Queer.

That was what he had been writing on the various forms that kept pestering him throughout his life. It was never his choice to feel the way he always felt about his body. The feeling of being trapped in a room with no windows always haunted him, he always tried running but it felt like he was running in circles in a room with no corners, his search for shadows to comfort his lonely soul yielded no results because the surroundings were always so brightly lit, leaving no room even for a shadow to offer him solace.

The people too were no different, they would stare at him, mock at him and look at him as if he was some kind of a strange being, not belonging to this world of theirs. His body suffocated him, his family misunderstood him and his friends shunned him. If it wasn’t for the new friends he had made, he would not even have been alive today. They reached out to him at the moment he was feeling his lowest and accepted him into their fold, zero questions asked. He finally began to understand what having a home and family felt like.

There still was a long long way to go, it would be years before they would be accepted into the society. But there was a difference now, he would no more have to use the word queer and be classified as an outcast, they now had a name – transgender.

photo credit: celesteh via photopin cc