Being Queer in B-Town

Being Queer in B-Town

The person I am now, a trans-nonbinary pansexual person, is the manifestation of a person I never thought could exist. Growing up in Burlington without access to information about gender identity made me feel obscure and unhinged. I struggled with anxiety, an eating disorder, and self harm from sixth grade until sophomore year of college. It took a lot of therapy and a lot of time before I realized that the depression was in part caused by years of not living authentically. I knew that I was different by age five. I didn’t have the words to describe it as I do now, but at that time, I knew at minimum that my best friend Aislinn and I were not the same type of child despite the fact that we were both treated as two little girls. I knew early that I wasn’t heterosexual either, but I so deeply believed the narrative that bisexual or pan people were “just confused” that I felt I too was confused, and if I just dedicated my life to only dating/liking boys, eventually all of the “gay” thoughts would leave.

Burlington is in a unique educational situation in that it offers a free Montessori program integrated into the public school system, which I attended from preschool until sixth grade. Montessori classrooms give students the space to learn things at their own speed and experiment with different styles of learning, and so I felt I had the space to express myself physically and emotionally however I pleased. I was essentially given a lot of freedom to express as nonbinary until right before 7th grade when puberty hit like a truck and I had to choose between living as a girl or being bullied, and Montessori kids already were plenty bullied. I spent the summer before 7th grade thrifting a new “girl” wardrobe to avoid it, but by that point I’d already been called a f*g by several people in and outside of the Montessori program for how I dressed the year before.

By the time I entered 8th grade, there were two people I knew of personally who had been sent to religious conversion therapy boarding schools in northern Wisconsin. One of them was my next door neighbor who was sent away his sophomore year of high school; he ended up living with my family for 9 months when he came out a second time at age 18 and his parents kicked him out. The other friend was someone I admired greatly who ended up coming out publicly as nonbinary themselves near the same time I did. In 9th grade, another close friend came out as trans and expressed her pain at her parents’ narrow-minded response. Even though my own parents are not too conservative or religious, the experiences of my friends were enough to make me feel that 1) it was an unsafe, poor choice to come out as a youth in this area and 2) even if I went to college in a bigger city, the fact that it was in the state of Wisconsin meant that my safety was never guaranteed. 

There was one time in high school when I actually felt like the person I am now. In junior year, the drama department did A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I played a genderless imp named Puck. People commented that they couldn’t tell my gender from my costume or the way I acted on stage...and it was like a light went off in my head. I was more comfortable with myself and happy playing the role of this gender-free fairy than I was every other moment of high school. It’s hard for me to look back on my time in Burlington and think about all the people whose only understanding of who I am is a girl who pretended to have her shit together, when in reality I was “faking it” the majority of the time. Burlington made me perceive that my identity was wrong; I pray that the current queer kids there occupy a different time in history that is less judgemental.