Tisya Cooke is a Jewish transgender woman and spoke about her experiences coming out and about how she personally defines gender affirmation.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Tisya Cooke: I think, for me, I knew very early on — when I was probably still in elementary school — that I was interested in men and women. I found everyone kind of attractive, but I also felt far more pulled to this feeling that I could be feminine and that I could express my femininity.
I have five sisters — or, I apologize — because a couple of my siblings have come out as non-binary, it kind of throws the math off a little bit, but pretty evenly split between feminine and masculine in the family.
And it was this nice feeling of any time that my mom would be like, “Oh, we're going to go out for a girls day to the mall,” my brain said that was me, and that was from a very young age, and I didn't really get questioned on it.
And so, by the time that I did come out to my parents, my mom was just like, “Oh, yeah, I know,” and even when I came out to my family as trans, the conversation wasn't, “Oh, are you trans? What's going on?” I was sitting down having a cup of coffee on my mom's porch, and she comes outside and she asks me my pronouns.
Which to me, I wasn't ready to have that conversation. I wasn't really mentally prepared to be in that space, but it felt right to be able to address it with her.
And I think that even though my mom and I don't live quite as close as we used to be, my mom has definitely been my anchor throughout my life — both in religion and in my queer life.
I am not on hormones. I've not gone under any sort of surgery, and that's largely due to personal medical issues. My family has Ehlers-Danlos, and I have very mild symptoms, but if I'm taking hormones, then it causes problems for my joints, for my connective tissues.
So, I did do hormones for a very brief amount of time, and just felt like shit all the time, and it wasn't the fault of the hormones, but just my bad luck with genetics.
And so, after getting off of hormones and trying to get out of that slump, that depression of “How do I affirm myself?” It was more so just about — I feel confident wearing a dress whenever I want. I feel confident throwing lipstick on whenever I want. I feel loved by my friends, and I feel loved by my community.
Really, for me, it's just about how I'm personally feeling. I've never felt a pressure to, necessarily, perform my queerness for anyone, certainly not to prove my queerness to anyone.
So, I think taking that pressure off of myself has allowed me to feel, again, that queer joy just within my daily life — regardless of how I visually look on the outside.
![David Hall sits on his couch on Monday, April 7, 2025, at his home in Columbia. “Even in Missouri there's certain areas that you still don't see that many queens of color. And especially in the bigger cities, how many of them do you see on cast in bigger bars that have, like, either a rotating cast or a main cast throughout weekends? I will give kudos to Kansas City because they've worked really hard on having that diversity within all of their cast, but still. Like, Columbia, one joke was like, ‘Kaycee can't work all the time.’ … ‘Kaycee can't perform in every show, so you can't really ding us on diversity.’ But I'm like, I still want to bring that representation,” Hall said. “Since [Nclusion Plus], one of the places I perform with, we go to smaller areas and perform. And I'm like, just to have one person look at me and say, ‘Oh yeah, I look like them. I can do that,’ makes me really happy. And it's like, ‘OK, what I'm doing, I'm on the right track for that.’”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/e0b602f/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1750x1158+0+0/resize/260x172!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F7d%2F9e%2Fe25c27e04e9a9b2be4ca9cb307d6%2F20250407-bas-queer-joy-david-hall-0291.jpg)
