When I was younger, I always knew that I was different.
And when I would close my eyes,
it was almost impossible for me to imagine
what my future would be.
I mean, I would literally close my eyes
and I couldn't think of anything.
I didn't really have the words for it when I was younger,
but to some degree, I knew that I was transgender
and I didn't really know what that looked like.
When I was growing up, there weren't very many examples
of who transgender people could be as adults.
Because I had such a hard time envisioning who I could be,
I felt like it was important for me to write down who I am right now,
and I bought this journal.
And it was the beginning of me having a dialogue with myself.
This journal was the very beginning of me becoming a blogger.
As a kid, I kept a journal for a really long time,
and as I moved into teenager times,
I went through what a lot of teenagers went through.
I was angsty. I was, you know, depressed and scared.
And back then, blogs were becoming a thing.
And I just thought that I would take my journal
and make it into a public online diary.
And so I started my first little blog
and I started using it the way that I would use my old journal.
I would just come home every day
and write about what was going on in my day.
And it kind of gained a bit of a following.
And through my own little blog, I started actually having
a little bit of a community.
And it was really great to sort of meet people
from around the world who were having similar experiences as I was.
A lot of people who followed my blog told me
that I should go and start a YouTube page.
And so every week, my parents would give me $25 for allowance.
And usually, I would go and spend this on Sims expansion packs.
But one time I decided to go and actually get a webcam,
and I started a YouTube channel.
And I used my YouTube channel the way that I used my public diary.
I would come home every day from school
and just speak to it and just talk right into the camera.
But because it was such a touchy conversation for me,
I really wanted to keep it secret.
I didn't want my friends or my family or my classmates
to know anything about my little blog.
And, you know, back then, YouTube was definitely not what it is today.
There was no such thing as being a YouTuber.
I was just somebody who had a YouTube page.
So in high school, I was an eccentric art kid.
I was in theater. I hand painted most of my t-shirts.
Like, I was just that kid.
My big goal at that point in my life was to get into CalArts,
which was my dream school. It's a school that was started by Disney.
And back then, all I wanted to do was be an animator.
And so most of my time was spent with me doing my portfolio,
which was, at one point in time,
the main topic of my YouTube channel.
Now I will say that I was a little popular in school.
I figured that people knew me because I was in theater.
And I didn't find out till I was about to graduate high school
that literally everyone watched my YouTube channel.
And my YouTube channel was peak teenage angst.
It was me gossiping. It was a lot of stuff
that I didn't think people were looking at.
But by the time I was in my senior year,
I already knew that I was going to CalArts,
and so I was really excited to embark on this brand new journey
in a whole new place where I knew absolutely nobody.
Now the coolest thing about college is once you get there,
you realize that you have no responsibility
to be the person who you said you were the day before.
It forced me to really think about who I was.
While I'd always kinda known that I was transgender,
it was really my first year in college where I knew
that I was a trans woman.
And of course that presented a bunch of complications
because specifically being a black trans woman is scary.
And I knew that transition would paint a target on my back.
But I had to move forward with my authenticity
and truly be who I knew myself to be.
So, back then, YouTube was very important to me.
I needed a place to vent, and I needed a place to share
all of the things that I was experiencing
in that strange point of my life.
So year after year after year,
I progressed in my transition,
and by my last year of college,
I had legally changed my name to Kathryn.
One of the big reasons why I wanted to change my name before I graduated college
was because I, at the time, was very, very invested in stealth.
In the early days when I started reading about trans life,
the story kinda went like this.
You figured out that you were trans.
You started taking hormones from, you know,
some person on the streets.
Your body started changing. You got a bunch of surgeries.
You eventually got the surgery.
You killed everybody who ever knew you before
who knew who you used to be. Moved to another state.
And then you, you know, married a man and fell in love.
And now you're writing this account from, you know,
your white picket fence house where you've got 2.5 children and a dog.
And your life is just perfect. I mean, all of that,
with the exception of obviously killing everybody.
But that was the narrative.
