Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: All The Only Ones

Episode Date: December 3, 2023

In this week's episode, Ayesha shares the latest series out of NPR's Embedded. In "All The Only Ones," Laine Kaplan-Levenson unearths the little-known and often neglected history of trans youth in America. The series follows the lives of young transgender people today and travels back in time to the turn of the 20th century to meet some of the earliest trans youth documented in American history.You can listen to the 3-part series on the Embedded feed here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. So here at NPR, there's always a lot going on. Breaking news, investigative reporting, tiny desk concerts, and deeply reported podcast series. I've been listening to this three-part series that finds meaning by weaving together the past and the present. It's out of Embedded, our long-form documentary unit, and I'm so excited for you to hear some of it. So I'll hand it over to Embedded host Kelly McEvers and let her take it from here. Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and I'm here with reporter Lane Kaplan-Levinson. They are the host of our new series, All the Only Ones.

Hey, Lane. Hey, Kelly. How's it going? Good. How are you? Good. I'm so excited about this series. Oh, that's really, really nice to hear. And I'm so happy to be talking to you today. And yeah, this is just a thrill.

Cool, cool, cool. Me too. So for a long time, you were a reporter and producer with our friends over at the NPR History Podcast, ThruLine, right? Yes. A show that looks at things that are happening in the news and goes into history for context. And for the past year, you've been digging into a topic that has been in the headlines a lot these days. Trans youth. Yeah. You might have heard about bills that state lawmakers across the country have been rushing to pass. They've gotten a lot of coverage. This week, a whole new slate of anti-trans bills passed in states across the country. This year, 2023, broke a record for the number of these bills. And that's the fourth year in a row. A lot of

them target trans kids in particular, banning them from bathrooms or sports teams or gender-affirming health care. There will be a ban on gender-affirming care for kids in Louisiana. Texas will stop at nothing to continue to protect women's sports for women. That sounds like a lot of bills in a lot of states. Are you seeing similarities in these bills? Any patterns? Definitely. So much of this anti-trans sentiment towards kids is based on this idea that gender transition for them is new. You might have heard some headlines like this.

We are in a new dawn of gender and sex complexity. Mm-hmm. How young is too young for a child to transition? On a daily basis, we're reading new headlines about gender, about gender nonconforming people. The subject of transgender kids has moved into the mainstream. It does feel like something we've been hearing way more about in the last few years, right? Like, more than we used to.

Right, but as someone who's been obsessed with history since, I don't know, middle school, and as someone who's non-binary, my immediate question was, how new is gender transition for young people? I mean, I was kind of familiar with it going into this project, but that history isn't so widely out there. And when I started digging into it deeper, I realized that if more people knew this history, it could really reframe our understanding of how trans youth are being treated now. How far back in history did you go? A hundred years. Oh, yeah. Okay. Good. But this is a podcast.

Like, how do you tell a story that's 100 years old? That's a good question. So we interviewed a few historians who've done groundbreaking research on this stuff and who helped us access medical records and letters from people who were alive back then. And then we hired voice actors to read from those documents. A heads up about that, actually, the real names of these people from history were redacted in the medical records. So we call them by the pseudonyms given to them by the main historian that we interview in this series. Okay. So then how do you bring

this history into the present, into the now? Well, I go to the source. I talk to trans youth today. Just like history is basically missing from the political debate, I also noticed that in so much of the current coverage about trans kids, we often don't hear from trans kids themselves. Yeah. What's in this first episode, then, of all the only ones? So in this first episode, we'll hear from two people who force us to step back and ask what it even means to be trans. These two people were born a century apart, but they're connected across time and space because they've wrestled with the same question. How do you define your own identity when the world is trying to define it for you? And just so you know, there's some profanity along the way. Okay, well, take it away, Lane.

