Schuyler Bailar
Benefitting The Trevor Project
As a teenager, Schuyler Bailar remembers being miserable all the time. As one of the nation's top swimmers, he was getting good grades, winning medals and accepted into an Ivy League school - yet he still felt empty. After an injury kept him from swimming, Bailar's mental health plummeted. He checked into a residential treatment center where he discovered that he was transgender. But what was he going to do about swimming? Schuyler shares why he ultimately decided to swim for the Harvard men's team, how he found the language and the courage to explain who he is, and why it's so important to make sure the voices in our heads are kind to ourselves.
Powered by RedCircle
Wise Words
“Language is incredibly important with marginalized folks...in general, but especially with folks who are marginalized, because language can be marginalizing, especially, even when we don’t mean it to be.”
“And so I spent most of my high school years underwater. And when I say that, I mean, literally, underwater, because I’m a swimmer, and I spent all of my high school experience mostly, if not all, in the pool training. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t coming up to breathe, I wasn’t wondering who I was. And the discrepancy between how people saw me, which was as this woman, and who I felt I was, which was definitely not that woman...and I didn’t have the language to explain what that meant to me at the time. I only understood that I wasn’t how people perceived me to be. And I don’t even know if I had the articulation to say that discrepancy, either. I just felt lost.”
“I mean the primary thing that I learned, I would consider the biggest revelation, is that I’m transgender. So, before then, I had literally no language about my own gender identity. I had come out as gay in high school, I knew that I liked girls. I thought, okay, I’m supposed to be this girl. And the word we use for that is gay, maybe that’s the thing that’s different about me, maybe that’s the thing that’s keeping me so miserable, because I haven’t come out. So, I come out about that. I told people, and I was… actually, end of high school, I had dated a girl I really liked. So, that would have all been there, but I had never had any language for gender identity.”
“And treatment was what brought me that language, because my therapist demanded that we talk about gender. And I think that was because...not because I brought it up….well I might have brought it up in indirect ways, but she noticed from the way I spoke about myself and the way I talked about my childhood, from the way I talked about my boyhood, that was honestly in contrast to the girlhood that I was, quote, supposed to have had. I was very boyish as a kid, and nobody ever thought that I was a girl because of the way I dressed and looked, how my hair was. My therapist said, “We need to talk about this.” And that was where we kind of drew the conversation from, and where I figured out, I’m transgender.”
“I’m transgender, I’m actually a boy, and I want to be this winning female athlete, which I’ve spent my whole life working to do, right? In a sport where the gender boxes are so clear, the differences between the performance levels of men and women in swimming is vast, and so I was absolutely panicking.”
“Oh my gosh, if this is my reality, what am I going to do with my life And is my life worth living?”
“Up to 41% of trans people attempt or complete suicide, most of them in their adolescense, and most of them before the age of 24. Parental acceptance is the number one factor that contributes or detracts from that percentage.”
“One accepting parent, one affirming parent for a trans kid can literally change and save their life.”
“You don’t have to get it or get me to accept and support me.”
“I remind parents of that, and trans kids often of this, because I think we all get stuck on that understanding. And the understanding will come or maybe it won’t, but the love must be there regardless. And that love is literally life saving, or life taking, and I think everybody needs to understand that.”
“So in the end of it all, I really decided to take that risk, right? And the risk was for my happiness at the expense of my success.”
“One of the most common questions people ask is, so, have you gotten the surgery? Or will you get the full transition? And what they’re really asking me in either of the scenarios is, what’s in my pants? I think oftentimes, when you open up a conversation about being transgender, one of the first questions people ask or assume that they’re allowed to ask is about my body and my genitalia, and it’s almost demanded that I share about my physical processes, my medical processes. And people don’t get that when they ask those questions, they’re being really invasive, right? They would never walk up to another stranger or somebody they just met and ask them what their genitals look like. That’s not a common question. In fact, I would argue nobody asks that to random people they meet. But for some reason, with trans people, it’s automatically allowed.”
“The most important thing that we need to do as marginalized people, and actually, as anybody who’s walking this world, is make sure that our voices in our heads are kind to ourselves. And when they’re not, everything falls apart.”
“Our identities do not ever have to hold us back from our passions.”
Links
Instagram: @pinkmantaray
Facebook: @pinkmantaray
Twitter: sb_pinkmantaray
Website: pinkmantaray.com