Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out

How can I explain myself to someone normal? I’m hard to explain. Usually I don’t like to use labels, but if I did, I would say I was gender queer, gender neutral, or simply queer. Intersex is another way I can identify myself. Intersex means that I’m both male and female. It means I’m neither male nor female; I’m a whole different gender, a third gender, so to speak, part of the transgender umbrella.

Intersex people can be identified a number of ways: by their genitalia, by secondary sex characteristics, or by chromosomes. They can be physically both male and female. Or they can externally look like one sex but internally be another sex.

My birth certificate says I’m female. I guess I looked female when I was born. I thought you follow whatever’s on your birth certificate. But maybe that isn’t always true.

Everyone always said I was weird, so that’s how I considered myself. That’s ’cause I was called a freak in middle school. And weird. A weird freak!

I was taller and broader than most girls. I looked like a girl — but not exactly like a girl. I acted like a boy, but I wasn’t a boy. When people became more sexual, around eighth grade, everyone assumed I was gay or lesbian.

I want people to use the pronouns them and they when referring to me because I consider myself both male and female. Since most people don’t understand that, I just tell them to use he. For years I was she, so it’s time to switch. I don’t like being a girl. I gave it a run. It didn’t work.

This chapter refers to Nat as them or they.

I never wanted to be a pretty girl, or even a pretty girl with a touch of boy. I thought of myself as just a kid. I’d sleep, eat breakfast, and go to school, draw something on the chalkboard, go back home, eat, sleep, and repeat. I never thought, Oh, I’m pretty today, or Oh, I want to look like a boy today. I don’t recall anything like that.

I had an image in my head about how my body’s supposed to look. I wanted to look androgynous, in between, as if you can’t tell that I have male or female genitalia. It’s a nice image. When people say I look male or female, it messes up my head.

I was born in New York City. My mom is Italian and French, and my dad is German, some other European nationality, and some indigenous tribe in Chile. But both are from Chile. At home, we speak English and Spanish.

According to my parents, it took four years to have me because they didn’t really like each other. They were fighting a lot. They said that those four years were living hell. My mom was forced to marry my father by her mother, my grandmother. My grandmother met my father, thought he was a good, decent guy, and said, “Oh, you should meet my daughter and marry her.” They married, spent four years in hell, and then they had me. A year later, they had my brother, Jova. I think he’s straight because he’s totally homophobic.

Even though my dad worked, my mom complained that he didn’t do anything. I don’t know what he does to this day. Me and my father don’t talk that much. He has worked the same job forever. My mom used to work, but after she had me, she stopped.

My parents told me that I didn’t speak until I was seven. As a kid, I didn’t speak at all. Most of the time, I just pointed. I started making sounds when I was around six or five. My guess is it was because the two languages confused me. I was going to a school where everyone spoke English. My dad said we had to speak English at home, not only to improve me but also to improve my parents’ English.

They loved speaking English. The problem was my grandmother never learned the language. One moment they spoke English; the next moment they had to speak Spanish.

Before preschool I did everything in my house. I was always alone. Even with my brother living in the same house, in the same room, I was a solitary kid. I used my imagination a lot. I thought of my toys as a way to see what I was thinking. Let’s say I had a movie in my head and wanted to see it visually. I guess when you’re a kid you need to see things visually. You need to know it’s real. Like, to pretend two knights fighting, I’d use two dolls or two action figures to enact what I had imagined. But I wasn’t comfortable doing that in front of people. I needed to be alone to do that.

I didn’t like preschool, but I felt good about being five. Five is my favorite number because it reminds me of the time when I wasn’t forced to think of myself as a girl or a boy. I was neutral. I didn’t have to explain myself. I wasn’t depressed. I never got into fights and I never had arguments with my family. I could go into my room and play with my toys and no one bothered me. Is it normal for a kid to do that? I don’t know.

There’s a major difference between being in your room playing with your toys and being in a room full of kids and playing with your toys. In preschool, like, if I had a toy, other kids might try to take it away from me. For me, that was an invasion of my privacy.

I had short hair, and my mom dressed me in shirts and pants. When I think about myself back then, I looked neutral. Sometimes I had a sweater with a horse on it. I don’t remember wearing pink or bows in my hair — maybe I did when I was a baby, but that doesn’t matter.