Thanks, Kelly. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. You can begin trans history as far back as you want, anywhere in

the world. We're going to start a century ago, in the U.S. That's when ideas about sex and gender dramatically changed within American medicine. It's also the time when young people start to appear in medical archives, questioning and redefining gender and sex. Already by this era, if you go to any major city in the United States, there are whole neighborhoods that are full of people that we would recognize today as trans. This is Jules Gill Peterson. I am a historian of trans people, trans medicine, and trans life. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University. So by the 20s and 30s, there's this really vibrant world

with its own set of rules that has been functioning for many, many, many decades. Some might call themselves inverts. Some people might have identified as homosexual, which was still a relatively new term, or a few might have even called themselves gay. So even though people wouldn't use the term transgender in a widespread way until the 1990s, trans people were very much around living full trans lives more than a hundred years ago.

There are whole sections of American cities, but they're also often segregated. In Chicago, the North Loop is a notorious queer kind of neighborhood in the early 20th century. But the South Side has its own Black queer and Black trans neighborhood as well. In New York City, you can see a similar thing happening. Greenwich Village is the heart of a vibrant lesbian, gay, and trans social world for white people, whereas the heart of the Black, queer, and trans world was Harlem. And if you were part of that scene, you could probably be found at the Hamilton Lodge Ball.

It was an annual social event that drew huge crowds. I know a fool that blows a horn. The Hamilton Lodge Ball was located at the Rockland Palace in Harlem and began in the late 19th century, but then kind of came into itself really in the Harlem Renaissance era during the 1920s and 30s. This is Marquise Bay, professor of African American Studies, Black Feminist Theory, and Transgender Studies at Northwestern University. It was an event that drew thousands of people to dance and to perform and to spectate, and it was characterized by what many would call drag balls. And it wasn't just the Hamilton Lodge balls.

You could go to the Ubangi Club and see Gladys Bentley, who performed in full tuxedos backed by a chorus of men in drag. Here she is singing Boogie and My Woogie. I was in the army, now the war is through. Look out pretty mama, I'm coming home to you. I wonder who's boogin' my woogie now. These places really birthed a new sense of what was possible for Black life, and in particular, Black queer life. There was a kind of search for freeness, and freeness in expression included gender expression. And in fact, to express myself in this way is quite seriously me living to my fullest.

So gender nonconformity fully existed back in the 1920s and 30s. But one thing was very different. Medical care. We didn't need medicine to exist. Trans people have existed in different forms, in different cultures, everywhere for thousands of years, for as long as there is recorded human history. But going to the doctor about your gender to try to get hormones or surgery, that wasn't initially on most people's radar. It wasn't an option. But it's at this moment, the 20s and 30s, between the two world wars, that science and medicine make it possible to medically transition. And so it's a profound moment of change for trans

people. And it becomes really fascinating to see which people will become interested in that. Bernard is one of those first people. Bernard is one of the first trans patients on record at Johns Hopkins trying to get what today we would call gender affirmation surgery. We don't know Bernard's real name because it was redacted from his medical records. So Bernard is a pseudonym that I invented for him. You have to treat people's medical records like you would treat them today and so you can't use any personally identifying information, even to conduct corroborating research. By the time the science rolls out, Bernard was in his 20s, and he was ready to take advantage of medical treatments to transition.

But he had been living as himself way before that, since he was a kid. I have always liked boyish things, such as games, books, and clothes. I wear my haircut short and tailored clothes all the time. This is from a letter Bernard wrote as a young man. I discovered it while reading Jules Gill Peterson's book, Histories of the Transgender Child. Jules dug through archives and found all sorts of records. She used them to tell the stories of trans youth in the U.S. over the last century, including Bernard's. So Bernard is this remarkable little boy growing up in small-town Alabama in the 19-teens.

As a young child, he is just so obsessed with his dad, looks up to him so, so, so, so much. He wants nothing, nothing more than to be like his dad, who was a doctor. And so from a young age, Bernard just has it stuck in his mind that he is going to grow up and be just like his dad. He's going to wear suits like his dad. He's going to become a doctor like his dad. He's going to become an upstanding, well-respected man. Only wrinkle is that everyone thinks he's a girl. His parents had explained to him since he was a child that he was a girl, not a boy.

