How a Trans-Inclusive Manual for School Teachers Turned Controversial in India

Whenever I talk about how bad school was for us with another queer person, I end up remembering how I would go without water all day long to avoid using the washroom meant for ‘boys’. Back then, I had neither the language nor the opportunity to express myself, but I felt uncomfortable in spaces demarcated based on the gender binary of male and female. Everything was divided from washrooms and uniforms to school assembly queues and class-seating arrangements. And there was of course no conversation on the diversity of gender experiences.

While gender-diverse people and communities have existed in India for a long time, their criminalization is a legacy of British colonialism, which remained in place in the post-independence attitude towards gender and sexuality. It is only recently that legal advances like the right to self-identification of gender and the decriminalization of same-sex relations have at least created a space for our experiences. Yet, Indian schools remain grounds of discomfort and bullying for trans and gender-nonconforming (GNC) students.

State-level surveys in India depict regular harassment faced by trans and GNC students in schools leading to dropouts. A study in selected districts of Uttar Pradesh and New Delhi found that about 28 percent of trans people surveyed faced harassment at school. “While 18.5 per cent of them were physically abused, 13 per cent of transgender people were sexually harassed and 60 percent were verbally abused,” it said.

For Scamel, hiding who they were at school became a daily struggle. Scamel went to an “all girls” school until 10th grade. They felt that their dislike for skirts and desire to bind their breasts were examples of femininity. It was later when they joined a co-educational school that they started experiencing dysphoria. Their teacher in 11th grade asked all those perceived to be girls to wear makeup for performance during a class assembly, which made them miserable.

“My last straw was in March 2021, when we had a graduation and all the girls were forced to wear a saree, high heels and specified makeup. I was the class topper, but I was so intensely dysphoric that I chose to skip my graduation,” Scamel said.

To address such issues and apply strategies to integrate all students, the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT), which is the country’s apex educational body, came out with training material for school teachers. The manual included a glossary for understanding different gender identities, expressions, and regional terms for trans and gender-diverse communities in the Indian subcontinent.

It further defined the concerns of trans and GNC children in school education related to the imposition of the gender binary in uniforms, classroom seating, and sports. It advocated for practical solutions like trans-friendly infrastructure, curriculum reforms, the creation of support groups for trans students, and the sensitization of school staff.

Many of us felt that it was an important first step in this direction.

But it was met with backlash, especially from right-wing platforms in India. It also led to systemic targeting on social media of a trans researcher who was one of the external team members behind the manual. Even the head of the child rights body wrote to the NCERT and asked them to rectify the “anomalies” in it. He wrote that the idea of removing binaries could deny equal rights to children for their biological needs and expose them to “unnecessary psychological trauma”.

Soon after, the NCERT removed the manual from its website and transferred two senior faculty members of its Department of Gender Studies who helped develop it to other departments.

Such an outcry depicted institutional apathy in place in the country. Despite the legal recognition, trans and GNC folks continue to face barriers not only in access to education but also in healthcare, housing, employment, and access to other social provisions. The Supreme Court of India in 2014 had recognized the right to self-identification of gender. The Indian parliament has also passed the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act even though it has many flaws. Such policies haven’t changed the daily realities of young people exploring their gender expression and identity.

Ishant Sharma is another student who shared multiple incidents where he felt out of place participating in binary activities in school. In one instance, a dance teacher made a comment on his dance movement: “I remember, he said to me, ‘Why are you walking or doing this in a certain way? Do it like boys are supposed to do it…Don’t do it like girls.'”

Ishant, who doesn’t relate with a particular label at present and uses the umbrella term “queer” for himself, said that, like many others, he became familiar with the vocabulary to express himself only after school.

“Since I did not have the vocabulary and understanding, these almost two decades of my life [of school] are always going to be ‘in retrospect’. I never got to live them as they were,” said Ishant.

Instead of being avenues for free expression and development, trans and GNC students find themselves punished for their gender nonconformity, explained Dr. Bittu K.R. (a doctor who asked to have their last name redacted for safety reasons). Dr. Bittu K.R. was one of the external experts who contributed to the NCERT module. They added that Indian schools need to explicitly protect gender nonconformity and suggested sensitization of teachers to be a step in that direction.

In December, the Madras High Court in Tamil Nadu called the NCERT’s decision to remove the manual from its website a knee-jerk reaction and later directed the NCERT to implement it for the next academic year. It remains uncertain what changes will be made to the manual and if there will be a strong will to follow it.

Dr. Bittu K.R. was not sure if the educational body would act on it. “I’d just hope that schools in general are thinking about these things as a consequence of it being in the media,” they said.

I, myself, wonder if I would have felt less alone if I had some avenue to understand or relate my experiences with others in the school. I instead learned to police my behavior and ignore all comments on my way of speaking or sitting. It left me with a deep sense of loneliness which followed me in college and at the workplace.

Schools are not the only places that enforce gender binary, but they are essential instruments for the early socialization of young people outside the family. That’s where they can provide students with the opportunity to explore and be curious and express themselves without censoring their lived experiences of gender. All debates and misgivings around washrooms, uniforms, and sports in India and countries like the United States are nothing but instruments of policing any deviance from the existing binary norms and codes of conduct.

My Gender Is Dyke

After coming out as a lesbian, the weight of never having never felt “feminine” enough lifted briefly. While denying my attraction to women (even when it was glaringly obvious like when I begged my best friend to dress up as the Daria to my Jane for Halloween), finally accepting my sexuality eased some gender qualms. Before coming out, I clung to my femininity. If I started being perceived as androgynous or masculine, everyone else would be able to tell what I wasn’t ready to accept. I felt like there was no option but to cater to a heteronormative beauty standard.

But once I came out, I felt like I could finally experiment with my gender presentation. I felt like lesbians, unlike other women, were allowed to be gender nonconforming, androgynous, or even masculine. I cut my hair short, I stopped wearing acrylics, and I bought sports bras.

For many baby lesbians, immediately jumping to express themselves in these ways is very common. There’s even a TikToker whose main joke is handing out “outfits” to new gays: snapbacks, ridiculous shoes, carabiners. When embracing a new identity, feeling visible within it can be incredibly powerful, especially in queer spaces where signaling is often clothing and cosmetic choices.

Also let’s not deny that within sapphic spaces, masculinity and androgyny is hot. My friends oo’d and aww’d over the campus butches and their shaved heads and sleeves. When we went to the gym, we prayed we would see the buff athletes later on Tinder.

I suddenly felt desperate to prove I was still a woman, despite being a lesbian.

However, after a while the pendulum swung back the other way. I suddenly felt desperate to prove I was still a woman, despite being a lesbian. (Undoubtedly in part due to my conservative Chicano family making incessant comments about my unshaved legs or Doc Martens.) No matter how I was presenting, there felt like a gap between my sexuality and the obvious gender that corresponded with it. All modern definitions said my sexuality meant I was a gay woman attracted to other women.

When I read Stone Butch Blues, I was acceptably feminine. In fact, I frequently joked with my other femme friends about how we passed for straight or how my girlfriend-at-the-time and I had to constantly reject men at bars. My family was accepting of the fact that I was queer, but that often felt contingent on my femininity and womanhood. I still needed to wear dresses to important occasions to prove that I wasn’t that kind of dyke.

When trans-exclusionary feminists insist that lesbianism is about “females”, they are wrong on so many accounts. One, there are so many trans lesbians that our community would not be the same without. But it also speaks to the isolation of masculine, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary lesbians. Especially since many nonbinary lesbians are nonbinary because of their lesbianism. Because living without attraction to men alienates many from conventional, cis heteronormative womanhood.

I wasn’t a woman, but a lesbian, an identity so powerful it’s the closest thing to a gender I have.

In a time where many lesbians learn more about their queerness through media, we are fed lesbians who exist for a male gaze. The same way my family approves of my sexuality on the condition that I remain feminine, mass media portray lesbians who are conventionally beautiful, clean-shaven, soft-spoken and kind. Cottagecore sapphics who hold hands at picnics have become more familiar than the angry, feminist dykes with shaved heads. But both of these types of people exist in plenty in real life.

Womanhood is so often defined through the desire and approval of men. When you take men out of the equation, womanhood didn’t feel relatable to me. The Bechdel Test was designed not to prove how feminist something is, but to show how little media shows women separated from their relationships to men. When I built my world, embracing my queerness and love for womanhood, ironically, I was able to see my disconnect from it. I wasn’t a woman, but a lesbian, an identity so powerful it’s the closest thing to a gender I have.

Being nonbinary is so common amongst lesbians, I know more lesbians who use they/them pronouns than I don’t. I know lesbians with top surgery, who microdose T, who don’t want to be seen as a woman but as a dyke. When I go out, if I embrace normative beauty standards it’s exclusively for other queers I may meet. Society is terrified of women who refuse to be easily consumable, and they’re even more scared of those who aren’t women.

I feel like I have finally gotten off the carousel of performative expression, and now others’ perceptions of me are tucked away in a corner. Now, I love putting on makeup while having a little mustache. I feel sexy when you can see an inch of unshaved legs between my jeans and calf socks. When my partner and I are out, I am proud that there is no doubt that we are together. My friends and I clomp around after drinks while shielding our femme friends from the stares of dudebros. Knowing that I’m a lesbian, completely and in all forms of my identity, has done more than release me or set me free, it’s made me comfortable. I can exist quietly for all of the years I had felt like an imposter.

On Gender Fabrication and Femme Embodiment

Femme. Whispered. Purred. Growled. Madonna’s “Express Yourself” may play on small, overly trebly speakers as we apply our makeup. Like… a lot of makeup. Immaculate and preciously, precisely placed flecks of glitter. Swath of eyeshadow gradient. And then dance the applied adornment into a whole new iteration of a look… eyeliner smeared in careless touches and mascara moving in drips down cheeks being pulled towards my throat on tracks of sweat. I am long, painted nails twisting up nervous coiled phone cords or tapping rhythmically on pale pink porcelain. I live in the folds of full-skirted 80’s prom dresses. I am made of heels so sharp they could cut glass. I am a great many necklaces worn all at once.

But these are constructs. The structure and shape of my iridescent ankle boot with six inch heels is only feminine because of cultural placement. Bury my shoeboxes in the earth for a few centuries and whoever uncovers them, the enduring synthetic materials, may not even know the meaning of the term “women’s wear.” With any hope their understanding of gender will have transformed into something liberatory and expansive and bear not even a vestige of our binary and bioessentialist categorizations. I imagine a variant of Ariel in her cave of treasures — such a material “girl” — projecting associations on found objects and combing her hair with a fork.

Yet even my Little Mermaid reference point is telling of some refraction of my gender identity, in how I’ve assembled the correlative hope for shared reality. I believe that some part of me and my femmeness is inherent to my corporeal biological form and my spiritual existence; however so much of how we construct and understand our gender(s) is informed by cultural placement. What occurs so often then when we try to anchor or define the inherent and or internal quality of our gender with external elements is this ouroboros (mine looks like an elongated tube of lipstick, melted/melting) where the evidences we find or bring forth are cultural in origin and therefore have no inherent quality to define or codify our gender(s). We are just chasing our tails. Infinite regress. For this reason the distinction between authentic and performative gender is difficult to demonstrate or articulate. This is true for people of all genders including cisgender bodies.

There are so many things I may reach for to explain how I know I am a femme or an intersex non-binary woman but these words and concepts themselves are devised and constructed. My intersex body demonstrates itself physiologically and externally, even outside of any cultural placement. My transness may be more or less visually obvious depending on your perception. Recent endocrinological studies have demonstrated evidence that seem to indicate trans specific brain chemistry, inherent physiological and chemical demonstrations of transness that have discernible corollaries to our genders, but even then these evidences are mostly approached from a binary framework and one of a specific cultural construction. And most of this evidential framing of trans and non-binary existence, the desire for some biological “proof” of our actuality, is fodder for transphobes and all too often devised from a US/Eurocentric scientific/medical origin which has hxstorically been used to transphobic ends. This is also a system that constructed and employed eugenics as a dominant practice. We do not need to justify our existence, in ANY capacity, and certainly not within a system that has been used to harm us. There is widespread evidence of transness and non-binary existence across a great many human cultures and many of them have vast hxstorical depth.

This essay is mostly about how I come to know and define myself as a “femme” and how I practice embodiment of it within my culture. Although femininity has some relationship with the constructs of woman and girl, through frequency of use and cultural assignment, they are not synonymous or directly connected by any means. There are many feminine men and many femmes that are not girls or women. But undeniably these connections do exist as does the proximity of femme to the construct of femininity. If femme as a chosen gender identity, is connected to femininity, as we define it more broadly in mainstream culture, then where do I anchor femmeness and how do I understand it? There are so many aspects of what seem to have an innate feminine quality that I relate to and identify with but of course this too is frequently an illusion and a machination of patriarchal, Eurocentric, white supremacy.

Pink can serve as an excellent example of this concept. Pink, a shade as much as a color, is something with such seemingly chasmic gendered associations in the US with “girls” and “girly” qualities and yet it only came to have such an association just prior to World War I. And the use of pastel pink and blue color assignment for babies arrived here in the mid-19th century (Feinberg, Transgender Warriors, 1997). Both supremely fresh in the spectrum of recorded human record. And yet it at times seems as if this has been the way for all of time. So is the terrible and destructive power of normalization processes, rendered invisible to so many eyes, so that they exist as the immutably “natural order” and portrayed to have always been so. But as far as this seemingly ubiquitous gendered color scheme for some time prior to World War I there existed an opposite gender color assignment/association where pink was used predominantly for “boys” and blue was used for “girls.” And this is a US/European culturally specific coding at that. I offer this to convey, at least for myself, so many components I employ to relate to my inherent gender qualities utilize external elements that often are cultural constructs with no innate qualities of positioning — and rather new cultural constructs at that.

Gender in its infinite and expansive nature, is still tied to some cultural placement. Words themselves are a construct of flawed human manufacture. And when we are trying to extricate something that exists predominantly in the internal, we will always fall short of a perfect extraction and correlation, to some degree, when we speak or write them out because these tools are so limited in relating something that feels so magically ethereal and intangible inside of me. Just as there is so much arrogance in the microscope… that when we gaze through it’s optics we believe we are moving closer to objective truth.

There are times I find solace in my feminine constructions. Maybe less and less as I deepen my understanding of the gender binary but they remain. There is an affirmation that transcends the oppressive walls of category. My early kitten memories are strikingly retained of sitting in front of a TV and staring, starry eyed, at JEM. I’m not sure where I fell in the run of Jem and Holograms from 1985-1988 but wherever I fell in that timeline for the show, I fell in love. So much so that here we are decades later and I’m still modeling aspects of my identity on Jem, Jerrica, and Kimber. Fronting a pop band, albeit with our own politics, I will clad myself in pink plastic and lavender glittered skirts, shimmering neon stripes painted across my face and enough blush to read from the back of any room. Jem was a guiding star for my young femme spirit. Pink hair, eccentric makeup, and THE OUTFITS. She was powerful, intelligent, and resourceful. And she literally transmutated at least once an episode. And she was me. Or some idealized representation we look to in trying to form ourselves. Mirror neurons and cathode rays. It wasn’t until recently I unpacked my subconsciously projected trans narrative of the show in the capacity of Jerrica to literally transform herself at will and experience recurring transitions/makeovers/metamorphoses in each episode, but that is a theoretical distillation for another time. I was very little and that show left a very big mark.

Make-up is another interesting notion as it pertains to gender expression. Make-up has so many varied associations to different gender identities in a cross cultural framework and only some of them have associations to “femininity.” For many other cultures, make-up has strong associations to the construct of being a “man” and “masculinity.” Just as “pink” is the modern Eurocentric association of the feminine, make-up is more of a modern development. There are large periods of time when it was normalized for cis men to wear makeup, and it wasn’t until the mid 1800s that this shifted to the other binary position.

My own experience with makeup is as a potion, and only a small sliver of how I come to frame myself as a “femme,” employing praxis from a queer perspective existing outside of the cis male gaze. I put on makeup often for my own enjoyment and connection, playing with colors and shapes and luminosity. At times it makes me feel beautiful. But my conception of beauty is so deeply ingrained and informed by culture that no doubt, even in moments of doing it for myself, the reasons for it eliciting joy cannot be completely extracted from those same oppressive beauty standards. And there are times I do end up wearing makeup for others. There are times I need to use it as armor to defend myself through assimilation and “passing.” To avoid misgendering and a whole range of harm and violence directed at transfeminine bodies and our existence. There are days I really don’t want to put on makeup and feel like I have to in order to reduce the chance of harm. In those days I am doing it for men. To increase my chances of safety in a transphobic culture of their dominion.

