I almost didn’t grow up

My story of how I’m lucky to be here

Content warning: su*cide, medical trauma, SA

In June, as I’m driving into the city to go to my healthcare follow-up, I had time to reflect on my journey. As I’m reflecting, I’m remembering clearly the sequencing of events and my suic*de attempt in high school for the first time. I’ve talked about having memory vaults before. This is where my brain has taken a traumatic memory, locked it up, and makes the key to the vault inaccessible. Then, some event happens that hits a certain emotion and the vault is open and the memory comes tumbling out. This was not that experience. This series of events and emotions were accessible now. The memories and emotions didn't come tumbling out. Previously, some of these events I had remembered as snippets, and some of them I didn’t remember at all. But now, these memories were there and in sequence.

The night before this drive, I had a talk with a good friend about being more visible for trans rights moving forward. Even though I have legitimate fears about being more open, I need to be part of a louder chorus of voices of trans people who speak up. Trans rights, especially those of trans teens and kids, are under attack. It is not OK to have discussions of transgender people centered around the pontifications of cis folks. All discussions of trans people need to be centered on trans people.

Forty-one percent of transgender adults have attempted su*cide. That's not a misprint. I'm sure that many of you have heard the saying that gender affirming care is lifesaving care. I've heard many people who are not trans try to dismiss that statement as hyperbole. It's not hyperbole. I also hear people say that they are for transgender rights, but that care should wait until they are eighteen. Friends, I didn’t have gender affirming care and I attempted ending my life before eighteen. Gender dysphoria was a major root cause behind that attempt. Too many teens and kids won’t make it to eighteen without gender affirming care.

I’m going to walk you through what brought me to attempt su*cide in high school. This is not a light article. We need to normalize discussion of this so that those who do not have the lived experience of being transgender can understand our stories and relate to us. We keep setting records each year for anti-transgender laws being proposed in governments across the United States. Most of these bills, if passed, would release some fresh hell on trans teens and youth. I did not finally find the courage to come out at age fifty so that younger generations can have it worse than I did. Transgender kids deserve to grow up, and it’s only by luck that I am here.

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I grew up with a significant speech impediment that made communication difficult. I also had this fog that started at age eight after a surgery. That surgery was incredibly traumatic and I know that there was a numbness to my life for seven long years. Unlike so many trans women who had horrible issues with puberty, I was so lost and numb that I just wasn’t aware of the changes. While I wasn’t truly OK anywhere, I felt better about myself in choir in high school.

My speech impediment didn’t show up when I sang. By my sophomore year, I had made concert choir. I was a second tenor, which was a tenor part in the typical four part arrangement. I wasn’t particularly that good, but if you were a sophomore and a tenor or bass, it was not competitive to get in unlike for the altos and sopranos. My goodness, this was where I belonged. The numbness of my life was lifting in this place. The choir had a lot more girls and I felt so comfortable here.

Let's advance to junior year. Like every year the choir director tests everyone’s voice range. I go up for my test. The verdict - my voice has shifted and I’m now a baritone. So on a standard four part arrangement I’m going to be a bass. I go up and take a new seat there. It was so different. In so many arrangements, the sopranos have the melody. This means the altos and the tenors are on harmonies. In my mind, the two groups in the choir that were most alike were the altos and tenors. We sat next to each other because we each need to hear the harmonies of the other group. But a bass? That’s a whole separate world. It’s THE masculine part of the choir. NO! NO! NO! THIS CAN’T BE HAPPENING!!! This was the one place in my entire life that I could find some identity that wasn’t completely wrong. I was alto adjacent. Now I’m sitting with the bass section and I swear every other junior or senior bass had facial hair. This cannot be my fate!

Three days after the voice test, I go to Mrs. M., the choir director. I make a plea to her. I need to be put back into the tenors.

Mrs. M: “But your voice has shifted. I’m concerned that if you go back you’re going to do damage to your voice.”

Me: “Why don’t we just try it and see if it works?

Mrs. M: “If you are really set on it, I’m willing to give it a try. But if I hear your voice straining I’m going to move you back.”

