At some point, a change of mind made you look untrustworthy.

We call it hypocrisy. Backpedaling. Flip-flopping. Getting exposed. The internet has receipts, and God help you if something you said in 2017 contradicts something you believe in 2026.

Which is a little strange, considering the alternative is apparently going through your entire adult life without learning a goddamn thing.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons to care when someone suddenly changes their position. Politicians discover new moral convictions suspiciously close to election season. Companies unveil heartfelt commitments to social justice right around the time their marketing department realizes people are mad at them. Public figures regularly apologize in the linguistic equivalent of a hostage video.

People lie. People dodge accountability. People reinvent their beliefs when doing so becomes profitable.

I am not talking about that. I am talking about the strange cultural expectation that a decent person should somehow arrive at adulthood with a complete set of correct opinions and then preserve them in amber until death.

We seem deeply suspicious of anyone who says, “I used to think this. Then I learned something. Now I think something else.” Which is unfortunate, because that is basically the entire mechanism of growth.

You are supposed to be wrong sometimes. Preferably about fewer things as you get older, sure. But still wrong.

I have changed my mind about people.
About relationships.
About what makes someone strong.
About what forgiveness means.
About what I owe other people and what they owe me.
About things I once thought were moral absolutes and now think are much messier than that.

There are versions of me from ten years ago who would probably find current me confusing.

Good. That guy was doing his best with the information he had, but he was also, scientifically speaking, kind of an idiot. I assume current me will eventually suffer the same fate.

That should be comforting.

Instead, we have built an online culture where changing your mind can feel less like growth and more like leaving evidence at a crime scene.

Everything is permanent.

An old tweet. A Facebook post from college. A terrible joke. A confident opinion you formed after reading approximately one headline and half a Reddit comment.

Congratulations. It lives forever now.

Someone can pull it up years later and present it beside your current beliefs as if they have uncovered the Watergate tapes.

“Interesting,” they say. “Because in 2018 you said…”

Yes.

In 2018, I also thought buying furniture from IKEA without measuring the room first was a reasonable adult decision.

People evolve. The internet does not. It preserves us in layers. There is a teenager you. Twenty-two-year-old you. Angry you. Scared you. Newly political you. Recently heartbroken you. Trying-too-hard-to-be-funny you. You after three beers and before anyone taught you that every thought does not need to become a public statement.

All standing beside each other in the same searchable archive. That is historically bizarre.

Throughout most of human existence, people could quietly outgrow themselves. You could say something stupid at dinner in 1994 and, with any luck, everyone eventually forgot. Now somebody could theoretically screen-record your ideological adolescence. And because we know that, we start performing consistency.

We defend positions longer than we should because admitting we were wrong feels humiliating. We double down. We moved the goalposts. We find increasingly elaborate ways to explain why we technically never believed the thing everyone clearly remembers us believing.

And sometimes we identify so strongly with an opinion that changing it feels like losing part of ourselves.

We do not simply believe things anymore. We become people who believe things. I am the kind of person who supports this. I would never have thought that.

People like me believe this.
People like them believe that.

Once an opinion becomes part of your identity, evidence has a much harder job. Changing your mind no longer means adjusting your understanding of an issue.

It means betraying your team.

That is how we end up with people arguing positions they barely seem to believe anymore because surrender would be socially worse than being wrong.

And the internet rewards them for it. Certainty performs beautifully online. Nuance is terrible content.

“I have complicated feelings about this and would like more information,” does not exactly set the algorithm on fire.

But certainty? Certainty sells.

This person is evil.
That person is good.
This idea is dangerous.
That idea is obvious.

Here is the correct opinion, available now in fourteen slides with aesthetically pleasing fonts.

We increasingly encounter complicated subjects through people whose entire job is to sound completely sure about them. Then the rest of us absorb the lesson.

Confidence becomes intelligence.
Consistency becomes integrity.
Changing your mind becomes a weakness.

The weird thing is that we claim to want people to grow. We tell people to educate themselves.

Listen.
Learn.
Do better.

But when somebody actually does those things and arrives somewhere different, we often respond by dragging out proof of who they used to be.

Imagine telling someone for years that they need to change, then mocking them because they changed. What exactly was the desired outcome here? Were they supposed to achieve moral improvement while maintaining perfect ideological continuity?

Growth leaves contradictions behind. If I am exactly the same person at forty that I was at twenty, somebody should probably check on me.

I want future versions of myself to disagree with me. I hope they do. I hope fifty-year-old me looks back at something I am completely certain about right now and says, “Buddy. You were trying, but absolutely not.”

Because that would mean something happened between here and there.

I met someone.
I read something.
I screwed something up.
I listened.
I experienced something I could not understand from a distance.
I learned.

And I changed.

None of this means every reversal deserves applause. Changing your mind does not erase the harm you caused while believing the old thing. Growth does not automatically entitle you to forgiveness. And there is a meaningful difference between evolving and conveniently rewriting your own history.

You should still be able to say, “Yes, I believed that.” You should be able to sit beside the uncomfortable older version of yourself without pretending they never existed. Accountability and growth are supposed to work together.

Instead, we often treat them like opposites. Either you defend who you were forever, or you renounce them so completely that you pretend they were another person.

But you were there.
You said that thing.
You believed the thing.

And then something changed. That is not necessarily hypocrisy. Sometimes it is evidence. Evidence that life got through to you.

I think we could use a culture that makes a little more room for saying, “I was wrong.” Not the theatrical version. Not the Notes-app apology crafted by six publicists.

The ordinary version.
The embarrassing version.

The one where you have to admit that someone you argued with three years ago may have had a point and you would now very much like the universe to destroy all documentation of the conversation.

