I came out as a transgender woman two years ago, the night before my 28th birthday. This public declaration occurred three months after I started taking feminizing hormones, four days after telling my parents at an O’Charley’s in Aiken and nearly seven years after realizing, for the first time, I might be a woman.
Like many trans adults, I regret how long it took me to begin transitioning. I spent my adolescence confused and my twenties grappling with whether authenticity was worth the risk of ostracism. But then I started reading books by queer authors, and those books helped me to understand that a life as a thriving queer adult, even in the South, was possible.
It is embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t even understand how gender transition worked until, in 2020, I read the novel “Little Fish” by Casey Plett. I didn’t know about hormones or how to ask a doctor to start estrogen. Up until that point, I had only ever experienced trans characters as the subject of mockery: the stereotype, the crazed villain or the murder victim. This subject of trans representation, particularly in film and television, is brilliantly explored in the documentary “Disclosure” (2020).
It took me a long time to find stories, in film or books, that communicated the lived experiences of queer people, that allowed queer people to be seen as not jokes or monsters but rather as fully-realized persons.
Evelyn Berry is a poet in Columbia, SC. Reading books about and by queer people helped her realize that a future as a woman was possible. (Photo by Jared Johnson/Provided)
In 2014, when I was a sophomore at College of Charleston, I read “Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel, a tragic-comic graphic memoir about Bechdel’s coming-of-age and coming-out. At 19, I was reading, finally for the first time, a book about LGBTQ+ experiences from an LGBTQ+ author. Despite my obvious differences from Bechdel, the story — the questioning, the repression, the secret shame of gay desire — resonated with me.
In 2013-2014, College of Charleston chose this book as the College Reads! Program, which encouraged students across the campus to read and discuss the same book, and the decision attracted the ire of conservative politicians in the South Carolina House of Representatives, who threatened to cut funding to the program and characterized the book as “pornographic.” A story that, to me, had been revelatory and affirming was to others obscene.
That same year, USC Upstate faced the same budget cuts when they assigned “Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Rainbow Radio,” a collection of essays about the experiences of being LGBTQ+ in South Carolina. Because I adored “Fun Home,” I was happy to be provided a recommendation for which book to pick up next. Reading about the experience of LGBTQ+ South Carolinians confirmed something I had started to suspect, that queer people lived and thrived in the South. The women who lived across the street from my childhood home were not, as my parents once explained, roommates, but rather lesbians. Queer people are not just denizens of far-off cities and blue states; we are your neighbors. We are teachers, tech consultants, librarians, lawyers, bus drivers, baristas, construction workers, cashiers, preachers, painters and parents. We have always existed here in South Carolina, and we have always belonged.
Reading made me trans. Books about trans people and by trans authors made me trans. Of course, this is what so many anti-LGBTQ+ critics fear. They object to even the mention of queer people in literature, classrooms and especially in their homes, because to read about queer people, to acknowledge our existence, is dangerous.
In challenges against books with LGBTQ+ content, they describe depictions of gay families, gender transition, and especially queer love, as “obscene.” My life, my family and my joy are obscene. To share those stories of my life is, for them, akin to brainwashing or propaganda.
Reading stories that accurately shared the lived experiences of gay and trans individuals did not indoctrinate me into queerness, but rather allowed me to question the deeply held beliefs, which were ingrained from years of attending Baptist church services, watching trans women be mocked in popular culture and living in a violently patriarchal society. All told me I could never happily live as a queer adult. But I’m happy; finally happy. That is the story we do not tell, the story we must tell, that despite whatever insults are aimed or legislation designed against the queer community, we’ll still be joyful and possible.
LGBTQ+ literature illuminated the possibility of a queer life, assured me that I could come out and be okay. Queer stories have helped me imagine a future in which I was still alive. I am still here, a trans woman making a home in Columbia, South Carolina, because I’ve read and written dangerously queer books.