Profile: Tomas Moore
Tomas Moore is a female-to-male transgender graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.
Understanding that I was transgender wasn’t really the difficult thing. What was hard was learning that there were words to describe how I was feeling. I never went for anything one would associate with girls. I thrived on physical activity, shunned dolls and dress-up and focused my reading on young male adventurers, such as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Dress-up occasions were constant battles between my parents and me — they wanted dresses and I wanted pants. Sometimes we would compromise and I would wear pants under my dresses. My family believed (hoped?) that this was a tomboy phase, but with time, it became obvious to them and me that it wasn’t going away.
When I was 9 years old, we moved across the country. It was the beginning of summer so I was meeting neighborhood children without the formality of school and decided to take my self-expression to a new level, telling my new friends that my name was Tom. I don’t think I ever verbally claimed to be a boy, but I let them infer what they wanted.
The first day of school, roll call was an eye-opener for my friends. Some were angry, some were amused and some just didn’t say anything about it. But some began rumors that I was gay, and at the time I didn’t dispute them. I was biologically female and attracted to other girls, so I figured it must be true. But soon after going through the changes that puberty brings, I realized that it was more than that. It was that I hated being a girl, myself. It felt wrong. I hated my body, avoided looking at myself in mirrors and agonized over each monthly reminder that I was female.
I was surfing the Internet when I first discovered the word transgender, and it was one of the most joyful yet frightening moments in my life. I was happy to know that there was a name for how I felt, yet at the same time terrified. Did this mean I had to have surgery? Take hormones? What would I have to do to become and live as the boy I felt I was? Would my family ever accept the real me?
The best thing I did for myself was not rush into anything. I found and read books about transgenderism. I located an online chat group for female-to-male transgender people. By educating myself, I realized that it was my journey and that I would be determining what was right for me. There was some information online written for parents about having a child come out as trans. Reading it really helped me understand what they would be going through — and allowed me to give them the time they needed to process and understand. Sure, it took a lot longer than I expected, and some of it was painful and some still isn’t completely resolved, but without that information I might have just written them off completely as a lost cause.
It is still a journey. I am comfortable knowing that I am transgender, and while I’ve not begun to transition, some day I might decide that is the right path for me. But for now, I know who I am and control my own future and how I handle those who aren’t as understanding. Many of them are where I had been, not even knowing there was a name for feeling born into the wrong body. But I can help educate them, just as I had to educate myself.