I grew up in a small town in rural Alberta, where I learned early that something about me wasn’t acceptable.

When I was six, kids started calling me “Gay Tylor.”
Not because they understood anything about gender or sexuality.
They were responding to something they could see but didn’t have words for.

Femininity. Difference. Me.

The “conversion therapy” I experienced didn’t look the way people imagine.
It wasn’t a program. It was a pattern.

Being sent to a priest.
A therapist’s office with a crucifix on the wall.
Waking up to my family praying the “gay” out of me.

Over and over again.

I moved out at fourteen and spent most of my life figuring things out on my own.

That kind of environment stays with you.
Even after I came out as trans at thirty-one, I still found myself in situations that felt familiar.

Sex work.
Drugs.
Moments where I thought I was safe, until I wasn’t.

My mom was a sex worker too, and after she died recently, I found myself working on a semi-biographical film called Solitude Divine.
What I thought was just a project ended up pulling a lot of this to the surface.
The way femininity was treated in my family. Wanted, controlled, silenced. It was difficult to finally see, but important for me to understand.

The difference now is that I finally find myself in a world where I am being heard.

I’m a singer, and a gender-affirming voice coach for the trans & queer community.
Yet, finding my own voice has been quite the process.

I still notice it in the small moments: catching myself filtering, adjusting, holding my body when I’m being “perceived”.

It still shows up, but now I have a name for it.

I was raised to believe that living as myself would cost me everything.

In some ways, it did.
But I don’t think I lost anything that was ever really meant for me.