The Peace Treaty

People often ask me if I am angry. They read my story, the beatings, the “Brogue,” the insults, the systemic erasure, and they expect to find a core of bitterness.

But I am not angry.

I look back at the Colonel, and I realize a complicated truth that only survivors of abuse can fully understand: It is possible to love the person who broke you. I still love my dad. I hate what he did, I hate the fear he installed in me, but I forgive him. I have let go of the need for his validation, and in doing so, I have let go of the rage.

I look back at the friends who vanished. I have learned that friendship is often seasonal. People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. To those who left when the road got hard: I forgive you. To those who stayed: I cherish you.

And I must look in the mirror, too. I am not a saint. I am not the perfect victim. I have made mistakes. I have been selfish. I have hurt people.

If you are reading this book and I have ever wronged you, I want to say, without caveats and without excuses, that I am sorry.

I own the pain I caused. I cannot undo the times I lashed out, or the times I was too wrapped up in my own survival to see yours. I am not perfect, and I carry the weight of those errors with me. I ask for your forgiveness, not because I earned it, but because I am finally striving to be the person I should have been all along.

The Invisible Scars

Sometimes, I stand in front of the mirror at home in Massachusetts, and I simply cannot believe I am still here. I am forty-six years old. By all statistical models of trans life expectancy and suicide rates, I should be dead.

If you could put on a pair of special glasses, lenses that reveal the truth of the soul, and look at a transgender person, you wouldn’t see “men in dresses” or “political debates.”

You would see scars.

You would see a body covered in the slash marks of words, the burns of rejection, and the deep, jagged wounds of self-hatred. Every trans person over the age of forty is a veteran. We have walked through hell. We have survived the “Medical Tribunal,” the street harassment, the job losses, and the silent nights where the pills on the desk looked like candy.

We are not monsters. We are the walking wounded who refused to fall.

The Quiet Truth

There is one final thing I need to say, because the world often gets it wrong.

Every transgender person is different. There is no single “trans narrative.” We are as unique as our fingerprints.

For a long time, I thought being a woman meant high heels, wigs, and dresses. I thought it was a performance I had to maintain to be valid. But here, in the quiet of my life north of Boston, I have learned the truth.

I don’t wear high heels anymore. I rarely wear dresses, except sometimes around the house for my wife. Most days, I am in jeans and a t-shirt. And yet, I have never been more sure of who I am.

My peace does not come from the clothes I wear. My peace comes from the chemistry in my blood. The moment I got the right hormones, the moment the estrogen settled into my system, the war ended. The “noise” stopped. I am happy not because of how I look, but because of how I feel.

Who I present is not who I am.

And this brings me to the hardest truth of all.

People think that transgender people are naturally prone to depression and anxiety. They think our sadness is a symptom of our identity.

They are wrong.

The depression doesn’t come from being trans. It comes from not being seen. It comes from not being accepted. It comes from living in a world that debates your right to exist.

Once you get the treatment you need, once you start to live your life the way you were meant to, the internal storm clears. But then you walk out the door into the world of 2025, and the anxiety returns, not because you are broken, but because the world is broken.

If we lived in a world where every human being was seen and valued simply for breathing, the “transgender mental health crisis” would vanish. We aren’t sick; we are just tired of fighting for a seat at the table.

The Shield

This is why we scream.

People ask why the trans community is so loud, so “aggressive” in our advocacy. They ask why we fight so hard for the kids.

We fight because we know what the silence does.

We fight because today, the “Architecture of Control” has gone digital. In my childhood, the bullies were in the schoolyard. Today, the bullies are in the legislature and on social media, beaming hatred directly into the pockets of vulnerable children 24 hours a day.

In the United States, I watch with horror as laws are passed to outlaw our existence, to ban the healthcare that saved my life, to strip books from libraries. I see politicians talking about us as if we are a virus, a contagion, a “sickness” to be purged.

They call us “groomers.” They call us “predators.”

They don’t see that we are the only ones trying to protect the children. We are trying to build a shield out of our own scar tissue. We are shouting, “Don’t go down that road! Don’t let them break you like they broke us!”

The Un-Erasable

To the world that debates our existence, I have one final message:

We are human beings. We have always been here. We were here in the ancient world, we were here in the quiet corners of history, and we are here now.

You can ban the books. You can close the clinics. You can pass the laws. But you will never be able to erase us. You cannot legislate away the human soul.

I am Juanita Catherine van Zyl.

I was the boy in the mask. I was the soldier in the brown uniform. I was the project manager in the suit. I was the stray dog in the alley. I was the cancer patient on the table.

And now, I am just me.

I am home.