’s Facebook group became obsessed with stalking and threatening her. The 13-year-old in Kentucky banned from playing on the school field hockey team she started. The 15-year-old Swiftie and class president who became the focus of a police investigation—with officers interviewing her classmates about her body weight and her anatomy—because she committed the crime of making the girls’ volleyball team. The Texas teenager who, after the governor declared his health care a form of abuse, attempted suicide only to have the hospital staff treating him report his family to child services under the governor’s orders. The 14-year-old who died by suicide after a California children’s hospital denied his trans identity in the face of a mental health crisis. Nex Benedict. Gwen Araujo. Kathryn Newhouse. Tay Dior Thomas. Pauly Likens. Nikki Kuhnhausen. Bailey Reeves. Leelah Alcorn.

Many of the transgender kids I had the luck of meeting were, by the fact of having parents not only supportive of their transition but fiercely defensive of the future they deserve, living out the best-case scenario. Pay enough attention to media coverage of transgender kids and you’ll see it’s predominantly white and universally middle-class kids speaking to journalists, or going viral on social media, those whose parents have the time and means to dedicate to school board meetings, statehouse hearings, media interviews, and lawsuits. This is not terribly surprising given what we know about racial inequalities in the American health care system and the increased risks endured by queer youth of color due to poverty and homelessness. A family losing access to health care due to a state ban—as opposed to lacking insurance, ignorant providers, and inability to travel—is enduring a nightmare all the same, but also being pushed off a position of relative privilege.

As bans on hormone therapies swept states, I heard of many families moving and restarting their entire lives—a disastrously expensive venture. Imagine, if you’re a parent, what it would take to find a new home, a new job, new schools, new pediatricians, and new caregiving arrangements for your kids or aging family members. Forget the emotional grief of leaving the only home your kids may have ever known—could you even afford it? And would you do all of this for anything less than essential to your child’s future?

After that 2022 Texas directive raised the prospect of removing these young people from their parents’ custody, a chill went through the Facebook groups, group chats, and advocacy organizations that connect these disparate families across the country. The number of families willing to speak to the media or be featured in online content shrank to near zero, each afraid of what their current or future governor might do. These were families used to sideways glances from other parents, exclusion from their religious communities, and judgment from strangers, teachers, and others who wish they would just punish their child for telling the truth about themselves. But the Texas directive represented a new escalation in their witch hunt, potentially putting a nightmarish tool in the hands of any busybody neighbor or online obsessive. Around that same time, Elon Musk’s purchase and rewiring of Twitter transformed the platform into a command center for hatemongers determined to turn any video or photo featuring a trans person—including children—into mocking content while their ravenously destructive fan bases inundate these individuals with stalking, doxxing, and bomb threats. The end result was pushing more and more trans people away from public advocacy or the kind of storytelling countless poll-testing showed to be persuasive and effective, muting our ability to humanize ourselves in the face of a heavily-funded onslaught of dehumanization. In 2023, twenty states joined Arkansas and Alabama in banning transgender youth from accessing affirming hormone therapies.

Among those families who did speak up about the necessity of their health care in courtrooms and legislators, a similar pattern emerged. I got used to the story about a young kid who defied their gender assignment and exhibited open distress when forced back into it. I had heard the story of the 6-year-old using their nightly prayers with mom to ask God to either transform them into a girl or take them away to Heaven, or the stoic teenager who hoped compulsive exercise and restrictive eating would prevent his periods and breast growth. Then, with a change in name, clothing, pronouns, and eventually access to puberty blockers or hormone treatments, a thriving young person emerged. They made friends, developed hobbies. Their grades even improved.

As I got to know many of these families, it was clear that, for some, the journey wasn’t always that linear, that many still struggled with depression or anxiety or behavioral issues after. But then again so do many teenagers, especially those forced into the bright spotlight of their own difference. Remember Camille Moran: “Any child would be lost in a world where denial of their experience is as wide as the sea.”

