Origin of a Trans Friend
how writing saved my life and started something unexpected
It’s been an Origin Story kind of week in my world. For those of you who found me through SmallStack (and the other way around for my long-time transfriend friends), I hope you have seen and enjoyed our SmallTalk discussion over there. If not, head over and take a stroll through the hundreds of creative and inspiring publication names and their stories. It’s enlightening, fun, and it might even tug at your heartstrings.
So while we’re talking about origins—and because we’ve seen a good amount of growth in the community here—I figured this might be a good time to tell you a little about where all of this came from. If you’ve been reading transfriend for a while, you might already know most of this story, but I’m getting older, and one of the perks of “older” is getting permission to tell the same story more than once without getting called out on it.
The origin of writing
I started writing in the second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Rocky, appreciated that I was doing a pretty good job at keeping myself occupied with my own work, and so she allowed me to skip some of our class material to write my first ever book. Sadly I don’t recall the title, but I know it featured a bear as the primary character. He had tons of woodland friends, and they all loved balloons and rainbows and happy endings. Writing opened up new worlds for me. It became an escape, a place where I could adventure, and a safe space for all the things the real world could not hold for me.
Growing up gender-diverse in the 80s and 90s wasn’t an easy thing for any of us who went through it. To handle all of those tumultuous feelings and the trauma that occasionally went along with suppressing them, my mind turned them into stories. Most of those stories stayed contained in my head through my teen and early adult years. I didn’t have the space or the safety to write the way I wanted. But those stories percolated and deepened in complexity the longer I lived with them.
Even into early adulthood I did not have a safe space to share all of that creativity bursting from within. It felt like a caged animal—pacing, antsy, angsty, tired and hungry sometimes, angry about being caged all of the time, yet still wild and full of energy. Creative energy is similar to physical energy. It needs an outlet. It needs space. But it also needs to know that being let out won’t risk our safety on any level, be that physical, emotional, or spiritual. I had no such guarantees, and so those stories stayed locked inside.
When things in life finally stabilized—I was married, we had two amazing kids, I was employed and in a position that appreciated my brain in good ways—there was finally space for my creativity to emerge.
And hey, don’t laugh, but I totally got into writing fanfic.1 There is no force on this earth that will make me share what genre or where those stories ended up, but rest assured it was incredibly geeky and gay and fun. I posted them online, and folks loved them. I got tons of comments and engagement, and the number one thing people said was that my characters felt far more real than the ones that had been created in books or on screen. I started creating characters who weren’t from books or film or shows. They were truly original and unique. They struggled with their identities and their past trauma, they lived double lives, they held onto incredible secrets.
[You can see what’s coming, right? Those characters were me.]
[Okay, but past-me didn’t see that at all…]
The pandemic locked the world down, and we all went into a real version of hiding, and my writing intensified. The isolation drove me deeper into myself, into that creativity that had been simmering for far too long, and I wrote with a fever that often woke me in the night, desperate to get the next dozen lines down on paper or my laptop. My characters changed. They expressed new parts of themselves. Some of them were incredibly risky things for me to write—love and intimacy and vulnerability and emotional confession—but I couldn’t dam those waters.
I didn’t want it to stop.
I had the tail of a tiger in my hand, and it ran me ragged with words I didn’t know existed. Pages and chapters and novels exploded from within, and I didn’t dare slow down to edit a single thing. I wrote, I posted, and I went back to write more. At some points I had three completely unique stories being written at once, and I would bounce in a frenzy between them, wishing I could write with two sets of hands and eyes. There wasn’t enough paper (or word docs) to hold it all.
And the story just begging to be let out? It was always the same one.
Different people each time, but the same in that they were all trapped in a life that wasn’t really supposed to be theirs. They were independent and handled everything without ever asking for help. They carried the world on their shoulders. And when they were confronted with the possibility of change, they laughed it off and always said, “I’m too old. I’m too set in my ways. People know me like this. I can’t possibly change now.”
And that was exactly how I felt about my gender.