The version where your pride takes a minor injury. Because being wrong should occasionally cost us something. It just should not cost us the right to become wiser.

Maybe we would all be a little less defensive if changing our minds did not feel like confessing to fraud. Maybe we would listen differently. Maybe conversations would become less about winning and more about discovering whether there is anything worth taking home with us. Maybe we would stop asking whether someone has been perfectly consistent and start asking a more interesting question.

What changed? Because sometimes the answer is cowardice.

Sometimes it is convenience.
Sometimes it is money.

But sometimes the answer is that a human being encountered something their old worldview could not survive.

So yes, somewhere out there is probably an old version of you who believed something you now find ridiculous.

Leave them there.
Thank them for getting you this far.
Cringe a little.
Then keep going.

You are allowed to know better now. And if we are lucky, someday we will know better than we do today.

History loves paperwork.

Birth certificates. Marriage licenses. Census records. Passenger manifests. Court documents. Newspaper clippings. Military records. Death certificates.

If somebody wrote your name down often enough, there is a decent chance some part of you survived.

But people are not paperwork.

A census can tell me who lived in a house. It cannot tell me who they loved when nobody was looking.
A passenger list can tell me who boarded a ship. It cannot tell me what they were afraid of.
A marriage certificate can tell me who somebody legally married. It cannot tell me whether that marriage was loving, convenient, expected, miserable, necessary, or simply the safest option available.

And when you start looking for queer and transgender people in history, those gaps become fucking enormous. That creates a strange problem for people like me.

I write fiction. More specifically, I am fascinated by the people who might have existed in the spaces where the historical record goes quiet. And sooner or later, you have to ask an uncomfortable question: Do we actually have the right to fill those silences?

The Archive Is Not the Same Thing as the Truth

There is a temptation to treat recorded history as if it were reality itself.

If we cannot find evidence that something happened, maybe it did not happen. If nobody described themselves using the words we use today, maybe people like them did not exist. If a relationship was never written down, maybe it was never there.

That sounds reasonable until you remember who usually got to write history.

People with money. People with education. People with social power. Institutions. Governments. Churches. Newspapers. Courts. And, frequently, the people deciding which parts of somebody’s life were respectable enough to preserve.

History did not record every life equally.

Some people were documented obsessively. Others survived as a name on a list. Some survived only because they were arrested. Some because doctors studied them. Some because newspapers thought they were strange enough to become entertainment.

And countless others disappeared almost completely.

That does not mean they were not there. It means the archive failed them. There is a difference.

Queer People Did Not Suddenly Spawn in 1969. This is where historical fiction gets complicated.

If I write a queer character in 1912, somebody can reasonably ask: How do you know someone like that existed?

And the frustrating answer is often: I don’t.

At least, I do not know that this specific person existed. But I also know that human beings did not suddenly develop complicated relationships with gender and sexuality the moment somebody invented modern terminology.

People loved people. People desired people. People changed their names. People dressed differently from what society expected. People built lives together. People hid. People ran away. People found each other. People survived.

The words changed. The laws changed. The medical language changed. The way people understood themselves changed.

Human complexity did not.

Still, knowing that people like your character *could* have existed does not give you unlimited permission to turn the past into whatever story you want. That is where things get uncomfortable. And honestly, I think they should.

There Is a Difference Between Imagining and Claiming

When I started writing Ink & Saltwater, one question kept following me around: What might it have meant to be queer or transgender in 1912?

Notice the word might. That word does a lot of work.

I am not claiming that every trans person in 1912 understood themselves the way a trans person might today. I am not claiming that modern identity labels can be dropped perfectly onto people who lived more than a century ago. I am not claiming to have uncovered some secret historical truth about the Titanic.

I am asking a question. And fiction gives me a place to explore possible answers.

There is something freeing about that. There is also something terrifying about it.

Because the moment you put a fictional person inside a real historical setting, you start negotiating with truth.

How much can you invent?
How much should you invent?
When does imagination become projection?
When does representation become revision?
When are you giving someone a life the archive denied them, and when are you just using the past as a costume for a modern story?

I do not think there is a clean answer. Frankly, I distrust clean answers to messy questions.

Sometimes Silence Is Evidence Too

One of the hardest things about researching marginalized lives is learning that absence can mean many things.

Maybe something never happened. Maybe nobody thought it was worth recording. Maybe somebody deliberately hid it. Maybe the record was destroyed. Maybe the person knew being honest would be dangerous. Maybe the language available to them did not match the experience they were having. Maybe they told one person. Maybe they told nobody.

That uncertainty is frustrating when you want facts. But it is also deeply human.

Most of us will leave behind a wildly incomplete version of ourselves too. Imagine somebody trying to reconstruct your entire emotional life one hundred years from now using your tax returns, your driver’s license, three Instagram captions, a work email, and whatever weird shit Google decided to preserve.

Good luck.

They would know things about you. They would not know you.

That changed the way I think about historical fiction. The goal cannot be to perfectly reconstruct a life that was never recorded. That life is gone. The goal, at least for me, is to approach the silence with enough humility to admit that I am imagining.

Fiction Can Do Something History Cannot

History has rules. It should. If the evidence does not exist, a historian cannot simply say, “Eh, this probably happened,” because it makes a better story.

Fiction gets to walk somewhere different.

It can ask: What if?
What if somebody aboard that ship was carrying a secret nobody around them understood?
What if two people loved each other in a way they could never safely put into writing?
What if somebody looked at America and saw more than another country?
What if they saw the possibility of becoming somebody new?
What if history preserved their ticket but lost their entire interior world?