I couldn’t believe it. I talked her into it. Thank goodness we didn’t have enough tenors or she would have never agreed! Not only was I a tenor in concert choir, there were also two elite ensemble groups. There was Madrigals. I ended up joining this group my senior year, but it really was not my jam. Then there was show choir where it was more modern and it combined singing and dancing. This encompassed so much joy for me. I’d get to dance! I had not done a lot of dancing at this point in my life, but it gave me a place to be able to do this, and I'd be doing it while singing! So often I’d be paired up with a girl and we’d have to have completely coordinated moves. My goodness this was everything! After the auditions it was announced that I made the group. I was able to feel and be myself so much more here than in any other area of my life, and much more than even in concert choir. Now that I’m in show choir, I’ve locked in that I’m a tenor! Only 16 people made it in, and it’s four people for each of the four parts. She can’t shift me to being a bass now! Show choir performed three times during the year. At the holiday show we had a couple songs. But we had a winter show and a spring show that were not with the other choirs. The show choir did their winter and spring shows with the jazz band. It was a concert for only these elite ensembles. The winter show was in March.

It’s now the day of the March concert and I finally have the ability to perform with the rest of the show choir for our concert. It's likely to be the most authentic I had felt in my life. I had barely avoided straining my voice to be a tenor and gave all of my being to sing and dance. We started working on this show in November. I did not have much parental support at my choir concerts. However, when my oldest brother was in jazz band, my mother went to those concerts. She hadn’t been going to the concert choir concerts, but we were performing at the same concert as the jazz band. I think she’ll come. Maybe for the first time in my life she’ll begin to see her youngest kid as they are.

My dad had done a complete shift. He was a drunk. But my freshman year he got a DUI and at the start of my sophomore year he lost his license and was sentenced to a 28 day hospital inpatient facility to dry out. Well, he did dry out. Once he got dry, he was gone A LOT because he attended AA meetings five or more nights a week so that he wouldn’t backslide. But there was no meeting tonight because he made it a point to not go to a meeting so he could come to the concert.

I have to leave for the concert at 6:15. We live less than two blocks from the high school so I just have to get into the show choir uniform and walk over. My mom gets home from work first. She settles in to her chair in the living room in front of the TV at around 5:00. I ask her if she’s coming to my concert. No. We were huge Chicago Bulls fans and had season tickets. These were Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in 1990. She’s going to watch the Bulls on TV tonight instead. Yep - that is my mother. She’s going to watch a Bulls basketball game on TV instead of going to the concert that her kid had been working on for months. I had been rejected before, but there are no words that could possibly describe the rejection I felt then.

The house I grew up in (there was no satellite dish in the 1990s)

At 5:50, the bus comes to deliver my father home. He walks in and before I can say anything to him, he sits in his chair and declares: “I don’t want to do anything but watch the Bulls tonight.” I’m crushed. Absolutely mother fucking crushed. I worked so hard for this night. I went to bat for myself to the choir director months ago and was at the edges of my voice all year to make damn sure I wouldn’t be confused for being too masculine as I was singing and dancing to these contemporary songs. Now I’m not going to have EVEN ONE PERSON in the audience there to see me. While I was completely crushed, I was not surprised. This played out many times over and was really nothing new. Neither of my parents looked out for me. They had even joked about it. The only person who did was one of my brothers. But he’s now in college and has moved on. Once again, I’m on my fucking own.

I go upstairs and I get dressed. The Bulls must have been on the east coast because when it’s time for me to leave at 6:15, the game is on. I walk right past both my parents and out the front door. I go, and I sing, and I dance. While I’m performing I’m present because I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone take that from me too. But as soon as the performance is over, the pain comes rushing back. I see the other 15 performers from show choir, and they are all visiting with friends and family. But for me, it’s just time for me to leave.

I get home after 9:00. My parents are still in the living room but the game is long over.

Dad: “Oh, hey (Veronica), where were you?”

Me: “At my concert”

 Dad: “What concert?”

Me: “My show choir concert”

 Dad: “SHIT! THAT WAS TONIGHT? WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME!”

Mom: “ART! YOU SAW (her) WALK OUT THE FRONT DOOR IN (her) SHOW CHOIR COSTUME! WHAT DO YOU MEAN WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL YOU?”

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Let me step into a modern lens for a moment. It’s clear that my dad wanted to go to the concert and had a complete brain fart. After not being present for activities, he had been at my previous two concerts. Giving up alcohol, while being incredibly difficult for him and requiring a daily battle, was allowing him to refocus on what was important in life and start to put his efforts there. Also, he never missed another of my concerts or any big events again. But I had no way of knowing it that night. He was only two straight concerts into this new pattern, and I still had many choir concerts with no family members in attendance. Two concerts was by no means enough to be a pattern.

On the other hand, my mom knew exactly what she was doing. She NEVER missed my brother’s jazz band concerts but actively chose watching a game on TV over her kid. There were years of additional alcoholism that she dealt with from my father and I don't think she ever came to terms with it or forgave him. So the thought never occurred to her that perhaps my dad forgot why he was home that Thursday. Back to the ‘90’s.