One day, for no reason in particular, I allowed a new character to be a transman. He was amazing. He knew exactly who he was, and he lived his life quietly, carefully, but authentically as himself. I scoured the internet for resources to understand him better. I watched videos of transguys from early transition to later life. I learned about top surgery and testosterone. I figured out the right language to use. I had always been an ally to the trans community, but I knew I could be better. There was still so much I could learn. He was the excuse I needed to explore.
But nowhere in those resources did I find anyone like me, a person in their 40s with a wife and kids, a job they’d been at for decades… in other words, I still had too much to risk losing.
It hit me within days of that reckoning: I suddenly knew that I was transgender. It was a lightbulb flashing on. It was the heatwave of an August day when you walk out from an air-conditioned building. It was the shocking taste of sour lemon on your tongue. It was falling wrong and getting the wind knocked out of your lungs.
It felt like the end of my life.
I knew without a doubt that if I told my family they would all leave me. That’s the narrative, right?2
But when I returned to those stories I’d written, I saw other potentials within. There were people who loved those genderwild characters. They had friends and partners and families and pets and whole worlds that were better with them included, and in every single story they found what they had been looking for in their lives—acceptance.
Coming out as trans resulted in two dramatic shifts in my writing
The first one was a sucker-punch to my gut—my creativity for fiction vanished.3 It abandoned me. But in that moment I no longer needed fiction as an outlet because the real world was suddenly hosting all of those stories for me. I had a place to express my feelings. I could cry and laugh and talk about my fears out loud. I didn’t need to invent a character to handle my emotions. They were mine for the first time in my life, and I could live them.
The second shift in my writing was the creation of this space on substack. Having looked around for resources for transguys at midlife, I knew there simply wasn’t enough out there for us. And it wasn’t just transmen and nonbinary/third gender folks who didn’t have resources, it was anyone who is genderwild, gender-diverse, gender-questioning, or just plain curious about gender as a whole. There were not enough trans stories. There still aren’t enough trans stories. There were not enough spaces for us to laugh and share transjoy. There were very few places where allies could ask hard questions and get real answers.
And why is that?
Because being an out transgender person in this world isn’t a terribly safe thing to be. And it makes me so sad to write those words. It is a constant ache in my lungs that my trans community feels the need to hide ourselves in order to feel safe. It’s impossible to read the news and not feel targeted. It’s even tough to find a home here on substack with some of the hatred published all around us.
But we deserve better. We deserve more. We deserve community and sunlight and freedom and places where we can express all of ourselves—the messy parts, the celebrations, the sadness, the curiosity, the fear, the love, the wonder, the slugs and bees and butterflies, the stories the stories the stories, the queer trans gay nonbinary genderfluid drag stories that make us real.
We deserve to be real.
TransFriend has grown a lot since I started talking about SmallStack and sharing it with everyone. So whether you’ve been reading along with me from messy, chaotic day one, or if today is the first post you have ever read from me, here is the message I want you to see:
I made this space for you. You, with all your wildness and creativity and quiet and shy smiles and nods of understanding and questions and reasons and worries, you with a brother sister sibling parent child cousin grandkid nibling auntie guncle, you on your own, you questioning your whole life, you questioning nothing, you needing a friend, you loving stories, you believing me. This space is for you. I started out as that trans friend you didn’t know you needed, and maybe I’m becoming that trans friend we all really needed, that trans friend who made being out look a little less scary, that trans friend who showed you there is a community for you.
Your trans friend,
Robin
My real feelings about fanfic? What a beautiful way to get people interested in writing! It’s so odd that fanfic isn’t taken seriously, yet so many best-sellers have come from authors who got their starts in the world of fanfic. Sometimes we just need a nudge to start creating new things, and using a developed character or world as a pathway opens up a world of opportunities to new writers. I wish our collective view of fanfic could fall in line with how inclusive and welcoming it makes the writing community, so I hope my “confession” of starting as a fanfic writer shows you that it’s a medium to be appreciated instead of mocked.
You know I’m here to change that narrative, right??
It came back, but it took a really long time.
Thank you Robin. There's so much heart and soul, strength and love of others in this piece. xo
I share your sadness that the world is so often not a safe space for transfolk. As the mother of a transwoman who often meets with abuse in public spaces, it's good to have havens wherever they can be found. Thank you for your words and your work.