In tracing my own hxstory I find some comfort in knowing I just wanted to play dress up and make-believe in tiny plastic pastel kitchens. I was not even an adolescent, obsessively drawn to these celebrity feminine entities and games designed for “little girls” — perhaps prior or at the very least contemporaneous with my developing understanding of gender. This makes me believe it wasn’t in some radical, rebellious opposition to an assigned gender role I was at times being pressed into but rather an inherent attraction. These early and pervasive adorations lead me to believe that the little, pink, glittered Cyndi Lauper loving grrrl was in there from the moment of self-identity actualization. The moment I could conceive of myself with terms like “I” … I wanted a pink satin bow tied around my neck. This is a feminized cat reference in case that wasn’t abundantly clear.

As to what the naming or framing of what my gender might be if we existed in a world without our current classification of it, I know not. Without the words or even a concept of gender as we have fashioned it I certainly wouldn’t presume to claim knowledge of how I would act or construct a similar facet of identity. I believe we all have innate qualities that demonstrate as thoughts and behaviors and reactions, endocrinological and biologically informed, but if we didn’t create the idea of “femme” or the idea of “girl” then I have no idea how I would exist outside of the vacuum. In the same way I wonder if I would experience dysphoria if we had never constructed cisheteronormative society. My assumption is that this is a symptom of a culture that demonizes, erases, denigrates, and murders trans people.

Part of where my comfort is derived from in reflecting on personal femme centered hxstory is how I can explain the self-awareness of knowing I was trans, without having the language for it. It is the closest experience I have to what described earlier, this conceptual world predating gender and or existing beyond the binary. No person is more authentic or more valid in their transness or non-binary existence because they were able to identify it at an early age. But when so much of this world moves to extinguish trans existence and invalidate our lives, I do sometimes find solace in this self-awareness that predates having a word or concept to describe it. It is an understanding without words or articulated concepts. It feels magical. And profound.

It is important to acknowledge though, when I look at these external points with which I discovered how to express and articulate my gender in an affirming way, beyond the sacred internal, the indescribable knowing, with an amount of critical inspection I often find these external mapping points informed by the violent and harmful gender binary we exist in. And it definitely sours the sweetness. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is an incredible song but the concept of “girl” is a racist illusion and one that does a great deal of harm in its boundaries and their violent enforcement.

To my trans girl, trans woman, trans femme, and non-binary femme siblings… I wish you all of an abundance of gender joy. I wish you all the affirmations you can find. May they be in pop songs and in eye shadow palettes. May they be in thick beards and chest hair. May they be in reflection and seeing oneself in the parts of others. May they already be inside of you. I wish and make plans for all of us to transform and transmute this world into something far more expansive and liberatory. Dancing until the makeup is running down our faces. In a world where make-up is for whoever the fuck wants it.

Photographer and Art Director: Janelle Pietrzak // @janellepietrzakphoto
Makeup Artist: Kendall Bennewitz // @Kendall.Bennewitz
Hair: Stephanie Craig // @stephaniecraig_hair
Top: Jessica Owen // @jessicaowenarts
Skirt: Zzyzx Couture // @zzyzx_Coutur
Special thanks to Sevi Giovanni Xcetera for advance edits

Sex With An X: The Perils Of Performative Spelling

I used to frequently facilitate trainings for corporations, organizations, and non-profits on how to be more inclusive to queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people. During these trainings I would discuss a range of initiatives, strategies, and proposed policies organizations could undertake. And every time – literally every single time – the cis people in the room would focus on gender-neutral bathrooms.

It’s one of the easiest, and one of the least significant, “inclusion” initiatives an organization can make. It would be miles more transformative if a workplace’s culture meant trans people could use whatever bathroom worked best for them without fearing harassment, for example. But that’s hard.

Gender-neutral bathrooms are fine, especially if all bathrooms are gender-neutral. But it’s hardly “inclusive” to create separate spaces for the weirdos to go pee, separate from everyone else, with the concomitant outing that frequently entails. Absent from actual culture shift at an organization, a gender-neutral bathroom is essentially a ghetto.

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In early 2020, I was asked to consult a San Francisco startup – they wanted the company to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people.

One of the top-of-line, most important questions for me to weigh in on: was changing their “women’s” Slack channel to a “womxn’s” Slack channel a powerful move toward inclusion, as some members of the leadership team believed, or a disrespectful encroachment on cis womens’ spaces? Would making a Slack channel specifically for trans and non-binary people be a better move?

I gently informed them that it was actually neither, and that there were clearly more foundational conversations that needed to happen before we got to the Slack channel question. Then the pandemic started and I never heard from them again.

The cultural discourse version of defaulting to bathrooms is performatively “inclusive” spelling. It’s easy, and is typically as useful as you’d expect from an effort that requires essentially no effort. Putting the x in “womxn,” for example, just reinforces to me that I’m not a “woman” – I’m a “womxn.” And is “womxn” inclusive of non-binary people? I have my doubts.

This is only one aspect of the language-based performative allyship that’s suffused social discourse over the last few years (acronyms can also be head-scratchers – see our roundtable “What Do We Mean When We Say BIPOC”). “Inclusive” spellings have a long, meaningful history, but the current usage, especially replacing certain vowels in words with an “x,” leaves much to be desired – and might actually be actively harmful.

At Best, Performative Spellings Are Confusing

I recently got a PR e-mail about an “intentionally diverse” conference featuring a slate of “BIPOC, women/womxn, non-binary speakers.” But what does this actually mean? What is the point of using “womxn” if you also use “women”? Who are these “womxn,” especially when the statement also says “non-binary?” On their website, every speaker featured uses she/her pronouns, except for one person who also uses “we/they” in addition to “she.” [Author’s edit: non-binary people can use she/her pronouns exclusively, so looking at pronouns isn’t conclusive of anything. Regardless, I’m confused by this conference’s usage of “womxn,” and suspect some terms were thrown in for diversity points.]

As with the acronym BIPOC, there’s still a lot of confusion about what these terms mean. Who identifies with “womxn” other than cis women who are attempting to signal inclusivity? I, and every other trans woman I know or have ever heard of or can imagine, identify as a woman. Trans and non-binary people actually aren’t a sub-category of “real” or “regular” women – which is what “womxn” implies.

It’s true that, if you really have to go there, there isn’t a good word for “non-cis-men.” But even if there was, having a “catch-all” term to describe everyone but cis men still centers them as a point of reference. It’s not the worst thing in the world to just be specific in our language. You might have to get creative, or use a few more words than you want. Is it so bad to put in a little effort in that regard?

But Often, They Do More Harm Than Good

The use of “womxn” as a purposely inclusive spelling is often exclusive of trans women and non-binary people. Even worse than accidentally doing the opposite of what’s intended, though, is that by some accounts the unwieldiness of the spelling is intentional. It’s intended to make the reader “stop and think.” Is purposely causing frustration in the audience you’re attempting to reach an effective praxis?Perhaps; it’s why protesters shut down highways, after all. But while the symbolism of of shutting down highways is an intentional nod to their oppressive history, it’s not clear the same can be said about these language issues. Historically, feminist re-spellings (including terms like “herstory”) have been intended to symbolically signify de-centering of men in general, despite the words’ complex and non-intuitive etymological histories. They weren’t typically used to refer to identity.

Another unfortunate fact: many performative spellings of “women” in particular have either originated from or been appropriated by TERFs; “womon” and “womyn” can often carry TERF connotations. “Wombyn,” on the other hand, is clearly essentialist. Those spellings have the benefit, however, of at least being pronounceable – “womxn” isn’t. It’s also classist for a term to only be accessible in writing, but more on that later.

This type of activism is easily appropriated not just by TERFs, but mainstream organizations and corporations – who can perform inclusivity without actually doing anything substantive. Of course, they don’t need symbols like spellings to do this, but it surely makes it easier.

There Are Legitimate Reasons for Inclusive/Reclaimed Spellings and Language Shifts – And Unnecessary Overuse Undercuts Them

The use of x, as in “Latinx,” has a legitimate, though often misguided intention when used appropriately – to de-gender an unnecessarily gendered word. The movement away from “Hispanic” to describe people from or who culturally identify with Latin America (as opposed to Spain), for example, and the movement toward “African-American,” and then away from that and toward “Black,” all have legitimate purposes (and varying degrees of efficacy and usefulness).

But whenever I see the word “folx,” I cringe. There is nothing to de-gender there. There is no historical patriarchy to highlight. There is just a seemingly random spelling, that I’ve heard multiple adherents explain is wholly about performing inclusivity. I’ve even read that it’s intended to “signify intersectionality!” That’s not what intersectionality means. “Folx” reads to me like an extremely pure example of virtue signaling.

It’s important to consider one’s audience here – does the spelling “folx” actually “do” anything constructive? Or is it intended to signal which “team” you’re on, typically to other people who’re already on yours?

What is the experience of people who aren’t already on your team when they come across these spellings? The people whose acceptance and understanding these types of actions are ostensibly intended to build toward? They’re frequently seen as examples of unnecessary liberal cultural authoritarianism, and are likely to contribute to a belief that all similar gestures of inclusivity are similarly unnecessary.

Case in point: the backlash against “people who are pregnant” or “people with penises” phrasings. These aren’t exclusive and shouldn’t be controversial, but they’ve been wrapped up in a “culture war,” the foot soldiers of which frequently point to activist spellings and inclusive buzzwords as motivating factors.

Genuinely significant and meaningful shifts in how we use language, like gender-neutral pronouns, moving from “female” to “women” as an adjective, and the slow death of gendered occupational titles can easily be lumped in with the performativity of “inclusive” spellings, to inclusivity’s detriment.

Bigots love throwing the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. We shouldn’t make it easier for them – especially on the back of performative allyship that, as mentioned above, isn’t even very useful in the first place.

Performative Spelling Can Be Colonialist And/or Classist

It’s possible that, not too long ago, some particularly loud or influential trans women and non-binary people propagated the idea that “womxn” was a good idea. I know that back in the day, using the asterisk when writing out “trans*” was common and promoted by a lot of us (including here at Autostraddle) – until we realized it was counter-productive (the journey of the asterisk is, by the way, actually an interesting case study of how performative language interventions grow, transform, and sometimes die out).

But it’s clear now that the eminence of “womxn” has not been in our best interest. I find it hard to believe that most trans women would have ever been on board, but things do change. And just because something potentially originated within a community does not mean it has the consent of the community.

A powerful example of this issue is the journey of the term “Latinx.” It rocketed to widespread usage only in the last few years – never without detractors on every conceivable side of the debate, by the way – and has only recently begun to fall back out of favor.

“Latinx,” and some other, similar terms like “Chicanx” and “Filipinx,” originated with activists within their respective communities – but while young, often online, written-word-heavy activism contributed to their growth and eventual mainstream adoption, apparently not enough was done to actually organize communities around developing inclusive language that actually had a chance of being adopted by those communities.

I’m not in the habit of agreeing with the Wall Street Journal opinion page, and am especially wary as a non-native Spanish speaker, but “Latinx” clearly has complicated issues. The primary issue with using the “x” to de-gender gendered languages seems to be around pronounceability. Other de-gendered spellings, like ending words with the “@” symbol, or “o/a,” suffer similarly in terms of usability. “Latinx” could be pronounced like “La-teen-ex” – but what about extending it to other gendered words like “tixs” (aunts/uncles), “amigxs” (friends), etc.?

These spellings work passably well in written, usually academic or online, text. But most language use among people outside of academia, especially among people who don’t primarily communicate online, takes place verbally. And in Spanish, at least, the letter “x” isn’t pronounced the same way as it is in English. In this way, these types of spellings have been criticized as being classist or even colonialist. No matter where they originated, they’ve gained mainstream adoption in the United States by young people as well as news and other media agencies – despite apparently only being used by something like 3% of the actual community.

That “Latinx” is only used by a small percentage of the community isn’t the end-all, be-all though. I remember organizing with folks 15 years ago who hated the term “queer” and argued its reclamation was not only unnecessary, but impossible – and now it’s essentially de rigueur. Language shifts and grows; “queer” might be on the way back out in favor of a more-inclusive use of the word “gay,” for example. Or maybe there are new terms young people are using I’m not even aware of yet.

Another argument, however, is that in many gendered languages, the “masculine” ending is already used in a gender-neutral way to refer to large groups of people – “Latinos” doesn’t usually just mean men, it means everyone. It’s similar to how in English, “guys” is frequently used in a gender-neutral way. Feminists have long criticized this usage, however. Why should the “default” also be the “masculine” version? There are subtle ideological implications there.

All of this is even more unfortunate given that another solution exists – “Latine.” It’s been around for a minute, but is starting to gain prominence as some organizations and media outlets move away from “Latinx.” The “e” ending has the benefit of being pronounceable, flexible (“elle” instead of “él/ella,” “ties,” “amigues,” etc), and already in use for some gender-neutral terms in Spanish, at least (“estudiante,” student, “comerciante,” merchant, “asistente,” assistant).

An overture toward “inclusivity” mightn’t be actually inclusive if it alienates the majority of people it’s intended to be used by.

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Like most forms of performative activism, “inclusive” spellings tend to be superficial interventions that don’t address the root causes of discrimination, dehumanization, or marginalization. They’re “easy” solutions, like gender-neutral bathrooms, that people outside of communities can latch upon to perform solidarity without doing the work to build genuinely inclusive culture and infrastructure.

I believe we’d be better off doing the real work of inclusivity rather than – or, at the very least, in addition to – performing it by changing the spellings of words.

Elliot Page Movies Ranked By Transness

On January 22, 2008, Elliot Page became the first trans actor to be nominated for an Oscar — he just didn’t know it yet.

Since they were a child, Elliot has been one of our most interesting, courageous, and flat-out talented actors. They have built a body of work that is dark, political, and outside the realm of normal Hollywood stardom. They’ve always given the impression that their goals as an actor — and a public figure — go far beyond themself, go far beyond fame and fortune.

If Elliot’s creative focus remains on acting, I am certain the next phase of his career is going to be even more fruitful. Hollywood’s transphobia is no match for the shot of adrenaline that is finally being out to yourself and the world. It’s a reality that Elliot would not have had his success had he been out as a child — it’s also a reality that trans actors and activists have changed the industry enough the past two decades that now he’ll be able to change it even more.

But before we look to the future, I think it’s worth looking to the past. Because Elliot may not have played trans characters, but in every single movie he showed up to set as a trans person and when we watch those movies we are looking at a trans person.

I think trans actors can play cis characters — though I’m far more invested in trans characters being complex enough that this wouldn’t be desired — but that doesn’t mean ignoring what those trans actors bring to those roles. I’m not arguing that Elliot’s characters have been textually trans — I am arguing that it’s worth considering them through a trans lens.

Over the past few weeks I’ve watched or rewatched just about every one of his movies. This project has only increased my admiration and affection for Elliot. I hope this is received as a celebration — a celebration of all Elliot has accomplished so far and, more importantly, what’s possible for their future.

There are three ratings: the movie’s overall transness, Elliot’s character’s transness, and the average between those two assessments resulting in the ranking.

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30. Smart People (2008)

Movie: 1/10
Elliot: 1/10
Total: 1/10

When I started this project I thought that no matter how not trans a movie was, I’d at least give Elliot’s character a 2/10 — then I watched Smart People. Elliot’s first role post-Juno has all the markings of Hollywood (and probably new management) squandering a once-in-a-generation talent because they can’t handle that talent’s innate queerness. This insufferable indie, about an insufferable English professor played by Dennis Quaid, forces Elliot to play a Republican teenager who uses the R word and only thinks about tax credits. He’s still good — he’s always good — but this is one of his worst movies and easily the least trans.

29. An American Crime (2007)

Movie: 1/10
Elliot: 2/10
Total: 1.5/10

This is a brutal movie based on the brutal story of Sylvia Likens. If you haven’t seen this movie and don’t know about Sylvia Likens, I would recommend not seeing the movie and not reading the entire Wikipedia page about her. (I, unfortunately, did both.) There’s nothing trans about this movie, but this is just one of many very brutal entries in Elliot’s filmography and I do find it interesting that they were so often filling roles where they were abused. Trans people in real life often face abuse prior to transition because vulnerability is read into our difference — it’s interesting to see that potentially play out in casting.

