how many years can a student take?

This essay contains brief discussion of suicide. Reader discretion is advised.
When I started fighting for my rights, I was only a kid.
My entire life changed after I came out at ten.
Since then, public schools that I once thrived in became the source of my pain.
From sixth grade until I dropped out in tenth, the way I was treated
by many adults and students around me slowly degraded my passions for a future.
Only when I found a learning environment that finally referred to me by the correct name
and did not mistreat me did I finally graduate from high school
and make my way into higher education.
It is unacceptable that I consider what I went through in my county
to be better than what is going on in over half of the United States.
I cannot speak on the experience of my community overseas,
but I know in my heart that our human rights are degraded.
I was lucky enough that I could access life-saving
hormone replacement therapy that made life finally feel right.
Many students preparing for university now
do not get to be called their preferred name, get outed, abused,
and bullied by the world.
How does that possibly inspire hope?
This is one of those messages that I'm unsure
will ever be heard by someone that
doesn't understand why youth should transition.
I've spoken plenty of times to people and explained my point of view.
I wish that those who think it is wrong could understand
what it's like to be a transgender kid in school.
So many of us don't make it, or don't even know until they're adults.
I want them to know about the other side of the story.
When you teach a child to suppress their feelings, they go on
to become an adult who does the same.
This is true regardless of if that child feels gender dysphoria or not.
It makes for a dysfunctional adulthood.
If you're lucky, you get to discover yourself when you're an adult.
It feels like a reasonable solution
to make a child wait until they're an adult
or out of your house to begin exploring who they are,
until it doesn't work.
A few years after I came out, I met a woman who didn't transition
until after she tried to kill herself.
Those feelings don't go away, even when you suppress them.
Her experience taught me that, and that there's hope.
Even at my lowest, I thought of her, and how
she got to carve her life out with her bare hands.
Transgender people deserve to exist, just as every other human being does.
We deserve to feel welcome in the world,
regardless of how any one person feels.
Ideally, we would be. I wish every person felt the same.
Right now, I think the smartest thing for us to do is to learn.
What I'm doing now is taking advantage of my ability to go to college.
As hard as it is, I think finding anything to help us navigate the world is of value.
I'm not going to give up on my dreams
because someone else says I shouldn't be who I already am.
This poem is written in relation to the TransgenderFirst organization.
All beliefs are my own and
do not reflect upon the organization.
I encourage you to share this.
There is hope for our liberated future and it starts today.
#TransgenderFirst
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i am trans first