One of the things I hear surprisingly often is that I “chose” this life, as if being trans was some kind of decision I made one morning after carefully weighing the pros and cons.
The truth is that the only decision I ever made was that I could no longer endure the constant pain of pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and that I was finally willing to risk everything I had spent more than forty years building in order to find out who I actually was beneath all the expectations, fears, compromises and performances that had accumulated over a lifetime.
I did not choose to be trans any more than anyone else chooses the fundamental truths about themselves. What I chose was honesty. I chose to stop running. I chose to stop sacrificing my own happiness and my own future simply because that version of my life was more comfortable for other people.
And yes, that decision came with consequences. It cost me relationships, certainty, stability, and many nights of sleep. It forced me to have difficult conversations, to confront fears I had spent decades avoiding, and to step into a future that was terrifyingly uncertain. But despite all of that, it remains the best decision I have ever made, because for the first time in my life I am no longer surviving someone else’s story while quietly disappearing from my own.
What has always fascinated me is that people are so quick to describe being trans as a choice, while rarely applying the same logic to the things that actually are choices. Being trans is not a choice. Treating people with kindness is. Treating them with cruelty is. Showing compassion is. Choosing prejudice, hatred, discrimination or hostility toward people who have done nothing but exist honestly is.
At the end of the day, my existence is not a decision. The way people respond to it is. And I have never understood why so many people are more troubled by someone choosing authenticity than by others choosing intolerance.