Those questions do not rewrite the historical record. They remind us that the historical record was never complete in the first place. And maybe that is where fiction earns its place. Not by pretending we know exactly what happened. By refusing to assume that what survived on paper was everything that happened.

But There Is a Responsibility Here

I do not think writers should wander into marginalized history with the attitude of, “Nobody knows, so I can do whatever the hell I want.”

Silence is not a blank check.

If you are writing people whose lives were erased, criminalized, misunderstood, or poorly documented, imagination should come with responsibility.

Research the world they lived in. Understand what language existed. Understand what risks existed. Pay attention to class, race, gender, money, family, religion, geography, law, and all the other things that shape what choices a person actually has.

And then, after doing all of that work, admit where the evidence ends. You are still imagining. I think that admission matters.

Because there is a huge difference between saying:

“This is what being transgender in 1912 was like.”
and saying:
“Here is one imagined life that asks what it might have been like.”

The first one closes the question. The second one opens it. I would rather open doors. Even if, given my track record with metaphors, I occasionally try pushing one clearly labeled PULL first.

Maybe the Question Is Bigger Than Permission

I started this wondering whether we have the right to invent the lives history did not record. I am not sure “right” is even the best word anymore.

Maybe the better question is whether we can do it carefully and honestly. With enough research to respect the past and enough imagination to acknowledge that records alone cannot contain an entire human life.

Because leaving every silence empty has consequences too. If we only tell stories about people whose lives were thoroughly documented, history becomes populated by the people institutions considered worthy of recording.

Everyone else becomes an absence. And absence has a funny way of being mistaken for nonexistence.

Queer people were there.
Trans people were there.
People questioning themselves were there.
People who never had the words were there.
People who had words we would not use today were there.
People who hid were there.
People who lived loudly were there.
People who were ordinary, irritating, hilarious, selfish, romantic, brave, cowardly, horny, confused, complicated human beings were there.

We may never know most of their names. That does not mean we have to imagine them as ghosts. Maybe fiction cannot give them their actual lives back.

Of course it cannot. But it can challenge the assumption that they never had lives worth imagining in the first place. And sometimes that matters.

—

This question sits at the heart of my debut historical novel, Ink & Saltwater, which follows a trans man aboard the RMS Titanic in 1912 and asks what identity, love, belonging, and the possibility of becoming someone new might have looked like in a world that did not yet have all the language we have now.

I cannot tell you that Thomas’s story happened. Though I can tell you that people like him deserved the possibility of having one.

Ink & Saltwater is available for preorder now.

I have been thinking about how I describe my transition, and I realized something that might seem strange at first.

I didn’t transition into a man; I transitioned into a trans man.

There is a difference, at least for me. I didn’t go through all of this to erase the word transgender from my life. I don’t see it as a temporary label I will outgrow once I look masculine enough, take enough hormones, or pass often enough. The word belongs next to man because both words reflect the truth about me.

I know biology. I understand how my body developed, which organs I was born with, and what sex my birth certificate listed. I know that hormones and surgery have changed parts of my body without rewriting every cell or erasing its complete medical history. I understand that some of that history still matters when I sit in a doctor’s office.

I am aware. The breaking news banner can come down now.

This is part of why I feel comfortable calling myself a trans man. The word trans honors the body I started with, the changes I chose, and the life I live now. It does not ask me to pretend my biology is gone. It shows that my biology alone was never enough to describe the whole person living inside it.

There is someone in my life who struggles to look beyond the biological part. They believe chromosomes, DNA, and sex at birth are the clearest facts. I understand why that view feels secure. Biology comes with charts, categories, and terms that sound final. A person’s inner sense of self is much harder to analyze.

Great. Cool. I respect their perspective.

The strange thing is I don’t feel as angry about it as I once did. I used to think that every wrong pronoun challenged my right to exist. If someone refused to see me as a man, I felt responsible for finding the perfect words that would finally make them understand.

I don’t carry that same need anymore.

Being misgendered can still hurt. It hurts more when it comes from someone who knows what I have faced and understands what being seen as a man means to me. But I have accepted that I cannot force someone to change their beliefs. I can explain myself, ask for respect, and decide what behavior I will tolerate in my life. I cannot climb into someone’s mind and rearrange their beliefs until they match mine.

For a while, this new calm worried me. I wondered if I was giving up or becoming less secure in my identity. I could already hear someone asking whether a “real” trans person would be angrier.

Apparently, even self-discovery comes with a surprise test.

But my anger does not define me as a man. My pain does not prove that I am transgender. I do not become more valid each time I correct someone, nor do I lose my identity when I decide that an argument isn’t worth my energy.

Perhaps I feel calmer because I no longer seek confirmation from others about something I already know.

I know that parts of my biology are female. I also know that I am a man. Those facts may seem impossible to hold together for someone else, but they are not in conflict within me. They are why a trans man feels like the most honest name I can choose for myself.

I did not transition because I thought a haircut and new clothes could change my chromosomes. The life I was given did not fit the person I knew I was, so I transitioned. Testosterone, surgery, a new name, and different pronouns helped me build a life where I could finally recognize myself. They changed my body, but they also changed the way I could live inside it.

For some people, being recognized simply as a man may be the goal. They may want the word trans to stay private or fade into the background. I understand that, and I would never tell anyone how they should describe themselves.

For me, though, transgender is not a warning label attached to a man. It is a record of my journey. It holds the years of confusion, fear, grief, courage, medical choices, hard conversations, and moments of joy that brought me here. It honors every earlier version of me who recognized something was wrong before he had the words to explain it.