Then, later on, when they started separating kids according to sex, that really started to bug me. I got in trouble a lot. One time, when I was six, I was playing basketball with the guys in the school yard. We were in two teams, the shirts versus the skins. I was in the skins. So when all the guys took their shirts off, I took my shirt off too. I didn’t think anything of it. One of the recess guards pulled me away and yelled at me. I didn’t know what happened. By the end of the school day, my teacher was talking to my mother. My mother dragged me all the way back to our apartment, all the while saying mean things to me. I think she hit me twice. I just remember her screaming at me, and she said it in Spanish, which I personally believe hurts even more than when it is said in English.

“¿Por qué haces esto a mí?” (Why do you do this to me?) “No hacer cosas estúpidas.” (Don’t do stupid things.) “La gente va a pensar que tu eres rara.” (People will think you are weird.)

I felt terrible. Then my dad came home, and obviously my mom told him, because he screamed at me too. All that just because I took my shirt off? I didn’t know I shouldn’t!

I guess when you’re born a girl people assume you know that you’re a girl. Period! My parents bought me Barbie dolls and my brother action figures. I liked them both — I really did. One side of me wanted the Barbies, but the other side wanted the action figures. Because I couldn’t play with action figures, I took off the heads of my Barbie dolls. I pulled them apart. I liked them both, and they forced me to one side, like, I had to only play with dolls.

I never talked about my feelings, even when I was a kid. It’s not that I didn’t trust my family. It’s just I didn’t feel comfortable talking to them about anything. It was a gut feeling. I mean, I’d say “hi” to my mom, and I’d say, “I love you,” because that’s what she expected to hear. I respected her. She’s a nice woman. We had some tough times together that I’ll tell you about, but she’s not completely bad. There are times when I mean it when I say, “I love you,” and there are times when I say it because she wants to hear it.

At this point in Nat’s life, they were referred to as she. Their family thought that once they began preschool, they would start speaking. But they didn’t. From kindergarten to second grade, Nat was in special ed.

Special ed. was nice because there were just eight kids in the class. I was the only girl. Everyone was there for a reason. One kid didn’t think fast. Another had temper tantrums. I had problems connecting with people because I had a speech problem, I couldn’t exactly express how I felt. I knew what I wanted to say, but because I lacked the vocabulary, I couldn’t give a complete message. People would brush me away and say I was being silly.

Bathrooms became a big issue for me. First of all, they weren’t the cleanest places in the world. Also, I just assumed you can go into any bathroom. But the teachers told me I had to go to the girls’ bathroom. If I went into the boys’ bathroom by accident, the teacher would pull me out. I didn’t understand. All the bathrooms looked the same to me. So I was, like, “You know what? I’m not going to any bathroom because that’s too confusing.” I would literally hold whatever I had for the whole day until I went home.

I developed a urinary problem that lasted till fifth grade. I didn’t wet my bed; I wet my pants in school. If I was embarrassed, if I felt I wasn’t understood, or if I was sad, I’d wet my pants. Then I’d be even more embarrassed, misunderstood, and sad. If I did it early I would have to go through the entire day with wet pants. I tried to hide it, but people weren’t that stupid. It’s embarrassing to admit this.

In third grade, I was put in a regular classroom, but in the same school. I went from classes with eight kids to classes with about thirty. All of a sudden, I was forced to wear a skirt and panty hose. I hated it. Panty hose! I hated it completely. I liked to run around, and I’d fall and rip my panty hose. My mom would get mad because she had to pay for new ones.

My hair grew long, and my mother pulled it tight into a ponytail. That hurt so much, I felt like my head was stretching.

I felt weird because I still couldn’t express myself. In my head, I didn’t feel like a girl; I felt more like a boy. But I didn’t identify myself as a boy, either. I started reading lots of books about stuff considered androgynous or hermaphroditic, and I looked at a lot of pictures. I learned that there are people who look like both sexes but are not both sexes. They’re another gender — a third gender. You know how during the Renaissance the portraits seem androgynous? I was attracted to that.

Sex and human anatomy were not something talked about in my traditional, Roman Catholic family. When I was around twelve or thirteen, my mom gave me hints, like, “A woman has an egg.” I thought, What’s that? What’s the point of that? Why is everyone so obsessed with this? So I thought I had better find out. I didn’t want to talk about it with friends because you don’t know who’s going to be a tattletale. And the last thing I wanted to be was in trouble. I looked it up in my dad’s encyclopedia and saw the egg and the sperm, and back and forth. I needed to know more, so I went to the library. I wouldn’t go straight to the books about sex because a thirteen-year-old looking at those kinds of books, asking for those kinds of books, might make the librarian look at me a little suspicious. When I finally found out what sex was about, I said to myself, Okay, that’s like, whatever.

