Meet Skylar Kergil, a truly remarkable individual whose journey of growth, acceptance, and self-love highlights how important medical intervention can be in the life of a transgender youth. Kergil’s “A Recycled Tale” is both a heartfelt and informative story and bound to touch even the most unflinching hearts.

Skylar Kergil, born Katherine Elizabeth Kergil, has described his life as a transgender man, struggles with body dysmorphia, and experiences with hormone treatment in a short eight-and-a-half-minute YouTube film.

Body dysmorphic disorder is described as a condition where people are unable to stop thinking about flaws in their appearance. As a transgender man, Kergil’s bodily flaw was in fact his entire body, which did not match his personal gender identity. Kergil, now 23, first began hormone treatment at age 17 in the middle of his senior year of high school. “It was a choice which I thought would make me more comfortable, and it did,” Kergil says in his YouTube video.

Testosterone treatment is fairly common in transgender men that are born females and is aimed to give them a body that more closely matches their brain’s gender. When a transgender man first begins taking testosterone, it is described as going through something similar to a young boy’s puberty, Livestrong reported. In the beginning stages, he will experience an increase in sex drive, thickening of body hair, and appearance of face and chest hair, and will find an overall increase in muscle mass. Although the hormone therapy will drastically shrink breast size, many transgender men, such as Kergil, will opt for surgical breast reduction to obtain a more masculine chest appearance.