“I was unwilling to buy a binder. It seemed like a declaration, the kind I was nowhere near ready to make yet. But for that winter, I had the bag.”

If you present in a traditionally feminine way, you’re just being a misogynistic parody of a woman, and if you fail to present in a traditionally feminine way, well ha! There’s the proof that you’re not really a woman right there.

“Our commitment was never in question. I just hadn’t faced the possibility that I could be, not someone’s boyfriend, but their girlfriend. That was the part I had to think about.”

As with the meaning of written text, our bodies float somewhere between the author (ourselves) and the reader (those we encounter).