BOCES v3 C
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Hi, I'm Rowan Collins,
and I am the education coordinator
for the LGBTQ Academy at the Gay Alliance.
And I just wanted to share my personal
coming-out story with all of you.
So hi, everyone, I'm Rowan,
and I'm an only child.
And when I was born,
I was my parent's only daughter.
I identify as a transgender man.
And I'm one of those people
who knew at a really, really, really early age
that something was just a little different.
I didn't like all the girly things I was supposed to,
I didn't like pink, I didn't like princesses' dresses,
I wanted nothing to do with this stuff.
At about the age of three,
one of the first sentences
I ever actually strung
together was no more dresses.
I said that every single morning to my mom
for about a month.
I had the end of the month
she looked at me and said,
"I heard you the first time
why are you yelling at me."
And I never wore a dress after that.
When I was about to turn 6 years old,
my family was gonna make a really big move.
My dad had been offered a new job
and we were kind of making a huge trek
to move to this new place.
And so my parents felt really bad for uprooting me
at such an early age
and they said, "You can have, basically,
whatever you want for your 6th birthday,
just whatever."
I realize now in hindsight,
I completely squandered this offer
and I'm like, "I could've asked you
something cool like a horse or a rocket ship."
But at the time, I said, "I want a haircut."
I think they, kind of,
looked at me funny and were like,
"Are you sure?
You can have literally anything you want."
I was like, "No, I really want a haircut."
So they said, "Yeah, of course."
Probably thank their lucky stars,
I chose the cheapest birthday present imaginable.
Took me to the salon, the hair that was coming
all the way down my back,
they put a nice ponytail
and chopped it right off,
and to this day,
it is the best birthday present
I have ever received.
But I showed up on my first day
of 1st grade wearing boys' clothes,
had a short haircut,
and I was really new.
None of these things went over very well
with my classmates.
I could probably say with 100% confidence
that I got asked the question, are you a boy,
are you a girl every single day
for about a decade.
The way that I was presenting my gender,
it didn't really go over well with most people
and I had no answers for anybody.
I didn't know the word transgender,
I had no way to describe how I was feeling,
I just knew that it felt comfortable
to wear the clothes
I wanted to wear and have my hair short.
The first time I even knowingly
saw a transgender person
wasn't even until I was in 7th grade.
I was homesick one day from school,
I was about 12 years old at the time,
and both of my parents work
so I was home alone.
And since no one was there to tell me
what to do or what not to do,
I turned on Trashy Daytime television
and I turned on Jerry Springer.
Now there is a transgender woman
on Jerry Springer that morning,
but since this is an Ellen or Oprah,
she wasn't really there to be interviewed
about her journey
or what she was contributing to society.
She was just there to be laughed at.
And I remember
I was sitting on my couch, kind of,
bundled in his blanket,
watching this woman get booed
and jeered
and called every name under the Sun,
and then a whole bunch of that
I had never heard before.
And I remember thinking,
"I'm so glad that's not me."
And then changing the channel.
And I didn't think about it again
for another three years.
It wasn't until I was in 10th grade,
I was about 15 that I realized
the word transgender actually applied to me.
I basically made my first friend who was trans.
He was transitioning at a different district
and this was back in 2007, 2008,
so this was kind of unheard of at the time.
And the first time I met him in person,
he just scared the heck out of me,
now he's like the shortest person on the planet
and also the nicest person
I've ever met in my life.
So it wasn't a physical intimidation.
It was because he looked like me.
And I kind of froze.
I had never seen myself before.
It was like looking in a mirror for the first time
after 15.5 years on the planet.
I wasn't ready to recognize
that the word trans was my word.
I knew that it was, and at the time,
I really didn't want it to be.
Everything that I had ever heard was negative.
I was worried that my parents
would kick me out
that I was gonna lose all of my friends,
that no one will take me seriously,
and so I figured I'll just ignore it
and it will go away.
Not my best strategy.
Everything always
comes back to you eventually.
But I spent the vast majority
of the second half of high school
just not mentally present.
I checked out completely.
I didn't want to deal with who I was
and I didn't want to deal with the potential
that other people wouldn't want
to be around me anymore.
About halfway through
my senior year of high school,
I was in a very intensive drama course
and I had to have a costume for a scene
that I was performing the next day.
We were doing Shakespeare scenes,
and mine was from Macbeth.
Now my costume had to be a woman's costume
because naturally those were the roles
that I was getting at the time,
and I was really freaking out.
The thought alone of putting
on women's clothing was, kind of,
sending me into a panic attack.
Now my mom was the only person in the house
who had women's clothing at all.
So she found me like midnight
in the dead of winter
on a school night desperately rifling
through her closet,
trying to find something to put on
that wasn't gonna make me hyperventilate,
and I was failing.
So she found me clutching
this floral bathrobe,
sitting on the floor outside of her closet,
and she looked at me and said,
"This cannot be about the costume.
We really need to talk."
She took me downstairs,
she sat me on the couch,
and I cried for an hour
and I didn't say anything.
I was petrified that
if I just opened my mouth and said it,
that was gonna be the last conversation
I'd ever have with her.
And it almost didn't make any sense
'cause my parents had supported me my whole life,
but everything
that I had heard outside of my house
was so much louder than any reassurance
my parents could've ever given me.
But I watch the minutes,
it get closer and closer to one on our cable box
and I remember thinking just say it.
Rip the band-aid off, it's not gonna be
any easier to do this tomorrow.
So I took a deep breath,
I looked at my mom, I said,
"Mom, I'm a boy."
She paused.
And at the time,
I felt like the longest pause of my life.
Before she just took this huge sigh of relief
and said, "Thank God,
I thought it was something serious,"
which was probably the coolest
and most infuriating reaction
she could've ever given me.
I freaked out
as a very dramatic 17-year-old.
It was like, "What did you think,
I had cancer, mom?"
Like, "What's worse than this react to me?"
And she shook her head at me
and did that affectionate.
I role that moms are really good at,
and she said, "It's okay."
You're okay.
So naturally, I burst back into tears.
And she said, "We'll talk about this
when you're ready."
I wasn't ready.
I wasn't ready the next day or the day after that
or the day after that.
I graduated that
spring having never breathed on the word of it.
I didn't want to talk about it,
I didn't know what to do.
I went away to college in New York City,
thinking that I would reinvent myself,
but I didn't even know
who I wanted to be in my reinvention.
So I took my second semester
of my freshman year of college off
to come back home
and start seeing a therapist
who had some sort of background
in this sort of stuff.
Through seeing her, I started to come out
to my dad and to all of my friends
and start to actually put a plan together
of who I wanted to be.
I came on to my dad
and all my friends all in one day,
it was a pretty busy Thursday for me,
but I am one of the unfortunately rare few
in the trans community
who has not lost a single person
and coming out.
My friends and family
were incredibly supportive and excited.
It obviously takes a while to make
the little switches in your brain,
but they were on board
from the very beginning.
I started hormone replacement therapy
that summer,
applied to a bunch of different schools
for transfer,
ended up in the Rochester area,
which is now where I live and work,
started getting involved the Gay Alliance,
very soon after my arrival
five years ago in Rochester.
And it's been a pretty amazing journey.
There's always ups and downs,
but I wouldn't regret it
and I wouldn't change it for the whole world.
I get to use my personal story to help
and inform people
and educate around New York
as well as across the country.
I'm trying to create the kinds of spaces
that I wish I'd had when I was younger,
but I have to say to pull it all together
the best part of my entire transition
is now I get to say
I am my parent's only son.