28. Love That Boy (2003)

Movie: 1/10
Elliot: 2/10
Total: 1.5/10

Even watching this through an early 2000s indie lens, I just couldn’t get past the conceit of a 22 year old girl falling in love with a 15 year old boy. Elliot plays an age appropriate person also in love with that boy. It’s a small part and not especially trans except in the way they always feel trans.

27. The Stone Angel (2007)

Movie: 1/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 2/10

Elliot is on the poster for this adaptation of what I’m told is an oft-read book in Canadian public schools. But they’re barely in it! The marketing people were probably just trying to capitalize on Juno, because while I believe it was shot beforehand, it was released right after. Their character is presented as feminine but they do complain that their mom used to make them wear sashes and bows. Also their future mother-in-law hates them which feels vaguely trans.

26. Super (2010)

Movie: 2/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 2.5/10

I know James Gunn’s breakout has defenders but I really loathed its gratuitous violence and general amorality. It’s self-aware, but is it self-aware enough? I’d argue no. Elliot plays a tomboy who works at a comic book store. Despite having to use gay as an insult (lol 2010), be really ableist, and — I’m so sorry — rape Rainn Wilson, they’re easily the best part of the movie. Anything about superheroes is going to feel a little trans even if it’s bad.

25. Ghost Cat (2004)

Movie: 2/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 2.5/10

One of two early Elliot Canadian kids movies about fun ghosts! His character loves cats, has a crush on the older boy who also volunteers at the animal shelter, and wears a cool brown leather jacket. I guess this movie isn’t that trans but it’s a good leather jacket.

24. Flatliners (2017)

Movie: 2/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 2.5/10

Elliot’s most recent movie is about a bunch of med students with guilt and a death wish. I don’t recommend watching this no matter how much you like Elliot, Kiersey Clemons, and Diego Luna — but guilt and death wish are unfortunately both trans.

23. Going for Broke (2003)

Movie: 1/10
Elliot: 4/10
Total: 2.5/10

Most actors have to be in at least a few mediocre TV movies and this one about gambling addiction is a real slog. But extra points for Elliot’s character dying his hair and becoming rebellious while being the most responsible member of the family. That’s a trans combo! There’s also a scene where he wants to wear jeans and his mom wants him to wear a skirt.

22. Inception (2010)

Movie: 4/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 3.5/10

Because this is a big budget movie made by a guy whose understanding of gender is men grunt and women die, Elliot is forced to wear a lot of makeup in this one. He’s also not really a character and is mostly just around to ask for exposition. But the trans person not being well-developed and just providing exposition honestly checks out?? I’m being snarky, but the truth is Inception is still really good and the movie being about “pure creation” feels trans to me. Like if we can cheat architecture, we can certainly cheat assigned gender, right? Tom Hardy is a hot blonde woman at one point so I’d say yes.

21. Homeless to Harvard (2003)

Movie: 3/10
Elliot: 4/10
Total: 3.5/10

Another TV movie, this one based on the life of Liz Murray. It’s a bit better due to Thora Birch and a bit more trans due to themes of being an outcast and overcoming adversity. Elliot plays her sibling and is only in the movie in the beginning but he’s wearing big baggy clothes and is the responsible one in the family.

20. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Movie: 4/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 3.5/10

19. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

Movie: 5/10
Elliot: 2/10
Total: 3.5/10

Despite being made by two of the worst people in Hollywood — and being two of the worst entries in the franchise — it’s impossible for X-Men movies not to feel trans. Elliot’s Kitty Pryde is femme and mostly just a love interest in The Last Stand, despite being able to walk through walls. They’re in Days of Future Past even less, but it’s cool to look at the movies side-by-side to see Elliot’s evolution. Even though they’re still playing the same character and they’re years from coming out, they seem so much more comfortable on-screen in 2014 than they did in 2006.

18. Pit Pony (1997)

Movie: 5/10
Elliot: 2/10
Total: 3.5/10

Elliot’s first movie is about a little boy who is forced to work in a Novia Scotia coal mine in the early 20th century. Elliot plays his loud sibling who is sad they don’t get to see their brother as much anymore. They’re not in it much of the movie but the whole thing is about striking! Collective action is trans! This was turned into a show that Elliot was also on, but I haven’t watched it so I cannot comment on its quality nor its transness.

17. The Cured (2017)

Movie: 5/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 4/10

This is a fascinating entry in the zombie movie subgenre, forgoing the usual outbreak plot for something far more complex. The zombie epidemic has already devastated Ireland — but now many of the zombies have been cured and have to face life as second class citizens haunted by memories of the harm they caused. Elliot plays a straight mom who was never a zombie but they are the number one ally to the cured and being a number one ally is a great step to being trans. Because the former zombies actually did commit harm, I find this movie works better not as an allegory for queer people, but as an allegory for those in our lives who don’t accept us. Can we forgive friends and family who didn’t see our humanity? Can we continue to see theirs?

16. To Rome with Love (2012)

Movie: 2/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 4/10

Elliot has called this Woody Allen film the biggest regret of his career. (It’s worth noting this was made before Dylan Farrow’s letter when just about every white actor was working with him — actors such as Emma Stone, Kristen Stewart, and Kate Winslet worked with him after.) I could only stomach rewatching Elliot’s section and God is this awful!! It’s horrifying that as a teenager I couldn’t see the grossness of Allen’s movies. But what’s wild is Elliot’s character feels really trans?? Woody Allen’s attempt to create a sexist stereotype accidentally resulted in someone who feels pretty queer. They’re bisexual and just got out of a relationship with a gay guy who they thought they could change! Both of these things are played as jokes but if you ignore the musings of Jesse Eisenberg and Alec Baldwin, Elliot’s character just feels queer, trans, and too good for this movie.

15. Wilby Wonderful (2004)

Movie: 3/10
Elliot: 5/10
Total: 4/10

Something I learned doing this project is there are a lot of lowkey Canadian movies about really dark things. This ensemble dramedy — co-starring Sandra Oh! — features Elliot as a teen who spends a lot of time making out with his boyfriend and slut shaming his mom who owns a café. There’s a moment where a homophobe talks begrudgingly about where the queers hang out and Elliot perks up. Combine that with a scene where he gets femmed up and looks uncertain in a mirror — and his confused shame-filled relationship to sex — and I’d say it all feels pretty trans.

14. Tallulah (2016)

Movie: 5/10
Elliot: 3/10
Total: 4/10

One of the best parts of watching every Elliot Page movie is it also means watching a lot of Allison Janney movies! The two of them have such good chemistry and their dynamic is at its best here. This movie is trans because it starts with Elliot living in a van with their boyfriend and ends up being all about chosen family. There’s also a moment where someone calls their character Lucy and they say no their name is Lu.

13. Peacock (2010)

Movie: 8/10
Elliot: 2/10
Total: 5/10

This isn’t my least favorite movie on this list, but it’s probably the worst. It’s like someone decided to remake Psycho but make it boring. Yes this is offensive, yes this is bleak, but worst of all… it’s dull! Cillian Murphy isn’t technically playing a trans woman here, but most movies that play into the violent transfeminine trope aren’t explicit about the character’s transness. I’m super curious if the genderqueerness is what drew Elliot to this movie, even subconsciously. And, for the record, I don’t begrudge their involvement at all — we all made mistakes a decade before transitioning.

12. My Days of Mercy (2017)

Movie: 4/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 5/10

Despite the movie’s queerness, there isn’t much here that’s textually trans. But like Tallulah, there’s just something about these later indie movies that Elliot produced that feel trans. Elliot seems more comfortable and more himself on screen and it’s very easy to read his transness on his characters. This is a morally complicated movie but I think it’s really good and has one of Elliot’s best performances.

11. Freeheld (2015)

Movie: 2/10
Elliot: 9/10
Total: 5.5/10

For me, transness is not just about gender identity — it’s also about political identity. Trans people hold all sorts of beliefs and act all sorts of ways, but if I’m ranking art by my definition of transness then politics are a factor. This weepy melodrama released at the tail end of the gay marriage movement is what people mean when they say a movie is gay but not queer. Elliot’s role as a butch lesbian lets them be truer to their own gender identity and they’re so comfortable and lovely on-screen. But they’re the only good part. This movie is filled with pro-cop propaganda and shows policework around drugs with the complexity of Law and Order. It creates heroes out of several cis male characters — including Michael Shannon as a straight cop — and is the kind of palatable gay cinema that does more harm than good. Which queer lives do we care about in politics and on screen? Which queer lives do we ignore?

10. Into the Forest (2015)

Movie: 5/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 5.5/10

Written and directed by lesbian filmmaking icon Patricia Rozema, this understated post-apocalyptic tale was tough to watch before the pandemic and is tougher to watch now. Elliot’s character begins as a self-centered teenager who throughout the movie is forced to quickly grow up and become the responsible member of the family — a theme in his work! As his sister (played by Evan Rachel Wood) begins to fill the mother archetype, Elliot becomes the father. He gets tougher, more butch, and starts wearing flannel. The movie is all about surviving under impossible circumstances and with its two queer leads and queer director the movie just feels very queer and trans.

9. Touchy Feely (2013)

Movie: 7/10
Elliot: 4/10
Total: 5.5/10

This is another one that’s not textually very trans but the vibes feel very trans. The great Lynn Shelton’s low-key dramedy about a massage therapist who develops an aversion to touch and her dentist brother who becomes a healer is all about intimacy, personal growth, and unlikely connections. Elliot plays the dentist’s child who lives with him and works for him but wants to leave. He’s obsessed with his aunt’s boyfriend and the culmination of their relationship is so tender in Shelton’s directorial care.

8. The East (2013)

Movie: 6/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 6/10

Sorry but ecoterrorism is trans. I cannot imagine a group of ecoterrorists that are all cis. I’m sorry I just can’t. And here Elliot’s vaguely queer character is joined by another ecoterrorist named Luca, who is beaten up by the feds for being gender-nonconforming. Elliot’s character is also the child of a man who works for one of the bad companies they’re trying to take down, and Elliot meets up with him as part of their scheme. Their dad says they look beautiful because Elliot is dressed femme and the energy is just very trans child meeting up with a disapproving parent — in addition to one being an ecoterrorist and the other being the true cause of the terror.

7. Marion Bridge (2002)

Movie: 7/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 6.5/10

Molly Parker is so good in our next lowkey Canadian indie about very serious things. (This is written by Daniel MacIvor, the writer/director of Wilby Wonderful.) Elliot’s character is introduced in all denim smoking a cigarette. He’s reading Jane Eyre. He runs away from home. There’s lots and lots of trauma. The whole thing is about returning to estranged family. Trans trans trans trans.

6. Hard Candy (2005)

Movie: 7/10
Elliot: 8/10
Total: 7.5/10

Many people’s first introduction to Elliot, this mouse-and-cat rape/revenge tale deepens with less obvious gender lines. Elliot’s character begins the movie playacting girliness, but once he’s begun his plot of revenge, the performance falls away. The intention is probably for him to go from a Lolita-figure to a more grounded portrait of a girl, but watching Elliot now, he feels like a vengeful trans boy, furious at the way the world treats women and furious at the way the world treats him. The scene when he wears his target’s clothes is especially sharp. It feels like he’s experimenting with going from prey to predator only to repeatedly retreat in discomfort at this new role. He doesn’t want to be violent. He doesn’t want to switch roles. He wants these roles to disappear altogether. But that’s not the world we live in. So, for now, he’ll put on these acts — girl, predator — so other people can safely be themselves.

5. Mouth to Mouth (2005)

Movie: 8/10
Elliot: 8/10
Total: 8/10

Even before Elliot gets their head shaved on camera, this rough-around-the-edges indie feels trans. Elliot plays an angsty runaway who joins a street cult called SPARK. They have a general dissatisfaction that makes them the perfect target for this group. Post-childhood but pre-X-Men, this movie feels like it’s capturing a moment when Elliot was coming into their own before Hollywood course-corrected them back to an attempted heteronormativity. It’s fitting then that the movie is all about running away from home only to run away from the new home that claimed you. It takes most of us a few tries to really find our communities, to really find ourselves.

4. Juno (2007)

Movie: 7/10
Elliot: 9/10
Total: 8/10

If you weren’t a teenager in 2007, I’m not sure you’ll ever be able to understand the unique way so many of us latched onto this movie. The soundtrack! Diablo Cody’s writing! Elliot Page, Elliot Page, and, one more time, Elliot Page. It’s honestly kind of emotional to realize how trans this movie is given how much it meant to us as kids!

Let’s start with the sort of clinical way Juno loses their virginity. It shows a certain disconnect from their body, like sex is something to cross off a list, even though we’ll see they do have feelings for the person they’re having sex with. Next up, their fashion. Sure they could just be a quirky girl but I think the pipe pushes them into trans territory. Bleeker’s mom says Juno is just… different. And they really are! The women around Juno are so cis and hetero and the contrast with Juno is stark. Also the way she seeks approval from the dude adopting her baby! “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am,” Juno says. Watching the movie now, the answer seems simple enough: not a girl at all.

3. I Downloaded a Ghost (2002)

Movie: 8/10
Elliot: 10/10
Total: 9/10

“I just think it’s time you put down the Goosebumps and start to act more like a girl!”

And so begins a kids movie so trans it makes all the Disney princesses seem cis. Elliot plays a child obsessed with all things scary much to his mother’s chagrin. She gives him a dress and begs him not to turn this one into a costume so he gifts it to a giant model swamp creature in his horror-themed club house. He’s determined to win his school’s haunted house contest even though every year the winner is the same popular rich girl. This is a movie where the villains are the cops and rich people. And there’s literally a scene where Elliot puts on a latex skin suit to pretend to be a woman.

When Elliot accidentally gets his dad fired, he cries, “My family is being hurt because of the way I am!” He then puts on makeup and a dress during a sad montage. But then he goes back to dressing like a boy to save the day! The movie loses some points because the titular ghost is an annoying cis dude comedian — like does Goodfellas impressions annoying — but this is still a delightful kids movie about a trans boy learning to be himself and making a great haunted house along the way!

2. The Tracey Fragments (2007)

Movie: 9/10
Elliot: 10/10
Total: 9.5/10

Out of all Elliot’s movies, this split screen indie drama is most improved by his transition. Upon release, most people thought it was an interesting but failed experiment. It’s less about plot and more about vibes and as a story about a damaged teenage cis girl, the vibes aren’t quite enough. But as a portrait of a trans teen it’s fascinating. And there’s plenty on-screen to support that reading besides its star.

Elliot plays Tracey Berkowitz, called The Titless Wonder by one of his many bullies. He’s a depressed outcast with a shitty homelife and a shittier time at school. He has a crush on a boy who wears makeup and his psychiatrist is literally a trans woman who urges him to explain to his parents how he’s feeling. When he helps a woman on the bus, she says “thank you, man” and when he uses the girls bathroom, another bully jokes about whether he is a “he or a she.” During the sex scene, he dissociates — picturing a horse among other things — and it all feels very trans and very gay.

The fractured style seems to capture something really true about his sense of self and experience of the world. At the end, he says, “My name is Tracey Berkowitz, just a normal girl.” He repeats that last phrase, unconvinced. Not normal. Not a girl. Just a confused teen trying to survive in a cruel world.

1. Whip It (2010)

Movie: 10/10
Elliot: 10/10
Total: 10/10

It’s one of my dreams to make a coming of age movie about a trans teen who never realizes they’re trans. But in a sense one already exists. It’s called Whip It.

When this movie came out, people complained that it wasn’t gay. But Elliot’s character falls for a femme-y douchebag rock star and if that’s not closeted gay transmasc energy I don’t know what is. (At one point they even swap clothes!) The whole movie is about Elliot’s character’s struggle between the girly pageants their mom wants them to do and roller derby where they feel more like themself. So many of us found conflict with our families long before understanding why. Maybe it was roller derby, maybe it was theatre, maybe it was how we dressed or how we acted — even if we didn’t have the language, we knew we were different. It’s an experience so many of us have and this is the rare chance to see it on-screen. It’s fitting that when someone tells their mom they’re doing roller derby, they say, “Thanks for outing me.”

It’s okay if you don’t read Whip It as trans. It’s okay if this whole exercise bothers you as a cis woman who grew up connecting to Juno and Hard Candy and all of Elliot’s other work. Maybe these readings won’t feel necessary when Elliot has 30 more movies they’ve made fully as themself, when all the talented trans actors who started their careers as themselves get the roles they deserve. But until then I’m grateful to have Whip It. I’m grateful to have Elliot Page. I’m grateful to have a trans actor who has already given us so much, and is sure to give us so much more.

