I’m not well versed in any body of knowledge that could be termed “transgender history.” So you’ll have to take it with a grain of salt when I say that I came of age in a unique, historical turning point in the life of the trans community. I can’t put a date on when this magical turning point happened, nor can I extend the statement beyond the specific environments I was in. Even so, I know that I came out as trans at a special time. I know because, as I came out, so did lots of other kids my age, and that was a very new thing for the rest of the trans community.

In 2004, I was sixteen, in the eleventh grade, with a floppy Mohawk and the kind of counter culture attitude that most sixteen year olds hold dear. In my case, though, that attitude was a bit more complicated, since it wasn’t just drugs, sex and rock and roll I was trying out. In addition to normal teenage rebellion things, I was dealing with issues like the relationship between sex and gender. Needless to say, my rejection of that relationship shocked my parents more than any haircut or drug habit could. But, perhaps more shocking than even that was the fact that I wasn’t alone. My gang of teenage misfits and I were roaming the halls of trans events in growing numbers and, though we weren’t being noticed yet, we would be soon.

In a variety of ways, we didn’t fit the profiles of other trans folks at such events. We had neither the complicated pasts of folks who had lived an entire life before transitioning nor the political know-how of the 20-somethings who could talk intelligently about gender theory. There was no getting around it: We were babies. We were 14, 15 and 16 years old, most of us still living under our parents roof and just trying to get by in the big bad world that was high school.

It wasn’t just that we looked young. In reality, tons of trans guys, pre-testosterone, resemble nothing so much as a twelve year old boy. No, in addition to looking young, we were young, and nothing was quite so obvious as the divisions between us and some of the older trans folks. We hadn’t lived forty years in the wrong body; we’d lived 14, 15 years, instead. More importantly, though, we hadn’t accumulated the relationships that one develops in forty or fifty years, so we didn’t have wives or children or coworkers who all had known us as the wrong gender and needed to be corrected. Yeah, we had high school classmates, and certainly teenagers come with a host of cruel tactics for singling out anyone who’s different, but it was a qualitatively different experience than those trans folks coming out in the workplace. Unlike the 20 something year olds, we weren’t part of campus activist communities that deconstructed everything from race to gender to hegemony. No, we didn’t even know the word hegemony yet, let alone know that we were the victims of one.

We were also young in other ways. We were highschool boys and we had senses of humor appropriate to that age. We made jokes about penises, threw our packing dicks at eachother and collapsed into fits of giggles about it. We made out with eachother because it was fun. Our romantic relationships had their fair share of complications because of our gender but rarely lasted longer than a month because, well, we were young. We weren’t trans men; we were trans boys.

It wasn’t all dick jokes and penis pranks, though. We were considered one of the highest risk groups around, in terms of suicide attempts and successes. I once heard the statistic that 1 in 2 trans youth attempted suicide at some point. Though I believe (and hope) that the statistic is no longer true, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been true when I was coming out. I knew too many of those youth to doubt it. That’s because, in so many ways, like other adolescents, we were at the whim of our parents and our schools. Those of us who got lucky, had good experiences, while those of us who didn’t had some pretty tough times. Some of us sunk, some of us swam, and a lot of the factors that adult trans folks could take into their own hands were out of our control. We couldn’t move away. We couldn’t change jobs. We got dealt our hand and we played it.

I don’t mean to get you down, though. We had good times. For the most part, we were living life and having a blast at it, despite the bumps along the road. I write this column, full of hope, as I prepare to go to a talk where folks will be discussing research on the factors that lead trans youth to succeed or fail. I write this column full of hope because these are incredibly important questions and I’m thrilled that someone has been asking them. I plan to go to the session in part because I care about the topic but in part because I want those researchers to see that I care. I want them to know that there’s me and everyone else in that room and we all want to see more research on this topic.

We were tough kids but countless among us became statistics. In many parts of the country, it’s still that way. I don’t take the fact that research is being done on this topic as evidence that the tide has turned. There’s still a long fight to be had, and I try not to forget that even now that I’m well beyond adolescence. Even so, I’m optimistic. Where there’s research, there’s the potential for publication of knowledge that stretch beyond the walls of trans conferences and overly dramatic talk shows.

Today, it’s a talk. Tomorrow, I hope to see a book. And, someday, I want workshops. I want sessions that aren’t just Trans 101. I want Trans 500, where highschool teachers are trained on what to do if a kid comes out to them as trans. I want Trans 600, where parents learn that their trans child isn’t doomed to live a terrible life but that s/he will need their support to live a good one. I want entire classes on how to run trans friendly schools and I want rockstars and Hollywood actors to come out in favor of trans causes. But, for now, I’ll settle for a talk. Because that’s pretty great, too.