It was on the trail in 2004 that I met an elected official named Jack Markell. Jack was in his early forties and serving his second term as Delaware’s state treasurer. Prior to entering politics, Jack had been a successful businessman, helping to lead the cell-phone company Nextel and working as an executive at Comcast. In 1998, he dove into politics and was elected state treasurer. To an intimidated thirteen-year-old, he was one of the most approachable of the statewide politicians, almost always sporting a big, warm smile.
In a crowded lobby of a hotel hosting the state Democratic Party convention, my friends and I approached Jack and asked him for an interview for our documentary. Either because we sensed that he was going to run for higher office someday or because we didn’t know what we were doing (as much as I still wish it was the former, it was probably the latter), we started lobbing controversial policy questions at him that were totally unrelated to his role and our film: “What’s your position on marriage equality?” “Where do you stand on the death penalty?”
He probably thought, Who the hell are these kids and why are they asking me questions when I just sign the damn checks for the state? Either way, he was gracious, and at each campaign event that year he would always come up to us and seemed genuinely interested in how we were doing. He made an impression on me; he was an adult politician who cared about what I was doing and what I thought. Like the Joe Biden note, Jack made me feel like I mattered in politics, even though I was only thirteen.
I was excited when I learned that Jack was rumored to be considering running for governor in 2008, when the sitting governor would be term-limited. Before he could do that, though, Jack would need to win reelection as state treasurer in 2006. And when my parents hosted a small campaign event for him two years after we had first met, I had the chance to introduce the man who had become my friend on the trail.
After doing a good enough job with the speech at my parents’ house, Jack asked me to introduce him at an event where he would officially launch his reelection campaign as state treasurer. It was just fifty people in the back of a restaurant, but to my sixteen-year-old self, it felt like I had made the big time.
Soon, I was introducing Jack everywhere, beginning a three-year ride of opening for him at various events and functions as he sought and eventually won the governor’s office. Speaking as a fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-, and eventually eighteen-year-old about what Jack Markell meant to me, I would frequently say that “whenever I’m asked who my role models are, after my parents, but before presidents, I always say Jack Markell.”
After he announced his candidacy for governor in the spring of 2007, I went to work for his campaign, first as an intern and then, during the summer of 2008, as a field organizer, my first paid job in politics. I spent the lead-up to the primary organizing volunteers in the state representative district where I grew up, knocking on doors and registering voters. It was a tough race. Jack was the underdog as he battled it out with the heir apparent, the sitting lieutenant governor, John Carney.
Throughout the campaign, the speeches continued. At fund-raisers and campaign events across the state, I’d be Jack’s opening act, speaking about his intelligence, accomplishments, and, most of all, his heart. It was a routine that, following a monumental wave of door knocking, phone banks, canvass organizing, volunteer calls, and speeches, culminated in Jack and his wife, Carla, asking me to introduce him on primary night, effectively the general election in our deeply blue state.
The vast majority of elected officials had endorsed our opponent, and the party machine was out in force for its preferred candidate. But in the end Jack would triumph by fewer than two thousand votes. A close margin to be sure, but even winning an election by one vote feels like a massive victory.
It was one of the best nights of my life. I believed in Jack and he believed in me. Standing in front of a big blue curtain and before news cameras, reporters, and hundreds of cheering supporters, I introduced the soon-to-be-governor on the biggest night of his political life. It was surreal.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presumptive governor introduced on his victory night by an eighteen-year-old,” observed a radio reporter covering the results as they carried my introduction live.
Jack and Carla had become like a second family to me. I was with them on Jack’s inauguration day in 2009, they would attend my high school graduation with my family in June, and that summer, just before I went off to college, I would travel around the state with Jack as his personal aide, the Charlie Young to his Jed Bartlet (for fans of The West Wing). I’d stay with them at the governor’s mansion, Woodburn, sometimes as a family friend and sometimes as a staffer.
He genuinely believed that I could be governor and would give me pointers along the way. He had already fulfilled his dream but was committed to lifting others up behind him. He gave me the confidence to think big and to fight for what I know is right.
If he was struggling with a speech, he’d call me into his ornate office, step out from behind his desk, and motion for me to sit at it.
“I don’t know what to say here,” he’d instruct me. “Would you mind giving it a try?”
He’d walk out of the room to go to another meeting, leaving me sitting at the governor’s desk to finish his speech, an overwhelming assignment for an eighteen-year-old kid. He’d frequently say things to me like “when this is your desk,” “when this is your home,” “when you’re governor.” Jack made me believe that my dreams were possible. But I still knew there was a trade-off. I had known it since childhood: I needed to hide and conform. I feared that if I deviated from the norm too much, my world would come crashing down.