How To Choose A Halloween Costume

Editor’s Note: The following includes mentions of suicidal thoughts and mental health crisis

When you’re a child.

You know what’s cool? Terminator 2 and the combo of an awesome, massive, plastic gun, a faux-leather jacket, and some shades. A couple years later, ask your big brother to do your face paint like The Crow. Instead he’ll paint your face like Peter Criss from Kiss – a cat. Throw a fit because Halloween is ruined.

When You’re 12.

Take a deep breath: you’ve just moved to a new town for sixth grade, and your next door neighbor, who’s in your class, invited you to play football with him at lunch. They seem like cool kids.

When they invite you to go trick or treating, accept! For some reason – maybe because you’re a weird loner nerd – decide to dress as Charlie Chaplin. All the kids love Charlie Chaplin. Right? All you have to do is find a vest and cane at a thrift store and paint a Hitler-esque ‘stache on your face. The night before Halloween, however, realize you haven’t made firm plans, don’t know where your new friends live, and it’s the nineties.

One friend will call your house and leave a voicemail, giving his address and a time to meet him. Unfortunately, he mumbles. What did he say his address was? Your dad won’t be able to make it out either.

On Halloween night, get all dressed up despite the fact you have nowhere to go. Get your dad to drive you around for a while looking at signs to see if you can put a street name to the mumble on the voicemail. You’ll fail. You can’t call him and figure it out – you don’t have his house phone number.

Go trick-or-treating alone for a few minutes before the loneliness and disappointment crush you. It was your last chance – next year, you’ll be too old.

When You’re 17.

You’re on the social committee in high school and Halloween falls on a weekday. Plan a weeklong “spirit week” culminating in a costume contest at lunch.

Your girlfriend will suggest you try a gender swap couple’s costume. She’ll put on one of your polos and a pair of your baggy jeans. Wear one of her skirts and let her manipulate your hair into what today you’d understand to be Bantu knots. There’s something thrilling about dressing “like a girl,” but don’t attempt to put your finger on it.

When You’re 18.

West Hollywood is only about 20 minutes from your college, and apparently that’s the place to go. You’re an overambitious freshman taking too many classes, so this will be a last-minute affair. Take a quick thrift store trip and you’ll be set – Risky Business. You’ve never seen the movie, but black sunglasses and an oversized white button-down shirt is all you need. Wear basketball shorts under it, though. You’re not yet confident enough for tighty-whities.

The beautiful teens and twenty-somethings in WeHo will take Halloween to another level. The women will basically be wearing lingerie. The men will show off their six packs. Every costume you’ll see is “sexy.” Every person you’ll see will be drunk or high. The streets will be packed with confident young people and painted with vomit.

It will be crowded, messy, drug-fueled, and disorienting. You’ll see people making out. You’ll think you see people doing more. The smell will be nauseating. Everyone will seem like they’re having the time of their lives. Regret coming. Then regret that seeing all of these beautiful young people makes you feel inadequate in a way you can’t define. And that somehow you’ve become a fun-hating, socially awkward prude. And that no costume can disguise this.

When you’re 22.

You’re young, newly single, think you could probably be queer, and the world is your oyster! You’re also introverted, a nerd, and not totally ready for drag.

Why not try a somewhat-accessible spin on a classic? Genderqueer Mario it is; find a red cap, red tee, and a denim overall dress thing at the thrift store you spotted on one of your sheepish, halting dips into the “women’s” section. Use construction paper to make an “M” for the cap and, to the degree you can, grow out a mustache.

By this point you’ll have gone out on two dates with boys. The first one had a Prince Albert piercing. You were surprised at how everything tasted – and realized quickly you weren’t drunk enough to continue. This hurt his feelings and you rode your bike home. On the other date, you got cold feet back at his place and left while he was in the bathroom. For now, your queerness is manifested in polyamory – maybe it’ll take time to work up to actually dating boys. Or maybe neither of them were the right kind of guy.

Go into non-monogamy with gusto: try sort-of dating three different women at the same time! It feels exhilarating and exhausting. So far it’s gone off without a hitch. Maybe this is what felt “missing?” Why you had to break up with your college girlfriend of 3+ years and go out to “explore” your queerness, even though dating boys hasn’t panned out?

Arrive at the Halloween house party and see Woman You’re Dating #1. She is dressed like a Sriracha bottle. Chat with her, and across the room make eye contact with Woman #2, who is dressed like a constellation. Smile and wave awkwardly. She’ll begin to walk toward you. Attempt to maneuver your way out of the first conversation and into the inevitable second – until you see Woman #3, whose costume you can’t make out from this angle. This will be … too much. Finagle your way out of both conversations and then out of the party, which you stayed at for less than 15 minutes. Non-monogamy is terrifying. And not for you. So then… what is for you?

As you get ready to bike home, your ex will call. She just wants to talk. Meet up at a burrito bar and she will already have had a double margarita. She isn’t wearing a costume.

Make small talk and “catch up.” She’ll finish her second double margarita. When she orders a third, tell her that you don’t think it’s a good idea. She’ll drunkenly disagree and start choking down the last one. Instruct the server to cut her off.

Pay the bill, call a taxi, and take her home. Walk her into her house and down the stairs to her bedroom – and then immediately into the bathroom. Hold her hair and pat her back while she sobs and vomits. Afterward, tuck her into bed. She’ll wail and hold you and try to kiss you and say she would do anything, just anything, if you only would take her back. She’ll ask you why. You won’t be sure anymore. She’ll ask if it was worth it. You won’t know.

When you’re 24.

Your partner is Russian and is going as a Pussy Riot member – a pretty simple balaclava and dress pairing. You’ll finally be ready to wear a dress in public, and since this is a momentous occasion, go all out.

You don’t yet own a bra, and haven’t yet braved the women’s underwear section anywhere. Your partner is much smaller than you, so you can’t borrow one. Instead, devise a contraption with bags of rice strapped around your chest. Find a purple wrap dress at the thrift store and get some cheap tights. Make a dozen little snake heads with Sculpey. Buy some thick wire from the hardware store.

Wrap your hair, which has grown out to the longest it’s ever been, in green and brown yarn and feed the wire through it, then attach the snake heads to the ends. Your partner will do your makeup – this isn’t the first time you’ve worn makeup, but it’s the first time you’ve really worn makeup. Voilá.

Medusa.

It’s just a costume, and it doesn’t really fit. But it really fits.

When you’re 25-28.

From now on, every Halloween costume will be femme. For a while, they’ll still be costumes. But eventually they’ll be extensions of the self you are in months that aren’t October. Finally realize – after literal years – that you aren’t a gay man, or non-monogamous, or a non-binary person. You’re a gay woman. This is thrilling. And terrifying.

Dress as Hermione one year. Amethyst another. Catwoman. Go to parties. Meet a cute woman dressed as Roxane from A Goofy Movie. A cute woman with a meme costume that you’re Not Online Enough to understand. A handful of other Steven Universe characters, other Griffyndors, some Harley Quinns and Poison Ivys. Make out with a few of them. You’ll typically go home alone.

When you’re 29.

In September, your friend will take her own life. Quit your career as a high school teacher and spend a month on the couch. You won’t have the energy to even notice that it’s October, except that the 25th would have been her birthday. Try and fail to follow her into the dark. Spend a few days locked up in the psych ward, and then a few more weeks on a couch – this time your dad’s.

She was the first person to empower you to wear a dress in public on a non-holiday. You didn’t get a chance to celebrate Halloween together, but she dressed like it was Halloween every day. It would have been epic.

Halloween will come and go. Spend the weeks before and after, at your dad’s house, wearing the costume of a daughter who isn’t on the precipice so as not to worry him. The costume of someone who just had a momentary lapse. Who just took her friend’s death a bit too hard but will be fine.

The costume of someone whose father’s concern and skepticism doesn’t hurt because he’s just being a cautious, careful parent. Of someone whose stepmom’s makeup advice doesn’t hurt because she’s genuinely trying to help. Of someone who doesn’t, upon considering their feedback, feel like she’ll never be taken seriously. Of someone who doesn’t wish she’d succeeded.

In your early thirties.

You’re not really into partying anymore – so what’s the point of putting effort into a costume? When you get the opportunity, go to the Kim Petras concert just weeks after her instant-classic, Halloween-themed, spooky album Turn Off The Light is released. Some people wear costumes to the concert, but don’t bother.

It’ll be the loudest concert you’ll have ever been to. Luckily, one of the ushers will be handing out free ear plugs – get some. Part of you feels like you’re missing out on the authentic concert experience. Maybe all those years of sitting on the speakers in the front row at emo concerts as a kid means that by now, your ears are busted. Or maybe it’s just because you no longer feel the need to suffer in order to have fun. Or be alive.

Bring your girlfriend to the concert. When you have a girlfriend, by the way, try suggesting a couple’s costume – but don’t push it. Some years you won’t wear a costume at all. Most years you won’t go out. Where would you go? To a loud bar filled with young, sexy people? A sweaty, dirty house party that’s so crowded you can’t think? And then the pandemic will happen. Stay in and make Jack O’ Lanterns that fall apart by the next morning. Concerts are better than parties anyway.

You went to see the band Fences once, on Halloween. Realize this was more than 10 years ago. You were a boy then, confused, stressed, finding yourself, harming yourself. You didn’t expect to live this long. Didn’t expect that a cozy holiday in, cutting pumpkins with a loving partner, was in the cards. Or that you even desired that – quiet, domesticity, love – so strongly it hurt. Maybe that’s why you turned that hurt inward. Except on Halloween, when you could be someone else. And for one night, at least that hurt was temporarily lifted.

“Halloween is Gay Christmas!” Kim Petras yells from the stage. You’ve never understood the phrase – Christmas is about giving gifts, about appreciating your loved ones, about celebrating rebirth and fresh starts. Right? But Halloween is about obscuring your true self behind a mask.

Unless it’s about giving yourself a gift. Appreciating the hidden beloved inside you by allowing her to break out, sniff the crisp Autumn air, and take a deep breath once a year. So that she can grow until she’s no longer the costume. Until she’s too big to keep inside. Maybe Halloween’s about celebrating that nearly dying gave you the courage to allow yourself to be reborn. To start fresh. That you weren’t obscuring your true self behind a mask on Halloween, you were doing it the rest of the year.

This year.

There’s no more pressure. No more crisis. Dress as Ms. Grotke from the cartoon Recess – a liberal teacher challenging norms in her own way. You’re not a teacher anymore, but it’s the closest that you’ve ever gone to simply dressing as yourself. It will feel comfortable – maybe because you’re finally, truly comfortable in your own skin for the first time in your life.

Halloween costumes are traditionally scary – ghosts, goblins, political figures. Look back at the last 20 years and realize how genuinely terrifying it is that you spent so long hating yourself, trying to escape, seeking. That you frequently went an entire year wearing a costume and only got a reprieve on that one glorious October day – which ended up turning out like shit. What a mind fuck.

Realize how terrifying it is that stifling yourself like that nearly killed you. That you nearly killed you. You know what’s scarier than the killer being inside the house? The killer being inside your own body. Inside your own mind. And she’s still there, stalking, haunting, creeping around – she gets weaker and weaker every day, but she’s still there. Whispering. A killer you can’t reason with because of her murderous irrationality. And can’t kill, because, well, you are her.

Test out the cheap earrings and necklace you bought, and the green dress you already had. Looks perfect. Go outside and smell the crisp autumn air. Buy a little gourd from Trader Joe’s. Take your girlfriend to a pumpkin patch and corn maze. You’ve finally got a couple’s costume – she’s going to be Ms. Frizzle. Gay teacher love! Maybe this year you’ll go to some kind of gathering – you and your partner, and nearly 90% of your city, are vaccinated – or maybe you’ll just stay in.

Either way, for maybe first time, this year Halloween won’t be a manifestation of an existential crisis. It’ll just be fun. Finally.

The Trans Body as a Work of Art

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I have been a burlesque performer for over a decade, and began before my physical transition. In the beginning, constructing my acts always involved an artificial silhouette and never a stripping out of a binder. My stage name is Lewd Alfred Douglas, a nod to Lord Alfred Douglas; a figure of queer Victorian scandal whose most lasting legacy was writing “the love that dare not speak its name.” Despite the best efforts of some, the phrase remains a lodestone for love that is considered profane.

People tend to understand the physical transition of a transgender man as female to male—and all that they assume it entails. A transition from femininity to masculinity. A transition from softness to hardness. Tender emotional openness to stark stoicism. Sensuality to functionality. All these manufactured opposites that have been piled on to the strict and untenable idea of a binary. My physical transition was none of these things. Above all else, my body transitioned from a source of pain to a source of pleasure. My burlesque became more and more flamboyant.

As a teenager, I knew that I was in pain. I knew that embracing and expressing my maleness would ease that pain. I knew that physical transition would also bring help for that pain. But I didn’t know exactly what else it would do.

I eased my pain by wrapping my body tight in suffocating bandages. On stage, I never showed the skin of my chest, even during a striptease. I took great comfort in a kind of Victorian standoffishness, the artificial silhouette of arched shoulders and corseted waists, going so far as to enjoy the feeling of tightly buttoned spats limiting the mobility of my ankles. All this I perceived as pleasurable to me, because it staunched the flow of pain, and gave me a sense of control. I depended on a Victorian sexlessness which limited what was comfortable for me to do in bed with my partners. This is just the way I am, I thought. And it was true, for the time being.

After my physical transition, and most remarkably after my top surgery, my maleness was not just better expressed on the outside. It was like being shown a whole new wing of a house you didn’t know was there. My body was not just relieved of pain, it was an undiscovered country. Contrary to those narrow opposites of the sensual female sexual energy and the aggressive male one—I discovered that being closer to my maleness took me to the full potential of my sensuality.

When my scars were still relatively fresh, I used makeup to cover them, thinking they would distract from the character I was trying to present; but I stopped almost immediately. Instead, I created characters for whom scars would be relevant. Soon, my own scars were imperceivable under stage lights and those characters needed scars drawn back on. Life imitating art, imitating life, imitating art.

Hidden histories always provide inspiration for creating a new dance. Looking for trans male ancestors in the post-Christian and post-colonial eras always leads to stories of the violated and murdered. Even triumphant stories of adventure and survival are framed as stoic and sexless. Those who are known to have sexual partners are never seen as sensational. Perhaps these grandfathers wore the heavy trappings of binary maleness for the purposes of their safety. Perhaps that is just the way they were, and these are the stories that survived. Perhaps it is the unforgiving hand of history through a cis lens. With these ancestors, it is easy to believe one is destined for a quiet and functional life of proving your worth as a man with grim, expressionless tenacity. To me, this would have been a life of suffering. Because as surely as I know I am male, I also know that I was not put on this earth to be functional. I am exquisitely useless, driven to decoration and poetry in all its forms. I have no strength to wield, no courage to prove, and no field to conquer.

After my own personal transition was complete, my expression through performance art changed utterly. Instead of tightly corseted automatons, I play satyrs, sorcerers, pirates, sword dancers, forest spirits. My body changed from something I strapped down, suffocated, and hid away, to something I unveiled like a new work of art, before cheering crowds. I am rewarded in more ways than I can count for the art I make with my own body, and not simply from cis people’s approval or rooms of paying strangers. Trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people have rewarded me with their confessions: that my performance unlocked something inside them, or told them they were not alone, or showed them something they always wished to see. This is my loving manifestation of what all my ancestors deserved—not simply tolerance, but unbridled celebration.

The perception I had was that it was possible for me to feel pleasure in spite of my body. Now, I feel pleasure because of it. It is my unique maleness that I have fought for, created, discovered, and always had.

Mirrors and Makeouts: Finding Trans Pleasure

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The tequila-soaked air breezed through the dark expanse of the bar and past our sweating bodies. I held her gaze for a second, and extended a slightly damp bar napkin with my name and phone number written on it. She pulled out a battered phone, slowly entering my number and then texting me. Time felt sticky as the bar floor, the humid roll of conversation from the other patrons slowly encasing us. The seconds trickled by, and then I left. A week later, she invited me to our first and only date.

I wore a cropped plastic jacket hoping to look like leather. She wore the real thing and stood a full six inches above me in her boots. We strolled into the bar that was next door to where we met. The barbacks gave her the kind of affection one usually reserves for family. She told me about living abroad, squatting in beautifully rotting buildings, and doing sex work.

