My name’s Jay(ce). I’m 17 years old and FtM transgender. First and foremost, I’m a dreamer. I’m a slam poet, a writer, an athlete, a reader, an artist, a thinker. I love to dream and imagine, stretch my mind to new and greater places. I’m a proud Whovian and Potterhead. I adore the sensation of being swept away to new and creative places. Words are my passion, and my favorite way to express myself. My favorite past time is creating something out of nothing. Destruction as an act of creation. 

I’m a fighter and a lover. A balance of the two. I fight for what I love. As my tennis coach says, I’m good at what I do  because I “fight and fight, I’ll run everything down and never give up”. That’s how I like to see myself. I work HARD, that’s what gives me my strength, my dedication to whatever I’m doing. I’m a whirlwind to deal with often because my pride makes in impossible for me to bend and accept help from others. I can be bitterly stubborn  and will fight even the people who just want the best for me. 

My story is not an easy one. My family and I are not always friends. My mind seems dead set on self destruction and I fight through the constant desire for self injury, disordered eating, depression, and constant anxiety. Discovering my gender identity has been a fight from the start, and my family has been fairly insistent that I need to be a stereotypical female. It’s certainly been a hell of a road. 

The early picture was me about a year ago. A little more. I can’t even articulate how much happier I am now. I have never for once been happy with my body, been happy in my body. Even when I was little I had an acute understanding of how much space I took up; my imposition on the rest of the world. I have always been able to feel every inch of my body and how uncomfortable I am in it. I feel each and every movement I make, and have to think about it. My body and brain just don’t quite connect. 

When I was younger, from elementary school towards middle school I largely preferred male clothing, or at least clothing that was larger and more baggy. I was a fairly happy child, but as puberty hit and my mother began to display her displeasure about my clothes, my head began churning. I never felt good about myself, the clothes that I wanted to wear made me “not presentable” to my mother. She told me she shouldn’t take me out in public looking like that. 

I didn’t know what to do, throughout middle school I went into a gothic phase, dressing all in black, scared of colour, and my mother and I couldn’t agree on what to wear. I tried to wear more boys clothes, and at the end of middle school my mother decided to toss those. By that point I was worn to my limit. I gave up. I entered into freshman year and made a goal for myself. I would dress well, I would make friends. I would be thin and beautiful, and make me socially acceptable. My mother would love me. Things would be perfect.

Towards the end of freshman year I became extremely depressed, and my eating disorder started to really take hold. That picture up there was taken towards the end of sophomore year where my eating disorder was running my life. I felt this need, this pressure to be thin and beautiful, I needed to be perfect. Eating was more scary than anything else, and any day over 500 calories was scary as hell and 1000 calories was a complete disaster.  

I was a spiraling, beautiful disaster. I was cutting all the time, wasn’t eating and to say that I was miserable was a sort of understatement. I wanted to die. I thought about it every day.  

Between the summer of Sophomore and Junior year I was trying to recover but still felt the pressure to be beautiful and feminine. I already knew there was a glimmer of a boy behind my eyes, I was just afraid to find out how much it was. I began to bind at the ending of the summer, and experiment with my image. My mother was pleased with all my feminine clothes, but very much the opposite with more masculine clothes. 

It was a struggle and took over a year to simply be allowed to cut my hair. Everyday I strive to be more and more, and fight to become myself. I just want to keep growing and becoming the best person I can be. I have two of the most important people by my side, my best friend and my most amazing boyfriend. Between Tori and Daniel, I know I can do just about anything. 

Daniel and I met in the most amazing way at the beginning of Junior year, both realizing the other was transgender as well. It didn’t take long for us to be thick as thieves and a few months later we were falling in love. Now I have never been happier than with him by my side. I love everything about him and hope to live my life with him there with me. 

While I am certainly not recovered and am recently dealing with a relapse where old eating habits have taken hold I am trying as hard as ever to try and recover. To come back. Things get hard. Life gets rough. But we deal. we fight. We don’t give into our demons. 

Stay strong everyone. 

That’s my story. Or the general idea of it.