XX. XY. Sex and gender is as simple as that.

Wrong.

In a world of transgendered, transsexual, pansexual, gender-queer and more, sex and gender is no longer determined by a couple chromosomes.

Dexter Thomas, sophomore in psychology, grew up with an ambiguous gender. Although he was technically a girl, people around him could not easily identify him as male or female. This led to many encounters of harassment and complicated social interactions.

“I have experienced a lifetime of women screaming when I’d use the women’s restroom and calling security, girls walking out of the locker rooms when I entered, trucks full of cowboys assuming that I was a gay male and aggressively following me screaming ‘fag,’” says Thomas in his blog, humancomplaints.com. “I learned to own and accept the fact that I didn’t ‘fit’ within the narrowly-defined binary.”

For a while, Thomas says he enjoyed the fact he was aesthetically gender variant and he learned not to take being mistaken as a boy as an insult. However, when Thomas hit puberty, he says a “disconnect” happened between his mind and how he was physically developing. He says he felt he was developing in the wrong direction and likened it to growing a third arm his brain wasn’t mapped for.

He says many times there are men who develop breasts in their teens. It becomes a medical emergency to get them removed due to lowering of self-esteem. “If you’re a [transgendered] guy, you have the same mental image,” says Thomas. “You’re mapping to go through male puberty but you don’t because something is going on hormonally that is in the wrong direction.”

Thomas says he created his own mechanisms and ways to deal with the disconnect, but eventually found those mechanisms mostly avoided his appearance and his true feelings.

“It wasn’t until later I recognized the impact it was having on my self-esteem,” he says. “I started to transition in order to fuse that disconnect.

Though he says he still didn’t feel the desire to be “male” as defined by society, he decided to take legal action because it was more convenient and safe to do so. He says many people are content without transitioning or going through any legal processes. “There’s not one route that everyone takes,” he says. “This is my route.”

THE LEGAL PROCESS

In order to legally change his name and his gender, Thomas had to first interview with a therapist who officially determined he was transgendered. That therapist then gave a referral letter for a doctor so he would be able to start hormones—which he also noted not everyone feels the need to take. 

Then after waiving a $350 fee, he met with a judge to fill out the necessary forms and legally change his name and gender. He says that part was the most nerve-wracking because he got a conservative judge who graduated from Brigham Young University. 

He says he was surprised when the judge gave him the option to talk privately in his office. Usually the court is full of people, but that day there was only one other person besides his parents there. The judge approved the name and gender change.

Thomas says he was able to get a new birth certificate and other forms identifying him as male, but in social security he is female.

“Ever since I’ve had my name and gender change, everything has been a lot easier just to navigate the world,” he says. “It’s a big obstacle when things don’t match.”

Thomas works as a media strategist for ASWC and is a McNair scholar. Even after the legal changes, he says he still had problems when he transferred from Salt Lake City Community College to Westminster.

He says his financial aid was stalled for a while because of e-verify and his campus job was held up for a month. He says it requires people to declare they are transgendered. “Here on campus I’m not worried about discrimination,” he says. “But out in the world if someone outs themselves to their employers it can be a problem.”

CHANGE

Now that Thomas has transitioned, he says the biggest change is his social interactions with people.

He recalls an encounter with a stranger. Thomas was wearing a big nose ring and expressing himself without gender at the time. He says he was walking down the street when a man he didn’t know walked up to him and said “God’s gonna pick you up by that nose ring and drop you into the depths of hell!”

He says the way he was gender expressing earlier was uncomfortable for people in society to comprehend; there was more hostility towards him. Now the more gender conforming he is, he says, the more people don’t notice.

A problem with the transgendered community is health insurance. He says his parents were very supportive of his transition, but the only problem was finding health insurance for him. There are many medical contracts which specifically exclude the transgendered community because they are not considered medical emergencies. Accordingly, he pays for hormones out of his pocket.

He says society still views the “trans” community correlating with mental illness and the procedures are still very new and foreign to doctors-especially with female to male transitions. He says they don’t really know much medically about the transition happening with the body and they don’t know what to expect.

MISCONCEPTIONS

Thomas says the biggest misconception about the transgendered community’s labeling of pre-op and post-op. He says labeling a transsexual pre-operation and post-operation is out dated because not every person is trying to pass as male or female.

“There are people who are really happy to be gender variant and they don’t need to be perceived as male or female,” he says. “There is more to gender.”

He says he identifies as gender queer, but it’s such a new term that he sticks to transgendered. Our language only recognizes he or she and that does not encompass all the forms of gender.

“Our language itself is really binary,” he says. “You can’t even talk, hardly communicate about anything outside of he or she.” He says the fact that the terms pre-op and post-op are already outdated, means that we’ll have a better and more evolved language in the near future that will be able to encompass gender more accurately.

“You’re just who you are,” Thomas says. “You are out in the world and you just exist as you are. It doesn’t really matter how you are perceived, what matters is if you are doing what makes you happy to fit in your skin comfortably.”

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