Translator: Helena Brunnerová Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thirteen years ago, today,
I came out as gay, and it was a huge, huge relief.
And at the time, I remember thinking,
"Thank God I will never have to do that again."
Turns out I was wrong
because two years ago, I came out again,
only this time,
instead of announcing that I wasn't attracted to the opposite gender,
I announced that I was the opposite gender.
The day I was born,
a doctor slapped me on the ass and said, "It's a girl."
But the problem was that I never really felt like one.
But in our society, gender isn't about how we feel,
it's about how we look.
It's assigned to us the moment we're born, by a doctor,
based solely upon what's between our legs.
But I think that needs to change.
One of the first things that I learned about my gender
was that it wasn't only about me.
It was about everybody around me, too.
When I was a little kid, I was labeled a tomboy
because I was a girl who wanted to do boy stuff,
like run around in the yard without my shirt on,
I wanted to join the Cub Scouts
so I could go camping, in the woods, overnight.
I wanted to play football, and baseball, and hockey.
But this was the 70s, and back then, girls weren't allowed to do that stuff.
So I settled.
Instead of the Cub Scouts, I became a Brownie,
instead of baseball - softball,
and instead of playing hockey, I did the next best thing - I went ice-skating.
But I had a plan.
Because there was a rink near our house,
and they rented boys' hockey skates, and I thought,
"Well, if I can't be a hockey star, at least I can pretend to be one."
So one night, I bounced up to the rental counter in my pigtails,
and I asked for those hockey skates.
And the attendant looked at me, reached back,
grabbed a pair of white figure skates,
dropped them on the counter in front of me and said, "Girls get these."
It did not matter to him I felt like a little boy on the inside
because I looked like a little girl on the outside.
How many of you here today are male?
Raise your hand.
First of all, totally jealous.
(Laughter)
OK, now, all of you who had your hands up,
I want you to image a moment this morning
when you first walked into the bathroom to shave,
only this time, imagine how you would feel if you looked in the mirror
and the face starring back at you actually didn't need to be shaved
because it was perfectly smooth;
no facial hair, no stubble whatsoever.
Now imagine what you would think if you looked down at your body,
and your chest, instead of being flat,
you realized you had breasts - not man boobs.
(Laughter)
And when you look a little further, you realize that your penis is gone.
And when you scream out in horror,
the voice you hear sounds more like your wife or your sister.
Now imagine going to your closet
and picking out the exact same thing that you're wearing right now.
You get dressed, you jump in your car, you drive down to the event here today,
and when you walk in and hand your ticket to the attendant,
they look you directly in the eye and very sincerely say,
"Thank you ma'am. Enjoy the event."
How would you feel?
Once I hit puberty, that's how I felt every day of my life.
And when I looked in the mirror, I wanted to scream, too.
I'm 44 years old,
and I didn't start my transition until about a year and a half ago.
And sometimes, when I tell people that,
they say, "Well, if you've felt like this your whole life,
why didn't you transition sooner?"
Well, it's kind of complicated.
First of all, coming out to my parents 13 years ago as gay was stressful enough.
The thought of telling them that I wanted to have a sex change...
not on my bucket list.
(Laughter)
But seriously, it was a lot more than that.
I was terrified. I was terrified of how public I knew it would be.
Because let's face it,
it's pretty much impossible to transition gender without anyone noticing.
(Laughter)
And just like at the ice rink, I knew that my gender wasn't just about me;
my family, my friends, my coworkers, my clients
were all going to be affected by this.
I knew that many of them would struggle a lot,
and whether I liked it or not,
they were all invested in the idea of me as female.
And ironically, I was invested in it, too,
but not because I identified as a girl but because I identified as a twin.
My sister, Jenny and I, are fraternal,
but our entire lives, we've looked and sounded identical.
And I loved it.
I loved walking into a room with her
and watching heads snap around and stare at us in amazement.
It was a huge part of my identity,
my identity with my twin sister.
And I knew that taking testosterone would erase it.
My face would change, my voice would drop,
and we would never again, ever, look and sound identical.
And the thought of that made me really, really sad
because I knew that making that decision
wouldn't only have an irreversible impact on my identity but on her's as well.
But one day, she was at my house,
and we were standing in the kitchen, and I told her that I made an appointment
to talk to a therapist about my gender identity issues.
And she said, "I knew that one day, you'd come to me and say
that you had to deal with this, and I am glad.
Because, well, on the outside, the rest of the world has always seen you like this.
I know that deep down, you've always been like this."
My gender journey hasn't been so much a giant leap as a series of giant leaps,
three, to be exact,
starting with the one I knew would have the biggest impact on me emotionally,
and probably the smallest one on my identity as a twin,
and that was my decision to have top surgery,
to have my breasts surgically removed and my chest reconstructed to look male.
But that's easier said than done
because in our society, women should look a certain way.
And when you're born female,
and you voluntarily choose to have your breasts removed,
people think there is something very, very wrong with you.
Wrong enough that in order to have my surgery,
my surgeon required a letter from my therapist
diagnosing me with a mental condition called gender identity disorder,
and wrong enough that when I went to make an appointment with my family doctor
for my pre-surgical clearance,
and he suspected what I might be having surgery for -
and not because I told him, because he googled it -
he refused to see me.
And he had been my doctor for over ten years.
And wrong enough that when I ended up in the emergency room,
a week after my surgery, with a blood clot in my leg,
I lied to the doctors, and the nurses, and the ultrasound techs
and told them that I had a breast reduction.
