The long-awaited podcast is finally here! Join host Evan James White as he gives insight into why he decided now is the time and offers some background tidbits about his life and identity.
Original music by Evan James White.
("In the Ether" keyboard musical intro)
Evan: Well, hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Just Another Guy (Who Happens to Be Trans). I'm your host, Evan James White.
I'm starting this podcast because I think it's time. You have one political party that really appears poised to kind of take away a lot of trans rights. I don't think that it’s always been a great time to be trans anyway throughout history. But just at the point where we have all these rights that we should have, like that's why they're called rights. We have access to care. We have people seeing us, we're out there in the world. We have exposure. Just at the height, at least what seems like the height of all that, boom, those could disappear. It feels urgent.
As much as I feel that I should be sharing my story right now, in some ways, no, I don't want to be seen as a trans man because I want to be just seen as a man. Like, I don't want to have to think about, “Oh yeah, there's this extra piece. There's this part of me that wasn't seen as a man for so long.” But then another part of me is like, “Well, the reality of the situation, Evan, is you did have this other life where people didn't see you that way, where you even fought with yourself to see yourself that way. You didn't even see yourself that way because of all the programming that you went through that made you think you were somebody else. So you have a lot of experience in that other life that you can bring to this one.”
I grew up knowing that I was a boy. Deep inside myself, I knew. I was getting messages from my parents, from church, from school, from everyone outside saying, “Hey, you're a girl.” But I didn't feel that way. The way that girls were described, the way that I saw girls in media, I said, “That's not me.” I saw myself as a boy. And I remember being in my garage and being like 7 years old and thinking to myself like, “Yeah, you know, I'm a boy. I just have a small penis.” And I told all of my friends at school [that] I was a boy. I would create boy names for myself. I had all these identities that were male-centered. When I looked at the media, when I watched TV, when I watched movies, I would identify with the boys in the movies. I would think about what they did. I wanted to be like them.
So as long as I can remember, that's how I saw myself. I told my mom. Her response was like, “No, that's not correct.” And after a while, you know, saying the same thing over and over and having nobody affirm it, I chose to cover it up and live this alternate life in my head. So I would create characters and I would think about what they were doing throughout the day, and I would dress them up in my head. I even played with my toes and made my toes into characters. And in the Sunday paper they would have all the catalogs for the department stores. And so I would go through those and look at what the boys were wearing, and I would make my toes be characters and pretend that they were wearing that. The actor in Dennis the Menace, he was one of my characters. Kids from school that I liked and thought were cool, they were some of my characters. And so I created these alternate worlds in my head that I could be or be like these other boys because I couldn't actually express that out in the world the way I wanted.
So I went through elementary school really suppressing my identity. I went through junior high doing the same thing. By high school, I had completely stamped him out. I was dressing very feminine, ultra feminine: skirts, the shirts that came down to show cleavage. I was doing all that. I was wearing heels. I became sexually active early, trying to prove that I was this girl or woman. And I think that had I been able to identify as the boy that I was, I wouldn't have had sex at an early age in the way that I did.
By college. I was telling people … I started to come out slowly in terms of my sexuality and who I was. And eventually it became known that I liked girls and I identified as a lesbian. I carried that identity from the time I was like 18 [or] 19 until I was in my mid 30s. I ended up having a really intense and long-term relationship with a woman for nine years and there were many beautiful aspects to that relationship. During that time, I did struggle with my identity as well, and I kept feeling this urge to come out as a trans man, but I was afraid. I didn't want to be different. I think with COVID happening, you're inside and you can't leave; and her and I were in the studio apartment with our two cats and I became depressed. I needed to take medication and while doing that started to really just understand that I needed to be myself fully, completely, and I couldn't hide anymore. The two of us, we kind of seemed like we were at odds a little bit with what we wanted. We couldn't grow together anymore. It was painful, but it was necessary because having ended that relationship, I was able to step into myself in a way that I really needed to and I don't know that I would have been able to do it in that relationship.
Fast forward, that relationship ends. I'm over here trying to find myself. Eventually I decide to transition, not just by using he/him pronouns. I decided to get on testosterone. I decided to go ahead and change my name, change my legal gender. Here I am trying to live the best life that I can.
Again, this is Evan James White and you are listening to Just Another Guy (Who Happens to Be Trans). Peace.
("In the Ether" keyboard musical outro)