TNG reader Levi brings us the first in a new series about his personal journey.

“I am the trick my mother played on the world
Seventeen doctors couldn’t decide
Whether I should be allowed in the game

“Why can’t monsters get along with other monsters?
Soi disantra, soi disantra…”
–‘Send in the Clouds’ by the Silver Jews

As I start writing this, it is 3:20 AM on a Thursday and I am watching Insomniac with Dave Attell. I probably haven’t seen this show since before high school. The big difference from then being the fact that, instead of merely staring in complete awe of all of Dave’s drunken antics and travels, I can actually view the show as sort of a reference to places I might want to visit in the future (since, as you have guessed by the time at which I am writing this, I am an insomniac).

I have reached “adulthood”; I am 18 years old and have graduated high school. I can vote, join the military (though they probably wouldn’t take me), watch any damn movie I want, smoke tobacco, or even never go to another day of school in my life and live as a panhandler in Estonia.

But what do I really plan to do in this new chapter of my life? With this power and freedom?

I plan to alter my physical and outwardly perceived gender. Makes the Estonia idea sound logical and easy, right?

It is often a lot easier to be glib and makes jokes, it partially covers up how totally terrified I am about what I am going to try to accomplish…What I HAVE to accomplish.

To roughly explain what is going on, I am a female-to-male (FtM, F2M, etc) transgendered individual… A transguy, if you will. (It is a little hard to call myself a transMAN when I still get called ‘Kid’ quite often.) I am ‘pre-everything’, meaning currently pre-T (Testosterone) and pre-op (no surgeries performed yet). I’m also rather closeted in my Maryland home base, and therefore am kind of stuck in the beginnings of a double-life between MD and DC, which is only cool for the fact that I can now compare myself to Bruce Wayne/Batman (though I am a lot more like Peter Parker/Spiderman). Surprisingly, the six or so friends who know have been overwhelmingly supportive and positive, and I hope that the trend continues, especially when I eventually tell my family, which I haven’t exactly planned out totally quite yet. One of my more hyperactive and eccentric friends even texted me, “I can’t believe you’re going to have a wiener! This is so exciting”. Hell, I’ll take whatever support I can get in this.

The way I look at it all is like this:

These are the years to figure out and start becoming the person I really want to be. It has been said that Darby Crash had a 5-year plan for The Germs. While I am no Darby Crash (though I do have the tendency to cover “Ritchie Dagger’s Crime” in my basement when no one else is home and dissect the Nietzchian references in songs like “Sex Boy”), I have my own 5-year plans. But we all know what can happen to the best laid plans, right? Scary.

But as Kurt Vonnegut (Rest in Peace, friend) would say, “So it goes…”

I’m a multi-faceted and complex chap, just as we all are as people (well, most of us…I hope for the sake of the world that my mile-wide misanthropy streak is at least partially incorrect). As a dude who just happens to be queer and trans, my path might be a bit (or a lot, whatever) different, but ultimately the same in the end.

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