Trans Joy

Hi, I'm Adam.  Today I am a happily married man living on a small homestead with my wife, gardens, and animals.  I've lived more than half of my life as a transman having made the decision to medically transition in the early 2000s under the Harry Benjamin standards*.  The path to get here had many branches, wrong turns, and a few dead ends, but along the way I also found pockets of love and joy to help me keep purchase.  Those are the lessons I keep and the backbone of Trans Joy.  

 

I have always existed at the intersection of labels.  I am the transgender son of a Mexican American, adopted and raised by an Italian American and a presbyterian Hoosier, brought up in the catholic church.  I vigilantly took mental notes on the rules and regulations that governed family and self.  Learning from loss that family is about love, from blood that love is eternal, and from time that heritage is about experiences.

 

I am a kid who passed as a boy on accident.  Getting run out of bathrooms and changing rooms by women clutching purses.  Scared and confused as to what I was seemingly doing wrong, itching to get out of the more and more feminine leaning clothes my wardrobe was becoming restricted to, a family friend noticed.  They bought overalls and shirts for me to change into while I was at their house.  Seen and accepted, I was allowed to be me, running through the dahlia gardens in the sun.  Gardens I still tend.  

 

I am the young man, newly sober, newly Adam, trying to make sense of self.  Alone and struggling with housing insecurity I accepted an invite from a friend of a friend to All Nations Indian Church in Minneapolis MN and it became the family I needed.  I was “transitioned,” barely.  On T a year, if at all.   In a way I was the child I must have seemed.  Baby faced and in need of a mentor to guide me into manhood.  In no small way that is what I learned: long talks with grandfather Garrett laying the foundation of self compassion.  The calm love of the circle embracing even the hardest days and the quietest prayers.  The intensity of the drums joining with voices so perfectly you can feel the vibrations in your soul.  Coffee hours run into evening dinners listening to Jim embody the interconnectedness of belonging.  Mitakuye Oyasin.  We are all related.  

 

Years later I keep many of the traditions I learned at All Nations, in addition to ones I gained from family, practice, and therapy.  The biggest gift tying it all together is the knowledge that no one stop on my path discounts another.  I am a girl who grew up to be a man as any child becomes an adult.  We deserve to honor our past and the lessons we bring from it into who we are today.  We are all related.  To the deepest depths of self, the circle is stronger for knowing all of us.  That is Trans Joy.  I lived nearly the entirety of my life stealth.  I worked mostly in construction.  I had mostly cis male friends.  I was isolated.  In many ways that was the design of Harry Benjamin in action.  I've since found pride in all of myself and learned the power of being in community.  In isolation I know I believed the shame I was taught.  It is standing in a circle seeing ourselves, our friends, our family looking back with love and joy where we can start to see the true magic of us.  

 

I hope you join us on this journey. 

 

-Adam 

 

*Harry Benjamin standards refers to a set of gatekeeping rules instilled on the trans / non-binary community through the early 21st century.  Dr. Benjamin received his medical license in 1912 and went on to work with notable sexologists such as Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey.  He published the Transgender Phenomenon in 1966 and went on to classify gender dysphoria as a sexual disease, and established the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIDGA) in the 1970s.  The HBIDGA, an association of therapists and psychologists, devised the standards of care greatly reliant on Dr. Benjamin’s case studies.  Notably these hurdles included the “real life experience” requirement, in which we were required to legally change our names and live “full time” for a year before getting the psych tests and letters necessary to gain access to life saving hormones.  These standards are no longer strictly enforced, but many of the gatekeeping steps are still integrated into the modern societal definition of transitioning.

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Harry-Benjamin

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https://www.wabe.org/storycorps-atlanta-adam-kaylor-beauty-not-fitting/