AS A YOUNG CHILD, I’d take my mom to the boys’ side of the clothing store, and she’d have to bring me back. I didn’t like my biological name Janice. How I wanted to come across to other people had more masculine energy to it. In my late teens I developed an eating disorder, which was framed around not wanting to have a feminine-looking body. When I was 21, my therapist said to me, “Have you ever thought you might be in the wrong body?”
When she said that, I was blown away. I didn’t know that was even a concept. I realized how I saw myself as a cis-gender man in the wrong body. But I didn’t take the initiative to transition until August 2019, when I met a new therapist who was a transition specialist. After that, I started to put on more muscle and focus on gaining weight because I was starting to create a body I felt more comfortable in.
When I started to transition, I tried to kill Janice. I thought she was dead. Only when I met my girlfriend did I realize it was okay to still have parts of her in me. I still have the biological organs of a female, because I feel, ‘This is not something I need to do. I’m a guy now.’ But one of the things I was self-conscious about was having breasts. I was going to the gym and wearing multiple shirts. I wasn’t big-chested, to begin with, but trying to do a flat bench chest press was very uncomfortable. I had top surgery a year ago. The scars are big—they go right across my chest. I love my body now, and the scars give me such an appreciation for what my body has done for me and how much it’s fought and adapted for me even when I was punishing it.
With social media and everything, it’s all about comparison. Everyone is competing. I fall into the comparison trap like everyone else. But as I’ve become familiar with the trans community online, they are not competitive people. There is no judgment in that community that I’ve noticed or experienced.
In March 2022, I started working with a bodybuilding coach, Alex Tilinca, who works with Scooby Prep and is a transgender man. Although I’m studying to be a registered dietician, I still have disordered eating patterns and will use food as punishment, which I have to be self-aware of. Alex has helped me gain 25 pounds between March to mid-July. I love being in the gym. I love that ten pounds is always ten pounds; it’s never something else. The gym is the place where I feel the most confident.
We should not seek perfection from our bodies. We should instead work to find peace within ourselves. That, to me, is perfection." —as told to Keith Nelson Jr.
This story appears in the October 2022 issue of Men's Health.
Keith Nelson is a writer by fate and journalist by passion, who has connected dots to form the bigger picture for Men’s Health, Vibe Magazine, LEVEL MAG, REVOLT TV, Complex, Grammys.com, Red Bull, Okayplayer, and Mic, to name a few.
