Growing up a member of an LGBTQ community is tough, especially in a world that continues to regard them as a glitch in the matrix, an anomaly. They are often bullied by their peers, and sometimes even their own selves.
One transgender teenager is speaking up against all this hate and prejudice against bullying toward the LGBTQ community in a moving video.
In it, Corey, a beautiful 14-year-old with beautiful eyes and gorgeous hair, shares her experience with bullying with the help of flashcards on which she’s written painful recollections.
Growing up, she says, she was fond of playing with dolls, painting her nails, and wearing her mom’s high heels when she wasn’t looking. However much joy these things bring, however, Corey never felt comfortable in her skin doing any of them.
“Because I was born a boy.”
Like most LGBTQ youth, she had trouble making friends because she didn’t feel she belonged. Girls and boys from her school bullied her relentlessly, lying to their teachers to get Corey into trouble. One boy even told her to kill herself.
“He told me no one would miss me if I was dead,” she recalls in her flashcard.
The bullying got so bad she often went home in tears, until finally her parents decided to pull her out of school and put her in a homeschooling program so she could be herself.
But the bullying didn’t stope there. Outside the house, people often pointed at her for wearing girl clothes. Once a woman “in the store started taking pictures of me with her phone.”
The teen was feeling all alone and desponded until her mother showed her a clip of transgender activist Jazz Jennings. It was then that she was finally able to reconcile her feelings since she was little.
Her parents then found her a therapist who had worked with transgender youths before, and then she began to transition from male to female and learn the basics of what it’s like to be a girl, like putting on make up.
On her 14th birthday, she began hormone treatment.
With her newfound confidence, Corey asked her parents to put her back in public high school. They found a wonderful, accepting school; she plays in the girls’ soccer team, uses the girls’ bathroom and locker room.
Despite her growth and maturity as a young teen, she doesn’t forget the hurt bullying causes. “Bullying is never okay,” she says, and that things will get better and that they are loved.
“You are incredible,” she says. “You are beautiful. You are worth so much.”
READ: Coming to terms: Life as a transgender child
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