Ryan Stalvey

Ryan Stalvey was born a female on March 4, 2000, in the United States of America. He later came to identify himself as a male. He has spent a considerable part of his life in Jacksonville, Florida. He attended James Weldon Johnson Middle School before enrolling at Paxon High School. He has a sister named Ashton.

Initially, Stalvey identified himself as a lesbian. In 2014, when he was 14 years old, he informed his parents that he was a transgender. According to Stalvey, his mother originally found out his gender identity when he showed up at his eighth-grade graduation ceremony wearing a button down shirt, dress pants, and a tie. His mother was there and it surprised her as when he had left the house, he was wearing a dress. She subsequently took him out to the parking lot and tried to hit him.

Stalvey has stated that his mother had been verbally and mentally abusing him since the time he came out as a lesbian. It only escalated after he spoke to his parents about his gender identity. Both of his parents allegedly started physically and mentally abusing him and put him through conversion therapy. Sometime in 2015, the school he was attending at the time, James Weldon Johnson Middle School, contacted child protective services with domestic abuse allegations against his father. However, these charges were later dropped.

In January 2016, he live-streamed a video in which his mother appeared to pin him down on the couch and attempted to remove the male clothing he was wearing. Multiple times, Stalvey screamed out that he could not breathe, but his mother blamed it on the “stupid binders”. At one point, his father, who had noticed what was happening, tried to calm them both down but walked out when Stalvey’s mother did not listen to him. She kept asking him to hand her the scissors so she could cut off Stalvey’s clothes, but he refused to do so. Stalvey’s sister was also present in the house during the incident. In a YouTube video about the night, Stalvey stated that the image of his sister in tears while he suffered abuse at the hands of their mother would never be forgotten by him.

The video was watched live by thousands of people. Nick and Heidi Dennis were among those viewers. They are the parents of one of Stalvey’s friends from school, Kyler, who is also a transgender. The Dennis family called the authorities on Stalvey’s mother, who was subsequently arrested. As for Stalvey, he was removed from his parents’ house and allowed to live with the Dennis family. In April, a judge ruled that the charges against his mother would be dropped if she agreed to therapeutic training, community service and paying a fine. According to Stalvey, the judgement terrified him as he was still having nightmares about his mother. Furthermore, he was afraid that she would force him to go back to their home as she was still his legal guardian.

In early 2016, Stalvey started a legal procedure so he could be allowed to stay with the Dennis family. He had the support of his friends at school, who used the hashtag #RiseForRyan to start a social movement online.

In the recent years, the relationship between Stalvey and his mother seems to have improved. His parents are divorced and his mother is now more accepting of who he is. She has made multiple appearances on his social media handles and also appeared in the videos covering his sex reassignment surgery. She supported him, had conversations with him and the medical professionals, and even filmed parts of the videos. Stalvey started undergoing hormone replacement therapy sometime in early 2017. In September that year, a double incision top surgery was performed on him. He vlogged through the entire procedure.

Stalvey is presently dating a fellow social media influencer named Aryn Garrigan.

Besides his main YouTube channel, he also runs STORMRYAN 2, on which he has over 35 thousand subscribers. He has a secondary Instagram page, ‘ryan.stalvey,’ on which he has more than 60 thousand followers.