A Year of Love. A Bright Future.

This week, I'm celebrating MAJOR early voting numbers, and I'm getting sappy about my one-year wedding anniversary,

Happy Sunday, my dearest readers. I continue to be so grateful for the support you’ve shown me in these writings, and I’m so glad to hear these messages are resonating with you! Next week will be my last newsletter before the election, and I want to make sure I share the things that are most helpful. What would you like to hear about?

Now, to get some important general election comments out of the way: Are you registered to vote? Even if you feel your vote for president may not make much of a difference, down-ballot races are going to have major implications on your life and the lives of countless LGBTQ+ people around you.

The victories I routinely celebrate here are judges (who your vote confirms) making rulings that build a safer world for trans kids, singular state legislators on both side of the aisle in state legislatures managing to block radical anti-trans legislation with one vote, school boards rejecting book bans and moms for liberty candidates, small towns celebrating their first pride festivals.

Remember: while voting isn’t the sole source of these victories, not voting is a surefire way to ensure they can’t continue to happen. So don’t forget to get registered and get to the polls!

Already, we’re seeing records blown out of the water for early voting. As of 5am today, according to NBC 13,251,928 early votes have been cast.

In Georgia, where the previous first-day early voting record was 137,000 people, 306,000 votes were cast on the first day alone. They’ve now passed 1,000,000 votes cast.

In an election that so recently felt completely hopeless, all of a sudden the light is getting brighter. This is within reach, and we have the power to build that reach.

Now, onto the squishy stuff.

This week is a very special week in my life. This past Tuesday marks my 1-year anniversary with my wife, Samantha. In last week’s writing, I threatened to out-sap the entire state of Vermont with this week’s newsletter, and I do intend to follow through on that promise. I’ll share a combination of a few things this week: Some of our story, the lessons I’ve learned about love as a transgender person, and some of the pieces of media that helped me learn that I, too, was worthy of a heart-stopping, life-building, fairytale romance.

At this point, it’s probably obvious to you that I’m a bit of a softie. Ask anyone who knows me personally, they can confirm I’ve always been this way. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that I’ve also always been a romantic. Transitioning pulled the rug out from under me, romantically—I had no idea whether I would be worth loving. Early in my transition, I got to see the openly transmasculine actor Elliot Fletcher star in multiple teen and family dramas as a romantic interest, and I decided that if he could do it, so could I. I wore my heart on my sleeve and pursued crushes and dates like any other teenager.

Aaron and Callie sharing a tender moment from ABCFamily’s “The Fosters”

I had my heart held with love, I had my heart broken, and I rebuilt it a little stronger each time. Sometimes I fell on my face—one particularly notable first date in my senior year found us in a bowling alley sharing a lane with every single gym teacher from my high school. There was not a second date.

While some of my experiences fit into the shared woes of every teenager trying to learn how to love, every ending was met with a belly-deep fear: did I just blow my last chance? Is anyone going to be able to love me as I am? TV shows that featured trans characters often showed their transitions and their bodies as an obstacle, a trap, a trick. Unfortunately, some of the experiences I had confirmed that narrative for me.

Some of the partners I had made me feel loved, while others made me feel like they were doing me a favor out of pity by dating me, or that my body was something worth apologizing for over and over again. I felt seen by the messiness of trans romances in shows like tales of the city.

A Screenshot from Netflix’s Tales of the City

By my sophomore year of college, I had decided to come to terms with the reality that maybe love wasn’t for me. After a series of painful relationships and messy breakups, I swore off dating and decided that I would just find love in other ways, and maybe I wouldn’t notice a lack of romantic love in my life.

Then, I found my opposite. For every class I may or may not have slept through, she worked extra early hours in her research lab. For my meandering interests in different subjects and majors, she was driven by an intense focus towards her STEM career. She came into college set on attending medical school, and I dropped my psychology major so that we could hang out (#NoRagrets).

Technically, Samantha and I had met a year prior. We’d worked on a series of plays together with her as a by-the-book, hard driving stage manager and me as a new actor dead-set on derailing our rehearsals. She didn’t like me very much, and I thought she was very scary. A year later, I was cast in the fall play she was stage managing (Noises Off, for all the theater nerds in the crowd), and since I’d become marginally less annoying, Samantha didn’t need to be quite as scary.

I liked to walk her home after our late-night rehearsals. Then I started coming in, just for a few minutes. We’d meet up occasionally to run lines, or to get lunch, and the next thing we knew we were spending every evening laughing ourselves breathless over mac and cheese.

By the time the show rolled around, I had realized that the ways I was feeling—wanting nothing more than to make her laugh, to make her life easier, to learn how to cook so I could make her dinner, to be around her constantly—was budding love.

I asked her to go on a date with me at the conclusion of our last show, and we were off to the races.

Young Ben and Samantha all dolled up for the Winter Formal :)

At so many turns, I carried with me a fear that eventually all the complications that came with my transition would be too much and she, too, would tap out.

Instead, at every turn, she stayed by my side and doubled down. Through our year of cross-country long distance, she loved me. Through my top surgery, she loved me. Through my decision to leave my teaching program and go full time into the unknown world of public speaking and advocacy, she was one of my loudest supporters. Through my fears around moving to Missouri for her medical school, she loved me. Through starting testosterone and growing into a newer, handsomer version of myself, she loved me enough to do my injections for me every week for the first three years because I’m afraid of needles. 

As I read and watched more hopeful stories of trans characters experiencing love and romance and desirability—shows like Heartstopper, Dispatches from Elsewhere, and Our Flag Means Death; books like A Shot in the Dark or A Lady for a Duke—I continued to get evidence from my own life that it was deeply possible for transgender people to receive unconditional love.

I look back on young Ben’s feelings about love and I want to shake him, hug him, dance with him. I want to say “just you wait, buddy. It’s out there. It’s possible. It’s everywhere.”

Last year, on October 15^th, we brought together everything that matters in life: our closest friends, our families, a bounce house, and pasta. We declared for all the world that we were partners in this life.

My wife, the recipient of the inaugural Jules Gill-Peterson Award for Emerging Scholarship for a researcher dedicated to trans health, makes me a smarter person every day. My wife, always the first to find a way that something could be better and set out to fix it no matter how major, makes me a more passionate advocate every day. My wife, a future OBGYN (and a current applicant, for any program directors reading this 😉 ), makes me proud every day. My wife, my best friend, my board-game buddy, makes me feel loved and safe and lovable every day.  

For anyone reading this, wondering if it’s possible to find love as a transgender person—whether for yourself or for a loved one that you’re worried about—know that it absolutely is. Let my story be just another piece of evidence that a better, kinder world is already out there.