So he's got to figure that out. Someone told him jokingly that, you know, well, if you kiss your elbow, you'll turn into a boy. It's basically impossible to kiss your elbow. That's what makes the challenge so cruel. But every day, Bernard tries and tries. Hundreds of times, hoping that it would finally come true. And really from a very young age, he's transgressing that line between genders. He is figuring out how to steal his younger brother's overalls or trousers, put them on, dress up as a boy. And as he's starting to grow up, people in his family and community are starting to mistake him for his father sometimes. And, you know, this really, really, really made Bernard very happy.

It seemed like some of his dream was sort of coming true. By the time he's in his 20s, Bernard's dreams have only gotten him so far. He has privileges. He identifies as white, and he comes from a well-respected family, with money. His father's a doctor. And he wants to be one himself. But society doesn't recognize him as a man, so it's really hard to go to medical school. Instead, Bernard's a textile worker. And he's sort of feeling pretty kind of frustrated, like his life is sort of stalled out where he would want it to be. He's got something going for him, though. He's in love.

He wants to marry her. He really wants to marry her, but he's worried. Because recently an evangelist came to town and basically told her to leave Bernard, saying, You're a woman. Well, you're not going to be marrying another woman. So he's determined to find a way for others to see him for who he is, a man. And it's, you know, around this time in the 1930s that he

first starts to hear about people who are like him. Prior to this era, when he was growing up, he really felt like he was the only person in the world with this issue, where he felt himself to, he really felt like he was the only person in the world with this issue, where he felt himself to be a man but didn't have the body to match it. For years, I have thought I was the only person in the world like that. And I have only lately heard that there are other people with the same feelings.

But then suddenly he starts to hear about sex changes. He reads a story about an English track and field athlete who was declared a man after two surgeries. Bernard's mind is blown, and he writes to the editor of Sexology magazine asking for more info. The editor writes back and says, You ought to go to Johns Hopkins Hospital. And so that plants the idea in Bernard's head. And he's like, okay, fine. I've got to get myself to Johns Hopkins and I've got to find this surgeon, Hugh Hampton Young, because if I go there, either he can confirm that I'm a man and give me the kind of certification that I need to get married to my sweetheart, or maybe he can make me physically into the man that I know myself to be, and then I can come back and marry her.

We'll get back to Bernard's story, but first, I want feels like you feel so free, like you could just like really be yourself. This is Zen Castro. I'm in their living room in New Orleans' 7th Ward, and they're showing me something super coveted in this city. I have a music shoe. Aeshoe during Mardi Gras is kind of like one of the Holy Grail throws. If you're not familiar with Mardi Gras, a museshoe is like a bedazzled, high-heeled pump. They're thrown from floats at parades.

And that's a really cool one. Yeah, I really like it. It's very colorful, very fun. Yes. Very glittery, too. It's getting all over my hands. Yes. So glittery, too. It's getting all over my hands. Yes, yes. So I'm going to put it away right quick.

Okay. Getting glitter all over your hands and really all over your body is very New Orleans. It's pretty much unavoidable, especially during Mardi Gras. I used to live there, and you really never rid yourself of glitter year-round. It's in your bed. It's on your sink. There's always a little fleck stuck on your cheek. You can see that as a nuisance or as a constant reminder of celebration. That's what New Orleans is often known for, a place famous for letting people be vibrant and full of life, proud of who they are, and loud about it.

