The most surprising aspect of my current Trevor Project Awareness Tour has been the overwhelming percentage of trans teens I've met.
(Here I am at The Oasis Project in Nashville. What an awesome group of kids!)
Going into this tour, I expected to meet lots of different types of teens at the events, which have taken place at high schools, churches, and local LGBTQ community centers throughout the South and Midwest. And I have met a diverse group, but the reality has been that perhaps 70 percent of the teens I've met have identified as trans.
The upshot of this has been a huge learning opportunity for me.
The downside is, I'm not so sure how useful it's been for some of these teens to hear my story.
After all, I'm a middle-aged, white, cisgender gay man who came out in the 1980s. It's occurred to me during my travels that even for a gay kid, listening to my story would be a lot like it would have been for me, at age 15, to hear the story of someone who came out in the 1950s. The pre-Stonewall story would have been interesting, and I'd surely have loved it if my school has invited such a speaker, but so much had changed in 30 years that I would not have been able to relate.
It's hard to know when my overactive brain is simply creating a story or when I'm "catching a vibe," but I've definitely felt at times during this tour that some of the kids are staring at me thinking, "When will the old gay guy stop talking?"
The more I think about it, the more I get it.
In my past visits with GSA groups in high schools, my story -- I came out while working at ESPN on the front page of ESPN.com -- has seemed to resonate best with those young people who are just coming out as gay, lesbian, or bi, and those who identify as straight who need to understand more about the experience of coming out as gay or lesbian.
Especially in the community centers where I've visited, the kids have mostly not been of that ilk.
I've treated this as a chance to open a dialogue and ask questions. After all, while I've known many trans people in my life, I've never taken the opportunity to ask a lot of questions. And as it turns out, I have a ton to learn. And not a ton to teach.
I recorded and transcribed such a dialogue with teens in Nashville last week. I felt as though if I'm still struggling to understand the trans experience, that's probably a pretty good sign that other cisgender people are battling, too.
I don't think I fully understood the spectrum of experience that the word trans has come to cover. My (very basic) understanding of trans, coming into this tour, was that it refers to those who feel as if they were born in the wrong body and want to transition to the other gender. That definition leaves out a huge swath of trans-identified people, who see gender as non-binary and themselves as gender fluid.
Many of these people have no interest in transitioning.
"It is different for everyone," one teen told me. "For a long time I did identify as transgender. I never did feel very comfortable identifying as female, but I never one hundred percent felt comfortable identifying as trans. So after a while I began to realize I was probably some weird place in the middle on that wide spectrum we're all stuck on."
Does that flexibility mean that gender is a choice? I asked the group of teens in Nashville this leading question.
"No!" they yelled.
We all had a good laugh. After all, I know that sexual orientation is not a choice, and I assumed, correctly, that these teens felt that more is at work here than a simple choice. One of the teens followed up by saying, "Gender is a feeling."
I nodded and nodded. And then, later as I drove away, I began to wonder about that. Is gender a feeling?
For me, gender has always felt like an inherent part of my identity. My exploration of gender has been focused on reconciling and accepting those parts of my personality that feel more feminine with the more masculine parts. It has felt like I've been working to expand my own understanding of what a man is.
The exploration of gender fluidity that these teens describe explodes those terms -- masculine, feminine, male, female -- and leaves me feeling as though I have nothing to hold on to in the discussion. I asked the kids in two different events if they could define gender. It was tough for everyone.
One teen in Nashville said, "Gender is a very personal, individual response to an inherent factor that we are raised with in our society. It's a concept we have to define for ourselves after we've been taught what we're supposed to think about it."
I think there is wisdom in that. And yet my inability to fully grasp this concept has me worried.
I am no helicopter parent. I don't have kids beyond two Labradoodles. And yet as an older, somewhat out-of-touch person who writes and advocates for teens, I admit I worry. Because if a well-meaning person like me who wants to understand is struggling, what does that mean about those in society who don't care to understand?
What happens when a person's search for authenticity comes up against the barrier of societal understanding? For me as a young gay person, 30 years ago, the result was frustration and depression. That struggle consumed me, and I had to fight and fight, with society and with my own beliefs, to overcome it. I want to believe that most L-G-B teens today have it a little easier than I did. I have to believe that it is.
But I do think that for trans kids, it's probably not yet much better.
It's up to this young generation of trans kids to create this better world they envision. The visionaries always lead the way. And it's up to the rest of us to be open to the conversation that will undoubtedly shake some of us cisgender folks out of our comfort zones.