Growing up in a small district of Assam, which claims to be a part of pseudo-progressive state, is a circle only just big enough to pass through with your identity as a trans man.
There are many battles you need to fight against — societal, personal, emotional (as well as teenage and hormonal) changes which you often want to just ignore. As a trans person, it was often difficult for me to accept my physical changes after puberty. While exploring the many sides of being trans, I also had to negotiate with gender dysphoria. It was among the most vulnerable phases of life I have had to deal with — knowing, understanding, realizing and accepting something which had already taken away an important portion of my life altogether. Most teenagers my age were busy with learning at school, honing personal skills, and more. I, on the other hand, was busy dealing with the confusion surrounding my identity.
Even while I was struggling to become habituated to my assigned gender, this ‘alternate life’ consumed a lot of my time as a teenager. I was offered two lives, driven on two different roads at the same time, and I was unable to withdraw from either of them. One was a form I was “meant” to live with, while the other was the one I wanted to be in. The latter one I knew was a long and exhausting journey where I would have to mostly rely on myself and my education for day-to-day survival, and also hope for acceptance and support from allies.
But how can you understand the ‘alternate life’ you have been trying to deal with as a closeted trans person? Growing up, your perspective is always linked to your educational values. Without being taught about your identity, it becomes difficult to handle the societal pressure of being on your feet almost all the time in a cisnormative world.
Being a trans person it became a hurdle for me to cooperate with myself in a competitive world where you are in constant battle with your identity and most of the time you dismiss the thought of your identity as “a phase”. You also try to not let it collide with peer pressure, and the pressure to excel in your career.
I was a mediocre student, but to be honest, I never lived up to my expectations in terms of my academics. Getting familiar with being trans, exploring myself and my queerness had a negative result on it. Numerous times I have failed tests. I had to devote my time to studies and I instead kept thinking about what was wrong with me and my body. Why am I so different from all the people of my age? I kept flipping through pages after pages trying to find out. I kept looking for words that would describe me better but I couldn’t find any. If only my education had put my thoughts at ease.
But our education system lacked detailed descriptions of anything beyond the gender binary. It was full of history, geography, literature and science , whereas it had nothing about how sex is different from gender. When it comes to basic education, we always lacked in proper classes or references that talk for gender identities. The consequence of this problem is that cisgender people are unaware and insensitive in dealing with trans people, while for me it led to an immensely tedious journey of self discovery and self acceptance.
As a teenager of 14, I was dealing with the hurdles of anxiety, mixed ideologies, of a society constructed within the gender binary, trying to understand and accept my identity. The graph of my academics fell at many of those exact phases when my identity (directly or indirectly) clashed with my health. However, my education should have been a preliminary step in helping me know about myself and explore a world I was oblivious to for years.
Being brought up in a world of binary gender existence, you are meant to deal with mystifying thoughts and questions constantly at every steps such as: “Why do you wear clothes that are meant for men?” “Why do you have your hair short?” “Why do you play with football other than with dolls?”
If you do not fall into society’s norms, it puts you in a position where you don’t know the right answers to these questions. I did not know why things were tough for me and what I was dealing with, until now. After a span of six years, I won’t say I have stopped being preoccupied with various thoughts, getting demotivated and low on energy many times to deal with being queer. But my journey of exploration to self acceptance has also positively influenced my life, letting me know how being different is beautiful in many ways that we often tend to neglect because of being ignorant most of the time.