But even in this place that should feel freeing, Zen has had a hard time figuring out what it means to be themself. They're now in their 20s, but they've been struggling with the gender binary since they were a kid, partly because traditional gender roles were so enforced at home. They were expected to take care of their younger siblings and help their mom with the cooking and cleaning. Over my brother, like, if he did not do that stuff,

then it was like, whatever, he's a boy. But then Zen discovered the social media site Tumblr, which was their portal to lots of things, including grunge fashion. I liked wearing, like, flannel, and, like, I had these, like, ribbed jeans that I'd always wear. Crop tops were trying to be a thing. And transness. After I see these words, like, gender fluid on Tumblr, I'm searching them up, and it feels so like me that I'm just like, wow, like, this makes sense. This is

the missing piece of the puzzle. The missing piece of the puzzle that they kept to themselves. Zen spent a lot of middle school hiding. They kept exploring their transness on the internet, but not out in the world. I got bullied a lot. For what? I don't know, I guess for just being me. And kids are really good at picking up energies, so I felt like that discomfort,

they were able to pick up on and used it against me. That really was the start of when I started to, like, not feel comfortable with expressing myself and my thoughts. They thought they might be able to come out once they got to high school, especially when they got into their dream school, Benjamin Franklin. Which here is like a pretty big deal because people see it as like the smart school or whatever. And in my head, I thought, oh, there's going to be other people like me. It's going to be okay for me to express myself and to talk to other people because they'll know what I have experienced, I guess. Which may have been true. There probably were other trans and non-binary students at Franklin. But when Zen got there, they had trouble fitting in.

A lot of the demographics at Ben Franklin are people who are upper class, middle class. People who have always had, like, these supportive people around them and resources. Zen had a much different upbringing. When they were 10 years old, their dad was deported to Mexico. Zen's dad managed to get back into the U.S. and to Zen's family. But a few years later, he was deported a second time. I knew that I'd probably never see him again. Zen was right.

They haven't seen their dad since. Their mom quickly remarried, and they moved around a lot. So it was even hard to, like, relate to most people in a school that I initially thought I would fit in. That's when I started to kind of be, like, over-feminine. It didn't feel right, but because of just just those expectations it felt like I had to like learn how to do makeup and learn how to like look good in a feminine way I think because of how I grew up and the experiences I've had I turned into a real people pleaser. So I felt scared to kind of be a different person than what other people wanted me to be.

Because if I were to be this other person people didn't want me to be, then I'd feel even more alone than I already was. So it was kind of heartbreaking. After the break, we learn how Zen started to live as Zen, out in the world beyond their Tumblr feed. But first, we'll return to Bernard, who's trying to transition a century before Zen was born. I have always liked boyish things, such as games, books, and clothes.

I wear my hair cut short and tailored clothes all the time. I feel much more at ease in men's clothes than in women's. As I understand it, a person may have secondary sexual organs which control his mental and emotional life, while the primary organs... After Bernard read about a quote-unquote sex change and later learned about Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, he wrote another letter, this time to the top surgeon at Hopkins, known for doing cutting-edge surgeries in the field, Hugh Hampton Young. He knows how to change sex through surgery. He's done it before. But he wasn't doing surgeries for trans people at their request. He wasn't doing it in a gender-affirming way. He was working with a different group of people. With intersex patients to force them into a binary sex. There are a range of intersex conditions which essentially produce bodies that don't cohere as far as biological sex in the ways that we've traditionally been

taught bodies do. This is Hill Malatino, assistant professor of women's gender and sexuality studies and philosophy at Penn State University. As Hill was saying, intersex is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of conditions where a person's reproductive or sexual anatomy doesn't align perfectly with what is traditionally thought of as female or male. We don't know exactly how many people live with intersex conditions. Some estimates say it may be as common as having red hair or green eyes, but parents often don't see it that way. And definitely in Bernard's time, parents treated it as a crisis. The fact that their kid wasn't sort of normatively male or female, at least not in the strict conception that we have of biological sex.

