Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Brawen Zakariasen

Branwen Zakariasen identifies as a monogamous queer trans woman and was assigned male at birth. She has one older sister. She took her wife’s last name to fully express how meaningful her wife and her wife’s family’s acceptance of her every stage along the way. She lived in Metairie, Louisiana at a young age and in England and New York. She spent her formative years in central Texas. She had an abusive upbringing, including sexual, emotional, and physical abuse. She also explains there was emotional incest where she was “saddled with the emotional obligations of a primary relationship” with her mother. She learned to hide well and walk within very narrow lines otherwise face swift and brutal punishment from her parents. She was often gendered as a girl by strangers. Her mother would get frustrated and correct them, telling them Zakariasen was a boy. She experienced bullying in school in Texas since she was smart. Her parents divorced, and she was free of her father’s authority and free to be whoever she wanted to be. She is no longer in contact with either of her parents now. She came out as bi in high school in the 1980s since she was looking for a way to say she wasn’t a man but didn’t have to vocabulary to articulate it further than that. She soon started identifying as queer as soon as she read William S. Burroughs since it was more of an umbrella term. Zakariasen says that as she began to resolve her issues with men, she found more men attractive and felt more comfortable around some men, more willing to give them a chance to get emotionally close. After beginning anti-depressants, she wasn’t struggling just to cope and realized she could wear dresses in public and be equipped to deal with expressing her feminine side in 2015. She then began using the label non-binary trans to describe herself. She soon called the Center for Sexual Health at the University of Minnesota to begin hormones, and two rough, emotional days later she realized she was a trans woman, not non-binary. Zakariasen is married to an accepting cis woman and identifies with being pansexual. She is currently looking into gender confirmation surgery and is starting laser hair removal. She is also thinking of top surgery down the road. She’s done full drag several times, usually for Halloween or for conventions. She worked in the video game industry as a writer and designer. She now working in tech support. Content Warning: This item contains potentially sensitive material related to child abuse.