Girls were becoming problematic for me. They were so girly. And they were so gossipy. They talked about things I never understood. It’s not like I was stupid, I just wasn’t interested. Clothes. Making fun of boys. Stuff about TV shows or the newest toys. They wanted to make a secret girls’ club, and I’m, like, “What the hell is this?” I never got into it.

Also, if you do one bad thing to a girl, and she has a group, the whole group will give you the cold shoulder and treat you like crap for God knows how long.

I tried to make friends with them, but little things hurt me. Like, once we went on a trip and a girl promised to be my partner. I don’t want to say her name, but this girl said she’d be my friend and we’d be friends forever. At the last minute she decided to partner with someone else. She left me, just like that. This happened a bunch of times.

The girls called me weird because I didn’t get the stuff they talked about. I knew I was smarter than they were, but when they gossiped or talked about girly stuff, I’d say, “What are you talking about? That’s stupid!” I’d say to them.

I said, “That’s because you don’t talk about educational stuff. You talk about sex and some other crap. You don’t even speak English well.”

I guess I was a little too outspoken, especially since I was the one with the speech problem. That must have hurt her because her clique gave me the cold shoulder afterward.

Although Nat was confident of their intellectual capabilities, they continued to have speech problems and could not express themself clearly. People began to think Nat was slow. They weren’t.

Nat was physically stronger than the other girls. But because they were considered female, and because in Nat’s world, females were stereotyped as weak, they did not have the opportunity to show how strong they were. Basically, society would not let Nat be Nat.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. By the fifth grade, I thought, You know what? I’m graduating to middle school and will never see you people again. Middle school was in a new building. A new school! A new environment! I couldn’t wait to be rid of those girls.

If elementary school was about making fun of boys, middle school was about being attracted to boys. To make matters worse, half the people in my new school were the very ones I hated in elementary school. Crap! That group? Three more years with them? Crap!

My mother said, “It’s a new school and a new year. Leave everything behind you. You’re there to be educated.” I took her advice and I tried. I really tried hard. I thought my life would become better if I just studied and stayed away from the girls, but it actually became worse.

Sexual stuff was starting to happen. Girls would blow kisses to guys and say, “Oh, you’re so cute,” this and that. Whatever. And guys would say, “Oh, you’re so pretty.”

I was sitting there thinking, I don’t understand any of this. I felt left out too, because no one ever said that to me. I didn’t feel exactly pretty or attractive. My mom said I was pretty, but I’m her kid. Parents always find their kids beautiful. But I didn’t look like most girls. I looked like something else. I went through a lot of teasing because of this. Most girls my age are slim and have curves. Not me.

Everyone said I wasn’t fat, but compared to the other girls, I would say I was fat. The other girls were really, really skinny. I called them sticks. That’s how skinny they were.

From first to sixth grade, my mom chose all my clothes. Once I reached middle school, I wanted to pick my own clothes. “I know how to take care of myself,” I told her. “Everyone is choosing their own clothes. As long as I’m not showing any skin, like any slut out there, I think I can do it.” She had to agree. We lived in a neighborhood where there were a lot of slutty-type girls. I don’t think they were actual sluts, but that’s the way they dressed.

I mostly wore neutral clothes, like a shirt and gray pants. I always kept a sweater on. Even if it was eighty degrees outside, I would keep my sweater on all day. I didn’t like to show my body. I didn’t like the way I looked. People said I looked physically weird, and I believed them.

I never looked at myself in the mirror. The moment I looked in the mirror, I would get depressed for a month. That’s how extreme it was.

My mom wouldn’t let me cut my hair, even though I hated the way it looked. It got longer and longer, so I put it up in a bun.

I liked school for the education but I didn’t like the social atmosphere. I took art and music. I love those types of things. And I loved to read. But being with other kids, studying with other kids, interacting with kids my own age? I didn’t like that. I didn’t know how to interact with people, and that was a problem.

I did manage to have one group of friends — three guys and a girl. The girl became my friend last because I didn’t want to hang out with females. But she seemed nice, and she was tomboyish, so okay, I was cool with it.

