Life with Gender Dysphoria | Sunny Miller | TEDxEBS

[Music] [Music] all right so I want to start out by talking about kind of a sobering statistic from the National transgender discriminatory serving in the United States they asked over 6,000 transgender people if they had ever attempted to commit suicide in their life and 41% of those people said that they had and had I've been asked in 2012 in the same survey I also would have had to say that I had attempted to commit suicide luckily I didn't succeed and I'm here but I think what's more important to start out is explaining what is transgender what it means to be transgender and what's important for that is gender dysphoria and the American Association of Psychiatry defines that as a conflict between your biological or the gender that you were assigned at birth versus the gender that you identify with and to introduce myself I'm Sonny Miller I'm a transgender person I'm 30 years old I live in Frankfort I'm married I have a wonderful life but there's always been this one kind of underlying theme for me that was always kind of nagging on me and to start that out kind of talk about my childhood I have four older brothers and I come from a really big family and it's a lot of masculinity and sports and hunting and fishing and that was always stuff I wasn't really interested in and I remembered telling my mom and I was four years old that I didn't want to be a boy I thought I should be a girl and I remember her saying that that's you can't talk like that you can't say things like that that's totally like that's crazy you can't say those things okay I was four but throughout my childhood I remember that I always with books movies anything that I would could kind of put myself into it was always with the female character that female voice it didn't matter how small that voice was that was always where I put myself and as a child you can kind of be a little bit more androgynous and you can kind of role play and it's acceptable at that point and that's kind of what I did I always would kind of Teeter on that line between a boy or a girl but then when you hit puberty that kind of all changes and then because much more difficult and as from talking to other transgender people that's a really difficult point in our lives that your body changes and it changes in a way that you don't want it to and for me I remember as my body was changing going through puberty hating everything that I saw and it just it was disgusted with what was happening because I couldn't be this little girl that I had tried so hard to be as a child and kind of fast forward a little bit more I started dealing with depression and I was on medications and my first kind of turning point was when I went to college I was kind of able to get away from my family and that environment of always kind of having to be this other person for everybody else but I had buried that that little girl inside of me for so long that when I started kind of exploring my sexuality I was attracted to men but the only way that I could really rationalize that was okay I'm I'm a man so I must be gay so then I came out to my family and I could do another speech about that but so then fast-forward a little bit more and I met my husband four years ago and we've been married for three years we have a beautiful home here in Germany we have two dogs two cats and for all intents and purposes I should be the happiest person in the world but I was still depressed and I could not figure out what what is wrong with me why why can't I be happy and so that's when I started to seek professional help here in Germany which is actually quite difficult to find and I came to the realization with a psychiatrist that you know I should I am a woman I just happened to have been born in a man's body and for me it was important to tell the people around me right away that it wasn't I didn't want to feel like I was hiding they're harboring some secret and so I told my husband which was not the easiest discussion to have at first I mean he married a man and was building a life with a man and now this man is saying I want to be a woman so I give him a lot of credit because he's very supportive and he's very open-minded and he will even go shopping with me when I'm too nervous to go shopping in the women's section so I have to applaud him for that and his family here his mother is 84 and she has brought me a beautiful letter saying that she accepts it and she thinks it's wonderful and I will love me as her own child and then I think about my own family back in the States and I have a cousin who is really supportive and that's pretty much it I have a lot of my extended family that either they don't really want to acknowledge that I'm going through this or that I'm doing this or they just don't talk to me and with my immediate family it's a little bit more complicated because I have four older brothers and I'm not really on speaking terms with my immediate family at the moment so or we just don't talk about it if I do talk to them it's always a little bit awkward but it's also about myself I mean transitioning is it is it does affect other people around you but it's also about yourself and for me I think what's important is for people to understand is you're like my daily life and I think when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror the first thing I ask myself is what kind of woman do I want to be should I do my hair so I not do my hair should I wear makeup so not wear makeup you know what should i what do all of these questions that seem superficial but for me they're really important because I need to see that on the outside what I feel like on the inside it's also a lot of trying to build confidence in this other person that you buried for 20-some years and now you're trying to let them back out and discover who they are fundamentally I'm the same person but there will be some differences and yeah it's learning to love yourself kind of all over again because the person you were before isn't they are and they aren't going to be there which is really kind of a complicated thing to say but then it's also thinking about things in the future I'm started hormone replacement therapy and July of this year and there are changes that happen with your body there's quite a few changes that can happen but it's all kind of based on biology and your family and just how your body recep's to those hormones and then you have to think forward even further okay how much do I want to feminize my appearance I mean I could chop my body completely apart to look like a completely different person or do I want to resemble myself do I want to get breast implants or I want to have my whole face makeover with plastic surgery and then there's things that I do know that after my hormone replacement therapy that I will have gender affirmation surgery and I do know that I will change my name because for me it's important that I make that decision because I'm the one that's deciding to do this to make this transformation that's really for a lot of transgender people it's also very important to do that to pick your own name so sadly it won't be sunny anymore but it's just it's about acceptance and inclusivity and just basic human dignity it's those things that most people take for granted because it's just given to you but for people for transgender people like myself that's it's not always the case people will say horrible things to you people will hate you for not they don't even know who you are simply for the fact that you're different and that's that and also the care and I'm fortunate to live in Europe in Germany and Gent and specifically in Germany where I have access to health care and the government protects those that access that I have to whereas in the United States you a lot of people resort to prostitution in order to pay for hormones or to pay for surgeries or the whole transition process but it still was very difficult for me to find care here and so I still think that that's something that needs to be addressed but what's more important and what's more important for people to understand is that me and other transgender people are just people like everybody else you just want the same things um it's a really personal thing it's different for everybody I can't speak for other transgender people because it's a journey that you have to take by yourself and there are other people there who can support you but it's it could it could be seen as a selfish decision but it's also something that I know for me knowing that it's not going to be easy to do this I'm a much happier and a much better person than I was a year ago before I decided to start this so thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 79,066

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Body, Change, Gender, Health, LGBT, Social Change, Women

Id: M9YICZZeJNs

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018