Yuvaan’s Journey: Embracing Aromantic Asexuality and Trans identity in a World Obsessed with Love and Sex

Name: Yuvaan (One of founding members of ANOAQA)
Age: 33
Country: India

The first time Yuvaan heard the word girl, he felt it like a sliver of glass caught under his skin.

At four, when his mother pulled him into an emerald dress for Pooza, he cried until he hiccupped. “What’s wrong?” she had asked, the soft lilt of her voice full of confusion, hurt. Yuvaan didn’t have an answer then. He just wanted the dress off—to peel away the falseness that clung to him like a wet sheet.

By thirteen, he had a name for it. Wrongness.

Boys in his class grew taller, shoulders widening, voices deepening. Yuvaan stayed trapped in his soft, unfamiliar body, the wrongness calcifying in his bones. “She” this, “her” that. It was like being dragged underwater while the world assumed he could breathe.

But no one saw the drowning.

When Yuvaan turned eighteen, he stood in front of the mirror for what felt like hours. With trembling hands, he pressed his fingers into his skin, his voice barely a whisper: This is not me.

The words lingered, fragile but certain. For the first time, he let himself imagine what it might feel like to be at peace in his own body—to see himself reflected back honestly, to exist as he was meant to. Yuvaan.

The decision to transition wasn’t a question of bravery. Bravery suggested he had a choice. But he didn’t. To not transition was to suffocate.

So he stepped into the storm with hope in his chest and terror at his heels.

The storm, of course, wasn’t gentle.

Yuvaan’s physician prescribed him testosterone—a vial of salvation, he thought, or so it seemed. His voice cracked and deepened. His jaw sharpened. The softness on his face eroded to reveal someone closer to who he was meant to be.

But then came the itch.

It started in the softest places—his forearms, the nape of his neck. Then his back. His thighs. A gnawing, relentless crawling sensation beneath the surface of his skin, as though his body was punishing him for daring to reclaim it.

The doctor furrowed his brows. Perhaps your T-levels are too high, he said, adjusting the dosage as though Yuvaan were nothing more than a malfunctioning circuit board.

Except the damage was done.

The itch grew louder, more violent, like ants marching through his veins. And with it came the unexpected side effect—a libido that arrived like an unwelcome guest in his body.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” a friend teased, with a wink and a nudge. To feel normal?

Normal.

The word stung. As if his worth as a trans man could only be measured by his ability to conform to cisnormative expectations. As if his transition existed solely to fit into neat little boxes: man, straight, sexual.

But Yuvaan didn’t want it—the wanting. It disgusted him, made his skin prickle with shame. His doctor had fixed one discomfort, only to hand him another.

Yuvaan found himself spiraling into himself, into silence. The rumors spread fast—about the surgery, about his failure to live up to it. What kind of man went through so much just to refuse intimacy?

The whispers were cruel, but Yuvaan’s resolve was sharper.

By twenty-three, Yuvaan had become a story people whispered about—a cautionary tale for the ignorant. A failure, they said. Why bother transitioning if you were going to live alone, untouched? If you were going to deny yourself the ‘natural’ urges of manhood?

But Yuvaan refused to carry the weight of their expectations.

“People don’t understand,” he said once, at a small gathering of activists. “I transitioned for me—for relief from dysphoria. Not for romance. Not for anyone else’s idea of what manhood should look like.”

He stood tall that day, his broad shoulders back, his voice steady in its baritone strength. There was no itch now, no wanting—only the clarity of being.

He was Yuvaan—aromantic, asexual, trans, whole.

And it was enough.

Years later, Yuvaan became a beacon. A speaker. An activist. A myth-buster.

“Not every trans story has the same ending,” he would say to rooms filled with curious eyes and hesitant ears. “We don’t all transition for love. Some of us transition for freedom—for the right to exist as we are.”

In his words, others found their reflection.

Young boys with wrongness in their bones. Girls who didn’t want love. People who felt broken for not wanting what the world insisted they should.

Yuvaan gathered their stories and handed them hope. He reminded them that they were enough, even if they never fit into the boxes carved out for them.

And though he stood alone, he was never lonely.

On quiet nights, when the world felt softer, Yuvaan would sit on his balcony, watching the stars scattered across the dark like distant possibilities.

The itch was gone. The wrongness was silent.

He was Yuvaan.

And he was free.