The three guys were, like, outcasts, nerdy people. You have your cool kids and you have the nerds. I interacted with the nerds mostly. I sat next to one of the guys in math class. During a test, I didn’t know an answer, and he helped me.

I know, that’s cheating, but it was very nice of him. We started talking, and he introduced me to the two other guys. Then once, during study hour, there were no seats except for one next to this girl. So I sat down. She was a nerd girl too, because she was drawing cartoons and stuff. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hated all girls, even though in my experiences most of them weren’t great. We started talking, and I thought she’s not that bad. We’re still in contact. It’s really ironic because I no longer see the guys.

Until late middle school, me and my brother shared a room. My dad said I needed my privacy. I never asked for privacy. “I don’t need privacy,” I told him. “I’m good for having someone to share a bedroom with.” But my dad insisted, and that isolated me more. By seventh and eighth grade, I was really angry. I went from “quiet” to “pissed off.”

Around this time, I began to grow breasts. They wouldn’t be considered breasts in the normal sense; it was more like fat. You know how when fat guys have . . .

Nat holds their hands up as if they’re holding two large melons.

I started to notice that my body was changing. But I wasn’t developing like girls. When I tried to compare myself to boys, I wasn’t like them, either. So where the hell should I go? I had a lot of trouble losing weight. I tried to lose weight for years and never lost a pound. I don’t want to sound like a victim, or whatever, but I constantly asked myself, “What am I?”

LaGuardia High School is a specialized school. It’s famous for music and art, and it’s just across the street from Lincoln Center. To give a general idea of the school, you know the movie Fame? Fame is based on LaGuardia. To get in, you have to take a test and do an audition. I think I’m smart, but I’m a terrible test taker. I auditioned for both music and art, but only got into art. I was doing fantasy art, abstract drawings.

At first I was pretty happy there. I had finally gotten rid of those awful middle-school girls. It was, like, “Good-bye I’m never going to see you again!” I tried to wear pretty shirts and stuff. I didn’t wear a dress, but I had nice pants, jeans. I tried to make my mom happy and just give “girl” a try. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t comfortable with this, so I went back to wearing neutral clothing — and back to feeling confused.

I wanted to study music too and thought, Hey, I got in for art — I’ll figure out how to get into the music part later. I told the music-school director that I played the violin and wanted to take classes. I played the violin, but I started at twelve, instead of the typical five, six, or seven. I said, “If I can’t play violin, put me in any beginner instrumental class.” Because I majored in art, the director told me that was impossible.

Every day I went to the office and asked to be put in a music class. I did that for a whole year. By my sophomore year, the director said, “Oh, you’re that person again? We’ll just give you it.” I went to a winds class and took tenor saxophone. It wasn’t the violin but, hey, it was a start.

I was getting 90s in winds and decided to push it a little further. I talked to my band teachers and asked about a teacher for strings. They recommended Dr. Washington, a very tough teacher. The tough teachers are the best.

She was the only strings teacher who asked me to audition. When I auditioned, I made a few mistakes, but I tried my best. She said, “I’ll put you in my orchestra.” So I was in her orchestra and her strings class. I was in Orchestra 6 and worked my way up to Orchestra 7, the second best orchestra in the school.

That was hard because I was taking both art and music classes. My school days doubled. I didn’t mind the long hours and hard work, but I was not comfortable with the student body. High school is a tough time when it comes to teasing, bullying.

“Even in an art school?” I ask. One would think that music and art students would be more open-minded.

I know — that’s what I say. You would think that they would understand me ’cause art people are supposed to be open. But everyone was very competitive. Everyone was against each other, trying to get their art displayed in the gallery. Some people would write that off as competition. I saw it as bullying. And in the music classes, to tell you the truth, I didn’t get a lot of respect. Most kids started playing early. They took lessons with private teachers. My family couldn’t afford that. One student violinist told me, “I’ve been playing for eight or nine years.”

Everything was getting really sexual in high school. Kids were saying, “Oh, having sex is great. I feel like having sex.” And I’m, like, I don’t feel anything. I was attracted to some people but not to the point where I would want to go to bed with them. Sex is still not high on my list.

