An Unremarkable Girl

When I was born, my birth certificate came with two glaring errors. The first was the name, a name which though well-intended, proved to be cruelly ironic- “Truman”. The second was the gender, “Male”. I don’t blame my parents for giving me that name, nor do I blame the hospital for assuming that the squalling kid with a penis was a boy. But as soon as I started to form consciousness, I knew something was wrong, that if boys and girls were different and mutually exclusive categories I had been sorted into the wrong one. Throughout my childhood I wished desperately that I’d simply wake up one morning as a girl, the mistake corrected. I didn’t desire to be a great beauty, an inspiration, or a heroine- I just wanted to be an unremarkable girl.

As I grew older and realised that I was not alone in my feelings, that others in “male bodies” felt whole-heartedly that they were girls. At thirteen I  learned the word “transgender”, and realised that the label was accurate in the extreme- though assigned male at birth, I felt at the core of my being that I was a girl. This discovery did not spur a radical self-acceptance, however. I didn’t want to be trans, because all the examples of trans individuals I’d seen in media were either punchlines or punching bags, deliberately mocked, made into masculine parodies of femininity. I didn’t want to be like that- I still just wished to be an unremarkable girl, hopefully cute, but not one who’d stand out in a crowd.

The years that followed were years of depression, self-denial, suicidal thoughts and occasional attempts, until finally in 2014 I resolved to go forward, to be who I was. In March of 2015, I began HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy), and came out to the world at large as Miss Beatrice Washburn. In September of 2017, I finally corrected the twenty-two year old mistake on my birth certificate, legally becoming the girl I’ve been since my earliest days. Between those two momentous events, my mother and I began to write a book, which we have titled An Unremarkable Girl. It is the story of becoming myself, the story of my mother’s frankly heroic struggle to support me and see me through the darkest moments to the other side. We are still crafting this story, still living it, and in these electronic pages I hope to show what it’s like to write a book and to be a transgender woman in Salt Lake City Utah in the time of Trump.

The final irony is that I will never be an unremarkable girl. I am six feet and two inches tall, transgender, a socialist, a monarchist (yes you can be both, but it’s not easy), and I am an unabashed geek when it comes to my passions. The journey to becoming myself meant becoming remarkable, for good or for ill.