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.
4. You were so much prettier with long hair.
“I once had a life where I could go blocks, miles, months without a stranger standing in my way, saying, ‘Hey girl, where you goin’ in such a hurry?’ I want to take my personal space bubble to the shop and have it re-inflated to its original size, but that chapter of my life seems to be done.”
“After three hours of waiting, the director sits us on the couch amongst three or four other couples. We stare deeply into the camera. I hype myself up. Look into the camera like it is a lover, NO, a hamburger! Look at the camera like it is a hamburger.”
While I started getting some hints that I was trans at an early age, my roots didn’t really take hold until I was older. Here are some of the stops along the way.
Adventures in non-normative handedness.
My family used to joke that only white people need therapy. Meanwhile, white academics told me that African-Americans merely fabricated ungrounded stigma around psychiatric help. No one ever tells you that the healthcare system is sick.
“Blaze squinted in the mirror and pushed her hair left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right, then righter, then really left, then up a little, then all the way down […]”
“Sad cloud” and “naked Christmas tree” did not make the list. You’re welcome, makers of anti-depressant commercials!
“Of course I’ve heard of Smith! Are you fucking kidding me? Every lesbian has heard of Smith. It’s fucking Lesbian Hogwarts. God. They’re all there, with their hair always on point, studying sociology, and the leaves are yellow and filtering sunlight through them because it’s always autumn there because autumn is beautiful and the whole continent has conspired to make that place beautiful and lovely and gay. Gay as fuck.”
“Like Russia itself, my parents’ instincts are torn. My birth country can’t make up its mind whether it wants its culture to be a part of liberal Europe or conservative Asia, my birth parents can’t make up their minds between simply loving their only child and feeling like there is something fundamentally broken about me now.”
What say you, my dear queer diarists? Are your journals destined to go up in flames? Or are you already planning the exhibition on your journal-writing career?
“The night was deep and dark over Ellen DeGeneres’ Burbank mansion. Inside her mahogany themed living room, Ellen sat in a velvet high back chair and quietly sipped whisky out of a crystal glass.”
“I guess if I freak the fuck out so much at the prospect of someone reading my journal then I should probably stop doing the things I end up writing about but that seems unattainable at this point in my life.”
“I hated my body and punished it, and it hated me and punished me back. Is that what happened? That’s the thing about getting sick the way I got sick: nailing it down.”
“I did not intend to have any experiences outside the range of what I had previously proven to myself I was comfortable with or could understand. Scully and I both convinced ourselves that this was possible, that it had ever been a possibility.”
“The truth is always messy. I told myself I could be gay and I wouldn’t ever be hurt again. I needed to never be hurt again.”
“I was angry. Really fucking angry. Angry because Jenny Schecter was right.”
I finally feel safe enough to imagine the big queer family I never had. A home where gender is an option, not an obligation, where parents can apologize to each other as well as to their kids and where long, ongoing conversations about race, power and privilege exist.
“Netflix is kinda like my fag hag, the kind that wraps you up in a warm rainbow blanket with a bowl of soup when you’re recovering from a Cinco de Mayo hangover.”