Before I Had the Words

On Being a Transgender Young Adult

Skylar Kergil

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781510723061
• eBook ISBN: 9781510723085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

At the beginning of his physical transition from female to male, then-seventeen-year-old Skylar Kergil posted his first video on YouTube. In the months and years that followed, he recorded weekly update videos about the physical and emotional changes he experienced. Skylar's openness and positivity attracted thousands of viewers, who followed along as his voice deepened and his body changed shape. Through surgeries and recovery, highs and lows, from high school to college to the real world, Skylar welcomed others on his journey. Before I Had the Words is the story of what came before the videos and what happened behind the scenes. From early childhood memories to the changes and confusion brought by adolescence, Skylar reflects on coming of age while struggling to understand his gender. As humorous as it is heartbreaking and as informative as it is entertaining, this memoir provides an intimate look at the experience of transitioning from one gender to another. Skylar opens up about the long path to gaining his family's acceptance and to accepting himself, sharing stories along the way about smaller challenges like choosing a new name and learning to shave without eyebrow mishaps. Revealing entries from the author's personal journals as well as interviews with members of his family lend remarkable depth to Skylar's story. A groundbreaking chronicle of change, loss, discovery, pain, and relief, Before I Had the Words brings new meaning to the phrase "formative years."

Tomboy

IN 2001, I TURNED TEN years old. Mom flew us out to Massachusetts to take a look at houses. We stayed in a hotel in Waltham for a few days as we were driving around in a rental car to visit properties with the realtor. Mom’s job was going to transfer her to somewhere in Boston, but the reality hadn’t hit me until that moment. We were moving, again.

On our first day there, I read a sign on the highway that stated MIDDLESEX COUNTY. Sitting in the backseat, I had no words to describe it and while I was reading every name off the signs, I skipped that one so I didn’t have to read it out loud. It made me feel uncomfortable to see that on the signs, the word “sex.”

Instead, I distracted myself with the fact that Worcester was pronounced “Wooster” and that Leominster was “lemon-stir” rather than “Leo-Mine-Stir” as I would have assumed. The towns all had weird names and it especially confused me that they had to indicate Concord, Massachusetts from Concord, New Hampshire because they weren’t creative enough to come up with different names for different towns in different states.

“California is unique, these Massachusetts people are boring with their names,” I thought.

Heading into the suburbs on one of the outings we took to peruse houses, we went down a street in Acton that ended with this barn-like house. It had a large backyard with a pond and hills. I liked that it looked campy, like something out of a movie; it was starkly different from any house I had seen in California.

JT and I followed along with Mom and the realtor, noting the things that ten- and twelve-year-olds look for—enough kitchen counter space wasn’t as important as imagining where our N64 and our beanbags would get to live, for example. The issue was that it was a two-bedroom house. The master bedroom was clearly set up for the adults, and the second bedroom had peaked ceilings with exposed beams. Coming from stucco and white walls and ceilings, I thought this bedroom was the coolest in the world. Plus, they had two or three kids, so there was a bunk bed in there.

“Mom! Mom! I love this one!” I gushed.

“Well, there are only two bedrooms …”

“It’s okay! I’ll share with JT! I don’t care! It’ll be fun!” I was optimistic.

In the end, Mom didn’t like the house that much. I tried to fight for it because I liked the rustic nature and I really liked the idea of sharing a bedroom with JT so we could be bros. In retrospect, I don’t think JT would have been down with that, but it was Mom who made the call—my dream of two brothers sharing a bedroom wasn’t going to come true.

Turns out, JT started puberty the following year, and I was heading straight that way, too. I didn’t realize it would be weird for JT and me to share a room because I didn’t realize what puberty was about to do to us both.

JT was about to become a “man.” And within a few years, I was expected to become a “woman.” A brother and sister sharing a bedroom wouldn’t make sense; my reality, the one I didn’t speak about, had been that we were brother and brother. And maybe, had I articulated that to my mom, she would have heard me before puberty.

I just didn’t have the words.

When all was said and done, we settled on a four-bedroom house that was one street over from the barn-like house I had adored. Then, we headed back to California for the final few months of school before packing everything up.

My friend Maria and I took a trip to our local skate park one last time.

“We will be even better next time you’re here,” she said.

“Heck yeah. We’ll be doing backflips!” I tried to stay optimistic.

