When I was born early on a January morning in 1992, my parents got a life-changing surprise: I had a bilateral cleft lip and palate. Twenty-five years later on a warm September evening in 2017, they received another: I am transgender. While I was there for both surprises, I do not remember my parents’ reaction to me having been born with a gap in my lip and no soft palate. I am sure there was shock, fear, and a little anger and sadness. I was not going to have the normal life that they had planned for me. When I came out to my parents, there was shock, anger, fear, and sadness, and I definitely would not have the normal life they had in mind for me.

I am very honest about the fact I felt different from other boys and children growing up. After all, I was the only one who went to the doctor and had routine surgeries, which my friends still talk about to this day. I never got people’s fascination and nervousness about having surgery, or why they thought it was so brave of me. It was my life; I do not remember not visiting Dr. Stahl. My cleft lip and palate has always been a part of me, and I still see the scar and subtle deformity despite nobody else seeing it. It is a part of who I am, for better or worse.

I realized I was trans when I was about twelve-years-old. I will never forget the fateful night. To be honest, I never had much trouble accepting that about myself. If anything, it made complete sense in my mind. It was as if I had the answer to a lifelong question. Since that night, it has always been a part of my life in one way or another, from secretly taking “Are you a boy or a girl?” quizzes in middle school to when I started HRT in my mid-twenties. My feminine brain has always been there, even though I may not have always been aware of it. I remember as a child playing with my hot wheels more like how a girl plays with dolls, and always played house with whatever I could get away with. The only real difference is that I always knew about my cleft.

I see both my cleft lip and palate in the same way that I understand how I ended up being transgender. While the cause of both is still unknown (cleft lip/palate is widely understood to have a large genetic factor). My personal theory is that transgender individuals are born with brains of the sex of which we identify. In other words, I understand myself as being born with the body of a male but the brain of a female. I have two birth defects. That does not make it a bad thing, for me, a birth defect is a part of my own life. There is nothing taboo or negative about it for me, because of my cleft. However, for some transgender people, they may not necessarily agree with that and that is valid. There is no one way to understand our transgender identities, we all relate to ourselves in different ways.

For me, it is what allows me to connect and adjust to the idea that I am not normal because I am transgender. Most people are not transgender, and most people do not have a cleft lip and palate. It helps me understand and manage my dysphoria. This is something I was born with that I cannot control or change about myself, but I can fix it. That is how I see my transition; I am fixing and correcting the birth defect that causes my dysphoria. I do not know what I would do if I was given a pill or some other medical treatment that could alleviate my dysphoria and essentially make me a cisgender man. A large part of me does not think I would choose to do that because I am a woman. If I am honest with myself and how I understand myself, I don’t see the mistake in my brain being feminized, but in me getting a Y chromosome and my body being born male. When I die, if there is sex in Heaven, I will be female much like I will not have the scar or slight lip deformity. I do not know if God gave me my cleft and transgender identity. However, I do not believe in getting involved in unanswerable existential questions such as that. What I do know is that it does not matter because I can use both.