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?

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

“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.

Why is it that time and time again, people act like they can’t make me uncomfortable? That as a butch — as well as a queer person, a top, someone who likes to flirt and be sexual just like most human beings — it’s impossible to sexually harass me?

There is something strange about the street harassment I receive as a butch in that it is often terrifying and extremely triggering, but something about it makes me feel justified. I am glad these men see me as a threat.