A sound, like a lightbulb’s fuse straining until it popped, went off in my head. She was the first trans sex worker I met, a dawning realization that I rolled around in my head and tried to stifle with bites of roti. And when I asked her if she missed Europe, she giggled like a schoolgirl, and confessed to the dilapidated decadence of her life there. I was disarmed by her candor, how easily she led me down the hallway of knowing her. My transness, my life in general, was something I kept in a cage close to my heart. Her openness, her gentle hand guiding me through our conversation, felt like such a seductive honesty.

I drove her home, to a gorgeous Victorian home in the Mission district of San Francisco. She said she would have invited me in, but her cousin was couch-surfing. We kissed in my car, our hands finding leverage and pulling each other closer. The liquor we drank still hid behind her teeth, and I greedily sought it out. I wanted to find out why she felt so untouchably real. How could her gender, in the way that trans women so deftly craft, teeter on the edge of act, advertisement, and personal amusement? And how could I ever attempt to balance all of that?

After our first date, I would intermittently text and wonder and wait, while weeks went by without a response. A few months later, I went on a date with someone else, who was also seeing her. They assured me that she lost her phone on a trip to Berlin and had no intention of ghosting me. I was devastated, in so many small ways. The minor tragedy of how first dates often are heartbreaking, the unspoken promise of a horizon never to materialize. But with her, the sensation of loss felt distinctive. It left the sour metallic taste of hangover in my mouth, even weeks later. Knowing her, even for that brief moment, felt like knowing a possible future.

I feel aglow in that same revelatory hum when I think of that date, the way kissing a girl with the tiniest amount of stubble cracked something open in me. Even the puffy perk of her breasts under a tank top felt like seeing my body from another angle. My body has, for as long as I can remember, felt like an abstract and oversexualized object.

Within the brief eternity of our car makeout, in touching her body, I felt my shame begin to melt. In desiring her emotionally and physically, I was able to desire my own openness.

I often think about desire as a mirror, a crucial tool for both acceptance and celebration of the self. And this act of desire, as both outward and inward work, has become profoundly more important for accepting my body while doing sex work. Being a trans woman who markets her body for sex has taught me so much about the political position of the reflected, about being that object of desire trapped in the mirror. The first images I was given of trans women’s bodies came associated with ridicule or horror or both. Hiding myself away felt less like an option and more like an expectation the world had for me—having partners who desired me only behind closed doors further confirmed this. When I posted a picture in lingerie, one of my first tentative steps towards being publicly desired, a high school classmate messaged me that I was “brave” for not hiding myself. But in excavating the shame that I have been taught to feel toward bodies like mine, I am leaving open space to better find joy in trans embodiment.

To see my body as something worthy of lavishing praise upon, to see my body as something desirable enough to charge for, I need to hold the joyous truth of my transsexual body close to my heart. That moonlit night in the Mission changed the depth of what I could feel for my own beautiful transness. Seeing a future that goes far beyond destigmatizing and actively acknowledges the powerful joy that beautiful and unruly bodies can provide, is one I am always moving toward.

That woman and I run into each other occasionally now: at all night raves in locations only searchable by map coordinates, at play parties while trusted friends joyously fuck each other, and at her bar job where we first met. Seeing her across a crowded patio, I still feel that same hum of fuses all lighting at once. And while we haven’t ever had that second date, what I was able to take from our time spent together has been invaluable.

Today, I am surrounded by a constellation of incredible trans workers, all of us standing in those double mirrors, desiring one another. The pandemic has only thrown the power of this communal desire into starker relief. Trans sex workers helped to show me that, rather than allowing the most readily present and dehumanizing narrative to consume us, we can celebrate the multitude of ways we experience our bodies being wanted as an ever-providing engine of self-love.

100 Things to Try When I Have a Vagina

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Of all the unexpected changes I encountered during my transition the most surreal had to be transforming a part of my body. I began my transition in 2018 at the age of 31. If you’d believe it, until then I hadn’t the faintest notion of my identity. I was relatively happy in my body and felt myself a satisfied, sexual person even before surgery.

In hindsight, it was all a little formulaic: privacy, porn, and pleasure. I would engross myself in the pleasure those women must be experiencing. Only later would I realize it wasn’t that I wanted to be with those women, I wanted to be them.

Before I endured my surgical crucible, my excited energy inspired me to start a list: 100 Things to Try When I Have a Vagina.

The entries were mundane at first.

1. Wear a bikini bottom without worry.

2. Ride a bike. (I had hoped for relief from squashed testicles, but I didn’t realize quite how connected I’d be with anything I sat on!)

3. Try a ‘rabbit’ vibrator. (It turned out to be a quick favorite!)

While many of my entries were things I would literally insert inside me, I soon realized others were yearnings to experience pleasure with my new body in the open:

13. Sex on the beach!

29. In a tent!

33. In the backseat of a car!

Heck, even #35, in a public restroom, stands out to me now as less sexual, and more about the freedom to connect with others.

By some miracle, my originally scheduled date fell between waves of COVID. Before I could even get to #69, surgery was upon me. I’d get my chance to finish by a frightful and ironic doctors’ order: two months of celibacy.

My journey in the year since has been full of joyful surprises and serendipitous discoveries. While I don’t have room to share them all, I hope you enjoy a few of the “100 Things” I’ve tried.

6. Find my G-spot, 7. And make it sing.

My new experience of penetration was something entirely different from what I experienced before. As swelling faded and my pussy healed, clinical requirements to frequently dilate eventually led to feelings of sexual fullness. Even without movement, it just felt good to have something inside me. (Which is a bonus, as I would spend nearly 12 hours a week in such a state during early recovery!)

17. “Go Fuck Myself”

One of my most pressing concerns leading up to surgery was preserving my former anatomy. Despite my best efforts and multiple attempts, I wasn’t able to “clone” myself.. It had been over a year on hormones. and my self-confidence had taken a dip. My sexuality was starting to emerge–I knew that I desired a feeling of fullness, but only wishful projection and a prescription for Viagra would have to suffice.

As luck would have it, I met a local caster with experience making custom intimate molds. I’ll never forget the experience of a stranger slopping and corralling casting mud over my genitals until it hardened into an amorphous blob. The mud was cold, earthy and grey. We made inconspicuous small talk, all while I desperately tried to squeeze out any last bits of courage my soft, feminized member could muster.

After my surgery, I received my clone, and I was immediately struck by how alien it looked. “Did you make any alterations?” I inquired. “No, it’s a perfect copy of your former self.” I rushed home for time alone. It was striking to experience myself, finally comfortable in my own skin.

4. Have a clit orgasm

You should know healing is a spectrum, not a set of milestones. This was made clear to me after three months, when I discovered that what I thought was my clitoris was in fact just its hood. As my swelling diminished, I saw her peeking out and I quickly learned the difference! There beneath lay the most gorgeous little nub, shiny and taut like the tissue of my glans I remember from before. She was now outstandingly sensitive, and masturbation became an exercise in control.

Where before I could give in to my pleasure and ejaculate quickly, the feeling of orgasm now took time and patience to achieve. My efforts would be rewarded. What once felt like a splash, was now a raging tide. Instead of rushing out of me, I felt that same hot ecstasy wash over me from head to toe, feeding my soul.

??. Squirting!?

The most dubious item on my list was squirting. I’d heard it was possible, but I tried to temper my expectations before surgery. Never did I expect to have my own experience to contribute.

Little did I know, my sexual awakening would present a whole myriad of new orgasms to me, two of which included squirting!

I spent hours pondering “what, where and how”. Although I no longer had testicles, coming to an orgasm left me notably wetter and sweetly odorous. As it turns out, I still possessed fluid-producing tissues, further enhanced by years of hormone therapy. Having been satisfied I wasn’t alone in my experience, I settled that it didn’t really matter, physiology was fascinating and it was a joy to explore. Not only does my body produce ejaculate (thanks clit!), but it was possible to squirt-squirt with just the right stimulation (thanks G-spot!).

101. Love Thyself

Most strikingly, COVID and “100 Things” gave me the space to develop a relationship with myself. At the outset of my journey I was searching for somebody to love. I spent countless hours trying to figure out who I needed to be for someone else. Isolation directed me inward, and in solitude I was forced to reckon with the possibility of loving myself both inside and out. I learned to spend that same time on myself and suddenly felt myself steady against life’s ebbs and flows. Finally, I could thrive. Finally, I saw me.

This can not be overstated: learning to love myself first and foremost was one of the most important lessons I learned undertaking “100 Things.”

Everyone’s transition is different, but I know for me July 1st, 2020, was the day mine was complete.

Change Is Magic: On Cooking and Bodies

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Over lockdown, we accidentally perfected vegan fried “chicken” sandwiches.

You start by making a seitan—kneading vital wheat gluten with a chicken-free stock, flavor enhancers like nutritional yeast and liquid smoke, and then adding liquid fat a little at a time at the end to create a fatty, pull-apart texture. Roll up in tinfoil, and bake for an hour while you make a thick cashew marinade, spiked with lemon juice or apple-cider vinegar to replicate buttermilk. Soak the seitan in the cashew cream while you quick-pickle cucumber slices with salt, sugar and soy. Shred some Taiwanese cabbage and mix with egg-free mayo and homemade sweet chili sauce for a spicy coleslaw. Coat the seitan in a mix of cornstarch and cornflour, and fry until deep golden brown. Load the slaw into pillowy buns, add the picture-perfect crispy seitan, then pile high with pickles. It’s my favorite labor of love. And for months, we couldn’t share it with anyone.

My girlfriend and I love to entertain. Our main form of socializing is having friends round once or twice a week, cooking a needlessly elaborate meal, then watching anime or playing video games until someone announces they have work the next morning. During the pandemic, we swapped to sitting in parks once or twice a month, smoking weed or drinking coolers, huddled under extra sweaters in the winter chill. We were cut off from the simple act of making food with friends.

Eating together is a time-honored form of connection. There’s a reason it’s the centerpoint of so many festivals: feeding someone is offering a bit of your life to them. We spend the time and energy making something tasty, and we gift that energy to our loved ones.

Making the food together takes the connection even further. Cooking is a science—it’s combining ingredients and heat in ways that produce chemical reactions that cause maximum deliciousness. Add an acid to boiling potatoes to help them keep their shape. Put soft-boiled eggs in ice baths to stop the yolks cooking too hard. Mix flour with fat to avoid gluten development in a reverse-creamed cake.

Science fiction taught me that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. In the kitchen, my girlfriend is a witch.

Take an onion. That onion could become anything. Will we caramelize it and load it onto veggie burgers, savoring the deep sticky sweetness? Will we chop it finely and sauté with garlic, tomatoes, and basil for a pizza sauce? What if we slice part-way down, coat in batter and deep-fry to make a homemade blooming onion, turning a humble vegetable into a vibrant flower ? There’s a world of possibilities in that little globe. Cooking means deciding which spell you want to cast today.

And then you get to work, with the slicing and heating and organizing and planning (and cursing at the stove because your favorite burner mysteriously stopped working). What you end up with matters less than the steps you take to get there. Eating together with my friends isn’t what becomes most memorable; it’s the three days my girlfriend and I spend in the kitchen every year before Christmas, preparing each part of the final meal as a mini ritual. It’s crowding around the table with a bottle of wine, cracking jokes as we take it in turns to check on the waffles or flip the vegan bacon as we make a boozy brunch. It’s folding a pile of gyozas with random fillings and turning dinner into a giggly game of Russian roulette: who’s going to get the dumpling that’s just avocado?

More than that, enjoying the process of cooking reminds me that there’s beauty in change. I think of my body the same way.

Trans, after all, means “across, over, beyond.” It is a word of movement. My body does not and cannot stay the same. I gained weight during the pandemic, but it feels like a comfort blanket: a reminder to take up the room I deserve to. Personal services didn’t shut down for long here, so I gained tattoos—She-Ra’s sword, a willowy fuchsia, a falling star. My hair changed from blond to purple to brown; I grew it out, cut it off, dyed it silver and let it fade again. It’s currently unnaturally red. I haven’t had red hair in a decade. It’s a reminder that who I used to be is still part of who I am.

There will never be a single, unified endpoint that feels like me. That would undersell any future change that’s yet to come which shifts my body away from that. I’m like a hotpot, bubbling away on a burner: you add new ingredients as you eat current ones, and the broth itself changes through the course of the meal. All of it is tasty, and the change is part of the fun.

In the six and a half years with my girlfriend, she’s changed a lot. I’ve watched her grow — her body revealed its latent curves and left trails of stretch marks across her thighs, maps of where estrogen has worked its magic. She’s gone from wearing thigh-highs and miniskirts into flowy cardigans and pleated midis, and developed a love for bomber jackets. She’s more confident now. Her purest, unguarded laugh changed from a snort to a bird-like caw.

And she’s an uncompromising cook. She took our prized chef knife and handmade chopping board camping with us, and insisted on bringing dried porcini to make homemade mushroom stock for our campsite risotto. In 2015, we made mac and cheese in her tiny dorm room with cheese and milk; now, we make a vegan version with cashews, nutritional yeast and white miso in our tiny apartment kitchen. She constantly amazes me.

She’s watched me change too, and listened to my accent as it slips transatlantically from our native British to something more mixed. When we moved to Canada, we’d been together around two-and-a-half years; we’ve lived in this apartment for over three years now, half our relationship, but only the beginning of our life together. We bought each other engagement rings last summer, and they remain in the back of our respective sock drawers. We’re waiting for the right moment to transform from partners to fiancé(e)s.

Every evening we still watch pots boiling, smell the onions as they brown, and take the time to admire the culinary transformation.

And the more people who get to participate in that crowded kitchen magic, the better. Sharing food nourishes the body, but sharing the cooking nourishes my heart.

The Night I Learned to Be In My Trans Body

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It was an unseasonably pleasant, breezy day for early June in Japan. I was leaning restlessly on a pillar at Narita station, second-guessing the outfit my friends had helped me pick out. Maybe the jean jacket and skinny jeans had been a critical error and the sight of denim on denim would make my classy date jump right back into her cab. My thoughts were interrupted by a lilting voice shouting, “Mollyyyyy! Hiiiiii!!!”

Heads turned to locate who had made that enraptured sound. May bounced towards me in a loud, colorful skirt and a simple white tee. The airs I`d been preparing to put on floated away in the breeze.

She was a bit shorter than me, but had a presence that made me feel small, in a good way. With deep brown eyes, and an adorable arrow shaped nose, she was uniquely beautiful and, at 41, could easily have passed for 29. Over soup, we talked about our passions, queerness in the United States and Japan, and her favorite fashion designers. May’s talkative nature made conversation effortless. She was the manager of a large banking firm, which explained the five-star hotel suite she’d booked for us and her refusal of any help with payment, but she still found time to run marathons and compose electronic music. The glamorous, erudite persona I’d created in my head based on our text conversations crumbled away to reveal a goofy, exceedingly charming woman.

Our conversation calmed, and the dregs of soup clung tight to our bowls just as anticipation clung to the air between us. She smiled and said “Shall we grab a taxi to the hotel?”

The suite was lovely, and on the 16th floor, I had never been taken so close to the sky for a hookup. As we sat together on the couch enjoying each other’s company, she complimented me on my curly hair and, without warning, ran her fingers through it. Her hand against my head sent an electric shock through my body that fried the language center of my brain. I tried to say, “Thank you! It’s natural, but sometimes my students ask me if I’ve gotten a perm.” But all that came sputtering out was “O-oh, haha… It`s, um, thank y-… you.”

The look on her face told me that she knew exactly what had happened. We locked eyes as she continued stroking my hair and a wry half-smile flitted across her face. The memory of that look still gives me goosebumps. In that moment, we both became acutely aware of just how much power she had over me, and how entirely incapable I was of hiding my reactions. She kept me on the couch for a while longer, teasing me with benign small talk and idly caressing me in a way that, in any other context, would seem completely innocent. Though we both knew that her touch was as intentional as my face was flushed. Then, she dropped our little charade. Her fingers sailed over my shoulder, up my neck, and cradled my chin. “Would you like to move to the bed?”

I managed to squeak out some sort of affirmative response, and she led me by the hand over to the big, cushy, king-sized mattress. “Lay down and relax.” I did, as she settled down next to me. “Can I kiss you?” she asked, and I eagerly let out the first “yes” of many.

Kissing her was like losing yourself in a daydream so vivid it blocks out all of your other senses. She kept one hand in my hair as she wandered, gentle as a feather, from my lips to my cheeks, my cheeks to my ears, my ears to my neck, like she was charting the landscape of my body and staking her claim. She undressed me, and her kisses grew heavier as she expanded her territory. Before going any further, she told me that she wasn’t interested in any reciprocation this time. She wanted all of the focus on me.

