You’re not alone; stress is real, and lots of folks experience it

Atlas, he/him/his, 19, MO – So mine was actually pretty recent. I'm a transgender male, as I said, and I've been on testosterone for almost two months before I left home. My parents basically figured out I was on testosterone and it didn't go very well. They basically told me that, you know, I'd never be a boy and that I was permanently. Damaging my body in that doing this was going to cause me to lose family members. They'll be coming to support me, to my family, and that I would not be accepted into the family. They were telling me, like, what is your grandma going to say? You know, what is your family going to think? What is your brother going to think? And it caused me a lot of stress and it caused me to really analyze myself and what I wanted in life. Really made me feel bad as a person because, you know, it made me realize that I might be risking losing people close to me in seeking judgment from a lot of people, but at the same time, I knew that it was something I had to do, but it didn't. Mean that I didn't feel absolutely awful about it.

Lily, she/her/hers, 19, NY — I would say definitely like being Black and part of the LGBT Community is, definitely, creates more stress and already judges the Black women enough, and then I have to deal with things like that. Especially in a conversation when I like first, not necessarily came out, but like told people that I was bi[sexual], someone was like, "I've never met a bi, like, Black women before," and I don't know that kind of took me back, like I don't know why race should be a factor. Why anything should matter that deeply? Just kind of like affected me, made me like reconsider who I told. It kind of just made me reconsider how I thought about myself and about my identity.

Hudson, he/him/his, 17, FL — So a huge source of stress for a lot of trans people is changing in bathrooms and locker rooms. And I had to do this actually on Friday. I'm not entirely out of school. I'm only out to some people. And so I had a change in a men's dressing room and it took a lot of willpower for me to just go in there. And the only reason I ended up going in there was because a friend offered to go with me who knew of my identity. But I was, you know, just worried that someone would see me changing and see my body and realized that I was trans and say something hateful or something derogatory or even get physical about it, because there are some people at my school who are openly transphobia. And so changing. And it was filled. The guys when I don't know everybody's attitudes or opinions on trans people or, you know, there are definitely people in there who didn't even know who was trans. It was a source of worry. And luckily everything was fine changed for no big deal. But, you know, it's the worry that there could be something that happened that could be a physical altercation or that mean words said.

Gage, he/they/zem, 18, FL — So this is just one of the many times I've experienced stress related to my identity. But the story goes is me and my boyfriend, who is also trans. We're on a train and people just kept staring at us. People will not stop staring at us because we are both very openly and visibly queer. And I honestly did not notice first, because I tend to look down. I don't look at people's faces until my boyfriend started texting me crying. And he's like, you, are you staring at me? I feel like such a freak. And then only then that I realized that I was also being stared at. And it just feels so dehumanizing and stressful when you know that people are staring at you and judging you and putting this whole idea in your in their head because you're just gay. They think that you're some kind of freak.