The narrative was that you were transitioning to disappear,
to not be seen so that nobody knew you were trans
because that would just make your life easier.
I wanted to be able to go through my life
only being known as Kathryn.
So after college, I moved back in with my parents,
and my parents had moved to a totally new town.
And in that town, I was able to be stealth.
I was able to exist in a way where nobody knew that I was transgender.
I worked in the animation industry for a little bit of time.
And it's kind of funny, you know, when you go to the top school for animation
in the country, the likelihood of you avoiding people
who you went to college with is pretty slim.
So I figured out pretty quickly that stealth in the animation industry
was not only kind of impossible for me,
but also really irrelevant.
Because animation really is one of those things
where they really do care about what you do
and less about who you are.
And so, going into the animation industry
was actually one of the first times I recognized
that maybe I didn't need to be stealth.
Maybe that wasn't the most important thing in the world for me.
So after working in the animation industry for a bit,
I kinda recognized that it wasn't for me,
which of course was a really upsetting realization to have
when I'd worked so hard to get there.
So I went back home and I did a bunch of children's illustrations for a bit.
And after that, I went back to YouTube.
And by the time I returned to YouTube,
YouTube was a totally different platform.
Like, a completely different thing.
Being a YouTuber was a thing you could be.
When I started back up on YouTube,
it was this weird thing where I was trying to,
on one hand, remain stealth,
but also have enough of a following
to where I could kinda make a little bit of money
and sort of sustain myself a little bit.
And of course, these two goals were kind of contradicting each other.
In the midst of me wanting to turn video creation into a career,
I had this amazing idea to make a video
with a little start-up company that no one knows about
about being transgender.
And I remember when I went in to film this video,
which was about pronouns, I thought to myself,
"Who's gonna watch this video about pronouns?"
So the video goes up, and it comes out really well.
And it reaches a bunch of people,
and the view count just gets higher and higher and higher.
And more people see it, and more people are sharing it.
And I start getting messages from people.
I start getting these emails from people
who have met me, you know, in the past two years
who had no clue that I was trans.
So people in general had a pretty positive reaction to that video.
- ( knocking ) -
So at the time of me publishing this video,
I was in a relationship, and I was living with
some of my partner's relatives.
And his relatives did not know that I was transgender.
And when this video came in their feed,
to really over-summarize the whole story,
they were really uncomfortable with me living with them.
And they moved to evict both me and my partner.
And I have to say that that was honestly
one of the scariest points in my life
because when I got evicted from the place that I lived with my partner,
it was absolutely terrifying to recognize
that my initial fears were not totally unfounded.
But sometimes a good thing about hitting a low point in your life
is recognizing that you can only go higher.
And in that moment, I realized that one of the worst things
that could have happened happened,
and I was still here.
So that really truly was a turning point in my life.
And I started to sort of attack YouTube and blogging
with a lot more confidence.
I started to actually make an effort to be a blogger,
to be, you know, a person making content on the internet.
And I'll be honest with you guys,
I got a lot of scary stuff early on.
I mean, I'm one of the only trans people on this platform.
And I've been on this platform since 2005.
And a lot of people who are trans YouTubers,
they come on here and they're there for a couple of years
and they disappear. But I'm one of the few that has stuck around.
And, you know, even though YouTube makes me so uncomfortable,
even being on YouTube makes me so uncomfortable,
I've learned that me being here touches so many people.
I will never forget that I was speaking at UC Boulder, Colorado
and there was this trans guy
who came up to me after one of my talks,
and he told me that the video that I made
where I spoke about pronouns
was one of the things that helped him realize that he was transgender.
And honestly, when I heard that,
it made all of the scary experiences I've had
with my eviction and the harassment I've gotten on the internet,
it honestly made it worth it.
I became the representation that I desperately needed when I was a child.
Even though sometimes it still terrifies me to be out,
I know that being out means that I'm helping so many people.
When you feel alone in this world,
sometimes all you need is to know
that there's others just like you.
So don't ever underestimate the power of your words.