Being a trans lesbian, I’ve struggled with some intense hang ups around receiving pleasure. Despite past partners’ insistence to the contrary—even a millisecond of hesitation or a single misinterpreted expression would seize me with the fear that I was somehow forcing myself on them—and that anything done to me was out of some obligation or a need to be “progressive”.

There was no room for doubt with May. She was confident and sure of what she wanted. And what she wanted right then was me, just how I was.

“Turn over and open your legs.”

Her authoritative tone launched a flurry of butterflies through my stomach. Now, technically speaking, I had been fingered before. But only ever as a warm-up for something else. This, however, was the main event. As I lay face down, fists gripping cool, silky bed sheets, I thought, Oh, so this is it. This is sex.

After what could have been hours, she gave me a chance to breathe. I had fully expected it to end there, but as I pried my face off of the pillow, I saw May standing beside the bed, adjusting a strap with a playfully devious look on her face. And the next thing I knew, my legs were behind my ears.

The two of us were so totally enveloped in it that she slipped completely into Japanese, and I into English, the both of us far beyond the point of bothering with a second language. No painting or poem could encapsulate the awe of seeing her over me, biting her lip and glowing with the sweat of her hard work.

As I lay there panting, looking into those deep brown eyes, I felt present and content in my own body in a way I’d previously written off as unattainable. In my childhood, I would pray desperately to God, begging him to make me a “real person.” It was an early expression of the oil-and-water disconnect between my body and mind that I regrettably came to treat as a fact of life. My mind was the real “me”, I thought. My body was just an unfortunate byproduct of my “situation.” something pitiable that I had to live in spite of, never with.

But then, on that summer night in Narita, they were my legs tangled with hers, my chest soaking up her warmth, my lips finding her lips. Me, desired in my entirety. In taking my body for herself, it was like she had given it back to me.

The next morning, May gave me money for a ride home, an indulgent goodbye kiss, and her word that I would see her again soon. As the driver pulled away from the hotel, it was as if the butterflies in me had multiplied to fill the whole taxi. When that next time comes, I hope I can give her some butterflies of her own.

Why Discovering Your Trans Identity As A Disabled Person Can Be So Confusing

In the third grade, I started an “I Hate Pink” club for girls that hated the color pink. I despised wearing dresses, so I forced my mom to let me buy clothes from the boys section. I even convinced her to let me shave my head, despite being ridiculed for how much I “wanted to be a boy.” At the time, I didn’t think I did. I just wanted control, and I wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t know who I was, but I definitely knew I wasn’t someone who wanted to present as feminine.

After my father passed away when I was ending middle school, I grew my hair out again. My mother became my full-time caregiver and things were bad at home. Suddenly, my self-expression didn’t matter as much—only survival. While I was used to being reduced to my physical needs, it was at this time that those were neglected as well. With an abusive, alcoholic caregiver that had an ableist society on her side, every day was a fight to stay alive. It took all of my time and energy to escape that household, but by age 20, I finally did.

Almost three decades of my life went by before I could begin to unravel the knot that is my gender identity. Growing up a disabled person and wheelchair user who experienced extreme caregiver abuse, it took me until I was nearly 30yearsold to be safe enough to believe I even deserved an identity to begin with.

For disabled people who require assistance with hands-on personal care, the battle for our autonomy is a never ending journey. Most able-bodied children don’t get to decide what clothes they wear, or how they cut their hair until their parents decide they’re old enough. Little by little, children are given choices that reflect their tastes, and that’s how identities are formed. Disabled adolescents often have to fight their parents or caregivers for these autonomous choices until they move out on their own—which some adults are never able to do.

When you’re constantly fighting the stigmas that society places around needing physical care, such as how burdensome or tragic it is for the parent to even have a disabled child, our own identities can easily fade into the background. For me, my entire existence became a scapegoat for my parents. The focus was always on them and how hard it must be to care for me. This kind of ableist view of my worth from society led to my livelihood being reduced to merely my physical needs.

It’s not just that my choices for my body weren’t respected, most people never even considered that I could make choices in the first place—or that I needed to. My parents were particularly neglectful of my mental and emotional needs, despite understanding that my disability was purely physical. It was the society around them. Every time a friend or family member praised my parents for being saints for having me, the more my own voice faded into the background.

This experience isn’t exclusive to disabled children, either. To this day, society often views disabled people as less-than, and this is reflected in pop culture, art, and the news. Because of these ableist views, there are very few queer or trans disabled people in the media in general. Fashion isn’t made to cater to disabled bodies, limiting our options for our physical expression. Since the world thinks that we can’t possibly be queer, trans, or conceptualize our identities, there aren’t access tools for us to begin exploring. Since we don’t have visible trans disabled role models, we don’t even know that it’s an option.

The ableist notion that physical disability equates a lack of intelligence followed me well into my young adulthood. At the age that most people get their first sex-ed lesson, I was pulled out of class to do physical therapy instead. Since disabled people are assumed to be asexual, I was never given a sex talk, and the school system hid me from sexual health. As I was reaching puberty, I became more and more confused, and I began fighting back against the choices that were made for me.

It wasn’t until I created a truly safe life that I was allowed to unpack the internalized ableism I had acquired and explore my gender identity. I hired personal assistants to help me live my life independently, and for the first time ever, I was in charge. I hired people who not only respected my autonomy, but celebrated it. After spending five years building a life, dating around, and chopping away at the ableism others put on me, I finally began to learn who I was.

Those who aren’t able to leave the homes of their parents are often stuck in the shadows of their carers well into adulthood. All queer and trans people grow up an unauthentic version of ourselves, but to be disabled and trans requires internal work that isn’t just confusing, it’s exhausting. When you exist in a world that doesn’t see your life as valid, it takes twice the effort to speak up for your gender or sexuality. When you’re merely surviving and tiptoeing around your carers, it’s easy for your self-expression to be put on the back-burner.

The lesson we all must learn is how to unpack what is ours and what has been put upon us. Society painted me as a burden, a tragedy and undeserving of autonomy. I have taken that paintbrush and created a beautiful life where being disabled isn’t a bad thing.

I’ve surrounded myself with people who love me for the disabled person that I am—not in spite of it. Now, I get to pick out the clothes I wear every morning. I cut my hair how I want and my friends and partner celebrate me. I have taken back my autonomy in every way, big and small. I had to start there before I could even begin to unpack the fact that I am non-binary, and that I deserve to express myself fully. And after a lot of work and a lot of therapy, I’m finally getting there.

When Thin is a Trans Requirement

Sometimes, I wonder how differently things would have turned out if my brother and I had switched our childhood bedrooms. His room doesn’t have mirrors, while mine has an entire mirrored wall; I grew up with my little inescapable avatar sitting next to me, like something out of a softer, subtler Black Mirror. I was a happy but insecure kid, and the mirror would constantly catch me at unflattering angles. I would turn my head and recoil at my unflattering posture, refold my legs, wrap my blankets around myself, tilt my head back, smile. Maybe it’s inevitable that my obsessions took the form they did. Or maybe the mirror could have been helpful, if I’d known how to use it properly.

This summer will mark five years since I developed an eating disorder, a touch over two years since I came out of it, and two years since I came out as trans. As it turns out, not eating doesn’t fix your problems and it doesn’t help you work out why you feel weird about your body all the time, but it does provide an excellent distraction from thinking about either of those things. I spent so much time staring into mirrors, but very little of it actually engaging with my own body and its mix of conflicting desires. Once I finally started trying to understand what I wanted, things became clearer: trying unsuccessfully to live as the wrong gender, alongside being bullied for being queer and neurodivergent, meant that I felt existentially wrong — distorted, woundable, clumsy. I blamed my body fat for causing those feelings, because I grew up believing that was what body fat meant, and by the time I realised what the real problem was, I’d already set the association between body fat and distress.

Body fat is intimately connected to how we perform gender and how we read each other’s gender, but we rarely name fat as a tool of expression. Of course we don’t: fat is meant to be undesirable, and where fat is desirable, we don’t intuitively see it as fat. But every makeup tool, every clothing cut, has some relationship to how we create fat and obscure it, reveal and shape it; how we use fat to hold ourselves, position ourselves, police ourselves. Fat can feminize, masculinize, degender or hypergender us, and few people know this more intimately than trans people, particularly fat trans people. “I felt barred from aspects of womanhood even when I was performing cisness,” writer Jenn Thorburn told me. “You’re seen as undesirable, and yet you’re also objectified and fetishised… Women talk about their diets, diet culture, their fears of being fat, as if you aren’t sitting right there.”

As writer and PhD candidate Caleb Luna puts it: “A cis gender is a thin one. Living up to normative gender expectations requires a body without fat, or fat in the right places only.”

The link between gender and fat means that many trans people have a complicated, fraught relationship with their body fat. Trans people are significantly more likely than cis people to be diagnosed with eating disorders and to engage in disordered behaviour, such as taking diet pills, vomiting and using laxatives, according to a survey of 300,000 U.S. college students. Eating disorders are complex illnesses, but the distress brought on by dysphoria is a factor; restrictive eating may mean a trans man loses his period and shrinks his breasts, or a trans woman reduces fat deposits that are coded as masculine, while binge eating can overwhelm feelings of bodily distress.

Being gendered correctly can also hinge on having the right fat distribution, which is driving more trans people to try to fund cosmetic procedures. Robin Craig wrote for VICE last year about increased numbers of trans men seeking lipodissolve, facial fillers and cheek/chin implants to create a more masculine facial structure, particularly if they don’t yet have access to hormone replacement therapy (which triggers some fat redistribution).

Body fat can present challenges for trans people of every size, but it’s a whole different ballgame for fat trans people, who may be denied vital medical care because of their size. A recent study found that 14% of the patients at a sample clinic were turned away because of their body mass index (BMI), despite BMI being a contested measurement, evidence against BMI increasing transition surgery risk, and the inconsistency of what numbers are officially considered “too high.” Alongside this, reports regularly circulate in private Facebook groups about surgeons making fatphobic comments, or telling fat patients that they should expect sub-par surgery results.

I’m not at risk of being denied surgery for my weight, but the people I spoke to for this article are, and they all brought up the profound effect clinic weight limits have had on their lives.

“Being fat has meant that most medical care is inaccessible for me, which as a trans, disabled person is completely exhausting,” writer and youth arts leader Emrys Mordin told me.

Meanwhile, support worker Leah Plath had to start using scales again despite them being bad for her mental health: “I know exactly what my BMI is now, because it’s required for me to be considered for lower surgery.”

Writer Jenn Thorburn faces being gatekept from getting top surgery, explaining that “it would be really, really difficult for me to get it because my weight would be seen as a risk factor.” Moreover, they face obstacles to a necessary hysterectomy: “I have stage 4 endometriosis and my periods are both very painful and give me severe dysphoria, but despite having had multiple surgeries at this point, doctors won’t let me get a hysterectomy because I ‘might want kids’ and because of my weight.”

These experiences are rarely given airtime, partly because the few trans people in the public eye are almost universally thin, and partly because fatness and transness together bring a double burden of stigma: they’re both seen as a form of excess & violation of public norms, and they’re both met with community policing and shaming. For a long time, I believed that some imagined hostile observer — the skinny cis white woman — had far superior knowledge of bodily existence than I did, and I was scared of the mirror because I’d learned to see myself through that perspective. But having a narrow, punitive view of what people should be doesn’t make you right.

“The gender binary is dependent not just on gender-appropriate thinness, but on whiteness, ablebodiedness, and even middle class norms,” as Caleb puts it: fatphobia and transphobia are intricately tied up with white supremacy and classism, all in pursuit of a eugenic ideal of the ‘correct way to live.’ It is not an exaggeration to use the term eugenics, either — in some countries, you have to be sterilized before you can access medical transition.)

Still, I don’t know if I would have had the conviction to truly commit to trans-positivity and fat-positivity in the face of massive stigma without finding the right communities, and the people who had language for what I was feeling. Community is absolutely pivotal for groups like trans people and fat people. Seeing people live and thrive with bodies and experiences outside narrow norms, and identify even tiny things you’re feeling as communal, legible, meaningful feelings, helps you feel like a person rather than a problem.

I only started to find these communities online as an adult, but Emrys’ mother is queer, and growing up around other queer and trans people gave them easy access to good role models. “The nonbinary butches around me were always fat and proud,” Emrys said. “I think I’d have a much more difficult relationship with my body and transness if I didn’t have the organic representation I had growing up.”

Leah, meanwhile, found that becoming a fat trans woman meant she could emulate her loved ones, including her grandmother: “She was a larger woman, and she had this kindness and softness and gravity to her…I really value my softness now; it’s an important counterpoint to how I used to be, where I didn’t receive any physical contact for a long time due to how much I hated my body.”

How we negotiate our relationship to our own bodies is deeply complex and personal, and it’s not helped by the myth that gaining weight means losing control of people’s perceptions of you, losing your grip on your own gender. It can instead mean that you access new ways of embodying gender. Leah enjoys the softness her fatness gives her as an expression of her femininity, while Emrys and Jenn, who are both nonbinary, said that the difference fatness gives them and its rejection of norms can create its own form of gender euphoria. “I love that people look at me and think ‘what the fuck,’” Emrys told me. “Being strikingly different and bold just makes me really happy.”

Fatness can be extroverted, sexy, welcoming, imposing, alien — all of which are powerful gendered forces. But when we are given the same skinny archetypes of womanhood, manhood and nonbinariness, we’re taught again and again that fatness is failed thinness, that fat forms of gender expression are inferior imitations of thin ones and aren’t valuable in themselves. I have to constantly tell myself that I’m allowed to feel sexy and exciting and androgynous and peaceful in the body I have, and I don’t need to be suspicious of my partner for being with me. It’s really scary to assert stigmatised types of desire and self-love, which means plenty of people who desire trans people and fat people allow shame to turn their desire fetishistic, violent and cold. But that shame is weaponized to make it look like authentic desire for transness and fatness is rare. It isn’t, and it never has been.

So many people have spent years believing we can’t take ownership of our bodies, and that’s a recipe to make us miserable and cruel to people larger than us. Thinner people also suffer under this system, but we’re taught to break solidarity with fat people through fear of gaining fat, which helps perpetuate the medical and social fatphobia that stops fat people being able to peacefully exist in public. I’m tired of chasing skinny ideals of gender that I’ve never been able to access in the first place and that hurt anyone larger than me. And I may not be sure how to be transmasculine or nonbinary with the body I have, but for the first time in my life, when I look in the mirror, I don’t want to “fix” what I see — I want to live up to it.

You Need Help: How Do I Know If I’m Really Non-Binary?

Photo by Zackary Drucker as part of Broadly’s Gender Spectrum Collection. Credit: The Gender Spectrum Collection.

Q:

Dear website that has saved my queer life, this another “How Do I Know”-type question.

I am someone who has been struggling with gender identity for longer than I probably realized at first. Sometimes I end up doing the maths (hmmm I kinda disassociate when I see the female pronoun in my Twitter bio or am addressed as my first language’s equivalent of Ms and can’t see myself wearing a dress or longer hair ever again BUT I also end up with a deep writhing sense of discomfort and angst when wearing “too” masculine clothing or when somebody once even suggested the idea of doing male drag, etc.) and kind of end up thinking that nonbinary may be the solution even though I know full well that, only based on this, that’s not how any of that works.

Nb also sometimes seems to be a way of understanding my own queerness and how I relate to the people I have dated and/or desired. There’s definitely ~something~ there, and perhaps that should be enough of a sign, just like when you come to terms with your sexuality and realize after the fact that no, not ALL people have these questions, because some people are, in fact, straight.

Now, I want to make clear that I do not dream of denying that nb/genderqueer/fluid/… people exist and are 100% valid. I am just finding it damn hard to figure out whether I fall into this. For me personally, I can’t help but have a lingering sense that this is really just what you get when you think about gender long enough? Like, once you have internalized gender as a construct, isn’t it inevitable that something about realizing the arbitrariness of these roles would make you disassociate from them? Have I simply deconstructed myself and ended up with nothing to hold onto, leaving me desperate for identity?

I thought for the longest time that I didn’t need an answer to this question, but here we are.

Thank you,

Aren’t We All Tired

A:

Hi Aren’t We All Tired!