While I was lacing up my skates, she took off down a smaller ramp and went up on the island. I was always nervous going down any ramps, much preferring to enter the park on level ground rather than jump right in. But it was our last time. As soon as I hopped over the edge, I knew I was about to get the wind knocked out of me. I had leaned backwards while going down, thus tilting entirely backwards and landing flat on my ribs. There were tons of other kids around, too; I looked at some of the guys over in the bowl doing tricks and wished I could do that but instead I was lying, splattered on white concrete. With no breath in my lungs, I felt like I was dying. Thankfully, I knew from previous experiences that I wasn’t.

“Dude! You okay? What happened?” Maria rushed over to my side.

Gasping, I gestured with my hands.

“Oh, I thought you learned not to do that last time, jeez,” she said, laughing as she reached down her hand to help me up. She reminded me of the time I had knocked the wind out of myself in her back yard and been super freaked out while her dogs licked my face.

“I still want to skate,” I announced, giggling once I had gotten my breath back.

“You sure?” she asked, concerned.

“Yeah … I don’t know when else I’ll get to be back at a park like this with a friend as good as you.” I slid down into the bottom of the bowl and did my usual routine of trying to get up on some of the edges but not doing anything spectacular. I never went to the skate park with my board, just with my skates, because I knew I couldn’t do anything on a board except get major speed, fall off, or get from my house to a friend’s house around the block. I didn’t even have enough skills to get out of the bowl without using my elbows to prop me up. And yep, I wore wrist guards, knee pads, and elbow pads. My parents required it.

“Dude, I wish I could get some Roces,” Maria said.

They were these sick skates she loved. They had been the latest fad in the roller-skating community. I made a mental note that I wanted them too; if not for myself to get better at skating then to remind me of her when I felt lonely in Mass.

When we finally had our actual goodbye, just the two of us, I felt I was losing my best friend forever. The distance was going to be too far; we still had so much time left ahead of us in school to make new friends and form new bonds. I hoped I could meet people like her in Massachusetts; I wrote in my diary that I was worried I wouldn’t. We had had everything in common, from Girl Scouts to being on the All-Star team in softball, and although I felt like nothing would change that, I began to feel defeated and alone.

One night in the hotel, days before we got to Massachusetts, Mom sat JT and me down.

“Your dad isn’t going to be with us anymore,” she said, as if she were telling us a secret.

Assuming something awful had happened, like Dad had died, we started crying and getting confused and angry. Mom clarified that she and Dad would be getting a divorce once we arrived in Massachusetts, but we were convinced he must be dead. We were in hysterics.

Dad actually turned his van around to come back to us and prove he was alive. He was there the next day. With both of them, we went over what would happen on the East Coast. Dad was looking for a job and a place to live, potentially hoping to own a motel. Part of the reason he drove cross country was so he could stop and look at different opportunities.

JT and I understood this, but perhaps JT understood better what it meant. In my mind, not much was going to change, but I was so very, very wrong.

I called Maria super quick and let her know what was happening.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She still sounded so close by. I wished we hadn’t said goodbye as early as we had, but she and her family were going on a trip the next morning. As we hung up the phone, I began to cry. I opened up my journal, picked up a blue sparkly pen, and wrote:

Sometimes life doesn’t seem so fair and I’m not happy about it. I can’t breathe, like when I fell skating the other day with Maria and I don’t want to keep moving this fast. Will I ever even come back to San Ramon? What if I don’t? Will Maria forget me?

We arrived in Massachusetts in August of 2001. I had been afraid to leave, but in reality, moving into the new house was exciting, especially since it was the summertime. One of the first things I remember is that we had to figure out what to fill the base of the basketball hoop with. In Cali, it had been weighed down with water, but here we were deciding if we should put water or sand in it. JT and I wanted it on the street but Mom insisted it had to be in the driveway until we were older or we knew how busy the street was. Something like that.

I settled into the smallest bedroom, right at the top of the stairs. Even though our guest bedroom was bigger, I liked this one because it had huge built-in bookshelves along the wall. Plus, the window in the corner overlooked our garage roof, something I knew I’d want to climb out on someday. Mom had let me get new bedroom furniture that I was so excited about. The brass bed set I had had before was not going to do.

