Buck's Story
I was born a biological female, but I always felt like a boy. My parents allowed me to be a boy, but I struggled through my puberty and into the years beyond. It was a nightmare; the world saw a woman, never the man I really was. I was bullied a lot and tried to escape my pain with excessive alcohol and drugs. Back then, nobody understood or talked about transgender kids. It was not like today; there was not even an internet to search for photos or videos of other transsexual men. I was totally on my own, and I suffered mentally and physically for most of my early adult life.
When I started my transition about 25 years ago, my endocrinologist had only worked with male-to-female transition – not the other way around. I was his first, and he made sure to say, “I have never done this so you will be my guinea pig.”
The transgender community does not have a single perspective. There are many factions, and new ones emerge all the time, each with different ideas about what it means to be trans. This feels great and fine for the new generation, but I, like many others, often feel left out – even though I am still very much involved in the community. For me, perhaps, the feeling has to do with my dependence on the medical aspect of my experience. If I did not get the treatment that I needed for my gender dysphoria I would be dead, and I believe this is what makes me a transgender person.
Today, there are many who say we do not need dysphoria to be trans, that anyone can self-identify as a trans person. They say biology is not real, that all that matters is identity. That is, quite simply, something with which I do not agree. Unfortunately, anyone who dares to express an opinion contrary to these new ideas is subjected to name-calling and slurs, and even I get called “transphobic” sometimes. So, I have a difficult relationship with some members of my own community these days.
To me, “community” means a group of individuals with something in common. I don’t think it has to mean a group where everyone agrees about everything all the time. It used to be that different opinions were welcome within the transgender community. Now, it seems a few loudmouths take it upon themselves to speak for the whole community, creating false narratives in the name of trans rights. They’ve created an unhealthy and destructive communal space. Currently, if you don’t at least pretend to agree with the dogma of identity-essentialism and biological-erasure, you are deemed a threat and are “canceled” for being “transphobic.”
If the community is to find a middle ground and forge a path forward, I believe we must build a bridge between the medical and psychological worlds of trans experience. As it stands now, anyone is trans if they say so. It no longer matters if you experience dysphoria – they call that requirement “gatekeeping” – and the community is being torn apart. There is an ever-growing divide between those who embrace newer identity-only notions of being trans, on the one hand, and transsexuals like me on the other. I think it is crucial for us to know more - a lot more - about why so many youngsters are claiming to be trans without any diagnosis, and why they are so obsessed with gender identity.
As a community, we must strive to find more compassion for people with different opinions, who dare think about their own bodies and their own experiences in ways that may currently be unfashionable. We are not well-served when we push for acceptance in a way that amounts to a demand for the entirety of society to remake itself in our image - it’s radical and unreasonable. I have fought for years for my rights and the rights of my transsexual brothers and sisters. We have made a lot of progress. But today, what I see is angry people calling themselves transgender just because they feel constrained by gender norms, people who fling vitriol and horrible accusations at anyone who challenges them in any way, even at transsexuals like me.
I believe in the power of love and acceptance, and that education from the heart is the way the world will ultimately heal from all this. Being transsexual is real, serious, and more than just a feeling of not fitting in, finding gender norms restrictive, or wanting to express oneself. If trans people truly want to move forward and coexist as a community, we have to do better than sequester ourselves in echo chambers and yell increasingly-extremist rhetoric at anyone who disagrees.
For more about Buck, check out his website or follow him on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can purchase his products here.
Artist Notes
“Buck finds himself in the middle of the controversy between biology and identity. The tree represents the transgender community, and the scale symbolizes Buck’s contention that facts outweigh feelings.”
Published Mar 18, 2021
Updated Oct 26, 2022