I am not ashamed of my body’s history. I am proud that I lived honestly within it.

Maybe that is why I don’t need everyone to agree with me anymore. Their beliefs cannot change what I have experienced. They cannot undo my transition, take away the peace I have found, or decide what words I can use for myself.

That doesn’t give anyone permission to treat me poorly. There is a difference between accepting that someone may never understand me and allowing them to use that limitation to hurt me. I am still learning where patience ends and self-neglect begins. I am still deciding which moments deserve grace and which need a firm boundary.

Maybe other trans people have felt this, too. Maybe some have grown tired of defending themselves. Maybe others feel deeply hurt each time they are misgendered and can’t imagine reaching this point. Both experiences are valid. None of us should have to perform the correct amount of pain to prove who we are.

So this is the question I keep coming back to: Can we recognize our biology without letting it define who we are? Can we accept that some people may never understand us while still asking them to treat us with care? Can knowing ourselves to be enough, even when someone else refuses to see us in the same light?

I don’t have a perfect answer.

I only know that I did not transition to become a different cisgender man. I did not transition to erase where I started or pretend my body never carried a different label. I transitioned so I could live honestly as the person I had spent years trying to find.

I didn’t transition into a man; I transitioned into a trans man.

My biology is part of that sentence. So is everything I did with it.

I did not expect writing Ink & Saltwater to be therapeutic.

When I first started shaping the story, I wanted to write historical fiction. I wanted it to follow a transgender man aboard the Titanic in 1912. I wanted romance, danger, secrecy, class tension, and the emotional pressure of being caught between how the world sees you and who you know yourself to be.

What I did not expect was how much of myself I would find in the pages.

Ink & Saltwater follows Tom, a trans man traveling as his true self at a time when language, safety, and visibility were very different. He boards the Titanic carrying more than a suitcase. He carries fear, hope, shame, relief, a body he has learned to manage, a name he is trying to trust, and a future he is unsure he deserves.

Somewhere along the way, writing him became more than just creating a character. It became a way for me to understand myself.

There were moments while writing Tom when I had to pause because I finally articulated something I had carried for years. The self-image issues, the constant checking, the way you study yourself before the world can see you. The way one wrong glance, one wrong word, or one wrong assumption can send your mind spiraling. The way you correct yourself before anyone else can, as if you can somehow get ahead of the world.

Writing those feelings in a modern essay is one thing. Writing them through Tom, in another time, under another name, in another life, gave me distance. Somehow, that distance made me more honest.

There is something strange about writing historical fiction as a trans person. You begin to see how much of your experience has always existed, even when the world lacked language for it. The fear of being seen incorrectly, the ache to be called the right thing, the quiet joy of being recognized, even for a moment, and the grief of knowing your body may tell a story you never agreed to tell.

Those feelings are not new. They are old. Older than us. Older than our language. Older than the arguments people continue to have about us.

Because when I wrote Tom, I was not just creating a modern person and placing him in the past. I was exploring what it would mean for someone like him to exist in a time with no space for him, no easy words for him, and no guarantee of safety if the wrong person looked too closely.

That is where the healing started. I got to write down the fear. I got to write down the relief. I got to write down the small moments that feel nearly impossible to explain unless you have lived them. A stranger saying “sir.” A shirt sitting right for once. The careful breath before entering a room. The strange loneliness of understanding yourself deeply while everyone else sees only the outline they expect.

Putting those moments on paper gave them shape. They stopped being heavy things swirling in my chest and became scenes, dialogue, silence, touch, weather, salt air, a ship hallway, a journal entry, a man trying to believe he is allowed to exist.

Maybe that is why this book has become so important to me.

Tom’s story gave me a way to speak to parts of myself I did not always know how to reach. There is self-correction in this book because there is self-correction in me. There is body grief in this book because there has been body grief in me. There is hope in this book because I need hope to deal with the truth of it all.

Writing Ink & Saltwater helped me realize that some things I thought were too personal, complicated, or hard to explain were actually very human. Fear of being known, wanting to be loved honestly, and carrying old versions of yourself like ghosts. Wondering if being seen is worth the risk.

That is not just a trans story. But for queer and trans people, it resonates differently.

So many of us grow up without seeing ourselves in history. We are told, directly or indirectly, that we are new, modern, or just a trend, a debate, a headline, or a problem people recently invented.

But we have always been here. Maybe not always safely. Maybe not always openly. Maybe not always named in ways we would call ourselves now.

But here. In quiet rooms. In hidden letters. In chosen names whispered. In clothes worn with trembling hands. In love stories that history never cared to record.

That is part of what I want Ink & Saltwater to do.

I want it to give voice to the lives history overlooks. I want queer readers to open the book and feel that familiar sense of recognition. I want trans readers to see a piece of themselves in a place they were told they did not belong. I want people who have never thought deeply about gender to feel, even for a moment, what it is like to navigate the world while constantly weighing safety against truth.

Selfishly, I wanted to write a trans man into a story this grand—a story filled with romance, fear, beauty, tragedy, and hope.

Because we deserve more than side notes. We deserve full stories.

We deserve sweeping stories, messy stories, and tender stories. Stories where our bodies are complex, our hearts are real, and our love is not treated like an afterthought.

Writing this novel gave me something I did not know I needed. It allowed me to explore my own reflection without looking directly into the mirror. It gave me a character who could carry some of my questions. It created a world where I could express my grief, hope, fear, and longing, and watch them take shape outside of me.

That is the strange magic of writing. Sometimes you think you are creating a story. Then the story turns around and helps you understand yourself.