But I never let that impact my values. I tried to be an ally to the LGBTQ community when so many think that the only way to prove they aren’t queer is with bullying and machismo. Outwardly, I presented as a straight, cisgender—the term for people who are not transgender—boy. I dated girls throughout high school and the first part of college. I had short hair and wore traditional masculine clothing. I did all of this out of a sense of obligation that I needed to play the part that others assigned to me. I just didn’t want to let anyone down. And I didn’t want to let myself down.
While I appeared happy to everyone else, perpetually sporting a large smile I had become known for, I continued to carry with me the struggle of that five-year-old in her neighbor’s Cinderella dress. And just as I had done as a young kid, every night as a teenager I would hope and pray that I would wake up the next day as myself.
Unable to go over to friends’ houses and play “dress-up” anymore, I’d find any excuse to wear a dress or makeup. I attended an arts middle and high school, where I focused on cinema studies. Films were an escape. They allowed me to develop plots where I would play a girl.
But they weren’t the only outlet. Halloween was one of the few opportunities when it became remotely socially acceptable for me to express myself. So while every other kid was going out as someone or something else, it was one of the few opportunities that I had the chance to go out as me. Nothing fancy. In fact, pretty boring: jeans, a cute top, and a cheap wig I’d purchase at a costume store.
It wasn’t until I got a computer of my own in middle school that I opened a window into trans lives. I learned that transgender people have existed throughout time and cultures. We didn’t always use the same words to describe them, but there they were transgressing gender lines.
I read about the six gender identities that existed in ancient Jewish culture, including Saris, a person who was assigned male at birth but developed female characteristics later in life, either biologically or through human intervention. I found out that many Native American cultures affirmed and celebrated individuals they called Two-Spirit.
I learned about the diversity of the trans community. That it does not just include trans women and trans men, but also gender nonconforming, genderqueer, or gender-expansive people. Gender
identities beyond the binary of men and women have existed and, in many cases, have been rightly celebrated throughout cultures.
I learned about our history. I came across the story of Lili Elbe, one of the first trans women to undergo gender affirmation surgery, whose story was told in the book and film The Danish Girl. Europe in the 1920s saw pioneering efforts in expanding the culture’s understanding of sexuality and gender, progress largely wiped out with the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany. I read articles from newspapers in the fifties about Christine Jorgensen, the “blond GI bombshell.”
And I first learned the names Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, the transgender women of color who threw the first bricks launching riots protesting anti-LGBTQ police violence in New York City at a bar called the Stonewall Inn. That uprising, known as the Stonewall Riots, helped launch the modern movement for LGBTQ rights and dignity.
Late at night, I’d hop online and read about our identities. I’d look at pictures of those who had come out. I’d surf the Myspace and, later, Facebook pages of everyday trans people. I’d read their stories and find that many of the things they wrote about were things I was feeling or experiencing in my own life.
I knew who I was, but I still couldn’t fully accept it. I’d stand in my bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror, just daring myself to say it out loud.
Say it. Say it. Say it. Say it. You know it’s true, I’d think to myself.
“I’m transgender,” I’d finally say into my mirror. “I’m a girl.”
Instantly, shame would run over me. It couldn’t be true. Incapable of accepting that fact, I kept trying to convince myself that it would diminish with age. Or, at the very least, that I could compensate for it. At eighteen and nineteen, I’d still try to convince myself with the same arguments I made ten years earlier.
Maybe I don’t have to live my truth if I can spend my life making the world a little fairer, if I can have a hand in making more space for other people—and future generations—to live their lives more fully.
With the support of people like Jack Markell and others, this goal seemed within reach. At the very least, it certainly seemed possible.
But with each professional advancement, I carried with me the sinking feeling I felt when I first learned, sitting with my mom, the word “transgender.” Each step forward increased the disappointment that I knew I’d be if—and, really, when—I’d come out.
I worried about disappointing people like Jack, who had invested so much time and energy in mentoring me. But most of all, I feared disappointing my parents.
I lucked out in the parent lottery. My mom, Sally, is a former guidance counselor turned stay-at-home mom, or as she refers to herself, a domestic engineer. My dad is a former antiwar protester turned corporate attorney in the capital of corporate law: Delaware. They had me eight and ten years after my brothers, Sean and Dan, and are the type of warm, generous, and intelligent parents that friends frequently adopt as their own surrogate family.
I never once heard my parents disparage a person for who they were, and I watched them seamlessly and lovingly greet the news that my brother Sean is gay with compassion and unending support.
“We all just want Sean to be happy and healthy,” my parents told me when Sean sat me down in eighth grade to tell me he was dating Blake, the man who would eventually become his husband.
But even for my progressive parents, I feared my news would be too much. After all, at that point, it was still too much for me.
I also knew that if I confided in anyone, it would force me to admit it fully to myself, and I wasn’t ready for that. So I kept it inside, as best I could. Increasingly, it was something I thought about every single waking hour of every single day.
