Day 9: The Internet Made Me Queer

The internet really did make me queer. Sort of.

All those right wing evangelistic preachers that said the internet would your children down the path to sin and homosexuality…they weren’t entirely wrong.

Gather around boys, girls and those who identify as neither or both. It’s story time:

See back in the day…1996, when AOL sent you eight or ten of those free CD-ROM’s in the mail every week, when CompuServe had a bin at the grocery store of free floppys – my mother, having always been a forward thinker, subscribed us to the World Wide Web. This was just after it stopped being a long distance call from LaFayette, GA to Chattanooga, TN. Before that, getting on the internet would have meant long distance charges…remember those? The graphics were grainy, web pages took hours to load and a download could be disastrously ruined if someone were to pick up the phone.

And there I was: fourteen years old, feeling monstrously tall at 5’7”, clumsy, chunky, acned, butch, mulleted….Not a pretty girl. I had passed that cute, “oh, she’s a tomboy” phase at warp speed just in time for the eighth grade. I walked into that school with ‘dyke’ tattooed on my forehead.

I need you to understand a little bit about where I’m from. My hometown is nestled into the armpit of where Tennessee and Alabama meet. We’re the dirty, red clay feet of Appalachia. We make yarn, buses and stoves. The closest movie theater is still a half-hour away, and Wal-Mart didn’t kill half the town until just before I graduated from high school.

Population: approx. 6000

At fourteen, I wouldn’t meet my first out gay person for another year.
And at fourteen, let’s be clear, I didn’t know what the hell I was. I looked down at my awkward teenage girl body and felt bewildered, overwhelmed and really confused. I was too terrified to look people in the eye to figure out whether they were cute or not. I kept my head down, my back slouched and read…a lot…

And I hate to say that all this came about from cable TV and the internet – but in truth, it was late one night, probably two or three in the morning and there was a documentary on the Discovery Channel. I’m pretty sure it was atrociously called, “What Sex am I?” And this is all a little fuzzy, but it went something like this: it followed three transsexual women and one transsexual guy. The guy was a short, bearded dude who had lost his job as a teacher, his girlfriend, had to move to a new town and his family didn’t talk to him anymore. He had found a surgeon to remove his breasts which left his chest looking vaguely like a cutting board.

So, y’know…the obvious thing to do for any fourteen year old girl would be to switch on the computer, dial-up to AOL and find the ONE message board and ONE chat room for trans-folks and read absolutely everything…right then.

Within a month, I felt like I knew every transgender guy that had an email address. I waited for my family to go to bed before I signed on and scoured the message board the any new messages. I hung out in chat rooms reading feverishly.

I searched the web and found the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care – a document that outlined what a person had to go through with doctors and therapists to transition from one sex to another…I memorized it. When I was in a big enough bookstore in Chattanooga, I found the DSM and looked up Gender Dysphoria – I memorized that too.

It was all so basic, just experiences coming through emails and message board posts. No one was doing much with digital photography yet. Everything was low level icons and text. All the information coming through was direct experience – what injecting yourself with hormones every other week would do to you? How much to inject? What blood tests should be run? How to pass as a man, bind your chest, shave, change IDs, birth certificates, whether to tell people you were transitioning or how to hide the fact that you did transition. It all came through in hunks of success or failure from faceless people 500 or 2000 miles away.

But, in contrast, the public library in my hometown had exactly one listing for transsexual; one paragraph in a 1987 abnormal psychology text book next to pedophilia and bestiality. I know…I memorized that paragraph too.

I was sixteen before I met another trans-person in real life.

Also at sixteen, I transferred to a new high school – a public liberal arts school in Chattanooga (the big city) and started living full-time as a boy. I found that high school via the internet. Very sort of Fame-esque.

The people I met on the internet cobbled together lists and resources that they emailed out on request: doctors that were trans-friendly, surgeons, therapists willing to see trans clients, endocrinologists that would monitor your blood. I found a group for transguys that met once a month in Atlanta, and I started going. By the time I was seventeen and just turning eighteen, I could track down websites of people documenting their transitions – writing about the changes they saw on hormones, posting pictures.

I tried my hand at it because at the time, it seemed like the thing to do.
Embarrassing content can be viewed here:
www.angelfire.com/journal/lonerspath

I found a therapist by posting to the internet. I found the other four therapists that I would go through there too. I found an endocrinologist that way. I discussed what I knew from the internet with my endocrinologist so that, while neither of us were really prepared to deal with my particular health care needs, we got the job done – my liver still intact and very healthy.

By eighteen, four years later, the community of fifty or sixty people that I’d known had grown exponentially as the internet became more and more accessible. I found a conference in DC – True Spirit and traded my senior class trip to Disneyland for a ticket to DC where I crashed in a room with ten people, all of whom I had met on the internet.

I went to a workshop where people who had had chest surgery took off their shirts and talked about their experience. I talked to some of the surgeons. They told me they expected to do maybe five or ten of these procedures their entire careers. Instead, they were doing five or ten a month, guys from all over the country – mostly thanks to the internet. I booked my surgery with a guy in San Francisco.
The next year, at the same conference, I took my shirt off to have my own chest photographed for
Transster.com - which I think is now defunct but was a powerhouse of surgery result pictures for years, thanks to a really hot transguy whose name I can’t remember.

Now…now I can’t imagine how many resources are out there. There are youtube.com video journal postings and responses. There are countless resource sites. There are blogs, blogs and more blogs. People are documenting their transitions daily. There are resources for partners, employers, friends and parents. There’s this:
TYFA for families with young, young kids that are identifying as trans. Its kind of overwhelming. When I got on the internet, people constantly dismissed me for my age. None of them were under 25 (atleast for a while). Now the community is dominated by people coming out at younger and younger ages, exploring what transition or gender expression means to them. They have innumerable resources just a Goggle.com search away. It’s beautiful and amazing. And as I turn 27, it makes me feel a little by-gone and old. I got to be subversive and dynamic for such a short period of time.

If you follow the links, you can see a little bit of how much I’ve changed, how much hair I’ve lost. But while I was talking about this project with a friend, it kind of hit me how important the internet has been. There’s no hindsight on this one. I really don’t know how to imagine where I would be with my life or my identity without the internet. Even seeing the documentary I did, I was so far isolated that information on transgender people would have been difficult or impossible to come by. I simply wouldn’t have known who or where to write to or call. I wouldn’t have changed high schools to live full-time, wouldn’t have gone to college in Ohio…and so on and so on until everything that I know unravels. A huge part of my identity was built by the internet, by a disjointed sharing of information. It’s been really fun to quit the internet and go back to doing the crossword in coffee shops and looking up movie times in the paper. But, really…the internet did make me queer.

If the internet made you queer, email me at antiochlogan@yahoo.com