I have every faith in you, baby butch. I know you will be careful with this word and its legacy. It looks like a badge but it feels like a battleaxe, and I need you to know that it’s five times as difficult to earn and ten million times more dangerous.

“Me too,” I could so easily say to the teenagers on that Edmonton LRT train: “Me too.” I had also wanted to leave, and I did; but then I came home.

“If I wear my heart on my sleeve – and I do these days, much to the shock and dismay of a butch gone prematurely tender – then the sleeve itself is my masculinity.”