Transouthern Youth: Meet Alex Yoon

Editor’s note: This is an installment of Transouthern Youth, a Spectrum South original series spotlighting transgender youth across the South.

By Megan Smith

20-year-old Alex Yoon was shocked the first time they saw an elderly gay couple kiss in San Antonio, Texas. But their reaction didn’t stem from homophobia. Rather, this was the first time Yoon realized that “queer and trans people can grow up and get old. They’re out there existing and thriving. Queer and trans people can become successful adults.”

For Yoon, who was born and raised in a very rural, conservative, and Christian town in Northwest Ohio, witnessing this simple, loving gesture between two men was revolutionary. “Living in a rural area, queer people were pretty much non-existent,” Yoon, who identifies as queer and non-binary, explains. “Our community was very small—everyone knew everyone. There were people who were gay, but it was treated more like something everyone knew but refused to talk about. Everyone who was queer either got out of town as soon as they turned 18 and you never heard from them again, or they turned into the local burnout and their queerness was just an addition to their failures.”

The evangelical church—and its values—also dominated the culture of Yoon’s hometown. As someone who has “always had a non-conventional sense of gender,” they struggled to fit in to the strict gender roles prescribed by the church, as well as with their peers around them. To make it through high school, Yoon says they adopted a tough and unapologetic demeanor. They also found escape in movies, TV, and video games. “I was a really big fan of the movie Mulan growing up because that was pretty much the only Asian representation on TV besides Brenda Song from The Suite Life and Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior. It was slim pickings,” Yoon laughs. “But I was always drawn to stories about ‘cross-dressing’ and stories of women disguising themselves as men to get into the army. I always had an interest in those stories because I saw myself [in them]. My own dynamic is masculine, but I didn’t feel like a man.”

“Once I started getting older—and definitely once I started having more Internet access—I started to seek out sites like Tumblr and DeviantArt that had thriving queer communities,” Yoon adds. Seeing this type of representation empowered them to slowly begin to “test the waters” and come out as queer to a few friends at school. While Yoon was met with acceptance from the few people they could trust, there was no way to ignore the extreme intolerance that existed outside of their small circle.

It wasn’t until Yoon and their family moved to San Antonio in 2016—and later to their current city of Houston—that they truly found the community support they needed to safely explore and come into their identity. “When I moved into a city, the burden of not standing out too much was completely cast off,” they say. “There was a lot more freedom of what you could do. I never had to worry too much about looking ‘too gay,’ or not conforming. Queer people were everywhere. No one really cared too much about who you were.”

They were particularly inspired by the folks at San Antonio’s Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, a grassroots, social-justice-minded community arts and cultural organization. “My dad was adopted,” Yoon says. “So I’m visibly a person of color, but I don’t necessarily have any specific learned culture, except for being treated differently for being a person of color. Seeing the people [at the Esperanza Center] who were proud of their heritage, proud of being immigrants, proud of all aspects of their identities, really resonated with me in a way I’d never experienced before.”

But as city life increasingly bolstered Yoon’s comfort in their queerness, something was still missing, they say. “I knew I didn’t have much interest in men, but I wasn’t a lesbian,” Yoon says. “I didn’t see how I fit in queer relationships within binary terms of gender.”

At the time, a new term was emerging in the online sphere: “non-binary.” Yoon didn’t immediately connect with this label, however. “When the term ‘non-binary’ first started being thrown around on a public scale, a lot of people were very negative about it,” Yoon says. “It took me awhile to unpack both my internalized feelings of resistance toward being queer in general and also the binary ways in which we see ourselves. Because, through a binary lens, I couldn’t see where I fit anywhere. It took a lot of exploring.”

Ultimately, it was the non-binary artists and content creators that Yoon followed online that helped them to better understand their identity. These individuals prioritized their creative identities first and foremost, Yoon explains. “They just happened to also be non-binary,” they say. “Seeing people who are established within the community just out there, living their authentic lives does weigh more than giving a 2-D definition of what non-binary is, or theoretically how non-binary people should look, act, and feel.”

Yoon has now openly identified as non-binary for the past seven months, an announcement they first made through a Facebook post. They’ve also been honing their own creativity and graphic design skills as a content creator for the Transgender Education Network of Texas and as the social media intern for the Change Project. “Access to good graphic design can really make or break small businesses,” Yoon emphasizes. “Smaller organizations and nonprofits deserve the recognition and traction that comes with having an effective and engaging social media presence. Unfortunately, to have that, you usually need an employee or intern dedicated to comms, and very few organizations can afford to pay a ‘non-essential’ employee. There needs to be more access.” As their career progresses, Yoon hopes to be hired as a full-time, in-house content creator, while still having time to freelance for nonprofits that can’t afford to have professionally designed resources like programs, fliers, and other assets. 

Now, Yoon stands firmly in their multitude of identities: creative, gamer, queer, eccentric, activist, non-binary, up-and-coming graphic designer, and so many more. “At the end of the day, the only person you have to live with is yourself,” Yoon says. “A lot of my life, I held myself back just because I didn’t want to be that person, shoving my identity down everyone’s throat. That gets really tiring and it weighs on you a lot. Once you move beyond that, and see yourself as a dynamic, multifaceted person who’s constantly growing and changing, you can experience life in a much more positive way.”

Keep up with Alex Yoon on Instagram.