As I begin pre-launching Ink & Saltwater, I keep returning to that feeling. The excitement, yes. The nerves, absolutely. The wild thought that people may soon meet Tom, Nora, Clara, and the whole world I have been building in my mind.

But beneath all of that is something quieter.

Gratitude. Gratitude that this story found me. Gratitude for being able to write it. Gratitude that somewhere between ink and saltwater, I found words for parts of myself I thought might always remain unspoken.

If this book can do even a small part of that for someone else, then it will have mattered to me. To those history forgets. To those still trying to believe their stories deserve to be told.

Because they do.

—

Follow the pre-launch here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sincerelykayden/ink-and-saltwater-publishing-pre-launch-campaign

One of the odd things about coming out as transgender is how often people act as if you’ve disappeared.

They say things like, “You’ve changed,” or “You’re different now,” or “I just don’t know who you are anymore.” Sometimes they say it sadly. Other times, there is fear in their voices. Sometimes, it sounds like an accusation, as if being honest is a betrayal.

I get why it might feel that way from the outside. A new name. New pronouns. Different clothes. A changing body. A different way of moving through life. I can see how all of that might seem like becoming someone else.

But on the inside, it doesn’t feel like becoming someone new.

It feels like coming home.

For a long time, I lived as a version of myself that made more sense to others than it ever did to me. I learned how to smile at the right times. I learned how to answer to a name that felt like it belonged to someone else. I learned how to dress the part, play the role, and keep the peace. I learned how to be familiar enough so nobody looked too closely.

And I got good at it.

That’s the part people often miss. Survival can look a lot like personality when you’ve been doing it long enough.

People may have thought they knew me because they recognized the version I learned to perform. They recognized the polite answers, the forced laughs, the way I avoided certain mirrors and conversations. They saw how I folded myself into a shape that didn’t scare anyone.

But knowing my act wasn’t the same as knowing me.

When I started living more honestly, I think some people felt like they were losing me. And maybe, in a way, they were losing access to a version of me that was easier for them to understand. They were losing the version who didn’t ask for much. The one who swallowed discomfort. The person who smiled through things that hurt. The version who kept everyone else comfortable, even when it meant disappearing from myself.

I didn’t become someone new. I stopped being someone I was never meant to stay.

That doesn’t mean the past was fake. I want to be careful about that. I don’t believe every old memory was a lie. I don’t think every photo was meaningless. I don’t believe the younger version of me was an empty shell waiting for the real me to arrive.

That person mattered. They laughed. They loved. They survived. They carried things I’m still learning to thank them for. They got me here. I will never pretend that didn’t mean something.

But they were also tired. So tired. Tired of trying to fit into a life that never quite worked. Tired of explaining away the discomfort. Tired of being praised for a version of themselves that felt more like a costume than a home. Tired of being loved in a way that depended on staying small enough not to challenge anyone.

That’s why transition didn’t feel like a performance to me.

The performance was before. The performance was saying “it’s fine” when it wasn’t. The performance was pretending I didn’t feel disconnected. The performance was letting people believe I was comfortable because I didn’t yet know how to explain that I wasn’t. The performance was living within expectations handed to me before I even had the words to question them.

So when people say I’ve changed, I want to say, yes. Of course I have. Healing changes people. Honesty changes people. Safety changes people. Finally being able to breathe changes people.

But change doesn’t always mean replacement.

Sometimes change happens when someone stops shrinking. Sometimes change happens when someone feels safe enough to tell the truth. Sometimes change is not about losing who someone was but about returning to who they were meant to become all along.

I think about that a lot. How many parts of me were always there, waiting beneath fear?

The stubbornness. The humor. The softness. The need to create. The ache to be understood. The quiet hope that maybe one day I would look in the mirror and feel less like a stranger to myself.

Those things didn’t appear out of nowhere. They were always there. They were just buried under years of survival.

Coming out didn’t erase me. Transition didn’t replace me. My name didn’t create a stranger. My changing body didn’t destroy the soul beneath it. I am still me.

And maybe that’s hard for some people because it means they have to look back and wonder what they missed. It means they have to think about whether the person they loved was hurting in ways they never saw. It means they must accept that closeness doesn’t always mean complete understanding.

That can be painful. I can have compassion for that. But I can’t carry the guilt of being honest just because someone else felt more comfortable when I was quiet.

I didn’t become someone new. I became more visible. I became more present. I became more willing to take up space in my own life. And if that feels strange, maybe it’s because you’re meeting parts of me I finally stopped hiding.

I’m not asking everyone to understand it all right away. I know change takes time. I know love sometimes has to stretch before it learns how to hold someone properly. I know people might need to grieve the story they thought they knew.

But I hope they don’t grieve so loudly that they miss what is still here.

Because I am here. More honest than before. More alive than before. More myself than I have ever been.

And maybe that’s the point.

I didn’t become someone new. I finally stopped pretending I was someone else.

“I miss the old you.”

If you are transgender, you have likely heard some version of that phrase before. It may have come from a parent, a friend, or someone who cared about you, at least about the version they thought they knew. Sometimes it’s said with sadness. Sometimes with anger. Other times, it’s in that careful tone people use when they want to avoid hurting you but still manage to.

Hearing that phrase used to make my whole body tense up. I didn’t always know how to respond. Part of me wanted to be gentle. Another part wanted to scream. I understood that people were mourning a version of me tied to their memories. Another part of me wanted to ask why that version mattered more than the person standing in front of them now.

I get it. Change is tough. When someone you care about comes out, especially as transgender, it can shake the foundation of what you thought you knew. It can change how you view old photos and make memories feel different. It can lead people to wonder if they missed something, lost something, or didn’t fully understand someone they loved. I can empathize with that. I truly can.

