There’s so much out there: forums and blogs and Facebook groups for people with all different types of identities where you can have conversations that maybe you can’t have with your friends or maybe you can find information that you can’t get from your community locally. So the internet has been a pretty essential part of finding community and resources … I think the internet has brought a lot of us closer together, and in the transgender community, the internet is such a life-saving force. If you think about 1 in 30,000 people being trans, we’re pretty few and far between. It’s kind of giving back to my younger self.Īs a YouTuber and generally as a millennial, it seems the internet has been a big influence on your life and your transition. I don’t know where I would have ended up. But I just found it was very necessary for me to be open because if everyone were to do that, and some people do and that’s totally fine, but if everyone were “stealth,” I don’t know that I would have met another transgender person. I realized I had the option of keeping it all to myself, transitioning to the man that I am now.

I don’t know what I would have done had I not met another transgender person who was open about it. The life that word gave to me, and realizing that I wasn’t alone, meant so much to me. When I first started making YouTube videos in 2009, it was because it had taken me 15 years to meet somebody who was transgender, to hear that word. I’ve gone back and forth with how open I’ve been, based on how comfortable I am both with myself and with this world. It might be simpler for you to go through your transition without telling your story to the whole world through YouTube and now your book. He’ll talk about Before I Had the Words at the Brookline Booksmith on Sept 19 at 7 pm.īeforehand, he sat down with DigBoston to talk petting cats and coming out as a meat eater. The memoir drops readers into Sky’s mind from being a sports-loving tomboy to sneaking away to rainy Boston pride parades to finding his community online.

Now, he’s opening up in a new way: with his memoir Before I Had the Words released Sept 5. Through the intimate ups and downs of being a trans youth, he’s grown a community of over 115,000 followers who comment and like as he explores his path to understanding his gender identity.

Skylar, or Sky, has been making YouTube videos documenting his transition from female to male since 2009. This is the YouTube channel of Skylar Kergil : musician, artist, local Boston resident, goer-of-hip-coffee-shops, and transgender activist.

Before I Had the Words by Skylar Kergil