Kade Warner has always felt like a man. It wasn’t until his first day of kindergarten when he realized he was not perceived as one.
On that day, Warner, a transgender man from Mackay, Idaho, took a tour of the school. The teacher stopped the group in front of the boys’ bathroom and asked if anyone had to go. Warner raised his hand and the teacher got upset, explaining that this was a boys’ bathroom.
When Warner said he was a boy, his teacher responded, “No, you’re not.”
While every individual’s experience is different, living as a transgender person in a rural area can be extremely difficult. Idaho recently passed two separate anti-transgender bills: House Bill 500, banning transgender women from playing on women’s sports teams, and House Bill 509, preventing people from changing the gender on their birth certificate.
Not every transgender person in Idaho will be impacted by these bills, but many transgender community members share a concern over what message this sends to those living in their state.
Questioning
Athene Peterson, a transgender woman from Caldwell, Idaho, began questioning her gender at a young age after having dreams about being a girl. Despite coming from a generally accepting household, Peterson struggled with the gender ideology she’d been immersed in.
“I had strange ideas regarding both masculinity and femininity,” Peterson said. “I became convinced that I was a bad person, or that I was a terrible person, for wanting to transition or even just thinking about anything in regards to being the other gender.”
In the process of coming out, Peterson struggled a lot with self-acceptance. She struggled with depression, eventually going on antidepressants to manage her symptoms.
“I think that was mostly just the result of being in my own head. That could’ve been from societal pressure or maybe from other family, I don’t really know why,” Peterson said. “It definitely made things a lot easier when I finally did transition, having an accepting household, but when I was trying to come out to myself fundamentally it was mostly just convincing myself and trying to get out of my own head.”
Body dysmorphia
Many transgender people describe a sense of discomfort with their own body, known as body dysmorphia. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but Mars Cantrell, a transgender man from Eugene, Oregon, says it’s similar to being stranded somewhere unfamiliar.
“It’s like you’ve somehow ended up in a foreign country,” Cantrell said. “You don’t speak the language, and you don’t have any currency and you don’t know anyone. You just feel really out of place and stuck, and you don’t know how to relate to the people around you, but in this really deeply personal way inside your own body.”
Cantrell said he always knew who he was and what he looked like, but never quite felt like the two matched up.
“There are these images you see of trans people, where there’s a woman looking into a mirror and seeing a man looking back out into the mirror and that’s kind of the opposite how I really felt,” Cantrell said. “It was more like knowing exactly what I looked like in this really, really deep way and feeling that it wasn’t right, feeling this extreme sense of discomfort.”
Community
Knowing you feel different and telling people about it are two very different things, and the community around an individual can play a huge role in the way they perceive themselves. Warner said this was one of the more difficult parts of his transition.
“Despite having all the stirrings and all the feelings my entire life, I buried it for the fear of losing all of my friends and family in the process,” Warner said. “It’s not that anybody ever really said or did anything to me — it was just the way they carried themselves around the whole topic.”
Warner said he felt uncomfortable with how the Mormon church he grew up in interacted with the topic of LGBTQA rights. Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, the topic came up at a Sunday service.
“(The bishop) spoke about it as in how we all needed to stay together and stay strong, despite what gay marriage equality would mean to the church and to its memberships,” Warner said. “He sounded as though some great big evil had been let in and we just had to hunker down and wait for it to be over.”
When Warner did come out to his family, it did not go over well. After coming out, Warner and his brother got into a physical altercation. Warner then left home and has not had much contact with his family since. Warner said while this process is painful, it has shown him who is truly by his side and looking out for his happiness.
“It’s something I definitely still think about every day. It’s hard to have to choose the people you care about, or your own happiness, and to not be able to have both,” Warner said. “Despite all the people who walked away, this was something I struggled with my whole life and I always knew this was who I was. And I’m far happier now even though I lost everyone.”
Cantrell, however, grew up seeing a larger LGBTQA community close to home. While he still struggled with figuring out how he identified, Cantrell said the community around him showed him he had options.
“My best friend, who I’m really close to, is a bisexual woman and she has a huge community of lesbian moms that I kind of ended up in the fold of. So even though I didn’t really know older trans people, feeling that there were older queer people in my community living rich, complex lives, and who had gone through a lot of the same things that we were going through was deeply heartening,” Cantrell said.
Transitioning
One of the biggest parts of transitioning is experimenting, Cantrell said. Every experience is different and requires the individual to try things out themselves.
Warner said one of the things that really helped him during his transition was hormone replacement therapy (HRT), a process of using hormone medication to replace the sex hormones naturally produced by the body. There are many forms of HRT, including pills, shots, gel and patches. Warner takes shots of testosterone.
“It feels like your whole life you’ve been a little bit sick and you just needed a shot to make you feel better,” Warner said. “It felt like getting that final thing that I needed to fit my body just right and to feel good.”
With the combination of HRT and surgery to remove his breasts, he has felt more able to take care of himself and to improve his physical and mental health.
“It’s no secret that physical appearances affect our mental perceptions of ourselves,” Warner said. “Having these things that help to confirm your feelings also helps you to treat yourself better mentally and physically. I eat better and definitely have a lot healthier thoughts.”
But legislation in Idaho makes it difficult for transgender individuals to go through the process of transitioning on paper. And in addition to the two other anti-trans bills, Idaho attempted and failed to pass another bill that would make it possible for physicians treating transgender youth for gender dysphoria to be charged with a felony.
Legislation
Fran O’Farrell, a transgender person from Idaho, said they watch the faces of the people around them as they walk through the aisles of the grocery store. They evaluate the way other customers react as they walk by, evaluating how safe they are in each and every aisle. Even existing in public causes O’Farrell concern for their safety.
“Literally the entire state that I live in is willing to undermine my ability to be in the world right now,” O’Farrell said. “When I meet someone or when I’m out in the world I’m constantly gauging how safe I am in that environment.”
Cantrell said he has not been directly affected by these bills, but he knows people who are being affected and had they been passed earlier, he too would be impacted.
“The thought of being somewhere with this legislation when I was an athlete in school or before I changed my gender marker on my birth certificate, before I started hormones, it would be terrifying. It would be life-altering and potentially life-ending,” Cantrell said.
Bills like these are showing the transgender community in Idaho the state actively doesn’t want them, Peterson said. She feels these bills make it extremely difficult and unsafe for people trying to begin transitioning.
“You want to transition when you feel the most comfortable,” Peterson said. “If you can’t even feel safe within your own state it’s really hard to transition because you’re literally being threatened by the state.”
O’Farrell said the process of transitioning has impacted the way they see others. The way people see them and treat them ultimately is a reflection on who they are.
“I am so acutely aware of the way I’m being perceived by other people,” O’Farrell said. “It gives me a way of seeing them in reverse because I can feel the way they look at me. From there I can know the way they look at people in general and it allows a glimpse into their interiority.”
Story by Brianna Finnegan
Illustrations by Riley Helal
Design by Lindsay Trombly