Not only did the talk become sexual, but also girls were dressing in more revealing clothes. Even the guys tried to reveal more of their bodies. And I became more and more uncomfortable. I thought of myself as a mix of feminine and masculine, leaning more toward the masculine side. I said to myself, I think of myself as a guy. But I don’t identify as a boy completely. So how in the world can I explain this? It was confusing. It was confusing to say I’m neither gender.

I didn’t talk to my parents about it because I knew they would never understand. Everybody is used to two sexes. I was already called a freak, and I didn’t want to risk more. I started to learn about gay stuff, on my own. One time in my neighborhood, I saw one guy give another guy a kiss. What was that? It was so awesome, but I didn’t know the name for it. That’s when I learned more about gay stuff or LGBTQ stuff.

In my high school, we took special health classes to show us how our bodies were changing during puberty. I said to myself, This is not how my body is changing. Like, when a girl gets her period, that’s supposed to come when she’s around thirteen, fourteen. Right? Mine came when I was seventeen, and only once or twice. Also, I couldn’t lose weight. That’s when my mom took me to a series of endocrinologists to see what was going on.

I went to five different endocrinologists, three females and two males. The first doctor, a woman, checked my blood and gave me a physical examination. She gave me some kind of medication, but it didn’t work out, so we went to a second endocrinologist. She recommended a sonogram. To take one, I had to drink a lot of water. It was painful. She checked my ovaries and couldn’t figure out what was going on. They looked like ovaries, but they had an unusual white lining around them. She thought it might be testosterone.

The third doctor, male, gave me another sonogram. He said that I had PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). PCOS means that during my development in the womb, it wasn’t clear whether I wanted testes or ovaries. That’s how I understand it, but maybe a doctor will give you a better explanation. This third doctor said that I was a whole different gender. That diagnosis made perfect sense to me. In fact, it made me happy and relieved.

But it also created problems with my mother. After we left the doctor’s office, she went into denial mode and said, “Oh that’s a bunch of crap. You know how doctors are. They say this just to make themselves look smart.”

The fourth doctor said I might have ovatestes — that’s in between ovaries and testes.

The fifth one took all the information from the other doctors and said she agreed with PCOS, the third doctor. She said my ovaries didn’t act like ovaries. I was making more testosterone than estrogen. Males and females both have testosterone, but females only have a small amount of testosterone. As an assigned female, I was making way too much testosterone. She assumed I was a girl. She assumed I wanted to be a girl. So she gave me medication to bring down the testosterone down and boost up my estrogen.

Did Nat want this?

When the doctors confirmed that I was intersex, I thought, Wow, I’m that whole other gender! It proved what I had been feeling all along. I was not only emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually both sexes; I was physically both sexes too. This is who I am.

In my sophomore year, I tried going to a GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) meeting. It turned out to be mostly a hook-up scene. I thought the Gay-Straight Alliance would be gay people and straight people trying to understand each other. No. It was mostly gay people and people who say they’re bisexual talking about sex. I saw it as complete bullshit. I was disappointed. I held my anger inside and pretended I was okay about school.

Meanwhile, my grandma forced us to go church every Sunday. I’m not saying I didn’t like church, but if I didn’t feel like going, why should I go? Not that I don’t believe in God. But if there is a God, maybe I was supposed to be born this way. There has to be a reason. But what is it?

Nat was unable to come up with a reason that satisfied society or the church.

I felt that I was bringing bad energy to what people consider a holy place. So I stopped going to church.

During this period, I tried to be more open. People say high school is when you really discover yourself. I said to myself, Let me give it a try. I explained to people that I was a third gender. When I tried, most people thought that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Or they thought of me as a joke. So I thought there was no point talking about this.

I began seeing a social worker my sophomore year. His name was John. He was a very nice guy. I explained how I felt, and he listened to me. I think it was hard for him to understand. To me, being a third gender makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t make sense to other people.

Around my sophomore year, I bumped into one of my old middle-school friends. She wasn’t actually a friend; I knew her because we sat next to each other in math class and she lived in my neighborhood. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, who I also knew, and she wanted to talk about it to me. She said I was a nice person to talk to because I was, like, nonbiased.

At that time, everyone saw me as a girl, and she did too. In a weird way, I understand both girls and guys — as much as I don’t want to admit it. Anyway, she started to get into the sexual stuff. That didn’t bother me. I thought, She’s just a teenager; she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

According to her, she was bisexual. One time she decided to kiss me. I thought, she’s a human being and she just wanted some kind of physical affection. I was trying to be a friend. I didn’t feel anything. I was just helping out a friend.