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I had been looking forward all year to where I might finally be able to show my parents this authentic part of me with my not quite straining high voice. I sang and danced and had this synergy with girls in my class like I had never before and no one came to see me. Now my dad unloads his baggage of forgetting my concert onto me.

It’s yet another thing that I had to process on my own. I had to process on my own waking up from surgery at age 8 and realizing that my body had been altered in a way where it destroyed any dreams of being feminine. In short, when I was younger, I relieved my gender dysphoria at age four and five by discovering how to tuck. People like to say that there are no transgender kids, but I discovered how to tuck on my own because I was fascinated with with the prospect of making these parts of me disappear. After tucking a number of times, one of my testicles didn't come back. It was stuck in my body cavity for years. Eventually, I started having severe pain in my abdomen and the medical team diagnosed me with an undescended testicle. So the surgery put it back into my scrotum and made sure that it stayed there. This made tucking, which had previously brought me relief from what I now know was feelings of gender dysphoria, impossible. It began my seven year fog, and wired my brain to believe that I would never be able to transition.

I was also a victim of SA multiple times as a little kid. There was no one I could turn to in order to help me there either. Now with perspective, I know my brain disassociated and created a lot of memory vaults. There was no way any little kid could process this on their own. My brain disassociated had me get through this in the only way that it could. The pain and emotion was locked away so that I could function.

Having been on my own in processing those two horrific events, I now had to process this night on my own again. I had doubted if I was worthy of being loved before, but that night I had proof that I was truly alone and no one cared about me with no one being there. In the irony of all ironies, BECAUSE I actually found an area of my life where I truly felt alive with show choir, I wasn’t disassociating from the pain of this evening like I did so often in other areas of my life. My life wasn’t what I wanted it to be, I felt it all, and it was too much. No person could possibly take this much emotional anguish. Within five minutes of my father going off on me, I grabbed two butter knives, went to the basement, and attempted suicide by electrocution. I’m only here because the US runs on an electric current level half as strong as the UK’s standard. I can tell you when I was still here after attempting and I ended up with massive ringing in my ears, I cried for what seemed like forever because I just wanted the pain to go away. And of course, no one in the house knew what I had just attempted. I was again processing this by myself. Soon after my numbness started to kick back in again. My brain just began to disassociate to deal with the pain and this is another reason that it took me so long to start putting everything together with my gender identity. My brain had to store these memories separately until I gained the skills to work through them, and that took a long time.

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Why all of a sudden did my brain release all of this information? Do you know the patient health questionnaire form to help medical providers evaluate mental health? The one that asks if in the last two weeks, how often have you felt hopeless and other similar questions? Each question has a number score, zero to three, for each answer. My health care provider gave me a version of this with two different sections of 10 questions each on the day I remembered my attempt. A composite score is somewhere from zero to sixty. Whenever I previously took this type of screening, one of two things would happen. Either I'd lie, because I thought the score would be too high if I didn't lie. The other option was that I’d answer honestly, and the score would be dangerously high, indicating a form or depression was present. On this day, when my memories of my attempted suic*de from high school came back, my total score was an amazingly low three. For the first time in my life, as I was awaiting my eight month gender affirming care follow up beginning HRT and transitioning, I was not depressed. The memories came back because it was finally safe for my brain to release them to me.

Gender affirming care saves lives and trans teens and kids deserve to grow up. Creating safe environments where they can talk openly about their identity and orientation saves lives. I can only imagine if the world would have been receptive to me talking openly at four or five and if I could have found the words to talk about my gender identity. It's obvious, as I discovered tucking to relieve gender dysphoria at such a young age, that I could have expressed who I was if I thought it was safe. Today's kids and teens now have access to the information that I didn't. They have the language to express who they are. There are legions of supportive parents out there and resources for the parents who don’t already have exposure to become supportive. Medical providers have decades of proven techniques to help teens and younger receive safe and effective treatment with a regret rate of less than one percent. For me, the dysphoria caused by my surgery and voice change, with the lack of parental support finally broke me. It took me until I was fifty to have the strength to come out and be myself, and I’m lucky to be here. There are consequences up to and including death for not listening to trans teens and kids and not allowing them to be themselves (see this link to one real impact of these consequences). If you have doubts that transgender youth and teens are who they say they are, please let my experience be your way to hear them so they don’t make a decision like I did. Hear them and join in protecting them from those who are scapegoating them. Hear their voices and amplify them.