Yes, we’re all tired. Here’s the thing – from someone who once identified as a man, and once identified as non-binary, and now identifies as a trans woman, and is considering whether I’m on the asexual spectrum, and maybe won’t always identify this way or any other way and reserves for herself the freedom to change her mind and how she identifies – it’s OK to not know, and it doesn’t have to be a huge deal, even though I am certain it feels like it’s so necessary and important to land on An Identity.

There is no “solution” to gender identity. It’s all a construct; non-binary has no discrete meaning outside of our gender binary, and it will likely never feel like it “fits” perfectly. It’s just a word, a label, something we try to use to make sense of our lives and selves, but it’s only useful as long as it’s … useful. You say that “that’s not how any of that works,” but what you’ve described is, for many people, exactly how all of it works! A lot of people come to understand their non-binary and/or trans identity through the exact process you’ve gone through. Some come to it through completely different processes. There’s no one right way to be non-binary or trans. Some people feel like it’s really about their sexuality. Some people think it has nothing to do with their sexuality and is strictly about their own relationship to gender. However you approach it is OK.

By the way: lots of straight and/or cisgender people do have these questions, too – it doesn’t have to mean anything, but if it does for you, great! If not, also fine! Tons of people have done exactly what you’re talking about here – pondered the arbitrariness of the gender binary and its constructs for so long that they don’t even fully understand what it all means or how they fit into it – and some of them realize they’re non-binary or trans and some realize they aren’t. Some decide to stop caring. Some can’t (I’m in the “can’t,” group, by the way, right there with you).

The key to me is that you feel desperate and feel that you need an answer and need an identity. That sounds like this question is causing you distress, which means it is something worth trying to come to peace with. You’re already stressed out about it, so spending some time really trying to really figure it out can’t stress you out too much more. Maybe you’ll find out you’re non-binary – maybe you’ll find out you’re not. Either option is a good thing to know! Maybe you’ll realize you’ll just always be confused. That’s pretty normal, to be honest, and if you get there after some deep introspection, you’ll be more ready to just make peace with it, I think.

So why not try it out? Try out non-binary pronouns with your friends and loved ones. Try changing your Twitter bio. See how it feels. Try buying a shirt or something that feels right to you but that you don’t feel like you should normally be wearing because “women” don’t wear that, or whatever (but remember that you don’t have to be non-binary to like, dress androgynous or masculine. Or to do or be anything, really. We’re all free to live however we want, no matter our labels). Read a bunch of non-binary content on Autostraddle. See how it feels. Think about dating people as a non-binary person, how you’d think about your relationship, how you’d feel within it. Think of yourself and envision yourself as non-binary. Imagine someone referring to you that way. How does it feel? Try some of the things recommended in this YNH from a couple years ago. Sometimes that’s the only way to really understand it.

A lot of us think and/or are taught that “trying on” identities is somehow offensive to people in those communities, or that you have to just know or else you’re not trans enough or something. I didn’t realize I was trans until I was nearly 25 years old, and I felt guilty for years that I wasn’t doing things right. Or that if I was really trans, I would have known since I was a child (“Born This Way” rhetoric sure didn’t help). But that’s all bullshit! Human beings are in a constant process of figuring themselves out their entire lives. The loving people in your life will be so pumped that you’re going through this process, and will be ready to support you in doing so however it ends up looking. Other people will be skeptical and/or dismissive or will want you to “pick a side” or something. Those people are toxic; ignore them.

We have to allow ourselves the space and freedom to try things out, to explore, to expand, transform, move forward and backward and in circles, to find ourselves right where we started but with more wisdom. One of the core transphobic ideas many of us have internalized is that being trans is a problematic, negative experience that any reasonable person would avoid (or prevent their children from experiencing) unless they are absolutely sure it’s the right move. But being trans or non-binary honestly isn’t that big of a deal – you don’t have to be “sure” and it’s not a permanent state of affairs. Our culture sure treats it like it is, but you’re still you no matter what your gender is or if it changes. You don’t have to do things different or feel different or be different to be trans. You just exist, with slightly more information about who you are.

It’s possible to be very tired about *gestures at the state of the planet* and also be non-binary. It’s possible to have all of the gender feels and still be cis. It’s possible for none of this to ever make sense. It’s possible to live a fulfilling, wonderful life without ever getting your gender settled.

I hope you arrive at some clarity, but I also hope that it’s comforting to know that you don’t ever have to get there and you’ll still be fine and valid and loved. Good luck.

Abeni

Myths About Testosterone and Fertility, Told Through Three Perspectives

Correction: The map indicating states that require sterilizing surgeries vary depending on whether an individual is obtaining a gender change on a driver’s license or a birth certificate.

For driver’s licenses, eight states require proof of surgery (but not necessarily sterilizing surgeries), court order, or an amended birth certificate: Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Iowa.

For birth certificates, fourteen states require a sterilizing surgery in order to change the gender marker: Arizona, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and New Hampshire.

You can learn more about identification documents requirements from the Movement Advancement Project.

Trans Fiction, Trans Imagination: I Will Answer Your Questions, If You Listen Closely

Editor’s Note: Our second story in Trans Fiction, Trans Imagination came from the massive pile submissions I received (and am still going through!) and when I read Viengsamai Fetters’s creative take on oral tradition, trans parenthood, fairy tale and inherited trauma, I knew Autostraddle’s readers needed to read it as much as I did. This short story is an intricate and masterful braiding together of voices; sit back and listen to the tale.

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You want to know where you came from, is that it?

You look at my body and cannot see motherhood, so you want another answer.

Do not be embarrassed. Nature did not see motherhood in me, either.

All right. I shall tell you a story. I suppose the kitchen is as good a place as any to tell it.

Once upon a time, there was a young man, Kae, who lived in this very village. He was not particularly gregarious and he kept to himself for the most part. His brother, on the other hand, had at least one girl at his side at all times. The brother—let’s call him Makani, for that was his name, though you will never know him—

I must backtrack. You will not understand where you come from until you know about where I come from.

Kae watched his first mother die. At six years old, all he cared about was the cool water rushing over him as they bathed in the river. After, all he remembered was her face as she watched him burst out from underwater, lungs gasping and eyes eagerbright, their laughs mingling before he felt something large and slippery rush by his legs, and suddenly her laugh was gone and so was she.

His second mother did not love him.

His third mother did love him, and he killed her for it.

No questions now—you will understand later. Would you like some rice while you listen?
There, nice and warm for you. Now, where was I? Oh, yes.

Once upon a time, there was a young woman named Vuy—

No, I’m sure I was telling you about Vuy. No matter. I will tell you of her now.

Vuy grew her black hair long and wore it in braids or on the top of her head, as women often do. As she grew older, the other women looked at her askance. When she asked what they said, she was met with furrowed brows and that certain silent tilt of the head. Since she could not know, she attributed their whispers to jealousy, because her hair was healthy and beautiful in a way none of the other women had. It shone even in moonlight, softer than fine silk—

Shh, eat your rice.
But yes, her hair was just like yours.

The men of the village found Vuy very beautiful and would buy her nice dinners to eat and fancy clothes to wear even as their wives wore their children on their backs. It is little wonder that she had few friends, but though they could have loathed her, the women of the village tended more towards pity.

You see, though Vuy had beautiful hair, no man would have her to wife. She could not bear children, and no man would pay a bride price for a woman who could not bear him a son or daughter. Many of the other women wouldnot understand why this distressed Vuy—after all, it seemed to them that Vuy had no need for a man, and without children she could only know freedom.

Perhaps they were jealous, after all.

And they were right, in a way. Vuy didn’t need a man, nor did she even really want one, and she could do as she pleased without a little one who needed her dry breast. So she told no one of how she craved motherhood.

And her body’s refusal to let her have it felt like a blade, a hawk’s cry, a fishing line tied to her spine and threaded taut through her navel, a helpless grief.

I don’t think she quite knew why she wanted a child so badly.

Perhaps it was because she longed to be like the other women. Perhaps she was hoping for a chance to be the parent she never had. Perhaps she just needed to be needed. All I know is that she yearned fiercely.

So Vuy pined for the child she thought would never come and went on dates with men she knew would never love her. One day, you will understand that, to some people, feeling desired is almost as important as being desired; to many, it’s more.

Vuy and Kae met one night at the river, the very same that took his first mother. A quick glance into the water and suddenly, they were both there, reflection shimmering as the river gently ran on.

He is less handsome than I am, Vuy thought vainly.

You are more beautiful than I am, but am I not still handsome? Kae asked, a smile in his voice.

Vuy knew then that it would be like this between them, as though they were the same, and she smiled at their reflection.

Yes, very handsome.

They met at the river every night, and soon they loved one another more than they ever could have loved themselves. They told one another things they had never spoken to another soul.

Child, how many times do I need to tell you not to interrupt? Some things are better left inside one’s own head. Fill your mouth with rice, not words.

Here—imagine that they spoke of Kae’s first mother, of her fondness for jewelry that clanked and for soup red with chiles.

Imagine Vuy shared a story of how she broke her brother’s nose, or shyly presented a whittled sculpture, the one good thing she learned from her father.

Imagine Kae shying back as Vuy traced the curve of his hips, and each of them teaching the other how and what to love.

Imagine they confided in one another a proclivity for petty theft.

Imagine a starlit evening where they grinned about the crisp eyes in a roasted fish, or whispered a secret distaste for cilantro.

Imagine their laughter as they dangled toes in lukewarm water, and imagine the tenderness as Kae braided Vuy’s hair.

Imagine that they fought! That there were harsh words and misunderstandings, that they held grudges or that they made up quickly with flowers and chocolates and a lot of sex, does that help?

Tck, that’s not enough? I suppose I can tell you a small portion more. After all, you will not truly know either one of them.

So Kae and Vuy loved one another. They met every night and would gaze at themselves in the river, run their hands over their body and find themselves newly beautiful in the other’s eyes.

As they grew closer, Vuy’s desire to have a child only intensified. She mourned each month that passed with an emptiness in her belly no food could satisfy, though she tried. Vuy was convinced that Kae would be the perfect father to her child, if she could have one.

But when she confided this in him, he shook his head. I would like to, he told her, but I cannot father a child. No one taught me how.

Vuy thought this was silly, since her school, at least, had had what she considered an adequate sex education.

This was when Kae told her of his second mother, his father’s second wife.

My father remarried soon after my mother died, he told her. They loved each other, from what I could tell, but she was cruel to my brother and me. She would beat us at any perception of wrongdoing, or sometimes because she was bored, and she spoke of us as if we were animals.

I do not think she enjoyed being a mother, nor even much of a wife—Makani was put in charge of all the cleaning and, as the eldest, I was given the role of cooking for the family. I was no more than seven, but I learned quickly enough. I was lucky that my first mother let me help her in the kitchen. That winter was a thin one and I often had four people to feed off a single fish, sometimes for days. I became adept at soups, at broth stretched from bones.

This new mother of mine was not satisfied with our meager meals. She came from nicer stock than us and was unused to poverty. Once, after dinner, she pulled me close and I thought I had earned a hug. Instead, she wanted me to hear the thunder in her stomach. My own was rumbling alongside hers.

It must have overwhelmed her, the hunger, or perhaps the hostility. The last time I saw her, she asked me to go find my father, who was out chopping wood in the forest. It was urgent, she said, and insisted Makani go with me so I wasn’t alone in the dusk.

The lock clicked behind her and the two of us stood in the cold in silence for a moment before heading off on the trail.

I didn’t realize until later what she had done. For many years, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

We followed the trail, Makani and I, until we reached where our father ought to have been, chopping wood, but there was no sign of him. I wanted to look for him. I worried an animal might have gotten to him, but Makani began to cry. He wanted to go back.

So we did. We trundled along that trail again, all the way back to our house on the edge of the woods, but the door was still locked.

We knocked, but no one answered. We banged and kicked and screamed until the cold air rubbed our throats raw. When it was clear no one was coming, we turned back to the path hoping we might run into our father on his way home. As we ventured into the forest again, the trees seemed to move behind us and the path became unfamiliar. We couldn’t return, though we tried many times.

I don’t know whether she hoped we would freeze or starve or be eaten by wild animals. By the time either one of us came back to the village, it was years too late to know—she and my father had both died.

I never found out which of them had the idea. I’m not sure it matters.

This chicken is nearly cool enough to eat, will you taste it for me? Saap, bo? Good, good. Here—
A drumstick for you, your favorite.
Do not fret. I will return to the story.

As Kae told Vuy his story, he was overcome with a strange understanding of the desire that still ached inside her. He became so distressed that his eyes grew hot and salty tears fell from them. He did not wipe them away.

When the third tear hit the surface of the river, something that looked not quite like a large fish swam to the surface and swallowed it.

Kae scrambled back into the grass, pulling Vuy along with him. The two of them watched as the creature raised its top half out of the water.

Its skin was grey and smooth like a catfish, but its face was too human to be fish and too fish to be human. Its thick whiskers waved and prodded at the air as though they were tasting it for the first time. The creature had thin shoulders and arms that were far too long and gasping gills flapped at its ribs as it opened its wide mouth.

To the young couple’s horror, the odd creature began to address them.

Why do you cry, young one?

Its voice might have been familiar, but it was impossible to tell; the sound felt coated with thick layers of wet algae, a sharpness drowned and forgotten.

The lovers explained shakily that they could not have a child.

That is not the whole story, the creature said, but you do not need to share with Mae Ba. Mae Ba sees your anguish all the same.

Mae Ba reached its long fingers to stroke Vuy’s hair, and she recoiled from its touch. It hesitated, and pulled its hand back to its gasping skeletal chest.

Mae Ba can help you. Wishes, Mae Ba can do wishes. The gills on its side seemed to ripple at this. Mae Ba has seen you here many times. Mae Ba can grant you a child if you wish it.

Why would you want to help us? Vuy asked quietly. What do you want in exchange?

Mae Ba cannot leave this river. The river and Mae Ba are one. You have made Mae Ba less lonely in your visits with each other.
A wish, a gift.
But something cannot be made of nothing. For a child, Mae Ba requires three things:
For laughter in life, sweet sugar for a queen. For swaddling, a blanket made of night. And to kindle the heartbeat, a coal from the hearth of a cannibal.

The river spirit swiveled its head between Kae and Vuy, sizing them up with beady eyes. Neither face seemed to show it whatever it was looking for.

Should you choose, the fishthing said, return here with those things at dusk on the full moon. Mae Ba will help.

With that, it sank back into the river, leaving no trace behind but clouds of muddy water.

For laughter in life, sweet sugar for a queen. For swaddling, a blanket made of night. And to kindle the heartbeat, a coal from the hearth of a cannibal.

What do you mean, what did they do? You’re here, aren’t you?
Silly child. I will answer your questions if you listen closely.

Vuy turned to Kae, eyes shining. Do you think it’s real? she asked him. Will you have a child with me?

Kae nodded slowly, seeing the cautious joy in her face. I will do my best, he told her. He was afraid, but he knew he could be ready, for her.

And with that, the young lovers began to ponder.

There aren’t any cannibals around, Vuy said. At least as far as I know.

And how are we supposed to find cloth made of night? Kae responded.

And we haven’t lived in a monarchy for almost three hundred years! Vuy stifled a half-laugh-half-sob in the way people who have tasted bitter hope do.

They sat like that together, wild longing and new despair flowing through them. It felt like forever, and the moon sank as they wracked their brains.

Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you? Chh. Do you want me to tell the story or not?

You are correct, admittedly. That was the first one they figured out, too.

They collected honey from the woods and found themselves overcome with apprehensive giddiness—perhaps they could have a child, after all.

This part of the story is much less interesting now that you’ve already guessed it. I will skip ahead.

A week passed and neither lover had found a solution to the other two riddles. This left them two weeks before the full moon. That night, there was a storm.

The wind battered the shutters and clouds blocked the starlight. Kae and Vuy could not meet at the river because of the rain. Alone in their homes, they each sat preoccupied with the question of Mae Ba’s gift.

Vuy prepared for bed by candlelight. She brushed her black hair with one hundred strokes, like she had every night for as long as she could remember. It flowed smooth over her shoulders and back like the sheets of rain outside her window. As she counted—forty, forty-one, forty-two, forty-three—she thought of all the men who had loved her hair, of all the men who would not love her. She thought of the many women who had not begrudged her their husbands for an evening. It still stung sourly to know that she couldn’t arouse a tinge of jealousy among them for it. But they envied her for one thing; Vuy clung to that on every night she spent alone and especially on nights she didn’t.

Kae was different than the other men. He still thought her hair was beautiful, but he would rather tell her about her eyes, her lips, her sides. He admired the fullness of her brows and the strength of her shoulders and the pads of fat on her stomach. No man had ever loved her stomach before, and she loved herself more for it.

