Meet Your Trans Neighbor with Max Hernandez

In this Know Your Neighbor episode of the Do You Feel Heard podcast, host Ian talks with Max Hernandez, an artist and massage therapist from the Midwest who is a trans man. The segment exists to challenge the assumptions we make about whole groups of people based on very little information, and Ian is upfront that he's doing it for himself as well: he doesn't have many close conversations with trans people and knows his own mind makes assumptions without his noticing.

Max is careful to say that he speaks for one experience out of many. As he puts it, there's "a cacophony" of trans people, and each shows up differently.

Curiosity instead of a wide net

One of Max's pet peeves is when people cast a wide net over a group and say, "this is how everyone is." Knowing the depth of your own life, he says, means accepting that everyone you meet has the same depth you can't see without a real conversation. Ian agrees and adds a hunch of his own: people who don't leave room for the depth of others may not have explored much of their own. Both men also say that you can only love others as much as you're able to love yourself.

Growing up, faith and an existential crisis

Max grew up as the eldest of six in a chaotic household without a safe space to talk about what he was going through, and he turned to journals, music and writing. Questions about gender identity began in his teens, within a Baptist church community, and they shook his spiritual life. What he came to realize is that knowing yourself deeply is a spiritual act: "to know myself deeply is to know God deeply." He describes the inner work as something that sometimes "feels like you're on fire," with worldviews collapsing and the ego in flames, and he says it taught him to have grace with himself and with others.

When he first saw trans people sharing their transitions online as a teenager, what stood out to him was a sense of hope. He saw people actively pursuing who they were, and for the first time he could picture a future. He has now been on hormones for just over nine years and describes the journey as harrowing at times but one he accepted "reluctantly but very willingly."

Max is also clear that transition wasn't a cure-all. He had half-believed it would be the answer to his suffering, and while it made his body a place he could connect with more intuitively, he still had to do the inner work. He says that's not a reason to avoid transitioning, just to understand that no single fix replaces the work. Ian echoes the point: whatever you think will fix everything, whether money or anything else, the answer is ultimately within you.

What safety feels like

Max talks about starting his transition in 2015, when public restrooms were becoming a flashpoint. He learned where all the single-stall restrooms in town were, because ordinary errands came with a fight-or-flight response. He offers an image: a dog that is likely to bite is an anxious dog, and a person who is anxious because they don't understand you can feel unsafe to be around.

Ian responds that most people in his position have never had to think about this, in the same way that most men don't think twice about walking to their car at night or worry about their drink being tampered with. Different people face different threats, and if a threat isn't yours, you often don't see it. Max adds that cis men face their own struggle, loneliness and the pressure not to express emotions, and that he wants everyone to feel safe talking about what's hard.

Politics, belonging and "us versus the problem"

Both men talk about how the desire to belong shapes our beliefs. In the human story, being cast out of your tribe could be fatal, and Ian notes how often people compromise their own views to stay accepted by their side. Max says most of his own anxiety comes from political headlines and that he tells his grandmother to change her algorithm. Ian points out that so many topics have become political that people are talking to each other less.

A line Max came across helped him shift: growth begins when we change the story from "us versus them" to "us versus the problem." Drawing on his work as a massage therapist, he compares it to stretching a muscle: if you breathe and tell your body you're safe, you can go further in your range of motion. Likewise, we can't treat the tension in society until we can feel where it actually hurts.

Feelings that need somewhere to go

Ian shares what he sees in his coaching: many men were raised with "suck it up and keep going," and unspoken feelings don't disappear. They get stuffed into a drawer until they come out in ways nobody intended, and often at the people we feel safest with. Reactions that seem out of proportion, like "I don't know what came over me," are signals worth getting curious about.

Max says he couldn't name his own emotions for the first 24 years of his life. As he started to confront that resistance and realized he didn't "combust," he found the image of rebirth, like a phoenix or an acorn, meaningful. Ian adds that owning your part is scary but freeing: if you've co-created your past, you also get to co-create your future.

Creating safe conversations about trans identity

Max asks Ian how people can build safer space for conversations about trans identity, and the two offer some practical thoughts.

• Acknowledge the fear. Many people hesitate to say anything because the topic feels volatile and they worry about getting it wrong.
• Take the pressure off. Ian says the heavier a topic feels, the more people walk on eggshells. He suggests treating it as a conversation instead of a high-stakes test, and respecting that you don't need to know everyone's personal life, though you can be open to learning about it if someone chooses to share.
• Use grace with pronouns and names. Max says nobody gets everything right the first time, and he encourages people to say "I'm sorry, I didn't know" and to ask if they aren't sure. Ian says that if he's unsure, he would rather avoid pronouns than put someone on the spot, and Max says that getting comfortable with being uncomfortable takes pressure off everyone.
• Don't assume bad intent. Both say that a mistake is often just a mistake. If someone still responds rudely after you correct them, "then you have your answer."
• Grace within the trans community too. Max encourages trans people to give themselves grace, to limit time spent in destabilizing media, and to extend grace to those who are still learning. Ian notes that in his experience, bad experiences travel faster than good ones, so if the goal is to coexist in harmony, how we respond to mistakes matters.

Not taking it personally

Max says he used to push back when his parents didn't use his chosen name, because he had tied his whole identity to how others treated his gender. When people seemed to attack his identity, his body responded as if under threat. He now sees that who he is as a person isn't "a trans man," it's a soul, and that gender is an outward expression of that.

Ian brings in Don Miguel Ruiz's The Four Agreements, including "don't take things personally": even if someone intentionally uses the wrong pronoun, it says more about them than about you. He is open that this is an advanced practice, "30, 40 years" in the making, but an ideal to move toward. When someone isn't available for respect, you can leave the interaction with love instead of anger. Every interaction, Max says, is like "casting a vote toward either division or unity."

Underneath it all, Ian says, is acceptance: much suffering comes from an inability to accept what is, and reactions rarely get us the connection we want. He also notes that some people build their identity around being the victim, and that it can be hard to give up.

The conversation includes a poem attributed to Sengcan (Seng-ts'an), The Great Way, which opens with the idea that the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. Max says he's been learning to be "preference-less," and to respond in ways that invite authenticity.

Where to find support

Both men encourage listeners to find a safe place to say the hard things, whether that's a therapist, a coach, a friend, a faith community or the flow arts. Max has been in therapy for five years, not because something is wrong, but because he is actively doing his inner work. He says that his core values, faith, inner harmony and community, give him something to anchor to, and Ian says that you can't fix what you can't name.

What Max wants everyone to know

Asked what he'd say if the entire world were listening, Max answers: "You are love." You have the capacity to be loved no matter what, and if you keep "flirting with the uncomfortable thing," you may find that love has been there all along.