Because I was afraid that if I told them the truth,
they would refuse to see me, too.
But not wrong enough
that my health insurance company recognized my therapy and my surgery
as medically necessary treatments for my diagnosed mental condition
and would cover the cost.
So I paid for those out of pocket.
But despite all of that,
the emotional impact of surgery was life-changing for me.
For the first time since puberty, when I looked in the mirror,
at least from here to here, it looked right.
But then something happened.
It was like as soon as I had my male chest,
it became harder and harder for me to hear people call me
by a female name, my female birth name, and female pronouns.
So I made my second decision.
I decided to legally change my name to Decker
and asked that everybody in my life please call me by male pronouns.
But unlike with my chest surgery, which I did fairly quietly,
when I changed my name, I had to tell every single person in my life;
everyone;
not just my family, and friends, and my coworkers
but my lawn guy, my pool guy,
my veterinarian, my electrician, my bar friends, my neighbors; everyone.
And when you change your name to the name of the opposite gender, it's awkward.
I felt like I needed to explain this somehow,
come out to them in some way as transgender.
But does my pool guy really need to know my life story?
(Laughter)
The whole thing was gut wrenching.
It took months and months and months and months
of phone calls and emails and heart-to-hearts, and it was messy,
and it felt endless, and I was scared out of my mind the entire time.
But in the end, I survived.
And pretty much everybody that mattered to me
either embraced me or was able to adjust.
A handful of people didn't.
And I learned who my real friends are.
But I also learned something else.
I learned that life cannot be lived in a bubble -
the family, and friends, and coworkers.
That it's a big world out there, and it's full of strangers,
and the bartenders, and the waiters, and the TSA agents, and the cab drivers
didn't get the memo.
They didn't know I'd changed my name to a male name,
they didn't pick up on the male pronouns, and they definitely didn't notice this.
They noticed this.
To them, I looked like a she.
I sounded like a her, or a ma'am.
So in the end, I made my third big decision.
I chose to walk away
from the part of my identity that I loved the very most:
the part that I shared with my twin sister.
I chose to take testosterone
because by then, I learned that that one hormone
was the only way that the rest of the world was ever going to see this
as anything other than female.
And in the end, I really, really needed them
to see me the way that I've always seen myself.
And today, they do.
Whenever I meet somebody new, they see me as male.
And they see me like this,
but the cool thing is my sister sees me that way, too.
But there are still hurdles
because changing your gender
is not the same thing as changing your gender marker,
and that one letter is attached to everything
from our birth certificate to our death certificate
and everything in between.
Even the ticket application for today's event asked your gender.
But legally changing a gender marker isn't as easy
as choosing and M or an F from a drop-down menu.
There are laws, rules, regulations, fees.
And it's up to every individual state.
My birth certificate says 'female.'
I was born in the State of Missouri, and in that state,
to change a gender marker on a birth certificate
requires a court order based upon proof of surgery.
But I live in Arizona.
So for me to get that would mean
making a court date, buying a plane ticket, flying to Missouri, paying a fee,
standing in front of a judge with a letter that says I got my boobs cut off -
thanks -
(Laughter)
taking that court order to the Department of Vital Records,
only to have them issue me a birth certificate marked 'amended.'
So, essentially anyone who saw my new birth certificate
would know that I was born female anyway.
If I had been born here, in the State of Ohio, I would have had it even worse.
Because this is one of three states in the country
where gender marker changes on a birth certificate
aren't allowed for any reason ever.
My driver's license and my health insurance both still say 'female'
because it's a really good idea if those two things match.
But changing them both to 'male'
could give my health insurance company
the right to deny my coverage for anything having to do with my female anatomy.
Because the way they see it, men don't get things like ovarian cancer.
My Social Security card - 'female, '
my college transcripts -'female, '
and on and on and on.
So, despite everything that I've done to get the world to see me as male,
on paper I'm still female.
Our world is set up to keep us in these two boxes.
But why?
Is all of this gendering really necessary?
Just for a minute, I want you to throw out everything that you know
about what is male and what is female; throw it out.
And imagine a world, where gender isn't left out to doctors or judges,
one where we are all able to claim our own gender based on what's between our ears,
rather than have it assigned to us based on what's between our legs.
Here, we're all able to self-identify
as male, as female, as both, or as neither.
And here, we never assume someone else's gender
because of how they look, how they sound, or because of what name they go by.
In this world, when you walk up and hand your TEDx ticket to the attendant,
instead of them automatically saying "Sir" or "Ma'am,"
they say, "Enjoy the event today, my friend."
And when you sit down and start chatting with the stranger next to you,
before they ask you what you do for a living,
they ask you which pronouns you prefer to go by.
In this world, I wonder, would I have gotten those hockey skates?
And joined the team?
Or became an Eagle Scout? Or a football couch?
Would I have had to change my birth name because it was too female?
Or take testosterone to be seen as male?
And sacrifice a part of my identity as a twin?
Would my chest surgery simply have been seen as cosmetic surgery?
Something that I chose to do to feel happy in my own body?
Like fixing a birth defect.
In this world, one free from this rigid binary,
I wonder,
would I have had to come out as transgender at all?
Today, just happens to be National Coming Out Day.
And if we had been born, or if we had lived in a world
that I've just described,
perhaps I would have walked up onto this stage today
and come out to you as an artist, or a writer,
as a dog lover, or an ESPN junkie,
or a lifelong Dolly Parton fan.
(Laughter)
Or maybe I simply would have walked out here
and come out to you as who I am.
[Human]
Thank you.
(Applause)