Tasting notes: This one is real, like a hallucination. You can feel it, see it, and it leaves very little evidence of its passing through your body. Lingers barely on the tip of the tongue, with high notes of bright genders named like quarks.

Getting top surgery with my butch identity is no longer some unattainable fantasy. Now the question firmly rests with me: do I want to go ahead with it or not?

Our thighs slapped against the tarp as we threw each other across the floor. Our eyes and ears were painted in mud like two casts of the human form. The thing that pulled me into the ring that night was desire itself.

“Other people built a gender for me and trusted that I would defend what they built. But what I was handed never made sense.”

“Not all of my experiences as an intersex person inform my being gay, and vice versa, but the overlap is there and it affects things in ways that are both good and complicated at a time in history when homophobia and intersexphobia are alive and kicking.”

It’s as if I had just discovered a new color and now had this entirely new dimension to my life. I was able to paint a holistic portrait of what I wanted the rest of my life to look like.

“Dating broken white women became a way to reprise a powerlessness that years of sexual abuse and generations of blackphobia had tricked me into believing in. I drowned this feeling of powerlessness in weed and seeking out relationships in which I could engage in yet remain completely hidden from view.”

It’s a boy, until and unless he tells us otherwise, I thought. It’s a boy who will be raised without gender roles. It’s a boy who will be defined by their heart and mind, not by the organs that happen to be between their legs. It’s a boy who will be loved wholly, deeply, and completely by the two women who created him.

“There are so many terms for what I am – genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, pangender, neutrois – but none of them feel quite right. So Kade takes the place of that descriptor, and Kade feels right.”