Welcome to Trans Tuesday! It’s less than a week until my birthday (seems I keep having them every year and thank goodness). Birthdays can be weird for lots of people, but for some trans people like me, they’re extra strange. So let’s talk TRANS BIRTHDAYS (and a letter to little Tilly).
My first birthday after coming out was so strange. It was the first one in my entire life that I got to spend as the real me, except that was much less the real me than I was on the birthday following, or every one after that. So in a way each of them was like an entirely new thing, though I think they’ve evened out now.
They felt deeply weird at first. Birthdays have always been a bit odd for me though. They were fine when I was a kid, as they are for many kids. Cake, presents, maybe a party with your friends. Even though the world still seemed wrong and broken.
Looking back, what little of them I can remember are still all tinged with sadness and pain, and they always will be. If you’d like more info on why the past can be so incredibly difficult for trans people who transition as adults, I’ve done a series of five essays on the topic, trying to reconcile with a past that was stolen from me. They’re THE PAST AND WHY IT HAUNTS US, THE PAST 2: THE NEW PAST, THE PAST 3: TRANS GRIEF 1, THE PAST 4: TRANS GRIEF 2, and THE PAST 5: RECOVERING TRANS CHILDHOODS.
In my mid-20s birthdays all started to blend together, but I imagine that happens for everyone. I remember 30 feeling a bit different, even though I don’t remember the day itself, but then they all blended together again after.
I couldn’t tell you what I did for any of my birthdays now. They’ve never been that special, I guess. Susan and our kid and I might go out for dinner or if it was a weekend, before it priced us out of going, we’d maybe go to Disneyland or something.
Even then, they never meant anything to me. I was getting older, happy to be married to my best friend, loving our amazing kid, loving writing, and that was it. The fact I felt disassociated and disconnected from the world and my own life probably has a lot to do with that. See GENDER DYSPHORIA for more on that.
But birthdays were always just a happy excuse to see people I love and eat food I like and get presents. Beyond that, even as a kid, it never felt celebratory to me. What’s to celebrate? It’s just the day I was born, who cares?
Well being an adult and continuing to exist, especially in our present climate, feels heroic. Between covid, and half the country wanting to strip my rights away, and the actual literal climate, just surviving is a big deal.
When you’re trans in this environment, persistence in existence is resistance
And we’re not just surviving. Susan and I are writing our best stuff ever, and we’ve never been happier or more excited by the work we’re doing. We worked on Star Trek: Prodigy and Monster High (the latter of which we won an inaugural Velma Award for LQBTQIA+ representation in children’s media). Our trans sci-fi short film, Long Away, is playing festivals around the world, and the response has been amazing. We’re writing the Star Trek Voyager: Homecoming comic series, have two more graphic novels on the way from different publishers, a new animated show we’re writing for, and so much more!
It’s all so wonderful, despite the state of the world.
But I look back and wonder what birthdays would have been like as a kid if I’d been able to be myself. I try to imagine what knowing that I was transgender would have felt like. I just don’t know.
It fills me with pangs of sadness and regret for the childhood I never had, for all the birthdays I could have had that might have meant so much more. What would it be like to be seen and accepted and celebrated for the real me every year of my life? Goodness.
I didn’t get to be a little girl. I didn’t get to be a teen girl. I didn’t even get to be a woman in her twenties. Those are experiences I’ve been robbed of, and can never ever get back because time still stubbornly only moves in one direction (because time’s a goddamned jerk).
Transphobic society steals years of life from so many trans people, and that’s for those of us who survive to adulthood. There’s no other way to say it, and no softening the pain and damage that causes. I will never get back the childhood, teen years, and young adulthood that should have been mine.
But then I realize that it’s all just a gossamer dream anyway because my home life was such that I certainly wouldn’t have been able to explore my gender, or live it. I’d have been forced to hide it and repress it, and that’s already what I was doing.
I would have been told I was not trans, and they would have attempted to force it out of me. So what’s worse, living with the feeling that the world is somehow wrong and I don’t fit, or living with knowing why and how to fix it but being trapped and kept away from it?
