Results for: you need help
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The Price I Pay For(ever) My Culture
Being a first-gen, Indigenous, queer, Samoan girl in diaspora almost cost me my Samoan culture. But one day, I’m going to be the queer Samoan elder who looks my grandchildren in their faces, and says: I was afraid the entire time that I was fighting for the world you deserve, but I did it anyway.
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How Writing “The Ship We Built,” a Children’s Novel, Helped Me Come Out
The first draft of The Ship We Built was intended as a valentine for one person. Six and a half years later, The Ship We Built has been released as a novel with Penguin Random House and continues to be a valentine – now for anybody who picks it up.
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The Closet Let Me Feel Anything and Everything
Closets suck, generally speaking, but sitting in mine gave me joy. This is a coming out story that doesn’t neatly fit in the queer community, much less my own mind.
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Making a Home in the Closet
I was a newly minted queer and everything I knew about queerness was rooted in coming out. I’d heard about the relief that came with coming out from everybody. If TV was to be believed, I would feel free even as my parents stopped looking me in the eye.
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Loving the Whole Me: A Bisexual Mom on Coming Out to Her Family
“I sent a short, simple message saying that although I didn’t realize it fully until recently, I was indeed bisexual, that this was an undeniable part of my identity, and I could no longer comfortably hide this fact.
He never responded.”
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Stigma and Sisterhood: Life for Trans Women Since 1994’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy”
“It took watching I Don’t Wanna Be A Boy to show me that the negative attitudes towards trans women have always been pervasive in society, that from 1994 to 2016 there hasn’t been much change in how society views us. But it also taught me that we share a sisterhood of sorts. No matter what time and what place, trans women of color are connected by our similar experiences.”
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On Performing in The Vagina Monologues When You Don’t Have a Vagina
“There’s an annoying song that’s only playing all the way through all day long on some days. Others, I can barely hear the chorus, and others I can’t hear it all. But every day, I know that that song will be there again one day, maybe even tomorrow, maybe even later that same day. And I hate this song.”
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Skydiving in Two Genders: An Essay on Trans Visibility
“I decide I’ll test the durability of a BB cream by Tarte at thousands of feet in the air, then feel ashamed at worrying so much about how I look, then feel the dread again, that all this might go completely wrong, not because I’ll fall to my death, but because I’ll be reduced to my past.”
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On The 6: Confronting the Mortality of Girls Like Me
“Trauma wasn’t meant to happen at 9 a.m. on that August morning. Not when I was running on time, and somehow missed the long line for the day’s first cup of coffee. Nothing could have warned me that the meticulous construction of my person would be unraveled while my peers watched from their own cocoons of solitude.”
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Coming Out To 50 People At Once Was So Much Easier Than Doing It One-on-One
“That’s right!” I shouted, feeding off their energy. “Clap because I’m gay!”
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Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously
“But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.”
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See Jane Teach: How Sexism In the Classroom Hurts Both Teachers and Students
“When I’m worrying about how to teach without coming off as a bitch because I expect students to be quiet when I’m talking, I’m not thinking as much as I should be about whether my students are really learning.”
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The Things You Say
Was I so far from the idea of trans in her head, that there was no way I could be “one of them”? Or did she refuse to make the association because there was something so wrong with being a trans woman that she could never be attracted to one?
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This Is Because I’m A Woman: How Sexual Harassment Invaded My Life (And Some Ways to Respond To It)
“I once had a life where I could go blocks, miles, months without a stranger standing in my way, saying, ‘Hey girl, where you goin’ in such a hurry?’ I want to take my personal space bubble to the shop and have it re-inflated to its original size, but that chapter of my life seems to be done.”
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Netflix Outed Me: “Gay & Lesbian Movies” Was My Smoking Gun
“Netflix is kinda like my fag hag, the kind that wraps you up in a warm rainbow blanket with a bowl of soup when you’re recovering from a Cinco de Mayo hangover.”
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The Army Taught Me That I Can Change My Body (And It Will Still Be Mine)
Here’s the deal: I both like and am my body. I am a girl, ergo I have a girl’s body. It’s neat. You know what I think helped me to be comfortable with my body more than anything else? The US Army.
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How Finding My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition
“I am an adoptee,” I explained through my tears. “I need to find my parents. I have waited all my life for this moment. I’m supposed to leave tomorrow, but I can’t go without knowing my family is fine. Please help me!”
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Identity Theft: A Trans* Intersex Woman On Traumas and Surgery
“It’s unfortunate, unfair and illogical that intersex people get assigned a gender and a sex and are expected to either stick with them or fix someone else’s mistake with expensive, risky surgery on their genitals.”
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“And I Do Mean All My Life”: A Trans* Coming Out Letter
For anyone who’s ever wanted to say it in a letter.
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Ten Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started My Transition
Ten lessons I wish I’d known when I started hormones in February 2011, and why I’m taking an indefinite break from the internet.