Growing up transgender

“It started with getting dressed for school,” says Benji Jaramillo Nicholson with a laugh. “I wore a lot of flannels.” 

Nicholson is 16 years old, and he’s currently getting ready to graduate early from Mount Horeb High School and head to the west coast. But before he leaves, this introspective student and artist is looking back on what it meant to grow up – and to grow up transgender - in the local community.  

“I think for me it’s definitely a happy [story],” he says. “I used to consider myself a pessimist, but not anymore. There were some bad things, but those bad situations helped me to get where I am.”

Nicholson has lived his entire life in Mount Vernon, a pastoral country hamlet located just minutes outside the Village of Mount Horeb. By middle school, he began to suspect he was not female, but rather male. 

“I was always one of those kids who didn’t really fit into the box of my gender,” he says. “I kind of started to figure it out in middle school. I started to figure out that I did not fit with the gender I was assigned at birth.”

At the same time, a national dialogue about what it means to be transgender rose to prominence, going from a fringe topic to a mainstream one in a matter of just a few years. 

“It kind of shepherded me along,” says Nicholson. “I got to grow with the discourse.”

One aspect of the dialogue centered around the idea that ideas of gender and sex usually run in tandem, but not always. Such was the case for Nicholson. 

“To me, masculine is what I want to be,” he explains. 

But what, exactly, is masculinity? For centuries it was seen primarily as something positive. In recent years it has been increasingly used in a pejorative sense. But what is it?

“That’s a really tough question,” reflects Nicholson. “I guess I’d say it really is something that encompasses the energy of what it means to be male. You do hear a lot about toxic masculinity, but that’s definitely not the only aspect of it. There are wonderful aspects of it, too.”

“On days when I can completely be myself, it’s just something I forget about,” he continues. “When I’m not, it consumes my day.”

Growing up - for anyone of any gender - is hard. People who are lucky enough to ever find themselves and grow comfortable in the identity they forge often look back on several attempts that sputtered, sometimes with a sheepish grin. It could relate to music or fashion or things that run deeper. Nicholson says it is worth it to keep trying, whoever you are. 

“It’s definitely a hard thing, you go through so many phases, and you’ll look back and think, ‘Why did I do that?’” he says. “But if you stray true to yourself, you’ll be happy.”

In fact, Nicholson says he sometimes wonders why he didn’t speak out about his gender earlier. “I knew my parents would be supportive; why didn’t I say something sooner?” he says. 

Not everyone in Mount Horeb was supportive. But most were. 

“With people surrounding me in the community, it was really wonderful,” says Nicholson. “My transition coincided with our PFLAG [Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays] group here, which was great because my parents could go to those meetings and find the resources they needed. The school system was very helpful, and they let me make a lot of choices.”

“One thing that was hard was a lot of the students,” he commented. “Like, some kids called me by my dead name, which I don’t appreciate.”

“But for every one person who was rude, there were always 10 people who were nice,” he says. 

If the small midwestern town where Nicholson grew up was relatively positive - social media, that firestorm of vitriol and judgement from people of all beliefs and persuasions - was less so. 

“There is definitely a lot of hate on social media,” says Nicholson. “The hate in the world definitely gets magnified there.” 

Nicholson talked about the hate directed at people who fall into traditionally marginalized groups, but also alluded to the perils of unrelenting cancel culture, in which people try to de-platform those they disagree with, or those who have changed their minds but said something offensive years earlier. 

“We have a culture where if someone messes up one time…” he trails off, leaving the ways people are punished and shamed to the imagination. 

“I honestly don’t know how you fix it,” he says. “It would require so many people choosing forgiveness over hate, and I don’t know if the world is like that.”

Nicholson’s world will be getting much larger in a few months, when he heads to Oregon to begin his first year of college. It’s been a strange spring, with the COVID-19 pandemic halting in-person high school and moving coursework online. But Nicholson is a good student, and he says he’s excited – and a little nervous – about the prospect of moving on. 

“I’ve lived in one place my whole life,” he says. “Now I’m going to do something completely different.”

“I want to be able to have a fresh start,” he explains. “I want to go to a place where the fact that I’m transgender is not common knowledge without my consent. I’m choosing to do this article here, but there I’d like to be known just as male.”

He’s looking forward to meeting new people and learning about them, as they meet him on his own terms. 

“I definitely want to bring people to me,” he says. “I considered joining an LGBTQ dorm, but then I thought, ‘No, that’s limiting.’” 

“I want the opportunity to become more open than that,” Nicholson adds. 

Whatever he finds, and wherever he ultimately goes, Nicholson says he will look back on the community where he grew up with affection. 

“I think a lot of it will be fond memories,” he says. “I don’t really want to remember the negative stuff. But I definitely will remember my friends, and the beauty of the town, because it is beautiful.”