Illustration by Gluekit
Editor’s Note: The names in this story have been altered.
Young and in love Jenny and Ryan moved from the East Coast to a small town in the midwest where they quickly married and gave birth to a baby girl, Maxine. As their story played out, Ryan struggled with addiction and stints in rehab, while Jenny fought to keep them afloat—holding a job and working towards a degree. But despite her efforts, Jenny was already learning how to be a single parent when after only two years following the birth of Maxine, Jenny’s husband committed suicide.
This moment, like many to follow, shaped so much of Maxine’s life. After her father’s passing, Maxine and her mother moved back to the East Coast where she spent most of her childhood in daycare or with her grandparents, while her mother continued to work and further her education in order to provide for Maxine. As the years passed and her family built a supportive environment to counter the loss of her father, Maxine faced a conflict in her own identity: not knowing how to handle the fact that she was born with the anatomy of the gender with which she did not identify. Maxine was a boy trapped in a girl’s body.
Over the years, it was in his grandparents’ restaurant where Max started to figure out his identity. “It’s funny, because when the bar was closed, I would go in there and be mesmerized by the jukebox. I have one memory I won’t forget: they had Nirvana’s 1991 Nevermind album cover in there,” he explains. “I think that was the first time I ever realized, I felt like I was missing something.”
Throughout middle school Max was considered a tomboy by his peers, but it was then that he started to realize he wasn’t interested in boys, but was instead attracted to girls. Stuck in a limbo trying to figure out what those feelings meant and what to do about them, Max actively began to change his outward appearance to try and combat what he was feeling inside.
“By the time I was a freshman in high school, I entered this hyper-feminized phase, where I thought if I tried to dress more like a girl and act like a girl, the feelings of wanting to be a boy would just go away,” he explains. “Clearly that never happened, it just made me more depressed.” Confused, and feeling alone, Max’s depression continued to manifest without help until he attempted suicide in the latter days of high school.
Max then had to face his gender identity and depression head on, and after spending time in several psychiatric hospitals, he came out to his mom. But despite his family’s support after discussing his sexual preference, Max still faced a depression he couldn’t find the root of. He struggled to understand why coming out didn’t make him feel okay. “I remember my mom telling me ‘Why cant you just be happy? We accept you for being a lesbian. It’s okay,’” he explains. “But I never felt ‘okay.’”
To help his depression, doctors prescribed various medications that simply masked Max’s feelings leaving much of his life caught in a blur. Max’s struggle with who he was, along with his ADHD, seriously crippled his academic performance. But in his constant struggle to just feel ‘okay,’ Max slowly began dressing how he wanted: in men’s clothing.
“I remember this kid in my history class telling me, if I was myself in his family they would ‘burn me alive with oil.’ That was the moment I realized how different many people are raised and wished I was normal.” Even after Max’s steps towards accepting his own identity, he then met college applications with meager SAT scores, an obvious result of so many outside influences. Not a single school accepted him.
Instead of giving up, Max worked hard at his community college and earned a 4.0—enough to transfer to a school in Hawaii on an academic scholarship. It was there, far away from painful memories and the imposition of his life to this point that Max was given the time and environment to learn more about himself.
“The lifestyle is completely different there, which gave me that opportunity. After a year in Hawaii, I decided to move back home,” he explains. Max then transferred to a school on the East Coast. “I majored in Psychology and did a minor in Sexualities Studies. It wasn’t until I took certain courses, that I developed, I guess, a language for how I felt all along.”
That language helped Max make his decision to transition to male and finally achieve the gender he was always aligned with. But of course telling people wasn’t easy; Max expected pushback, but quickly came to the realization that his transition wasn’t a choice that only affected him, it impacted the lives of those that were a part of his before his transition.
“Early on, I told my ex girlfriend [Ann] how I felt. [Ann] was not supportive at all; she told me it was disgusting and wrong,” Max remembers. As a lesbian, Ann was concerned with how she would then identify after his transition and Max first saw how his decision affected others. This made every confession to those close to him both terrifying but even more so—necessary. “I told a couple friends one by one,” Max says, reminded of the anxiety it caused, anticipating a reaction similar to Ann’s each time. “When I didn’t really have anyone I remember just listening to Pearl Jam for hours. Pearl Jam for me was the band that made me feel something.”
But Max’s news wasn’t only met with frustration and animosity. However hard it was to swallow, his family understood why he needed to make this choice. “It was very hard to tell my mom about my transition. I didn’t want to upset her; she had been through enough with me at this point,” he remembers. “She actually took it very well, I think she knew.” Max then told his younger siblings, his two brothers and sister, who responded: “We would rather have you as our brother than sister.”
Still, for some it was hard to digest. “My stepfather’s biggest concern was if I was going to psychologically mess up my siblings. But I’ve learned he is just projecting his own issues with it on to them.” This attitude was something his mother had predicted, and advised Max to ignore.
“When I first told my mom about me transitioning, she told me that there were going to be people who would never accept me, but if this is what I needed in order to live my life to the fullest then, ‘Fuck them.’”
So he did just that. With the difficulty of telling his closest allies behind him, Max began the first steps of his transition, a process that is both lengthy and requires a ton of extremely detailed planning.
“When I first decided to transition to male, I made sure I had a binder in order to hide my chest,” he explains, highlighting how small the details involved were, and how so much of his process was extremely thorough. “You just don’t wake up one morning and decide you would like to start taking hormones. For myself, I had to go to therapy for 3 months.” There Max discussed his history to determine whether or not hormones would make the most sense for him. “Before hormones, you have to live as the opposite sex [from the one assigned to you at birth] for a year or more. When you think about that, it’s hard. During this time I had to file for a legal name change, new birth certificate, social security card, and drivers license.”
It was in this logistical part of the process that Max felt discrimination from his birth-state’s laws, “I actually cannot change my gender on my birth certificate even though every piece of identification I have, the gender marker is male.” Max had to accept the outdated, and ignorant laws but he didn’t allow them to dampen his journey.
“After therapy, hormones are usually the next step. My voice deepened—dramatically. Sometimes you get facial hair, or if you are like myself, after over a year and a half on hormones I barely have any.”
Facial hair-growth aside, one of the hardest parts of pre-surgery wasn’t what you’d expect. Max found that one of the things so many of us take for granted actually riddled him with the most anxiety: using public restrooms. “Going into the men’s bathroom I felt like I didn’t belong there—I felt like if a guy saw my feet facing the wrong way they would beat me up or something.”
When it was finally time to go under the knife, Max was more than prepared. Having a nurse for a mother helped make the recovery smooth. Finally, he achieved something he had prepared for his whole life and it was what he needed all along. At last, he to start feeling ‘okay’. Still, Max knows better than anyone in his life how much time he still has left in his journey.
“Prior to surgery it was hard for my mom to use male pronouns, but since, she has done much better,” he remarks on reactions to his surgery. “There was no real change with how my friends reacted. But I felt more confident, it was really liberating. I was so excited not to go topless but just to be able to wear a tank-top, it’s the little things.”
Now, several months on the other side of his surgery, Max is one step closer to becoming the man he wants to be. “Growing up, I didn’t have any real father figures that I could look up to and learn from,” he says. “I had no guidelines on how to be a man or even a good respectable man for that matter. I feel like I am still learning how.”
Throughout Max’s transition he’s met full support from his grandmother on his biological father’s side. “She actually met my girlfriend over the summer and it was probably one of my best memories—being accepted as her grandson and being able to have my girlfriend there with me.”
Believing above all else throughout his journey that: “Everything happens for a reason,” Max has lived through plenty of reasons to finally be the person he’s always wanted to be: comfortable in his own skin.
