Like many Americans, transgender Chicagoan Zia Varajon despaired when Donald Trump became president again. So she decided to do something about it: write a book to help other trans women on their journey.
When Varajon was “pretty down in the dumps” after the second inauguration, she recalled, someone came to her with questions on how she obtained her gender-affirming procedures.
“I just kind of helped them through that process, and my partner actually said, ‘You could write some sort of manual that might be able to help people on a greater scale,’” Varajon told Windy City Times.
The result is Love, Your Trans Big Sister, which contains advice on finding supportive health care, staying safe, coming out, dating, choosing a name, experimenting with clothes and makeup, and more. Varajon also shares her challenges, such as the awkward mid-transition stage she calls “the booger phase,” and emphasizes that there’s no one right way to transition or to present one’s womanhood.
“I hope that people can take away from the book that you’re not as alone as you may feel,” Varajon said. “We are connected in a way that you can always find a source of support and a companion in your journey.”
Varajon’s gender journey played out over several years. She grew up a small town in Tennessee, with little exposure to LGBTQ+ people until she went to college. She eventually signed on with a modeling agency, first in Atlanta, and then moved to Chicago to join its main office in 2015.
In Chicago, she discovered the joy of drag, performing at Berlin, Roscoe’s and other venues. Meeting people of a variety of identities “opened the floodgates” of her memories, she said. This included playing dress-up in elementary school and telling her classmates her name was Krista, after her babysitter. It all made her realize, “This is who I am,” she noted.
Varajon started receiving hormone replacement therapy in July 2019. Less than a year later, the COVID-19 lockdown began. But she found there was an advantage to the isolation the pandemic brought.
“It gave me a lot of time to figure out how I wanted to present my womanhood and what empowered me,” she said. “There was a lot of self-discovery, a lot of time with myself to delve deeper.”
In her book, Varajon emphasizes that her transition was not seamless. Facial feminization surgery left her with one eyebrow noticeably higher than the other, but it adjusted after a week. She went through “the booger phase,” and she’s been misgendered.
But she found affirmation, often in things that might seem small, like seeing her reflection in a store window and realizing she looked just right and having a stranger call her “Miss” without hesitation.
She also notes that trans people will have multiple coming-out moments—to family members, friends, colleagues, and others. Some of her relatives took her transition well, and some didn’t. Her parents are no longer together, and she is not on speaking terms with her very conservative father and his branch of the family. But she grew up primarily with her mother and sister, and she has had a good experience with them.
“My sister is fully supportive and loving and amazing,” Varajon said. Her mother “was a little skeptical at first, but she came around and actually helped me through a lot of my surgeries.”
She advised families that when a member comes out as trans, “It isn’t a death of someone you love; it is a rebirth of someone you love, and who they are at their heart isn’t changing.” Dealing with family can sometimes be painful, but it’s important to remember that “there are people out there who will love you wholeheartedly, without reserve,” she said.
Varajon has an idea for another book, one centered around dating and trans memory, and she is thinking of writing a one-woman show with music and possibly doing stand-up comedy. She also plans to resume performing in drag, which she hasn’t done for a while.
She admitted she took her partner’s suggestion to write Love, Your Trans Big Sister somewhat reluctantly, but once she started, the ideas came quickly, and the process flowed smoothly.
“I feel like I could have almost written a book for each chapter,” she said.
To get the word out about her book, which came out May 12, she recently recorded an episode of Twin Spin Podcast, hosted by Adrian and Andrew Nuño, and she hopes to have some events around Chicago. “I am overwhelmed by the response that I’ve already had for the book,” she said.
She had some advice for other people feeling oppressed by the anti-trans administration in Washington: “The powers that be are trying to instill fear in us as a community…but there is so much more to life than giving in to that fear. There are good people wherever you are. There are good people wherever you go, and everything you want is on the other side of that fear.”