Medicine was coming to solve what was supposedly a problem. To sort of normalize intersex bodies. I use scare quotes when I say that. Which is exactly what Hugh Hampton Young was doing at Hopkins. These were surgeries forced on children who were born with genitals that didn't look obviously male or female. A lot of these kids were too young to consent, couldn't talk yet. So there was just a lot of incredible medical abuse being done in the name of social conformity. And the techniques that those doctors were developing were the same techniques that were being used to treat trans adults in most instances. That's why trans kids and intersex kids traveled together throughout the 20th century. And I think you can't understand the history of trans youth

without understanding intersex history and vice versa. They're totally, totally intertwined. Trans and intersex kids in this period were treated in completely opposite ways. Young and other surgeons operated on intersex kids, but refused to operate on trans kids and adults who asked for the very same procedures. In both cases, the power was in the doctor's hands, not the kids. When Bernard writes his letter to Hugh Hampton Young, he's not exactly a kid. He's in his late 20s. But he's chasing something he's known about himself since he was a kid.

And suddenly, the person holding the key to his self-actualization is some doctor in Baltimore. Bernard needs to stand out. As I understand it, a person may have secondary sexual organs which control his mental and emotional life, while the primary organs are of the opposite sex. What I want to know is, can these secondary organs really be developed in such a way that a person who has been known as a female becomes a male? So Bernard sits down to write this letter to Hugh Hampton Young over in Baltimore and says that he's writing to him, quote, concerning what is to me a most vital subject. If this can be done, I would like to know about what the cost would be and the time required. I have read that most of these operations are

in the experimental stage, but I am perfectly willing to become a part of any experiment that might be of any aid to the thousands of other persons affected as I am. I hope that this letter does not seem too foolish to you, and that you will not regard it as a mere whim. I think that you can understand I need help badly, and if it can be attained in this country, that you can give it. This letter must have been pretty convincing because Hugh Hampton Young replies and says,

come to Baltimore for an appointment. I'm just imagining how thrilled Bernard must have felt to get that letter from Baltimore telling him, come on up, we'll see you. So Bernard packs his bags and... Makes this trip all the way up to Baltimore. He shows up, meets Hugh Hampton Young. Young was very charmed by him.

Bernard may have been charming. He was also well-read and had done his homework. He came to Hopkins with a strategy. He presents himself to Hugh Hampton Young as intersex, which was a very smart choice to make at the time because Young was treating intersex patients at Hopkins. And intersex medicine was understood to be a lot more legitimate. So Bernard shows up and says, I know I'm a man. My body just has these female body parts, but I have male body parts too. He says, you know, I can feel that I have a penis, but I think it might be sort of submerged or lodged inside my body somehow. So it

needs to sort of be freed. I know I have testicles, but I think they're internal. I think that they failed to, you know, descend from inside the body. Young is apparently convinced. After just two meetings, he's basically prepared to give Bernard the surgery he wants. But is a little nervous about it. Nervous because of what happened after Young's colleague examined Bernard. This physician issued a report that said, This person is not intersex. So already there's been a sort of objection raised to the story that Bernard was telling. What Young really needed

was some sort of professional endorsement to justify him being willing to work with Bernard and give him surgery. And he thinks, I'll just send Bernard over to a psychiatrist just for a quick assessment. So now Bernard has to go through one more gate to get his medical transition, a gate named Dr. Thomas Rennie. He goes through and interviews Bernard about his childhood, hears about this longstanding wish to be a boy, feeling himself to be a boy, dressing as a boy, being mistaken for his father. Dr. Rennie took detailed notes during the interview. And heads up, he uses female pronouns for Bernard. She has a very interesting problem.

She has come to Johns Hopkins because she feels that she is really a man, in spite of her female body build, and because she wishes to she is really a man, in spite of her female body build, and because she wishes to have an operation to give her male organs. Rennie isn't really buying it. She says she must have this done because she has been in love with a young lady in her hometown for the past five years, and now wishes to marry her. Rennie basically is like, you're a homosexual. You're a woman in a relationship with a woman, and that's a psychiatric illness.

