What Are Y All Hoping For - 1585 Words

â€Å"What are y’all hoping for?† inquires a woman of her newly pregnant friend. â€Å"Oh,† replies the expecting mother, â€Å"we don’t care, we will love our child no matter what gender they are!† The child is born in a celebration of pink and leads a fairly normal life for the first few years, but now the toddler is in school and realizes that it is more enjoyable to play sports and have short hair. The tomboy reaches middle school and begins the horrific changes of puberty, praying in vain every night to keep these changes from happening. A secret burdens the child’s heart like the sky weighs down on Atlas. This troubled teen does not feel like the young woman puberty has created in the mirror. Years pass, and the discomfort only grows. This†¦show more content†¦In the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community (LGBT+) labels often have various definitions depending on the understanding and identity of the individual. For this reason, it is simplest to refer to the medical definition for transgender: The experience of a transgender person can travel along a variety of extensive, winding paths especially dependent on when the person begins to tr ansition. Since young children don’t have large physical variances between genders, the changes are less about hormones and body parts, and more involved with gendered social constructs such as hair styles, clothing, hobbies, and how the child is socialized to act in public. Personally, I wasn’t aware of my own experience with being transgender until recently. Since I am past the point of puberty, though, my transition from female to male will entail both physical and biological changes. After puberty it is common for transgender individuals, such as myself, to begin having feelings of gender dysphoria. The best way I have devised to describe gender dysphoria is by explaining that when I look in a mirror in the morning, I won’t be wearing makeup, or have my hair done, but I still don’t recognize my own face; it’s as though a mask is concealing myself. In the past, I only felt like I could identify with being a girl when I wore very feminine outfits or heavy m akeup, but even then I didn’t feel like my true self; I felt like a character on a stage portrayed by a