By Justus Sturtevant, Staff writer
Hailey Leseur sat in Starbucks, staring at her notes, trying to stay focused on her work. The seating area had emptied long ago; now the faint glow of the lights in Mellon Lounge illuminated an empty hallway, save for Hailey.
The hours slipped by, 1 a.m., 2 a.m. then 3 a.m.
Hailey’s mind began to wander away from her work. She thought back over her first few semesters at college.
Suddenly, a realization came to her.
“It just hit me like, ‘Oh shit. I’m [transgender],” she said.
“I went through it in my mind like, ‘Am I sure that this is really what it is? Am I just like making this up? Am I just like exaggerating this?’” Hailey said.
“I kept trying, but when you know that something is true and you’re trying to rationalize every thing against it, but you know that it’s true; it was sort of like that,” she continued.
During finals week in the fall of her sophomore year, Hailey realized she was transgender.
For years leading up to that moment Hailey had felt uncomfortable in her biologically male body. She came out as bisexual during her first year at college, hoping that it would make her more comfortable with herself.
It didn’t.
“It just sort of felt like, well kind of like I was a theater character. I wasn’t who I was presenting myself to be, but that was the role that was assigned and I just had to learn as much as I could,” she said.
“I was just pretending, especially with anything regarding trying to be masculine,” Hailey added.
Being a man did not come naturally to Hailey. During her middle school and high school years she imitated the men around her to fit in.
“I literally just took cues off everyone else around me and did not follow any instinct at all, because I had none,” she said.
In high school Hailey played soccer and baseball and ran track. To those around her, it appeared that Hailey enjoyed sports, but she has realized it was an act.
“I definitely didn’t really like sports that much,” she said. “But I kind of felt like I had to, because that’s what I was supposed to do.”
In the time since coming out as transgender, Hailey has worked through the difficult process of evaluating which traits and interests are actually true to her and which ones were an act.
“After you act a certain way for so long, it is hard to figure out what of that is a part of you and what isn’t,” said sophomore Angelina Poole, a close friend of Hailey’s and a member of the Susquehanna Gender and Sexuality Alliance with her.
“Seeing her untangled the more tight knots of ‘Who am I? What do I like?’ was interesting,” Poole said.
When Hailey came out as bisexual during her first year at college, she found a community of support. There were a number of other students who were coming out as bisexual, gay or lesbian, which Hailey said took some of the pressure off her.
“It didn’t really affect anything because if someone looked at me it’s sort of one of those things where it’s hard for someone to say ‘oh you look bisexual,’” she said. “You can just kind of hide that. If someone wanted to talk to me about it, I was super up front and willing to talk about it, but it’s not something that you necessarily have to think about all the time.”
That was not the case when Hailey came out as transgender. She described that process as much more “serious.”
She started coming out to
her friends and family over winter break and during the spring semester of her sophomore year. Following this, Hailey began to wear more feminine clothing. In the spring of her sophomore year she began to paint her nails and apply more makeup.
“I was terrified of what people in my fraternity would think and what people on campus would think,” she said. “I thought people would want to beat me up and kill me.”
In some cases the reaction of people on campus has been negative, as Hailey anticipated. She said that people have glared at her and given her weird looks.
“There have been times on campus when people have called me it or that thing,” she said.
Poole said, for the most part, people on campus have been fairly accepting of Hailey and other transgender students on campus. Many are hesitant around Hailey though, which is something Poole says can be remedied by normalizing the act of asking people what their pronouns are.
“If you normalize that you also normalize the idea that you can’t tell someone’s gender just by looking at them,” Poole said.
When Hailey came out as bisexual to her parents she said they were hesitant but ultimately they were okay with her announcement. When Hailey told her parents that she was transgender, they were not as supportive.
“When I came out as trans to them things were really really bad for a while,” she said.
After coming out to her parents, Hailey did not go home during breaks, instead deciding to stay with friends when the campus was closed to students.
“They’ve gotten a lot better with it,” she said. “They still struggle sometimes with misgendering stuff, with pronouns and with deadnaming me, but they go to PFLAG, which is an organization for parents of LGBT kids, which is kind of cool.”
While she was working in Boston in 2015, Hailey began the process of hormone treatment.
Before a transgender person can begin the treatment, they must meet with a counselor, therapist or psychologist for a span of at least three months.
They can then be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which al- lows them to begin the hormone treatment process.
For Hailey, the hormone treatment process required her to take eight-hour trips from Boston to Philadelphia on what she described as a “dirty old Megabus.”
For Hailey, sexual reassignment surgery is appealing.
“It’s something I definitely want to do,” she said.
The surgery will have to wait though; Hailey’s insurance does not cover the $25,000 procedure.
It is also one of the most invasive surgeries an individual can go through, according to information on the University of California Santa Cruz website.
Hailey added that individuals who have the surgery can remain in the hospital for one to two weeks afterward, and generally require care for several months.
Despite the cost and difficulties of the surgery, it is still some- thing that Hailey wants to proceed with.
For now though, it’s enough for Hailey to be able to be herself outwardly.
“I’m just a lot happier with myself, especially since starting hormones,” she said.
“I just feel a lot less bothered by my anxiety, a lot more emotionally in tune with myself, a lot more like an actual person, like how I act and what I do is more representative of who I am and not just me pretending to be something because that’s what everyone else wants me to be or because that’s what I’m expected to be.”
