Pete Subkoviak looks back at his childhood...

I grew up a child of the 80's in a quintessential wholesome Midwest family. My well-meaning Catholic parents did the best they could to raise me to be a pretty in pink little girl, but when, from the age of three, I kept telling them I was a boy, they soon realized that this kid was totally off the rails. From then on my entire childhood was riddled with ignorant and incompetent medical and psychological professionals, trying in vain to change an immutable fact of my life. This was back in the 80's and 90's, but frankly many health professionals are as clueless today as they were back then.

By the age of 10 I was suicidal. I had identified as male for my entire life, but as I aged, I started to realize that my body was not going to change to fit my mind. It's a boggling place for a ten-year-old kid to be in, such a monumental quagmire with no way out. And so while I could not imagine growing up, I could definitely imagine ending it all.

I don't know how, but I stuck it out. At the age of 17, after 17 years of waiting, I finally got a diagnosis, something that despite my display classic symptoms of transgenderism from the age of three, no doctor or psychologist believed to be a real-enough medical condition to address. Even the therapist who eventually diagnosed me didn't take it seriously, so I had to drive two hours from my home to find a therapist who had experience treating people with gender identity disorders—and the drive was well worth it. My suicidality disappeared the moment I began to transition at the age of 18. My grade point average jumped from a 2.5 to a 3.7, I was happy for the first time in so many years and I finally started believing that I might have a future.

Other trans folks aren't so lucky: fourteen trans individuals were murdered in the United States this year and, Pete points out, "transgendered individuals are much more likely to die by their own hands than by another's."

November 20 is the 12th Annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. More info here.