Max

My name is Max. I'm one year on testosterone, I'm a queer trans man living with my partner and my son, I grew up in Cedar City and I have lived here for quite literally my entire life.

I grew up, like many of us did, in a highly religious household. From a young age I understood that I was not the person that my family was raising me to become. I didn't have the language to understand what was wrong with me, why I felt so incorrect, and it hurt me to lie to myself about who I was every day to make other people happy.

I took on more masculine presentations through my youth but did not come out to myself in an honest way until I was 24. I felt that to continue to live a lie was just going to make my every day worse and worse forever. I knew I had to make a definitive choice: to either live as I had been raised and make my family happy or to be an example to my son to live authentically. The moment I made that decision, my life changed.

I had the fortune of meeting my partner who loved the parts of me that I thought were unlovable, who uprooted their life to become a part of mine 2 years ago.

I then made the decision when my son was three years old to begin medical transition.
I've lived in a world that did not want me to know what I was; hoping that denial would change me. I had no elders of experience to look up to who could show me that I wasn't just experiencing a youthful fad.

I never want to see another kid feel the way I did. I need to know that we're raising a generation that trusts themselves more and can safely find others like them without fear. I want to see queer people growing old together in security who can prove that we're not going anywhere. I want my son to live in a home that has pride in itself and I want that home in Southern Utah.