But understanding doesn’t mean I have to go back to who I used to be.

When someone says they miss the old me, I wonder who they really miss. Do they miss me, or do they miss the version that made more sense to them? Do they miss my smile, or do they miss that I didn’t correct them? Do they miss having me around, or do they miss how easy I was when I was trying to survive by being quiet?

I miss things too. I miss the years I spent pretending. I miss the childhood I never had as my true self. I miss the moments when I could have been honest but was too scared. I miss the photos where my smile looks real because I had become so good at faking it. I miss the version of me who thought being loved meant being agreeable, easy, and small.

Maybe that’s what people forget. While they grieve who they thought I was, I am grieving too. I am grieving the time I spent trying to be someone I was never meant to be. I am grieving the energy I wasted making others comfortable while feeling disconnected from myself. I am grieving all the little deaths that happened before I finally chose to live.

There’s a strange kind of pain in being mourned while you’re still alive. It’s hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. You stand there, breathing, growing, trying, healing, and becoming more yourself than ever, while someone looks at you like you’re a ghost.

Like the real you is gone. Like this version is a replacement. Like your honesty took someone away from them. But I didn’t die when I came out. I stopped hiding.

There’s a difference.

The old me was not exactly fake. I want to be fair to that version of myself. They did the best they could with what they knew. They survived things I am still learning to name. They carried me through years I thought I wouldn’t survive. They kept going long enough for me to get here.

But that doesn’t mean I want to return.

I can honor who I was without being stuck there. I can be grateful for the version of me who survived without letting others use that version as a cage. I can look at old photos with kindness and still know I wasn’t meant to stay frozen in them.

Some people think acceptance means pretending nothing changed. But love needs to be more flexible than that. Real love makes room for growth. It makes room for new names, new language, new understanding, and new versions of people we thought we already knew.

We are all changing. All the time. Trans people just have the courage to be honest about it in a way the world can see.

So yes, maybe you miss the old me. Maybe you miss the name, the voice, the clothes, the role, or the future you imagined. Maybe you need time to grieve that. I can understand that more than you might think.

But please know this.

I lived inside that old version. I know what it cost me to be them.

If you miss them because they were easier for you, then I need you to reflect on that. If you miss them because they never challenged what you believed, never asked you to grow, and never made you uncomfortable, then maybe what you miss is not me. Maybe you miss the comfort of not having to know me fully.

I do not want to be loved only when I am easy to understand. I do not want to be accepted only when I am quiet enough to make others feel safe. I do not want to spend my life being loyal to a version of myself that mostly existed for survival.

I want to live. I want to laugh in photos and recognize the person looking back at me. I want to hear my name and feel it belongs to me. I want to build a life where I am not constantly apologizing for being real. I want to be loved as I am now, not as a memory someone struggles to let go of.

Maybe that is the real sadness of it all. Some people miss the old me because they loved me. Some people miss the old me because they never had to meet the real one. I can have compassion for the first. I am done shrinking for the second.

So if you miss the old me, I hope you know this: I do too, sometimes. But not because I want to go back. I miss them like you miss someone who carried a heavy burden for too long. I miss them with sadness. I miss them with gratitude. I miss them with tenderness that says, “Thank you for getting us here.”

But I am here now.

Not as a stranger. Not as a replacement. Not as someone you lost.

I am the same soul, just less buried.

And if you can love me here, in the truth, then maybe we didn’t lose each other after all.

If you’re transgender, you’ve likely faced that question before.

Perhaps it came from a stranger online, a doctor, a friend, or a caring parent. The wording might have differed, but the question was often the same.

What if you regret transitioning? What if you regret the hormones? What if you regret the surgery? What if you regret becoming who you believe you are?

For a long time, I didn’t know how to respond.

Not because the question was tough, but because it raises an intriguing question about regret. It assumes that regret is the worst thing that could happen.

As I grow older, I’m less sure that’s true.

I’ve regretted many things in my life. I’ve regretted staying in relationships longer than I should have. I’ve regretted making myself smaller to please others. I’ve regretted saying yes when I wanted to refuse. I’ve regretted staying silent when honesty would have been healthier. I’ve regretted waiting years to trust myself.

To be honest, some of my biggest regrets have nothing to do with my actions. They stem from the things I didn’t do. The opportunities I talked myself out of. The risks I never took. The versions of myself I let go of because I feared disappointing someone else.

So when people ask me if I worry about regretting my transition, my answer is straightforward.

Of course I do. Because I’m human.

Every major decision comes with uncertainty. Every meaningful choice asks us to move forward without knowing exactly what lies ahead.

No one can guarantee a perfect outcome. Not in marriage. Not in parenthood. Not in careers. Not in moving to a new place. Not in love. Not in becoming yourself.

Life simply doesn’t provide that kind of certainty.

What fascinates me is how selectively people fear regret. When someone changes careers at forty, we call it brave. When someone relocates for a fresh start, we call it exciting. When someone pursues a dream, we urge them to take the leap.

But when a transgender person decides to feel at home in their own body, regret suddenly becomes the first thing everyone wants to discuss. It’s as if the possibility of regret is seen as proof that the journey shouldn’t occur at all.

And I don’t think that’s how life works. Because if regret is the standard, then no one should ever do anything meaningful.

No one should fall in love. No one should marry. No one should start a business. No one should have children. No one should take a chance on an uncertain future.

The truth is that every life worth living involves risk.

For me, the greater fear wasn’t regretting my transition.

The greater fear was spending my life wondering what might have happened if I had never let myself try.