I chose a lofted bed from a local furniture store, so it was like a merge between the bunk bed I actually wanted and something that would fit in my small room. The bed was about four feet up and so I would be sleeping right in the middle of my window, able to look out through it to the backyard. Underneath it, I had a small dresser, a sliding-door chest that was perfect to store all my mini skateboards and Legos, and a desk table that could roll out. There was space for my giant stuffed lion that I used to ride down the stairs in Cali. I kept him under there to keep me safe; he fit perfectly. I also used pipe cleaners twisted together to tie a small baseball bat to the railings by where I slept, just in case. In some way, because my dad wasn’t around anymore and because I was right at the top of the stairs, I wanted to be sure I could protect the family.

The cats we had adopted when I was a baby, Thelma and Louise, liked to sleep on my bed lots. But right when we moved in, we couldn’t find Thelma. Dad happened to stop by around that time and he helped us to look for her. She legitimately wasn’t anywhere to be found; JT and I began thinking we would have to post MISSING CAT posters already and we had just moved there! It was so scary and it was hard to remain calm.

The basement creeped me out, but of course we had to look there too, as it had the most nooks and crannies. The gross faded brown carpet matched the dark wooden paneling that ran halfway up the walls. The rest was painted off-white, and the ceiling had those dropped tiles combined with fluorescent lights that I originally thought were reserved for schools.

We heard something in the wall and looked into one of the electrical outlets in the corner that we could pop open for some reason. Thelma had squeezed herself in between all the wood paneling and the structure of the house, with all the wires and pipes running through it too. Seeing the bare bones of the house was confusing to me, since Cali had felt like it ended with the white stucco walls. Way creepier, for sure. Thelma looked spooked in between all this dust and rubble with the flashlight in her eyes, and JT and I called for help. Being a cat, she was stubborn, and unlike a dog, wouldn’t come when we called her name. Dad had a pretty great idea of spraying her with one of our water squirt guns to scare her and get her to run out the other side where we’d opened a small door. Dad would talk about that genius idea for years because it was quite smart.

She ended up bolting right on out of there and we sealed up the way to get into the wall space. Soon after, we also had to seal up the workshop-type room that had this awesome graffiti: a giant smiley face that simply read “SMILE AND THE WHOLE WORLD WILL SMILE BACK!” However, that room didn’t have a finished ceiling so my other younger kitty, Tiger, had managed to get himself up in it and walk around in between the floorboards and the basement ceiling, causing little white bits of it to break off and fall, until he got his butt stuck under a support beam right above the washer and dryer. That time, it was alarming but also pretty hilarious to have to pull the rascal out by removing the ceiling tile under him.

Dad wasn’t around much after that. That’s the thing about divorce; everyone seems to go about it differently. My parents had never had any huge fights around us before we moved, but after getting to our new home in Massachusetts, it was clear that this was my mom’s space and that Dad wasn’t supposed to be in it.

One of the last times I remember Dad being at our house was when he had dropped off a box on our front porch at the end of August. The cats had been staring at it through the window when I came home. I opened the box. Inside was a tiny turtle. It had a spiky tail, its shell no bigger than the palm of my hand. I knew it must have been Dad who had dropped it off because in the box there was one piece of green vegetation and a bright orange cap to a milk carton filled with a little bit of water.

When Mom got home, she was pissed about it. She didn’t want a turtle and she wasn’t thrilled that Dad was still coming by and adding to our house when it was clear he was supposed to be off finding his own. I called Dad and told him we had to bring the turtle back to wherever it came from. Oh, also, it was a baby snapping turtle.

Dad came back in his van and picked me and the turtle up. I sat down in the big gray passenger seat. I loved that it had arm rests; they were huge and could go up or down. It was a super cushiony vehicle overall and anytime I rode in it, I felt like we must be on some type of space adventure.

We drove back to the Walmart where Dad had found the turtle. He had been sleeping in the parking lot one night near this fenced-in area when he had found the baby snapper. As we approached that same area, I could tell right away it was infested with giant snapping turtles. I laughed, knowing my dad would have totally ignored the potential danger in search for a critter.

“Everything isn’t changing, right?” I wondered aloud to Dad.

“Some things are changing, Katherine. That’s the way life works. Things are constantly changing. But I’m going to be your dad forever, no matter what. This is what is best for you and JT.”

“What do you mean, what’s best?”