For some reason, she decided to tell her ex-boyfriend about the kiss. Then her ex-boyfriend decided to tell one of his friends. His friends had an Xbox. He went on a chat room and told people what he heard. One of the people in the chat room was my brother. Instead of going directly to me about it, my brother went directly to my parents.

That kiss didn’t mean anything to me. I never saw it as a big deal. It was just kissing. I didn’t want sex — that was the last thing I wanted. In a simple sense, it was a person helping another person through physical affection. That’s how I viewed it, but other people viewed it as something different. They saw Girl Kissing Girl!

My parents called me into their room and said “We heard about this. Is it true?”

I automatically lied ’cause I knew they wouldn’t approve. “That’s a lie! People make shit up.”

Then I called the girl, and I asked why she thought it was okay to talk about this. I asked her to please lie for me because I knew how my parents were. Then I called everyone who knew about this: her ex-boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend’s friends, my brother, and my brother’s friend. Eleven people. Nobody would lie for me. Here were people who said they were my friends but wouldn’t lie for me.

My mom made me come to her room and stand in the corner. Then she brought each person in to tell her what happened. I had to watch and listen. As each one told her what he heard, I tried not to cry. I thought that was the strong thing to do. I had to hear this story eleven times. I was never given the chance to speak. My parents always said that they were my support system. But they didn’t support me at all.

Finally, my mom said that what I did was wrong, that girls weren’t supposed to kiss girls. I said, “You see what I don’t see? I don’t see myself as a girl.”

As punishment, my computer and my cell phone were taken away. I had a strict curfew. When I finished school, I had to be home a half hour later. They thought the books I bought influenced how I acted, so they took them away from me.

I felt terrible. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t feel that anyone understood me. I started to physically hurt myself. I started to cut. I heard that lots of people do this and it wasn’t a big deal, so I tried to do even more. I started to burn myself.

I was always depressed, but by this point I got even more depressed. I stopped going to school. My brother and I weren’t communicating. He was always home. I was always home. We stayed in separate rooms. My brother was fighting with my parents all the time. I guess you can say he had anger issues. One of his therapists called Child Services. They came to the house every two weeks to check if we were eating well and this and that. According to this social worker, I was suffering from emotional neglect and my brother was suffering from educational neglect. It’s a funny way to say it, but that’s how they said it.

My mom wasn’t very happy about this. When they came over and checked everything, she thought they treated her like a criminal, that she was not treating her kids well. She said, “You must think I’m a bad mother.” I personally don’t remember how we responded to that.

I thought, Why am I depressed? I have everything good. I have a family. I have food. I have a house. I go to a good school. I couldn’t explain to Child Services why I was depressed. So I said to myself, I’ll just shut up because I’m just going to create more problems and no one’s ever going to understand what I’m going through.

Even though I had no desire to protect my family or anything like that, I just shut up and went along. I went with the flow, thinking, Things will work out.

I attempted suicide twice. The first time, I had a knife but I couldn’t use it. I was really close to doing it, and I would have done it, but then something in my head said, I would spill a lot of blood in the bathroom. And then my parents are going to yap at me even after I’m dead. That’s another problem I don’t need. So I got myself out of it. But still, I felt unsatisfied.

The second time, I gave hints to my social worker that I wanted to do something. He called my parents, worried that something might happen.

The second time, when Nat was ready to attempt suicide, a phone call from the cousin of the “kiss girl” stopped them.

I still don’t know why I picked up that phone. I guess it was an automatic reaction. The phone rings, you pick it up.

The social worker, John, wanted to send me to the hospital, and I kinda agreed with him. “I think I really need to go to the hospital,” I told him.

To tell you the truth, as terrible as it sounds, that hospital gave me one of the best times of my life. I was still depressed, and I had to be on medication. But I was away from my parents. I was away from everyone. I wore hospital clothes, so people couldn’t tell what sex I was.

The doctors did a physical examination. They said I had an abnormality on my genitalia because I had taken drugs or steroids. “I don’t do drugs,” I told them. “You can give me a tox screen. I don’t do drugs or drink alcohol.”

They sort of ignored that and said I have severe depression. At one point, they said I had a schizoid personality disorder. Those doctors weren’t agreeing. And it wasn’t just one doctor; it was a series of doctors. Each of them had a different opinion. From what I saw, they didn’t communicate with each other much. It’s like I got twenty different answers every day.

