When I tell people I’m trans, they always give me this look — their eyebrows raise, their mouths hang open, and the corners of their lips twitch as they think of how to respond to me. It’s usually only a second or two before they settle on a high-pitched affirmation of “oh, great!” or “okay, sure!”, but I know exactly what’s running through their heads in that moment: several presumptions about my upbringing, mental state, and anatomy, not to mention the three or four gender-variant media personalities they’ve been exposed to over the past decade.

They’re thinking about sexual reassignment surgeries, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry. They’re thinking about Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono, and wondering which bathroom I use or whether or not I keep a fake penis stuffed in my pants. No matter what story they’ve assigned to me, I know it’s always the wrong one. Due to mainstream narratives regarding transgender people, our experiences with gender are often ignored and replaced with limited, cisnormative ideas of what it means to transition.

People assume that because I’m trans, there must be something wrong with me. They think I must feel “trapped in the wrong body,” or that I’m rejecting who I am in favor of who I want to be: this societally sculpted notion of what a man is and what it takes to be one. They never come close to considering my actual story, which is one of choice and power.

During my senior year of high school, I was asked to be interviewed for a local news segment about transitioning as a teenager. It was aired following Caitlyn Jenner’s first interview after she came out, as a way to showcase the experiences of a local transgender person and provide insight into the trans community separate from Caitlyn’s fame and media presence. I jumped on the opportunity to share my experiences with a large audience, and told the reporter everything I thought she should know.

I said that I wanted to reject the “wrong body” narrative, that I didn’t think trans people should be told our bodies are incorrect. I told her that to me, being trans isn’t about molding yourself to fit into dominant ideas of what a man or a woman is, it’s about re-creating what gender means entirely and evaluating how it shapes our culture at large. I told her that being trans doesn’t have to be scary, sad, or painful; that it can be beautiful and empowering and centered around living life according to your own truths. I rambled to her about all of this for over an hour, so you can probably imagine my devastation when the segment aired two weeks later with the opening line: “Ever since he was a child, Sam has felt like he was born into the wrong body.”

None of my ideas about re-shaping gender or the trans narrative were included, only trivial details about what kinds of toys I played with as a kid and how my parents reacted when I came out to them. It’s obvious the reporter already had a story mapped out before she even interviewed me, one that almost exactly replicated every TLC documentary made by cis people about trans people, and that she just needed a Real Live Trans Kid to be the face of it. That’s when I remembered Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, in which she says that to create a single story, one must “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” I realized that even though trans people have been excluded from popular discourse until very recently, we’ve already had a single story assigned to us: one where we’re desperately trying to alter ourselves from one end of the binary to the other, in order to fix something within us that is innately broken.

In 2015, The National Center for Transgender Equality conducted the largest-ever survey of transgender Americans. Of their 27,715 participants, more than one-third identified themselves as nonbinary, or not fixed to either end of the spectrum. Gender nonconforming people are a huge part of the trans community, yet are often ignored in favor of cisnormative narratives of transitions that can easily (and lazily) be described as “female to male,” or vice versa.

While it was one hell of a diss for that reporter to ignore everything I had to say to her, I can’t really blame her. She’s been taught for her whole life, as have the rest of us, about how gender works in our society and how people should look, act, and function as a result of it. It’s no surprise to me, then, that trans people are almost always talked about in ways which reinforce that dominant idea of gender.

It’s easier for cis people to think about gender as something binary and unyielding, only changing from one identity to the other due to extreme discomfort, rather than what it really is — an entire spectrum, with facets and elements that collide and blur together; a whole world with limitless words and names and feelings that we can question, explore, and construct as we like. For many of us, gender is something vast and incomprehensible. For most cis people, gender is something that’s hardly thought about. It’s time to change that. Through language, media, and education, we can build a transgender rhetoric out of liberation instead of assimilation, one that honors the complexities of our stories and inspires others to do the same.