Either way is awful. I’m so envious of trans folks who figured it out young and have supportive families that let them explore and find themselves. I have no idea what that’s like. It’s something all of us should have. It shouldn’t be something we have to hide, a pain we’re forced into.
But I’ve also mentioned many times in these essays that if I had known earlier, and even been able to explore it and transition earlier, it would have changed my life in every conceivable way.
And then I might not have ever found my wife, and we might not have our wonderful kid, and I would never trade either of those things. But that doesn’t stop the well of pain that’s like a hole in my heart at wondering what might have been.
And so part of me wishes I was born a cis girl, because how much easier life would be. Not that cis women have it easy, but they have it a damn sight better than us trans women. But I don’t want to be cis, if that makes sense.
It’s not like I’m ashamed of being trans, or sad about it. I love being trans and wouldn’t change it for the world. I just wish I could exist in a world that accepts me as me from the get-go, and only ever sees me for who I really am.
You have no idea the kind of courage it takes for every trans person to exist in this world. It shouldn’t take courage, mind you. But it does. See TRANS COURAGE for more.
And so this is like every other aspect of being trans, at least for me. It’s complex and nuanced, with layers, and there’s no easy answer or even an easy way to explain it.
Since realizing and accepting my transness, and being out and becoming more my true self with every passing day, birthdays have been even more different. Because on each one I’ve been more me than ever.
One of the biggest changes came from the first time I finally got to go a gathering with people I didn’t know, as myself, and discovered what an amazing new experience it was. See CONFIDENCE and especially CONFIDENCE 2: INTO THE UNKNOWN aka WHAT IS HAPPENING aka A WHOLE NEW WORLD for how getting to be who I really am changed so much of how I interact with the world.
And I had the realization that I could have this… on my birthday? For me?
YES YES I WANT THAT SO MUCH.
It would make me ludicrously happy, but I’m not used to feeling that way. I actually feel like I want to celebrate, which I guess is what birthday parties are supposed to be all about? Hey! I survived another year in this mess of a world, hooray!
Last year I had my first real birthday “party” ever. I mean it wasn’t really a party, it was just me hanging out with friends in the outdoor beer garden at a nearby brewery (I don’t drink, but the place we go has some nice non-alcoholic drinks and usually a food truck or two).
And it was just… lovely? Just so perfectly lovely.
My friends who were free came out to just be with me, to celebrate that I made it through another year, and we hugged and talked and it just filled me with so much joy and love. This is why people have birthday parties?! Extraordinary. Another fabulous thing I’ve been missing for my entire life.
It’s all still so discombobulating, it’s such a wild and completely unforeseen shift in my life. For more on the wild ways transition can do that, in so many ways you might not expect, see FREEING UP MY BRAIN (lunch with Tilly), UNEXPECTED BONUSES OF TRANSITION, and UNEXPECTED CHANGES FROM TRANSITION.
I’m gonna have another birthday hang this year. Are we real-life buds? Are you in LA or willing to travel here? ‘Cause I’d love for you to be there. Celebrating with me. 💜
If I could write a letter to that kid who didn’t understand birthdays, who always felt broken, or that the world was broken, or that everything was broken, and tell her what was coming…
Hey Tills!
I know you feel weird. I know you always feel weird. Like you don’t belong, like you don’t fit in the world, like the world is made for everyone but you.
Even when you’re happy, even when you’re with people you love, something’s always off. “Like a splinter in your mind.” Some really smart and talented ladies wrote that line in a movie that’s going to knock you on your ass for reasons you won’t realize until years after.
You’re actually gonna come to be known for talking about those movies, and it’s going to help other people like you, in ways you can’t even imagine (and I know that for a fact, because they’ve told me). But I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it.
Did you know that there’s a reason, when you were six, you were devastated when your friend Chucky’s older sister was having a sleepover with her friends and he got to go because he lived there, but you didn’t because they thought you were a boy?
