“I put “they/she” on a pronoun button for the first time and countless people — moms, older gay and lesbian folks, and my peers — asked me to share what that meant and what genderqueer identity is because they genuinely wanted to understand ideas that were foreign and difficult for them so they could love me better.”
“My father has very few admirable qualities when it comes to our relationship: he doesn’t follow through on his promises, he doesn’t compromise, and he has a God complex. “
“That’s right!” I shouted, feeding off their energy. “Clap because I’m gay!”
“I’ve come to believe that my one wild and precious life will never be full if I don’t aggressively dismantle my childhood hardwiring, if I don’t ask the people who love me most to give me what I need.”
“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.”
This post is 25% Mey Rude Appreciation Club and 75% “personal essays by trans women oh my gosh how do I pick only 16.” (I picked 17.)
This week, it’s a cartoon. Next week, maybe I’ll write you a poem in the sky from inside a hot air balloon! Or, you know, just use my words. It’ll be an adventure. Me, you, and my Philips GoLITE BLU Energy Light, slogging through the snow and sunless days together.
“The first girl I ever kissed spent her summers on her uncle’s farm, helping him bale hay. She would come back to school with the insides of her wrists all welted-up like she had been stung by bees. I wanted to kiss each sting but I never asked.”
This is a story about how the Buzzfeed series “You Do You” made me feel like someone might wanna do me.
“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.”
“Time Change Sunday is my personal gateway to hell. It gets dark earlier (and then earlier and earlier). It gets cold in the morning and night (and then stays cold all day and all day). I stay inside to keep warm and then I stay inside because I don’t want to leave and then I stay inside because I can’t get out of bed.”
Witchcraft, trials, death and the Devil: how the long road of history winds from 1692 Salem, MA to 2015.
After removing my damaged locks, I realized that that was the easy part. Removing the Eurocentric straight- haired image of femininity embedded in my brain was much harder.
“Becoming secure with being alone has relieved the frantic pressure to believe that every new person I meet might be the next person with whom I enter into a significant relationship, and instead it has provided me with the security and confidence to build a life on my own terms.”
“But for change to happen, for the community I want to grow, someone has to stay. Someone has to wear the flannel not just because of its function.”
They call a child born after a loss a rainbow baby. The storm left a devastating aftermath, but this rainbow is bringing us daily joy.
Now I start over, and rebuild, and confront fear and learn to drive alone and figure out how to secure Eli in the loft so I can still snuggle with him at night. Now I have to hang the art I’ve collected from friends over the years, find a place for my autographed Eileen Myles books, and learn to do yoga. Now I need to meet all the versions of myself hiding in this city and make friends with every single one of them.
I’m starting to realize I’m not a connoisseur of anything so much as just a total fucking weirdo.
“He gave me “the benefit of the doubt” that traffic was indeed too rough to allow me, a braless 25-year-old nervously driving a station wagon, to shift over.”
Back in August I received an invitation to the Papal arrival ceremony …a story went up, was picked up by Breitbart, and Fox News took it from there. Before long a few gay and trans folk among 15,000 guests on the White House lawn was enough to get media talking around the planet.