I made friends with two people. There was a girl in the emergency room. She said, “You don’t look so well.”

The other person I made friends with was this guy named Thomas. He was a lot older than me. But I don’t mind talking to older people. We talked about intellectual stuff, the arts. It was very cool. He used to be a doctor, and now he was a patient in the ward.

There were kids there too. Girls with eating disorders, guys with anger issues, teenagers with cutting problems. I was simply the weird one.

Sometimes my parents visited. I didn’t want them there. I didn’t want to think about the outside world where no one would ever understand who I was. My father still believed I was just going through a phase, teenage mood swings that got extreme for some reason. He never tried to understand.

My mom was disappointed. She never imagined that her kids would be in this type of situation. I guess when stuff like this happens, parents ask, “What did we do wrong?” I don’t think it had anything to do with them.

After a month, I got out. It was May, near the end of the school year, so I decided not to go back to school. I didn’t flunk out per se, but I had to make up the year.

Surprisingly, Nat felt more terrible once they left the hospital.

I fell into a deeper depression, and in August I went back to the hospital. This time I was diagnosed gender dysphoria. I think that’s how they diagnose transgender people. Transsexuals. It’s like, if you’re physically one hundred percent one sex but you think you’re the other sex, then you have this.

I continued to research “intersex” in the limited access I had to the hospital library. That’s when I learned about hormone therapy. I considered myself gender queer intersex, but I thought hormones would get me closer to my ideal self. It’s very difficult to explain. I mean, although I was both male and female, people still saw me as female. Maybe it was because I had breasts or my voice wasn’t masculine enough. I just wanted people to accept me as me. I thought that hormone therapy would help me become my ideal self.

Nat’s ideal self is hard to explain without invading their privacy. Suffice it to say, the hormones are working and Nat is coming closer to finding happiness.

Before I could get male hormones, I had to go to therapy sessions. I had to explain everything about myself. Even today, right here, I struggle talking about how I feel. I’m trying to be comfortable about myself. Now I’m getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t want to go to school, but I forced myself just to get that diploma. I was still playing in the orchestra. I enjoyed that, but the other students didn’t consider me a musician. I FYed everyone.

My average was 70 compared to when I started with a 93. But I graduated, and that’s it.

I didn’t want to go to graduation, but I had to. My mom and her friend were there. My dad was at my brother’s graduation, which was held that morning, and then he came over to mine. After my name was called, he left. I was pissed.

After graduation, I heard my mom fighting with him on the phone. He didn’t stay because he wanted to go back home and watch a soccer game between Argentina and Chile. If you’re supposed to be a parent, you’re supposed to be there for the whole graduation and not just leave for a stupid soccer game. This is not being a parent. This is not being a father. So I’m pissed. I did a lot of things to respect him, but he didn’t do this one thing for his kid.

Because of my high-school grades, I only got into one college, in the CUNY system in Queens. So I went there.

I was fighting with my brother all the time. He always thought he was better than me. We were living under the same roof, but we weren’t talking to each other.

On New Year’s Day, my brother started throwing stuff at me. I told him to stop, and he wouldn’t. We physically fought. My mom tried to separate us. He was yelling that he wasn’t the one with the problem. “She’s the one with the problem. She’s the one that ruined the family because she’s a freak.”

Whenever the family called me she, I’d try to explain, “Please don’t call me that. I’m not she.”

I needed to get out of the environment that was making me feel bad about myself. I decided to live on my own. I now have my own apartment in Queens. It has a kitchen, a small bathroom; it’s a studio basically.

I talk to my mom a little bit more now, but I still keep her at arm’s length. I don’t talk with my father, and I don’t talk with my brother at all.

I’m living on my own. My parents are separated, but not divorced because we are a strict, traditional Roman Catholic family. My mom’s going to college and has a boyfriend. Dad lives with my brother; Mom lives with her mother. My mom’s not fighting with my father as much. My brother is doing his own thing. My dad is doing his own thing. Not all families are perfect.

And me? Things are sort of going my way. I have my own place, I have a job, I’m taking hormone therapy, and I’m going to a support group at my clinic called “Mindfulness.” I think it’s to help get rid of negative thinking. I only went to one meeting so far and tomorrow is the second one. It doesn’t hurt to try something new.