In 2009, I moved down to Washington, D.C., to continue pursuing politics. I started at American University, a college consistently ranked one of the most, if not the most, politically active in the country.
During my sophomore year, after serving in the Student Senate, I decided, at the urging of the sitting student body president, to run for president of the AU student government. So I ran. And I ran hard. At our hyperpolitical campus, it was a coveted position.
I became the first candidate for student body president to knock on every single door in every single residence hall on the main campus: thousands of doors. I worked night and day and, in the end, won by about ten percentage points in a four-person field—a decent margin, given the number of people in the race.
It was the first time I had tested my skills outside Delaware—and outside of Jack’s mentorship. I promised my parents that I would call them the moment I found out the results, which were expected to be in at about eight p.m. on a Wednesday night. I was delayed in calling them due to celebrations in the dining hall and interviews with campus media.
“Mom! Dad! I won!” I yelled into the phone when they picked up.
Ever the crier, my mom broke down and said, “Why did it take so long for you to call?! We were convinced you had lost!”
They were ecstatic when they got the news, and shortly after getting off the phone with them, I got a call from Jack.
“You kicked ass,” he said, clearly having checked the results online. Jack and I had frequently talked about his own run for student body president at Brown University, which he lost. Fifth place out of five candidates.
“Thank you, but winning your student government race is a bad omen for things to come,” I said, reminding him of his, and Bill Clinton’s, early losses in college campaigns.
He laughed and shot back, “Well, I have a feeling you’ll turn out differently than the folks who beat us.”
To my surprise, the role was a full-time job and then some. It was a job you could never escape. Sitting in class on the first day of school during my term, everyone’s heads would turn when the professor called out my name on the roster. People, particularly freshmen, would explode with excitement if they had a drink next to me at a party. I was a “campus celebrity,” as my friends would mockingly say.
At the start, I thought I would enjoy that part, but it got old quickly. The introvert in me enjoyed my anonymity, and even the coolest parts still felt like I was living someone else’s life.
The theme of my term continued my long-standing passion for inclusion and equality that I had developed as a precocious reader of history. Everything I did was about “making AU as inclusive, accessible, and open as possible.” Every initiative, every policy, every speech fell within that theme, including our robust work on LGBTQ equality.
It was through this work that I gained my first experience in trans-specific advocacy by offering the student government’s support to a Transgender Day of Remembrance event, a commemoration of those who had lost their lives throughout the previous year. Beyond the 41 percent of transgender people who report attempting suicide are the countless, and often unknown, individuals who take their own lives, as well as the dozens in the United States who lose their lives to violence committed at the hands of someone else.
I worked with the school administration to secure gender-inclusive housing, which would allow students of all gender identities to room with the student or students of their choice. The old policy, automatic segregation based on someone’s legal gender, was rooted in the assumption that two people of different genders could never comfortably live together and that doing so would inevitably lead to attraction and, potentially, drama.
That policy, however, completely erases the reality of gay students and harkens back to a period when men and women could never just be friends. It also limited options for students who were transgender but had not yet legally changed their gender. With surprising support from the school administration, we succeeded in expanding options and creating more choice for students.
The substance of the job felt good. From big-scale issues like combating sexual assault to smaller quality-of-life issues like th
e construction of speed bumps in highly foot-trafficked parts of campus, getting things done and making life a little easier for others was truly just as professionally fulfilling as I imagined. But even that satisfaction could not distract me from my identity. And I finally became convinced that the reasons I used to rationalize staying in the closet wouldn’t actually bring me the wholeness I hoped for. It was becoming clear that as rewarding as making a difference in my community was, it wouldn’t compensate for a life in the closet. Far from it.
One day, while I was sitting in the office of our friendly director of student housing, he asked me where my passion for LGBTQ equality came from. I had been pushing gender-inclusive housing pretty hard, and people were curious where the interest originated. After all, at that point, I identified as your typical straight boy. Everyone, including straight, cisgender people, should be able to care about LGBTQ equality without others questioning their motivation, but I knew the director of student housing understood that. He was letting me know that others were curious.
“Well, it’s the right thing, for one. But I think personally…” I paused. I wanted to say it. I wanted to say, “because I’m transgender.”
But I couldn’t.
“One of my brothers is gay,” I told him. “And I want to make sure people like my brother have the same opportunities to feel safe and welcomed as every other student.”
The answer was half true, of course, but it was the closest I had ever gotten to confiding in someone.
I left his office feeling like I was about to explode. By now, I had gone from thinking about my gender identity every hour to thinking about it every single minute. I could no longer compartmentalize. The only way I could get through anything was to imagine myself redoing it as a girl. Even the simplest action, like walking between classes, became unbearable unless I relived it in my own head, imagining a life that resembled my own but with one big difference: I was myself.
Tomorrow Will Be Different Page 3