I know what that life looked like. I lived it. I know what it feels like to act the way others expect. I know what it feels like to look in the mirror and feel disconnected. I know what it feels like to endure years of hoping the discomfort would eventually fade.

It didn’t. And eventually, I had to make a choice. Not between certainty and uncertainty. But between fear and honesty.

People often ask if I regret transitioning.

What they rarely ask is what I would have regretted if I hadn’t transitioned.

That answer comes much more easily.

I would have regretted never allowing myself the chance to live honestly. I would have regretted spending my life trying to be someone else. I would have regretted choosing comfort over truth. And I would have regretted never discovering who I could become.

Maybe that’s what I’ve learned about regret.

It doesn’t always wait at the end of the road you take. Sometimes it’s at the end of the road you were too scared to walk.

And that possibility frightened me far more than transition ever did.

— — —

For more from Kayden and what he is up to, be sure to follow and subscribe to his Substack.

When I first came out, I thought the hard part would be figuring out who I was.

I thought it would be the conversations. The fear. The uncertainty. The awkward explanations and the possibility that people might not understand.

And to be fair, those things were hard.

What I didn’t expect was what came after.

The moment you become openly queer, something strange starts to happen. People stop seeing you as just a person and start seeing you as a representative. Suddenly, you are expected to explain things. Questions appear from every direction. Some are thoughtful. Some are curious. Some are asked with genuine kindness. Others feel less like questions and more like tests.

At first, I tried to answer all of them.

I wanted people to understand. I wanted to help. I knew what it felt like to be confused, and I knew that most people were probably trying their best. So I explained. I shared articles. I told my story. I answered questions I had answered a hundred times before.

And then, somewhere along the way, I got tired.

Not because people wanted to learn but because suddenly people expected me to know everything.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just Kayden anymore. I was expected to explain transgender people. Then LGBTQ+ people. Then language. Then politics. Then whatever topic happened to be making headlines that week. It felt like I had accidentally accepted a job I never applied for.

The strange part is that nobody hands you this responsibility. It just appears.

One day you’re sharing something personal about yourself. The next, people expect you to have a fully developed opinion on every issue, every debate, every social question, and every disagreement happening within the community itself.

And if you don’t?

Well, then people get disappointed.

The pressure can come from outside the community, but sometimes it comes from inside too.

There is this quiet expectation that queer people should always know the right thing to say. We should always use the right language. We should always have the perfect response. We should always understand every issue, support every cause correctly, and navigate every conversation flawlessly.

Sometimes it feels like we’re expected to graduate from being human.

The truth is, I spent years trying to become myself. Years.

I spent years questioning, learning, growing, changing, grieving, and trying to understand parts of myself that I had buried for a very long time. It was messy. It was confusing. It was uncomfortable. There were moments when I got things wrong. There were moments when I changed my mind. There were moments when I simply didn’t know.

That didn’t stop the moment I came out. I’m still learning. I’m still growing I’m still figuring things out.

The difference is that now there seems to be an audience watching.

Sometimes I think people forget that being queer doesn’t automatically make someone an expert. It doesn’t grant perfect wisdom. It doesn’t suddenly provide answers to every complicated question.

It just means we’re people. People who are trying. People who are learning. People who are carrying our own fears, insecurities, mistakes, and blind spots like everyone else.

I don’t mind sharing my experiences. Honestly, that’s a big reason I write. I believe stories help people feel less alone. I believe conversations matter. I believe understanding matters.

But there is a difference between inviting someone to share their story and expecting them to carry the weight of educating everyone around them.

There is a difference between curiosity and obligation. One feels like connection. The other feels like performance.

And if there is one thing I have learned through all of this, it is that I am tired of performing.

I spent enough years trying to be the version of myself that made everyone else comfortable. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to be the perfect version of a queer person either.

I don’t want perfection. I want honesty.

Some days I have thoughtful answers. Some days I don’t. Some days I want to have a deep conversation about identity, language, and belonging. Some days I just want to drink my coffee and exist without becoming a panel discussion.

And I think that’s okay.

Because being queer is part of who I am. It is not my entire job description.

I don’t owe anyone perfection. I don’t owe anyone expertise. I don’t owe anyone a flawless explanation of my existence.

The only thing I owe myself is the freedom to keep growing.

And growth has never been perfect.

It has always been human.

— — —

For more from Kayden and what he is up to, be sure to follow and subscribe to his Substack.

Every year when June rolls around, I can almost predict the comments before I see them.

Pride Month begins. Someone shares a rainbow flag. A company changes their logo. A friend posts a coming out story. Maybe someone talks about their wife, their husband, their partner, or the journey it took to finally become themselves.

And almost immediately, someone asks:
“What about veterans?”
“What about men’s mental health?”
“What about fathers?”

I’ve seen it so many times that it barely surprises me anymore.

The thing is, I don’t actually disagree with the heart behind those questions. Veterans matter. Men’s mental health matters. Fathers matter. Those causes deserve support, attention, and conversations that happen all year long.

What I find myself wondering is why those conversations seem to appear most often when Pride Month begins.

Because if we are being honest, many of the people asking about veterans are not posting about Veterans Month in November. Many of the people asking about men’s mental health were not talking about men’s mental health in May. The concern often seems to arrive the moment LGBTQ+ people are given a little visibility.

That has always felt strange to me.

As a transgender man, Pride Month has never felt like a month where the world revolves around me. It has never felt like special treatment. It has never felt like a trophy.

Honestly, it feels more like a breath.

A reminder. A chance to look around and see people who understand what it feels like to spend years trying to fit into a life that never quite felt like yours.

