'Living here is an uphill battle, but it’s my home and I don’t know where I’d be if I hadn’t found my community of rurally raised transgender people working to make each others’s lives better.' –syd_ls Transcendence
For as long as I can remember, I knew that I wasn’t a girl. I grew up in Kingston, Oklahoma — a small town with a. As a closeted queer and trans kid, my youth was lonely, to say the least. I didn’t understand why I felt so unattached to my gender, and I was too scared to ask if anyone else felt the same way.
When I came out as non-binary in January of 2018, I didn’t know anyone else who was trans. It was a really lonely year. I was finally accepting myself while navigating a world that saw me as an aberration. I lost many friends that I thought would have been accepting. As the months went on, I met a few trans people, but I was truly unaware how vast our community in Oklahoma is until that fall.
In college, other connections with transgender friends were forged through social media platforms like Twitter, campusFor some of you, it may seem odd that so many transgender people have found each other in such a conservative, rural, southern state; people are often quick to dismiss the residents of states like mine as a bunch of rednecks. But queer and transgender people do in fact exist in Oklahoma, and do deserve to be treated with dignity and basic human kindness.
Government support aside, the transgender community I’ve found in Norman is significant to me because it flies in the face of every stereotype about my home state. We have community members, like my good friend Shelly, working tirelessly to make sure that trans students like myself have the resources we need to stay fed and housed. We’re active in progressive politics, which many of us got involved with only after arriving on campus.
That said, living in Oklahoma as a transgender person is a unique experience. Many of us grew up in rural communities so small that we knew every single person in town. We grew up almost desensitized to fear because of our
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