[About Isaac]

I am Isaac. I am Trans.

I think it safe to say that those two sentences alone have nearly destroyed me on several occasions over the course of my thus far 24 years of life.

The reason they were so hard for me to grasp was that growing up in a small, rural and usually rather religious area does not lend help towards self-discovery. Fitting in, staying quiet and getting out were the main goals for anyone who felt different in a setting like that.
Violence was something I was fortunate to (mostly) avoid during my formative years, but the speech and the behaviors of those times and places will definitely linger.

I was born a healthy baby girl. I was promptly stuffed into a cute little baby blue dress, the hair that I was born with did not go long without a bow and my cute little face was probably rouged. I’d like to think that had I come out in the proper fashion, I would have been attired in nothing more than a loin cloth and armed with a monstrous club.
I’ll admit, it’s a stretch. My younger brothers just got sweater vests for scrawny kids.

How does one decide who they are?

That was a question that I spent a lot of time thinking about once I realized that there was a very serious disconnect in the way that I felt from the way that others saw me. These nagging thoughts were easily dismissed at first, but as they became more and more obvious and the disconnect became larger, I was no longer able to repress the feelings of who I was inside.
I tried to tell people about myself when I was younger, and for one reason or another – getting called into a counselor’s office, being shunned or rejected by friends and having parents direct me not to say those things – I shut it out early on.

There are all kinds of things I would tell myself to make the days go better, but the truth of the matter was that I was depressed and alone. I did not have anyone close enough that I felt I could entirely confide in. I tried to confide in a first girlfriend but it was not understood. I tried to tell my friends but I did not have the words and could only describe myself in terms of sexuality. I was ‘bisexual’ or ‘a little gay’ but there was more and I found it impossible to get anyone to understand. By the time I was in high school, however, I had grown a strong distrust against just about anyone and even with the words may not have been able to explain the conundrum I felt I was trapped within.

Once graduated, I was able to move on to college and a new place. I decided to be more open with myself and came out as ‘bisexual’ but I still felt as though there was something more and it would yet be a couple of years before the terminology was introduced to me in a way that clicked with how I was feeling. Once that clicked there was nothing left for me to do but get in touch with the GLBTA services director and ask to talk about gender identity.
From here I will continue to explain myself with updates and details in linear blog posts.