Freja’s experience with coming out and her entire story are inspiring. That coupled with the work she put in for her training at Periferry and the REVIVE programme, made it certain that she could be independent. But it is a long route from where she started her journey.

Coming Out

Coming Out for Freja was difficult, as is the case with most Trans youth she describes her experience like this, “Well, I don’t know from where to begin actually because the whole thing was very gradual and it of course started with me acknowledging that I am Trans. And then slowly started to speak to my friends about it and that this is who I could be. For the longest time, I was not even aware of the word Transgender. I just knew that I was a girl but there was something wrong with me, that was it.”

There were a few steps involved

Freja describes her experience as a step-by-step process. She says that her “First step was definitely the acknowledgement, and the second step was major depression and being scared of male puberty as I was assigned male at birth.”

Trigger Warning for mentions of depression and suicide

Here Freja talks about a very difficult part of her life. Freja talks about her major depression and also her suicide attempt here. “So I would just lock myself in the room, not speak to anybody, be in my bed, cry all day and then there was just blood spilling from under my door because yeah, I tried to commit suicide and my mom saw that and she wouldn’t leave the room after that.”

Support from her mother

Her mother was her biggest support in this process but even that took a lot of time. How would she begin to explain her experience to anyone? “And I didn’t know what to say and I hid my face in her bosom and then I just told her that this is who I am, I am a girl. So I just told her that and she was shook. After that, a lot of crying and breakdowns took place- it was not a fun thing to watch. And then I started researching some NGOs within my hometown itself and I decide to take my mom to some of these places. And in these NGOs, people would talk to my mom and my mom would go through this dilemma of whether this is the right thing to do, if I should support her or if I should just push her into conversion or something like that. She had a sort of a yes and no, yes and no sort of phase for a very long time and then we were recommended to a government hospital in my hometown itself and we decided to go there, a lot of therapy was involved and then all this happened without any of my other family members knowing. It was just me and my mom doing this on the inside for a couple of years and yeah, that was my coming out I guess.”

Coming out only to mother

Freja did not have to explain herself to the others. She says, “For me, I just came out to my mom and I did not have to tell anybody else that oh yeah, I am Transgender person, I just underwent Testosterone-blockers. And people were confused by me, they were wondering why I was not hitting male puberty I turned 18 and then I started my hormones, again, people were more confused about what wasn’t this person supposed to be a boy. I was just growing up to be a girl. So I never had a coming out, it was just me secretly undergoing HRT and people from my family and everyone seeing that oops sort of a moment and then I just decided to move out and now I am in Bangalore so that’s it, that was my coming out. So the funniest part being right after I started growing up into a woman and people started realising me and my mom decided to just cut off from all of my family relationships, relatives and all of them so yeah.”

Moving Out and Future Aspirations

Freja moved out of her hometown to pursue her higher education and then she found out about Periferry and REVIVE. That served as another turning point in her career. But she has bigger ambitions. She explains, “Well, my personal plans would most definitely be being somewhere where in the field that I graduated in. So somewhere around the lines of media, communication, marketing and advertisements so that’s where I want the future to go but I don’t know how it looks right now. So that’s my plan.”