“For you to be with Mom. I want you with me always, of course, but I always knew. It makes sense for the children to be with the mom when a divorce happens. Mom is amazing, I’ll always love Mom, and it makes the best sense for you guys to be with her,” he explained.

When he dropped me back off at home, that was the last of him coming around to the house. Soon after, he found a motel in New Hampshire, about an hour and a half away, that he was going to own and operate. Mom dropped us off there every other weekend, but once school got busy, visits to Dad’s were limited to holidays or other long weekend trips.

While Dad had mentioned some things would change, it felt like everything had. Holding the landline phone to my ear every other night, I’d call Dad to see what was up with his days. Once I hung up, I missed him immediately. But even though I seemed to favor my dad, I wasn’t mad at Mom. Somehow, even though none of my friends’ parents were divorced, and it was still pretty taboo, I knew that this made sense. I didn’t expect to have a “normal” life and this seemed to reinforce that. The pieces, although jumbled several times, still fit together. I was working with what I’d been given. I opened up my journal for the first time in this new state.

December 2, 2001—MASS :,(

Dear Journal,

Sorry I haven’t written for so long! I moved from San Ramon Calif to Acton, MA! I left all my best friends back there! Douglas is a cool school, but my teacher, Ms. Francine keeps staring at me as if I have 2,000 heads! Yesterday, Maria called! Cool! Today I hope I can call Betsy!

I have a good friend here in Mass, her name is Amy. Even though my parents got a divorce, I’m still stuck living here! Because if I moved back to CA, my dad would still be in New Hampshire. I wish they’d go back together! Hopefully, they won’t get married to other people!

California is my most favorite place in the world. I’m glad I can visit there in the summer.

Midway through the fifth grade, we were told that were about to begin a series of videos and talks about puberty in the coming weeks and that we needed our parents to sign off on a permission slip. Or something like that. I was not paying attention.

I was too busy kicking some serious butt in kickball. Amy and I were often the best girl players on the kickball field and we got close because of that competition against the boys in many ways. We also got involved in baseball during recess and were pretty good at that, too.

At some point, my uncle gave me a shirt he had gotten from a Cheerios box. It was a bright yellow shirt (my favorite color) and had the logo across it. People began calling me “Cheerio Girl” instead of Katherine. I didn’t mind it because I didn’t like the nam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Disclaimer
• Speaking
• “You Can Call Me Mike!”
• Not Twins, but Close
• Cross Country Doesn’t Feel Super Far (When You’re Six)
• Cool Bike, Yo
• Talent Shows in 1999
• Tomboy
• A/S/L?
• Cancer
• Blending In
• JT
• Peter Pan
• Sneaking to Youth Pride in Boston
• You Can’t Always Get What You Want
• Ice Cracks, Hearts Break
• Unitarian Universalism
• The Word: Transgender
• Thinking, Thinking, Crying, Thinking, Hoping
• Dissection and the Construct of Gender
• Questioning While Certain
• What Is a Name?
• Coming Out
• Transitioning Seems Expensive
• Sixteen
• A Circle, a Bird
• Listen Up?
• Gender Therapy
• Gym Class
• Parental Involvement
• On Birds and Bodies
• Full Speed Ahead
• 2008
• Have You Hugged Your Kid Today?
• Bathroom Bouncer
• Getting Accepted into College: A Casual Miracle
• “I’m an Obama Baby!”
• Day One—January 21st
• YouTube and Community
• As Our Lives Change, Come Whatever
• Stealth
• Skylar Tucker Kergil: Legalized
• Top Surgery
• Coming Out Is a Lifelong Process
• Scars
• Sophomore Slump
• Some Days It Feels Like
• Kissing Is Just Like Falling Right on Someone’s Face
• Period
• A Primary Care Physician, an Ultrasound Technician, and a Surgical Assistant
• Bellybutton
• Will I Die?
• Daughters
• Day of Silence
• Why I Out Myself
• Then Love Lets You Let Go
• Re-Humanizing the Transmasculine Community
• Inspiring Toward Wholeness
• Moms
• When People Aren’t Kind
• That Time I Almost Fist-Bumped Joe Biden
• Tell Me a Story
• Camping
• “For a Moment, I Didn’t Feel the Pain”
• Conversation with Mom
• Conversation with Dad
• Conversation with JT
• Resources & Inspiration