My name is Krystian, my pronouns are he/him/his, and I’m a trans man. I’m also a research assistant in the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, and some of the things I love are maths, programming, and singing in choirs. This is my first year celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility as an out trans person - something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Passively being visible is not the one solution to trans equality, but it’s important to be visibly transgender in a cisgender normative society. Sometimes being visible is an act in itself.
Perhaps ironically, this Transgender Day of Visibility comes at a time when I feel like I can be invisible again. I’ve come out to most of the important people in my life, I’ve got paperwork and ID that matches my social identity, and strangers unquestioningly see me as male. I don’t (usually) stress about using the men’s toilets. And this is what I want; that people will see me and treat me as male, without my trans history being immediately obvious to them.