It was merely suggested to the patient that in view of her own history, there might have been strong psychological influences which led her to wish to be a man. It's really hard to me, from reading the larger body of his work as a psychiatrist, to think that he sincerely believed this. It was more that he was alarmed that Bernard wasn't intersex. And so he was just grasping for a psychological explanation to block his request for medical transition. And homosexuality was really the only one in circulation in the United States at that time. This was a time when medicine conflated sexual orientation and gender identity, even though in society a clear distinction of those two things was starting to emerge,

which makes it hard to claim that Bernard was a lesbian. We're talking here about the late 1930s and pretty clear distinctions between butch lesbians and trans men between lesbians who want to be known as butches because they want to be known as masculine in the context of a lesbian social world that has its own bars and has its own courtship rituals and then groups of people who were assigned female at birth but live full-time as men and didn't necessarily socialize in that gay world, but were more likely to be found at the bar with all the other workers in an industrial plant. And there they passed for men. So we can place Bernard in that context. And Jules says there's Bernard's life, as he tells it.

The fact that he's always felt himself to be a boy, the fact that he works, you know, in a manual labor setting and really resented being kept out of medical school. These aren't really the kinds of life narratives that butch lesbians would be presenting about themselves in the 1930s. But despite what Bernard was saying, Dr. Rennie concluded that he was a lesbian. Because of the fact that the patient wanted to return home at once, and because she was not interested at all in any psychotherapy but merely in the matter of surgical intervention, not much could be undertaken. And that was it. That's the end of Bernard's medical record. No doubt after hearing that he wasn't going to get what he wanted, he decided to get up, turn around, and walk out that door, returning to Alabama and disappearing, ultimately, from the historical record.

Bernard's medical record may have ended there, but Jules says the response Bernard got from his doctors was among the first of its kind in the United States. Young is actually one of the first people to use the pretense of there's nothing different about your body from a so-called normal person. You're not intersex. So if there's nothing wrong about your body from a so-called normal person. You're not intersex. So if there's nothing wrong with your body, then the only way I could imagine saying that you're disordered is to find something wrong with your mind.

Bernard is kind of this fateful person who shows a lot of what is going to come and what is going to define trans people's experiences with medicine decades later. When we come back, Zen meets Bernard. It's just before sunset on Zen's front porch. It was kind of like a spur-of-the-moment thing. We're talking about the time they dug up the confidence to do something they weren't sure they'd ever do. Come out to their mom. There was one point where I was like, I don't think I would ever tell her because I just had this expectation that she wouldn't understand or at the worst that she would say that my identity isn't real or just like react negatively. Like,

I don't know. I was kind of preparing for the worst. So the strategy was to have a little distance, a phone call. I told her in English, I'm not on binary. And my brother was on speaker. And at first, my brother was trying to explain to her what that meant. She didn't understand at all. She thought I was trying to say I was lesbian. Then I'm like, okay, this is going to get lost in translation. Then I told her the Spanish version of non-binary. But Zen needed backup. They needed Spanish CNN. I saw this like news segment and I looked over and I'm like, oh my god, this is perfect. Muy bien. A ver, ¿qué significa ser una persona

que se identifica con el género no binario, como es el caso de Demi Lovato? I sent it to her. I think she watched it, and, you know, she was, like, very accepting. Maybe for, like, a couple days, but then she reverted back to

my dead name. The name she gave Zen when Zen was born. And to she, her pronouns. The only person who's really on top of that stuff is my brother, who I'm closest to in my family. And I'm really appreciative of that because I feel like I have some support. But it always does make me cringe when I do end up calling her or she messages me and she uses my death name. Because it's almost like on some level you're trying to justify it, if that makes sense.

Like, justify your existence as a trans and genderqueer person. I don't want to have to do that with my mom, especially with other people, less my mom, so it's just really complicated. Zen's out to everyone in their life today, at home, at school, at work, but they still deal with insecurity around claiming their

transness. Because mainstream ideas float around about what that means. Around what transness means, and in Zen's case, what non-binary means too. It feels like that pressure to represent myself as gender neutral is there. Otherwise, being misgendered is a common occurrence. So it's kind of a lose-lose situation. I don't know, I haven't really reached a point where I feel like I could go outside and be okay with how I look. Professor Hill Malatino writes about what Zen's experiencing.

