Finding Family

A Love Letter to my Trans Sisters

It’s a very special kind of strange to meet your sisters for the first time when you’re 35.

Growing up, I never knew that I had sisters. I grew up with just one sibling. Plural anything for sibs would’ve confused the hell out of me, and if you’d told me five years ago that I’d find not one, but two sisters out there in the wide world, I would’ve laughed in your face. Especially if you’d’ve told me I already knew one of them.

I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t met these women. Not by half. In many ways, I owe everything I am, as a person, to them.

But now I’m getting ahead of myself.

Music and Possibility

I met C— at a board game night in the summer of 2017, in the back room of a local board game store. She had the most lovely curly blonde hair, a Teeturtle shirt, and was a bit shy. I can’t remember the game we played, but I remember the laughs, and how she came out of her shell inch by inch over that week and the weeks following it. It wasn’t long until I was looking forward to seeing her every week. After a year, when my wife and I started a new D&D campaign, she was the first person we asked to join us.

She was trans. She didn’t hide it, but also didn’t advertise it; her being trans was nothing particularly surprising or unusual for my wife and I. We’d had many trans friends over the years.

Well, I had, which meant that my wife had. Like any cis guy does, right?

In the summer of 2020, our weekly campaign had retreated to Discord and Roll20, and all of us looked forward to it all week. C— was having a hard time at home, and one week, apropos of nothing, she posted a link to a webcomic in our Discord as game wound down.

Yeah. That webcomic.

C— was the first friend I came out to two weeks later, and she welcomed me into the trans community with open arms. A couple of weeks later, she moved in with us for a few months, to escape the troubles she had at home.

Most nights, she and I would stay up into the early, early hours of the night, and I would pour my heart out to her, telling her the secret feelings I’d always had, asking the questions I didn’t know the answers to, and listening to her story. She’d always known, unlike me, but it meant so much to hear her story, to hear her say that I belonged, and to feel it too—we drew close to each other during this strange, transitional time for the both of us.

Aside from my wife, C— was the first person who ever really saw me for me. She helped me feel like life was really worth living.

A Message on Reddit

In January of 2021, I’d just come out publicly, and was riding the high if the incredible freedom of not having to hide yourself anymore. I’d started getting really involved with the trans community on Reddit, particularly with people who were questioning their gender (a habit I have, to say the least, continued). And, one day, a message popped into my inbox.

L—, she said her name was. She’d also had her egg shattered by that same damned webcomic, she was around my age, she was also married without kids, and it turned out that she lived about fifteen minutes away. COVID lockdowns were still on, and the vaccines weren’t out yet, so we popped over to Discord and started watching Kill la Kill together over Discord and chatting about our transitions and lives.

To say we hit it off would be a gross understatement.

L— and I had spookily similar lives. She and her wife got married literally the week after my wife and I had. We shared many, many interests, from gaming to movies. Our life stories had more parallels than I could count, and we frequently took to joking that the two of us only had one brain between us, and that we’d have to pass it back and forth.

The months turned and the snow melted. I rollerblade for fitness, and in March, she joined me at a nearby park one cool Saturday morning for the first time. We hugged, and it was like no friendship I’d ever had before, right away. Bit by bit, we rolled down the long, winding parkway path and talked and talked and talked. The trip was maybe two and a half miles, and it took us forty-five minutes to travel it.

The next Saturday’s “workout” was the same. There was exercise, certainly, but the real work the two of us did was talk about how we felt, the open questions we had over what we were both coming to recognize were the huge physical dysphorias we each had. And so was the next week’s, when I met her wife. And the next, and the next…

We became inseparable.

I told her things about my body I never imagined I’d tell anyone who wasn’t my wife or my therapist. Told her things about my life I’d never told anyone but my wife, my therapist, and C—.

When Michigan froze over for the winter nine months later and we couldn’t skate anymore, we couldn’t bear the thought of not spending that hour every week, so we just moved to our homes. An hour stretched to two, then three.

With the sole exception of my wife, I’ve never been as close to anyone as L—. She, her wife, and my wife have become damn near inseparable. We go on double dates every other week to this day, and have traveled together several times.

She makes me feel like I belong.

In the Trenches

If you’ve ever known a teacher, you’ve probably noticed a weird thing that we do.

Ask us about how work is, and we’ll smile, say something bland about our students, and the conversation will move on. If you ask us about what problems there are for the profession, we’ll toss off something about funding or stupid testing requirements or helicopter parents, and then change the subject.

We’ll say what we believe, what’s true, but we won’t get into it.

But if there are two teachers in the same room, pull out a stopwatch and start timing us. Within five minutes, we’ll start talking about teaching to each other and we will not stop. Hours can pass, and we can be complete strangers, but we look at each other, we see each other, and we know.

This person understands. They’ve been there.

The simple truth of the matter is that no human being alive can understand what it’s like to be a teacher unless they have also been a teacher.

It’s the same thing that happens when you put two veterans of the same war in the same room. Things they’d never talk about with their spouses, their children, their brothers or sisters suddenly bubble up and spill out to a complete stranger because, no matter how much these vets love their family, none of them were there, in that place, at that time.

They just… can’t understand. No matter how much they might want to, they can’t.

And if you put two trans people together, we do the exact same thing, don’t we?

Found family has always been central to queer stories because, frankly, the families we’re born into often don’t really accept us for who we are. Even those who are supportive are often supportive… with asterisks. Not many of us get parents like Jamie Lee Curtis.

Every queer person, when we come out, has to renegotiate our relationships with our families. Each of us has to find a new equilibrium with family who loves us, but doesn’t really understand this part of us because they never had to question that part of their lives. Other queer folks get it, on a fundamental level.

But found family is different for trans folks. We don’t just have to renegotiate our relationships with our family, we generally have to rebuild who we are from the ground up, from names and pronouns. Not only that, but our collective understanding of what it means to be trans has transformed rapidly and drastically in the last twenty years. Hell, just look at the flak that the landmark book Whipping Girl gets for being dated, despite the fact that it’s only sixteen years old!

For trans people, our elders are often impossibly distant to us because, among other things, the realities of their lives, their transitions, their identities, were built under vastly different understandings of what transness even meant. It takes real work to keep up with our advancing understanding of transness. Who can blame someone if they just want to unplug for a while when they transitioned twenty years ago and just want to get on with their life? And that’s fine! For a lot of us, that’s exactly what we want out of transition!

Even when two people are the same, or very similar, that simple difference in timing can create a distance that’s sometimes unbridgeable. In rhetoric, we call this kairotical—an argument that depends utterly on the moment, on shared, immediate experience. And if you miss that moment?

It can never be recaptured. It’s lost forever.

Finding Family

There’s something magic in the struggle of transition, something life-changing. You bond with people in ways you never have before and never will after, because you, together, are in this moment of becoming as one. You’re wrestling for answers to the same questions at the same time, and you’re being seen and heard for who you are for the very first times by someone who actually understands what these things mean.

It’s pretty heady stuff.

Over the years, my found family has grown, because I’ve embraced the connection of this special, ephemeral time. I’ve become close with people in ways I never expected to. These people are every bit the family that my blood relations are, and I say so proudly.

We’re weird.

We’re family.

I wouldn’t be half the woman I am now without these people.

And if you find yours? Grab on with both hands. They’ll change your life.

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Afterword: I wanted to take a moment to thank everybody for their kind wishes on my hiatus post. My boy is still sick, and declining, but not as quickly as we’d feared. As you might’ve guessed from the lighter post, the hiatus is still on… but I’ve had family on my mind for a bit now, and wanted to write this.