brandt is one of the roughly two percent of u.s high schoolers who identify as trans
with his little brother by his side as he began transitioning at 13 he chronicled bits of it on
tick-tock which his family gave us permission to show he went from long blonde hair to appearing
more masculine with psychological counseling and under supervision from a pediatrician
he started taking cross-sex hormones by injecting testosterone my name is dylan this is
my voice one day on t it's my voice two months on t marveling as his voice dropped that's my voice
seven months on testosterone my name is dylan this is my voice eight months on testosterone
we first met dylan at a cafe in fort smith arkansas with his mom joanna and 13 year old
brother luke dylan explained how as early as fourth grade he'd had confusing feelings
that stretched on until his teenage years i really wanted to cut my hair like really bad and so when
i did that that felt really good and then i held the door for somebody and they said thank you sir
and i was like oh yeah that yeah that this little things little thing that sir put
words to how i was feeling and i was like oh yeah that that felt nice and then after any time after
that somebody would say ma'am or something i'd be like um yeah no i don't like that
dylan started homeschooling in eighth grade after being bullied and says it's been difficult
reconciling mind and body your insides do not match your outside whatever like what's what
it feels like that's what it feels like and people are saying well well you look like this
so you have to do this that's that's hard especially when in the inside you're like
no no no no that's that's not right i know i look like this but that's not how i feel he revealed
it as best he could it says dear mom to start out with you aren't losing the child you raised
in this letter to his mom which he wrote two years ago i don't know how to say this i am a boy i am
a boy trapped in a girl's body i look at myself and i don't like what i see i wear the same five
four or five shirts because they are loose and it hides my chest area every time anyone calls me a
girl or says she her i get uncomfortable i feel good when someone mistakenly calls me a boy your
son or he him i'm sitting here and he even signed it your son dylan what did you think i thought
back on him as a as a little kid and and just him growing up that things started to make sense
while joanna worried how dylan would be accepted in their small city she says they immediately
began adjusting we started making the switch to heat him how was that it took a little time
it took a little bit of time look at this little one it had been a very personal family journey at
least until march of this year there's no reason to do that to a child puberty blockers on a child
those are things that we don't need to do that's when debate was raging over that arkansas house
bill 1570. you're hell-bent on passing this bill and running it through the rest of the
legislature also called the save adolescence from experimentation or safe act and the ban on dylan's
care including his weekly doses of testosterone became real i understand that you believe you are
preventing harm but just because you believe it does not make it so when the law goes into effect
it would be illegal for dylan to be prescribed testosterone and without it he would begin to
redevelop some feminine characteristics such as breast growth whereas other changes like his
deeper voice are permanent there were people that didn't know us trying to tell me as a parent what
decisions i was allowed to make for my son and i knew how happy dylan was and how well he was doing
with his gender affirming medical care that he had been receiving the idea of that being taken
away just i just didn't understand it the safe act passed through the republican-controlled arkansas
house and senate but on april 5 republican governor asa hutchinson who'd signed a separate
bill earlier this year banning trans girls from playing in school sports vetoed this one this
would be and is a vast government overreach house bill 1570 is passed the objections of the governor
notwithstanding the legislature overrode the veto and the law is expected to go into effect in july
dylan knows who he is he knows what's best for him i as his mom
have to make decisions and for him because he's a minor does some part of you worry that
i'm i'm helping make a decision here that this is still a minor these are now irreversible changes
no because it wasn't just the two of us when we started to look into our options of what was going
to be best for him we sought the advice of medical professionals we stopped the advice of therapists
we did not seek the advice to lawmakers because that's not their area of expertise