I think about the kid I used to be a lot during Pride Month. The kid who learned how to be whatever everyone else needed. The kid who thought being loved meant being easy. The kid who spent years trying to fit into expectations that looked right from the outside but felt wrong on the inside.

That kid would have loved to know there were other people like him.

He would have loved to know that one day he would find community. That one day he would stop introducing himself with a name that felt borrowed. That one day he would look in the mirror and feel something closer to peace than confusion.

Pride is not about declaring ourselves more important than anyone else.

It is about visibility. It is about history. It is about celebrating the fact that countless LGBTQ+ people fought for the right to exist openly when doing so carried consequences that many people never had to think about. It is also about joy.

And I think that part gets overlooked.

Because so much of the conversation around LGBTQ+ people centers on debate. Politics. Arguments. Headlines.

But Pride is also a celebration of survival.

It is people holding hands without fear.
It is first dates and weddings.
It is chosen families.
It is parents learning, growing, and staying.
It is someone finally telling the truth after years of silence.
It is joy that was hard earned.

The older I get, the more I believe we can celebrate more than one thing at a time. Supporting veterans does not require opposing Pride. Caring about men’s mental health does not require resenting LGBTQ+ people. Love is not a finite resource. Neither is attention.

Someone else’s visibility does not make you invisible, and someone else’s celebration does not diminish your worth.

So this Pride Month, I am going to celebrate.

I am going to celebrate the people who came before me. The people who made it possible for me to live openly. The friends who helped me find myself. The family members who stayed. The people who are still figuring things out. The ones who are scared. The ones who are healing.

And I am going to celebrate that kid I used to be, the one who spent so many years surviving. Because if Pride means anything to me, it is this:

No one should have to earn the right to exist.
No one should have to apologize for being themselves.
And no one should have to shrink so other people can feel comfortable.

Happy Pride Month.

There is room for your story here too.

People talk about grief like it only shows up at funerals.

Like it only belongs to death.

But grief is everywhere in the transgender experience.

It lives in old photographs. In family conversations. In dressing rooms. In childhood memories that suddenly feel confusing when you look back at them with honest eyes. It lives in every version of yourself you tried to force into existence because everyone around you told you that version would be easier to love.

I think a lot of us grieve long before we ever come out.

We grieve the feeling of not fitting in. We grieve the exhausting performance of trying to be “normal.” We grieve the years spent hoping that if we just tried harder, smiled more, dressed differently, acted better, maybe the discomfort would finally go away.

It never does.

Denial is usually where it starts.

Not always loudly. Sometimes denial looks quiet. Functional. It looks like convincing yourself that everybody hates their reflection a little. That everybody feels disconnected from their body sometimes. That everybody secretly feels like they are playing a role they never auditioned for.

So you keep going.

You go to school. You laugh at jokes that hurt. You wear the clothes. You smile for the pictures. You let people call you names that feel like they belong to someone else. You build an entire life around trying not to look too closely at yourself.

Because looking too closely might ruin everything.

Then comes anger.

Not just anger at the world. Anger at yourself.

Why can’t I just be normal? Why can’t I just fit in? Why does this have to be so hard?

That anger sinks deep. It turns inward. You start blaming yourself for every hard thing that comes with being different. You look at your family and wonder if you are ruining the future they imagined. You hear the silence after coming out and start feeling like a disappointment before anyone even says the words out loud.

Sometimes the anger is grief wearing armor.

And then comes bargaining.

This stage hurts more than people realize.

It is the stage of “maybe I can live halfway.”

Maybe I can just keep this to myself. Maybe I can be queer, but not too queer. Maybe I can transition quietly. Maybe I can still be the version of me everyone wanted if I sacrifice just enough of myself.

So many trans people become experts at shrinking during this stage. We negotiate with our own existence. We trade pieces of ourselves for acceptance. We tell ourselves survival is enough.

But survival is a lonely thing when you are abandoning yourself to achieve it.

Depression follows closely behind.

And honestly? A lot of us know that stage too well.

Because there is a specific kind of sadness that comes from realizing how much of your life was spent trying to earn love by becoming smaller. There is grief in realizing how many memories feel disconnected because you were never fully there inside them. There is grief in looking back at childhood and wondering who you might have become if you had been allowed to grow naturally instead of carefully.

Some of us grieve the years lost. Some of us grieve relationships. Some of us grieve family members who are still alive but chose distance over understanding. Some of us grieve old versions of ourselves with guilt so heavy it feels hard to breathe.

And families grieve too.

I know that part can be uncomfortable to say out loud. But it is true.

Some parents grieve the child they thought they knew. Some loved ones grieve futures they imagined. Weddings. Names. Expectations. Dreams they quietly built in their heads before ever asking us who we actually were.

But here is the hard truth.

Trans people grieve too. Probably more than anyone else in the room.

We grieve because we spent years trying to become someone we never truly were just to make other people comfortable. We grieve because we know exactly what it costs to stop pretending. We grieve because honesty can change everything.

And finally, eventually, if we are lucky, acceptance arrives.

Not perfection. Not fearlessness. Not some movie moment where everything suddenly makes sense. Just acceptance.

A quiet understanding that maybe the goal was never to become “normal.” Maybe the goal was to become honest.

Acceptance is realizing that you were never failing at being a woman or failing at being a man. You were failing at being someone you were never meant to be.

That changes everything.

I used to think transition was about becoming someone new. Now I think it is about grieving long enough to finally meet yourself underneath all the expectations.

And maybe that is why it hurts so much.

Because every stage of grief asks you to let go of something.

But for trans people, the thing we often have to let go of is the performance that kept us alive.

That is terrifying, brave, heartbreaking, and beautiful.

All at once.