He and others say these feelings are a product of something called transnormativity. This idea that there's one right way to be a trans guy, a trans woman, a non-binary person, I think that that's always violent, it's always limiting. I certainly experienced that as a trans youth. And I too didn't entirely know where those messages came from. I hate to see kids grapple with that now. I really wanted Zen to meet Bernard as best they could. So one day while we were driving around New Orleans together, I told them his story about trying to kiss his elbow, about falling in love, about his letters to doctors,

and about how after being denied surgery, he just completely disappears from the historical record. I like the history about Bernard so much, but, like, also it makes me so sad. It just feels disappointing that we don't know, like, the conclusion, I guess. Yeah. What do you like to think was the rest of his life? That he found another way to cope with his body not matching his gender

identity or like maybe he found another clinic that was more receptive to what he had to say but i feel like that's wishful thinking But he and his wife definitely got married. They had to have gotten married. Even if it wasn't like official. Like marriage doesn't have to be official on paper. What do you think he liked to wear? He loved wearing overalls. He loved wearing like trouser He loved wearing, like, trouser pants.

Very on brand. Yes. With being queer. He's queer. I don't know what happened to Bernard after he left Johns Hopkins because the only reason I could reconstruct all of this about his life is because I was able to read his medical files. But I like to imagine that Bernard kind of got the last laugh,

gave up on that nonsense from psychiatry, and went back home and lived the life that he wanted to. Back at Zen's house, I see their high school diploma on the wall, something they're really proud of. It does have my dead name on it, but this was before I came out entirely, so, I mean, it's a moment in time. Now, Zen's thinking about their future. I'm jealous of future Zen, because I'm sure they have it all figured out. Describe the future Zen that you're jealous of.

Who are you? I don't know. Who am I? I just, I can't. It's a thought experiment. Someone who is confident, able to express themselves, comfortable being vulnerable, is so kind to themselves, so patient with themselves, and is able to take care of themselves how they take care of others.

Oh, and they definitely have their wardrobe together. I guess finally what I will say is the way I approach my identity might take a lot of work to, like, undo those thoughts of having to look a certain way or be a certain way, when in reality there's no certain way to be trans other than like saying that you are. I guess that is just part of my journey. Sorry, I'm going to cry if I keep saying stuff about future descent. On the next two episodes of All the Only Ones, we hear from trans youth who need gender-affirming care to feel fully themselves. We learn what happens when trans kids trying to get this care are told they have to wait. I can't wait six years. If I have to wait that long, I'll go crazy. And what happens when they get the care they want.

The end goal isn't to be a girl. Being a girl is where I feel like I can finally begin. That's coming up on All The Only Ones from NPR. Thank you. to show your support for work like this at NPR, and you'll get to listen to every episode of Embedded without any sponsors. Head to plus.npr.org slash embedded to find out more. All the Only Ones is written and hosted by me, Lane Catherine Levinson. Our producers are Max Friedman,

Skylar Swenson, Abby Wendell, and me. Editing by Raina Cohen, Brenna Farrell, Bilal Qureshi, Katie Simon, Liana Simstrom, Thank you. Special thanks to Nina Patek, Sam J. Leeds, Lauren Gonzalez, and Gary Duong. Also thanks to Eli Conley, Austin Sibley, Erin Reed, Cam Ogden, Hansi Stokes, Jovan Kallenberg, Burns, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Eve Abrams, Lou Olkowski, and the folks at the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico. And a huge thanks to Jules Gill-Peterson for being our historical guide and lending her scholarship to this entire series. Our voiceover actors are Jude Batterman, who played Bernard, and Max Friedman, who played Dr. Thomas Rennie. Special thanks to Transgender Talent.

Our fact-checkers are Kevin Volkel and Will Chase. The NPR execs are Yolanda Sanguini, Irene Noguchi, and Anya Grunman. Our theme music is by Kyle Kidd and Sound on Tape. Additional music in this episode is by Shane Ivers. I'm Lane Kaplan-Levinson, and this is All The Only Ones from NPR.