Most trans people can tell you that a transition doesn’t solve all your problems, but it can make your problems worth solving. The public discourse about this care—which characterizes it not as an act of self-determination but as basically a suicide prevention strategy—elides that complexity and, in fact, sees it as a vulnerability to exploit. Trans youth especially must show grave distress to justify a transition, but any distress post-transition must be proof you needed something else, as if a vial of testosterone or an estrogen pill could magically undo years or even decades of being raised under a constant barrage of shame and discordance overnight. It’s nearly a literal repetition of the paradox at the heart of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—you have to be crazy to transition, but you can’t transition if you’re crazy.

If you ask groups of cis people in focus groups what comes to mind when they imagine transgender youth, they will name bullying, harassment, discrimination, isolation. Most people do not need to be told that transgender youth lead hard lives. What they don’t have is any conception of a world that wants transgender youth in it, any idea of how a transgender life can be not merely a livable life but a joyous, free one.

To that end, in meeting these transgender young people and their families, I often asked them what they imagined for the future. What do you want to be when you grow up? What passions and ambitions do you want to pursue? Sitting in a Little Rock courtroom back in the fall of 2022, I heard four families with transgender youth take the witness stand and retell many of the same above story, the one of despair, transformation, and hope. What surprised me was how many noted their child had no conception of their future before they came out, had no idea what their adulthood would look like without the vice grip of shame the state was trying to encode into law. After transitioning, they realized their dreams were not swirling hallucinations in the night. Suddenly, their dreams were real and immediate, as inspiring as music but as concrete as their own hands.

As M. Gessen notes, the Supreme Court majority’s opinion in Skrmetti, like its opinion in Dobbs, seems intent to elide the people at the core of its consequences:

“I ask you to imagine that teenager, the one who has to leave Tennessee or this country. The one who has to go through ‘natal’ puberty when everything about it feels wrong. The one who spends those hours in front of the mirror not trying to make their hair look good but trying to hide body parts that make them hate themselves. The one who adjusts, stuffing their desire, their shame and their hope into some dark closet of the mind.”

I don’t have to imagine that teenager because I’ve met her. I’ve met her and many more of the thousands upon thousands like her. And with each I meet, I imagine those I never will, those lost in that dark closet or drowning in other people’s expectations, buried not just under new laws but under dispossession, alienation, fear—their own or their parents’. I am furious with the world that silences them.

Back in 1997, Camille Moran sits in a circle with that group of queer youth. “I am fierce with pride at the strength of their tenderness, astonished at the intelligence, perception, compassion, acceptance, articulation, and determination of these youth.” Moran survived the kinds of institutionalization and violent conversion efforts that many powerful people—Clarence Thomas, Hilary Cass, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr—are plainly nostalgic for. Waiting for the Court’s opinion, I fed on Moran’s writing and strength of its vulnerability, imagined myself, then 9, sitting in the circle with her:

“I give them fragments, shattered like glass and glued together, and pieces of dreams. And from this continuum of desperation, they take my dot of history and turn it into a part of the whole of gay history, of their history…They will scatter into the night, and I will go home and light a candle and pray to someone I do not know to keep the 10,000 threats from falling on their heads. I am afraid for them, but I am sure of them.”

I will have much more to say about the Court’s decision. I expect to be advocating in the shadow of the Court’s decision for the rest of my life. But for now, I am outraged that more of my fellow adults in this world don’t share my sense of indebtedness to these young people, that those with infinitely more power than me can dodge responsibility for their equality and their future, that even otherwise intelligent and liberally-minded people can fail to see how deeply they’re submerged in the presumption of trans people’s nonexistence.

I am eternally grateful for the trust of these families, their willingness to stack their strength against a world trying to crush them. It is impossible for me to see these young people as abstractions, as talking points, as issues to debate. I remember their homes, their faces, their dreams. I remember the names they gave themselves.