![]() ![]() My friends who are girls, I see how comfortable they are wearing whatever they want. My friends have been dating, having flings, stuff like that. You get to witness your friends do all these things that you wish you could do, but you just can’t, because it’s just not the same. I’ve said this to my therapist, but a frustration of mine is that I feel like I’ve had to mature a lot faster, because I’ve had to go through things that are heartbreaking. I made it harder than it needed to be just because I didn’t want the attention, but it was a good experience, and I’m lucky to have the family that I do, because they’re all supportive.Įvan with one of her school friends sitting in front of lockers. But she was actually perfectly fine with everything.Ĭoming out was a big weight off my shoulders. Like, when I say religious, I’m talking - when we were in quarantine, she’d only watch Mass all day long. The one relative I was kind of worried about was my great-grandmother, because she is 92 and very religious. I have an uncle in my family who is gay, and my grandma’s friend who lives with her is also gay. My family is very Hispanic and religious, but they’re still pretty supportive of me. My parents are divorced, and I mainly live with my mom and visit my dad. But eventually I told my mom, and I had my mom tell my family, and my stepmom told my dad. ![]() I don’t like answering questions, and a lot of people tend to ask a lot of questions. ![]() I’m really introverted, so the thought of attention being on me, I just didn’t like that. The following interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity. ![]() They’re not going to let anyone take that away from them, and they know people are going to try.” “These kids have found joy in the smallest of cracks, they have broken them open and found the light underneath,” Monforte says. Over months spent following Natasha and Evan, Monforte was especially drawn to the teenagers’ hard-earned wisdom and their determination to create their own happiness. “The news can be extremely reductionist, and especially for people who do not know anyone who is trans, that will become their only reference point for what trans life is like,” Monforte says. For this project, they focused on two trans girls living in L.A.: 15-year-old Evan and 17-year-old Natasha, both of whom are being identified by first names only to protect their privacy.Īt a time when transgender youths have been targeted by state legislatures across the country, when headlines often highlight the effects of laws that would restrict trans kids from accessing medical care or playing sports or using certain bathrooms, the rest of their lives - the nuanced entirety of their childhoods - can be overshadowed, Monforte says. Monforte, who uses they/them pronouns, has spent more than two years photographing queer youth in Los Angeles. It looks like every other teenage experience, which is just living life, making friends who support you, running into difficulties with your parents, trying to find an outfit that makes you feel good in your body, getting your homework done on time.” “In regular, everyday life, it is not a crazy journey that looks like a movie or a fairy tale or a dystopian story. But I’m interested in the mundanity of growing up,” Monforte says. “When you hear the words ‘coming of age,’ I think people immediately think of films and TV, these romanticized narratives. When Emily Monforte set out to chronicle the lives of transgender teens in Los Angeles, the California-based photographer wanted to tell a universal story of self-discovery, to capture the turbulence and ordinariness of becoming a young adult. ![]()
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