And there’s a reason you were more upset about not getting to hang out with the girls at the sleepover than you were about not getting to hang out with Chucky all night? Always wondered why that was, huh? Believe me, I know.
There’s a reason you kept that barrette you found in the street while walking home from school in fourth grade and hid it in your room, and put it in your hair every time you were home alone. You never knew why you did it.
It embarrassed you a bit, even though no one knew. Because “boys didn’t do that.” Why would you do that? What’s wrong with you, you freak? I hear you wondering that over and over again and it breaks my heart.
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you, you beautiful tortured little child. What’s wrong is the way the world treats you based on your biology, and who they decide that makes you. That’s all it is. It doesn’t make you a freak, and it doesn’t mean this world isn’t for you.
It just means you’re a girl. Yes you are. I am. Look at me. Look at me. Do you see? Can you imagine? This is you one day. You’ll get here. Don’t give up. It’s going to feel like it takes forever, but you can’t give up.
Don’t give me that, you are so a girl. Despite the fact you never believed in god, how many times did you fall asleep literally praying you’d somehow magically wake up as a girl? How many?
It’s okay, I can’t count that high either. But did you know cisgender boys… don’t do that? They don’t. It’s not a thing every boy does. But it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you!
It’s just your brain trying to work stuff out. It’s your subconscious telling you something that it’s going to take you a very long time to figure out, but it’s there and it’s the truth and it’s just waiting for you to find it. And so, so much happiness is waiting for you on the other side.
So keep putting that barrette in your hair. Keep looking at girls you have a crush on and finding them almost as cute as their clothes. Keep looking at their hair and wondering what it would be like to have hair like that.
You don’t have the words or the knowledge yet to explain who you are, but that doesn’t change the truth. You know it, you feel it deep in your heart, even though you can’t express it.
I know, because I can feel it too. Even now. Being who I am today, who I’ve always wanted to be, who I am. Because it’s who you are, and I can still feel inside me now how you felt then.
I know the pain, and the longing, and the sadness, and how nothing at all makes sense because of this one thing, and how that plagues you and won’t give you a moment’s peace. But you’ll get through it, and your future’s gonna be amazing.
Your best friend in the world is going to be your wife! And you’re going to love her more than you thought it was possible to ever love anyone or anything in the entire universe. She’s going to light up your world like you can’t imagine.
You’re also going to have a kid! And being a parent is going to be the toughest, most exhausting, most amazing, most rewarding thing you’ve ever experienced. And you will love that kid in ways you never knew were possible.
And you’re a writer! And you’re working on tv shows and comics and you run a podcast production company (I know you don’t know what those are yet, don’t interrupt me, smartass) and that endless imagination is getting put to wondrous use telling stories for others.
And the world won’t be so strange anymore. I mean, it’s still effed up in a lot of ways, don’t get me wrong. But you’ll always fight to make it better, so definitely keep that up. But that splinter in your mind?
You’ll find it, and you’ll rip it out, and you’ll heal, and suddenly the world will make a lot more sense. And you’ll have wonderful people who love you and support you, to help you every step of the way. And there’s so much beauty waiting for you. Around you. In you.
Don’t give up. Keep fighting. You’re a girl and that’s beautiful.
Let the tears come. Then wipe them away and stay strong.
You’ll make it.
I love you, Tills.
Happy birthday.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission. (you say this all the time, it’s like your thing, don’t worry about it)
tillysbridges@gmail.com
PS – Your wife and kid are making you tomato risotto for dinner ‘cause the future is magic. I know you don’t know what that is, just shut up and trust me. No you shut up. No you shut up! It’s really great, I mean it. What? No! It’s like fancy mac and cheese but with rice and ketchup! YOU’LL BE FINE.
Jesus.
PS – I have a wishlist if you’re feeling generous and in the mood. 🙂
PPS – ooh yeah, that’s the stuff! And yes, little me would have responded just like that even about something as benign as tomato risotto, because she could not handle new experiences, or new foods, very well due to dysphoria… see FREEING UP MY BRAIN (lunch with Tilly).