Are you listening? This is an important life lesson, you know. No one loves you who doesn’t love your stomach, okay?
Mm, good.

Vuy’s father had told her when she was very young that it was foolish to have long hair, that it was impractical. But it was beautiful, and that was reason enough for Vuy. Her childhood had not had much beauty, so she cherished her hair and cared for it tenderly. Before Vuy’s mother died, she had been careful to spend evenings brushing their hair together; it was the strongest memory she had of her besides that last day.

And after Vuy finished—ninety-nine, one hundred—she blew out the light. In the darkness, her hair still shone just a little, as though there were glinting stars within it, billions of miles away.

She knew then, but did not act.

Vuy pulled her covers up to her chin and tried to sleep.

Are you listening? This is an important life lesson, you know. No one loves you who doesn’t love your stomach, okay?

Another week passed. One week left. Those nights at the river, Vuy and Kae tried not to talk about Mae Ba’s gift. Instead, they talked around it. They moved in together. They bought a new set of towels that were all the same color.

They redecorated all the rooms in their house but one.

Kae went to fetch more wood from the forest. He didn’t enjoy doing this—it reminded him too much of his childhood—but between the two of them he was the one who was better with an axe, and besides, he liked to pretend he could take care of Vuy the way she took care of him.

As he walked along the path, he wondered about the coal. Having a child without a heartbeat could be the only thing more devastating than not having one at all. He had one week to find a cannibal. Unless this too was a riddle, as the honey had been. What could the coal represent? The hearth?

Kae kept following the path, which began to feel unfamiliar even though he had walked it hundreds of times before. And then he heard the rustle of trees moving like they did in his nightmares, and then it felt altogether too familiar.

The only way was forward, so forward he went, dreading every step.

The trees blocked out the sunlight and eroded Kae’s sense of time. He didn’t know how long he walked, but he knew where he was going.

Kae’s third mother had lived in a painted house in the middle of the woods. They had never had visitors there; Makani had once half-jokingly accused their mother of enchanting the forest so no one could come to the house unbidden. As Kae returned along the path for the first time in many years, he wondered whether his brother had been right, in a way.

Their mother—the third one, the one they had had the longest—was buried next to the tall tree behind the house. Kae and Makani had dug the grave together, but Kae alone had placed the half-burned bones inside and covered them with soft soil. Makani had not wanted to say goodbye. Good riddance, he had said.

But even after the brothers had moved away, Makani hadn’t been rid of her the way he had thought he was. In every silence, her voice rang in his ears and her presence loomed over him with every move he made. One summer evening, Kae caught a glimpse of his brother walking along the main road, and Makani never returned home. Sometimes, Kae wished he had gone with.

As the brightly-colored house came into view, Kae felt himself shrinking into his body. Though the house was abandoned, his skin crawled with an old alertness.

How strange that this place had once been refuge, Kae thought.

He retrieved the spare key from the still-blooming flowerpot by the door; the lock still turned loudly and the door still opened despite its peeling paint. Soon after the boys had first moved in, Kae chose the colors for the doorframe. Its candystripe of red and white had once felt whimsical, enticing.

And he had felt so special, painting those stripes around the door. Their mother had even stood on the table to make the beams in the ceiling match. Makani once spent a whole month touching up the scalloped pastel trim along the roof. They had been important here, in this odd little house.

How strange that this place had once been joyous, Kae thought.

As he entered the house, the tilt of the pitched roof pressed in on Kae, and when he found himself treading on the quietest floorboards out of habit, he admonished himself. She’s dead, he told himself. But she had taken so much of him with her—and even more of Makani. She would have kept going until there was nothing left, if they had let her. What would they have become if she had?

The black sootstreaks on the walls and floor around the fireplace hadn’t changed since the last time he had been here. Coals were strewn across the hearth where they had all left them, picked through after they were cold to retrieve crumbling bones.

Kae pocketed one, and turned to go home. The path was straight, and the trees closed behind him.

Kae didn’t mind this time. He didn’t intend to return.

Yes, Kae’s third mother did love him. She loved him the way a heron loves a fish, the way fire loves paper.
Do you see? Good.

Now, the next week, when the full moon came, the young couple only had two of the three items for Mae Ba. Fear twisted their stomachs like wet laundry in the hands of an impatient grandmother, but they still went down to the riverbank at dusk just like Mae Ba instructed them. They peered over the edge of the water to catch a glimpse of it, and instead saw just themselves.

Worried, they waited. When the sun slipped below the horizon, the slimysmooth river spirit rose up out of the water, its gills flapping breathlessly as they hit the air.

She loved him the way a heron loves a fish, the way fire loves paper.

You would like Mae Ba’s gift? Its eyes flickered between them, and it seemed like it would be licking its lips in anticipation, if it had lips or a tongue.

We could not find all you asked for, they told it. The sugar for the queen, the coal from the cannibal, these we have for you. We hope it will be enough.

Mae Ba watched them curiously.

You have decided to turn down Mae Ba’s gift?

No, they protested. We would like your gift, very very much.

Mae Ba needs a blanket of night to swaddle your gift, it said to them. Why do you hesitate?

They said nothing. Their faces did not move, but they were afraid.

Bring the items to Mae Ba in the river, it said. The words felt like a plea. Join Mae Ba in the river.

Its body began to shift, to stretch, to pull itself into something somehow more grotesque, and the river began to rise. It was loud, louder than the silence between the lovers.

They could not move from where they sat. The water soaked their legs, then their waists. As the water rose to their chests, beating on their bodies with the full force of the current, Vuy unwound her hair from its position atop her head.

The water slowed, but did not stop.

The ends of her hair floated in the water around her, a halo of darkness. Vuy held out her hand to Kae, and he understood. He handed her his hunting knife, and in one motion she cut it all off.

The blanket, Vuy said. For my baby.

The water stopped rising. It was at their necks. For your baby, the river spirit said, its body contorted and sorely misshapen.

Suddenly, the water roared. It swept above their heads, rushing higher and higher. Their clothes weighed them down and at that moment they anticipated death.

They opened their eyes to look at one another one last time, but through the river water, they saw only themselves, reflection no longer. They did not even feel when it happened. They looked, simply, upon their hands that once were four and now were two.

I washed up on the shore some time after, my body waterbeaten and not quite the same.

And then, there you were.

The story is not over, child, but I have already told you—all this is where you come from.

Are you finished eating already? Let me refill your bowl.

Nursing as a Nonbinary Person Was Hard; Getting Back to my Binder Was Harder

For two years, between the spring of 2019 and the spring of 2021, the top drawer of my dresser was haunted.

The ghost of my flat-chested self, who bought their first binder five years ago and experienced a nonbinary euphoria that I’d previously thought only existed in Tumblr posts, spent season after season in that cramped, dark drawer. The ghost was anchored to my binders, which lived in a little cloth organizer, safely separated out from sports bras and the very rarely visited special occasion bras.

I put my binders away a week after I got a positive pregnancy test, when my chest went from “occasional cause of dysphoria but more often just a part of my body that messes with the line of my shirts” to “place full of swollen, miserable pain that reacts to pressure with crocodile tears on the train.” My doctor, when I brought that up at a prenatal appointment, said that wearing a binder during pregnancy probably wasn’t ideal anyway, so, with some regret, I tucked them into my drawer and switched to sports bras and, later, nursing bras through the end of my pregnancy.

My intention was always to go back to my binders as soon as I was done nursing my son. But the longer I waited, and the longer they sat there in my drawer, tucked in with my socks and underwear, the more they became less a sense of self that waited to be reclaimed and more a lurking, almost ominous presence that filled me with anxiety every time I thought about going to put one on. The more my anxiety swelled, the more it felt like putting a binder back on represented a huge, terrifying barrier–a million miles from what was once just the simple act of getting dressed.

I missed that simplicity. And everything that it represented.

I bought my first binder in 2016, about three weeks after I came out to my partner as nonbinary. Queerness had been a known quantity in our relationship since we got together in college, but gender, for the most part, had always been taken for granted. The sailing of that coming-out wasn’t perfectly smooth, but the boat made it through more or less intact, and he measured me for my first binder with the relative comfort of someone who, if not totally grasping the concept of why binding was important to me, at least had a secure handle on how to take an accurate shoulder measurement.

When my GC2B package finally arrived and I wiggled my way into the binder for the first time and then tossed a henley and a flannel over it–it was fall, so obviously it was henley-and-flannel season, as opposed to summer, which would be Hawaiian-dad-shirt season, and to this day I am stunned that no one saw this gender awakening coming–I felt, despite the unfamiliar pressure around my chest, a sudden swell of air inside me, like the first inhale after spending too long underwater.

I never wore a binder daily–usually three or four days out of a given week–but I loved having the choice. With my particular fat, ample-chested body, I was never going to really pull of the androgynous aesthetic perfectly, but it was still gave me a feeling of control of my presentation that made me feel safer and more comfortable in my skin than I had since before puberty. When I had to stop binding earlier in my pregnancy than I expected, it felt like losing yet another piece, in an already-dwindling pile of pieces, of control over my body and the way my gender was perceived. I had already–and with great joy, though I’m sure it doesn’t sound like it; I was excited by this much-awaited pregnancy–resigned myself to a default of feminine language, to strangers touching my body and mentally writing woman all over it, to the pastel-pink walls of my OB-GYN’s office and vaginal ultrasounds and the truly horrific process of finding pregnancy clothes that weren’t covered in ruffles.

Giving up the freedom of how I presented my chest, so much earlier than I thought I’d have to, just felt like a kick to the metaphorical nuts.

I’ve never been able to determine if giving up binding so early in my pregnancy was made better or worse by my desire to breastfeed my potential kids. Even before my understanding of my gender identity was a twinkle in my eye, I’d put off the idea of breast reduction surgery on my back-breaking chest because nursing was something I wanted to experience, even when I researched it as an adult and found that having a reduction wasn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for breastfeeding. And when I eventually had a traumatic birth experience and had to struggle to even establish breastfeeding, spending hour after hour strapped to my pump while we worked with my son and his tongue-tie and our lactation consultant, nursing went from a wouldn’t that be nice to something I almost needed. I needed, very desperately, for one thing about this process of pregnancy and birth and feeding to feel like it was going to happen the way I wanted it to. And since pregnancy and birth didn’t do it, well, nursing it was.

The first time my son properly latched and took a full feeding at my chest–no supplemental pumped milk in a bottle, no nipple shield, just my body and his–I had an absolute sobbing breakdown. Granted, it was after a month of chronic exhaustion and an overwhelming swell of hormones, but I think that it was mostly just the feeling of relief. That I’d finally gotten something right.

I nursed for over a year, and, to my surprise, had the best relationship with my breasts in that time that I can honestly remember. I wore a bra nonstop, even to sleep–pour one out to the geniuses over at Kindred Bravely, I owe those people my life and my sanity–but always thought, at least in the back of my mind, that as soon as my son stopped nursing and my chest was no longer communal property, I’d dig my binders out of my drawer and get back to feeling like myself.

Only my son weaned himself in February, just before hitting the fourteen-month mark, and I didn’t, in fact, take my binders out of the drawer. Instead, I started coming up with reasons not to. The pandemic! The weather! My pre-existing back pain! The humidity in my house! The weird tendency my skin had developed to become incredibly sensitive to pressure for seemingly no reason at all! (Yeah, that was cool. Loved that. Thanks, pregnancy!)

And my binders lurked, and lurked, and lurked.

The realization that the uncertainty I was feeling was about my own perceptions of what it means to be nonbinary than anything else came slowly, with no real lightbulb moment. What I had mistaken for anxiety about the act of pulling a binder over my head for the first time in two years was really about having gotten to a place where I’d convinced myself that by getting to a place of comfort with my unbound chest, I’d somehow forfeited my right to nonbinary identity. And despite the community rallying cry that nonbinary people don’t owe the world androgyny, pushing past what I can now recognize as basically nonbinary imposter syndrome was a lot.

And weirdly, it was my son who pushed me past it, when he used his newfound height–height! On a toddler! Horrific!–to open my haunted drawer and proceeded to cheerfully toss things out as he found them. Three mismatched, partnerless socks. A pair of polka-dot boxer briefs. And then, standing on his tiptoes, he reached in and pulled out a binder. He held it up to me and gave me the world’s biggest smile when I took it from him. He declared, very cheerfully, “Yay!” and resumed systematically throwing my socks on the floor while I held a universe of gender identity symbolism in my hands.

A few hours later, after I put the baby down for a nap and went to clean up the carnage of my underwear drawer, I picked up the binder again. On a whim, I pulled it over my head, and muscle memory kicked in with the familiar motions of squirming my breasts into place. And suddenly it wasn’t a universe anymore. It was just a piece of clothing, nylon and spandex and cotton, stretchy and worn to softness.

But the sensation was the same, as simple and meaningful as it was the first time. A filling of the lungs. Not something to be deserved or earned with a certain number of ticks in the nonbinary presentation column. But comfort and pressure and warmth. Like a chubby-armed toddler hug. Like a breath of air.

A Gender by Any Other Name: What Does the Term Genderqueer Mean to Us in 2021?

Genderqueer was my entry point into understanding my body, my gender and my sexuality. Becoming genderqueer felt like coming home inside my body. Years later, nonbinary would become a word placed upon me as my comics and writing became more public. I didn’t fight it, but it also never felt quite right.

Last week, I talked to four people, Aden, Sy, Naveen and Rad, about why they’re genderqueer and how being genderqueer changed how they relate to themselves and the world at large.

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Aden is a genderqueer musician and songwriter living in Nashville TN, and has been exploring the genderqueer identity since they met their “masc” side during a mushroom trip in 2014. They love their pug Eloise and dancing to disco in stunning outfits whenever they get the chance. You can find their music on any streaming platform under the name Bare Bones and the Full Body.

Sy is a Black genderqueer + transmasculine virgo with a love of cooking and wandering around bookstores.

Naveen is a South Asian genderqueer trans person who currently lives in Austin TX. They’re a writer and digital creator with a passion for first-person storytelling as a means of education, and they can usually be found oversharing on the internet @naveen_thebean. They also spent too much money getting an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU.

Rad is a theatre artist and playwright based in Chicago.

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Archie: Can you all talk about the first time you heard the term “genderqueer” or how you were introduced to genderqueer as an idea? 

Sy: I came out as genderqueer in 2008, which is a really long time to think about, as far as time goes, particularly around identities. I think I had always had these feelings of, “Well, I’m not a man, and I’m definitely not a woman… So I don’t really know what it is, but I’m somewhere between two pools moment in the middle.” There was, I think, a YouTube channel or whatever, where someone was talking about being genderqueer. And I was like, “Oh, that’s the one. That’s the space.” But I think it wasn’t until I was in queer spaces on campus, to where I was like, “Yeah, genderqueer is it.” And I think once that became the words that I was using for it, people were like, “We don’t really know what genderqueer means.” And I was like, “Well… Both, and, neither, sometimes maybe.” And even now, I think that’s still where I land, as far as what genderqueer is for me.

Rad: I literally feel that. I did come out as trans in 2015, and I consistently feel this barrier between myself and my people that come out post that. And I think it’s because in 2015, Laverne Cox was on the front of Time magazine. And that, to me, was a very important marker. It was the first time talking about trans as a thing–but very much like, “Trans… What is it?” I didn’t know that being a trans person who was not of a binary was a thing at the time. So my genderqueer identity came later. I’ve come back into being genderqueer after being a binary trans person. My genderqueer identity works because these other things don’t work.

Folks who know me from online, I think will know that I’m very outspokenly, critical of the non-binary existence. Even though it’s perfectly valid, and has its beauty in its own way. But I’m just like, “What are we doing? What are we really saying with this? Where are we really going?” And [nonbinary] doesn’t encapsulate my experience. Genderqueer, it’s got a very homey sense. It’s indescribable, but it’s like a homey working class, blue jeans, butch-ass shit. In general, I feel my queerness and my genderqueerness is very effervescent. It’s very non-describable, but I do appreciate the way that genderqueer is literally about the clearing of gender. So I’ll say that.

Naveen: So much of that resonates. After I came out as queer, I came out as genderqueer. I went to a Dad-themed party and went in Dad drag. And I think that was around the same time that Snapchat beards were a thing. And I shit you not, but Snapchat made me trans. I didn’t realize I was interested in looking different, or that it was exciting in any way until augmented reality filters. I was like, “Wait, hold on. I think this just unlocked something that I didn’t know I wanted or needed.

I really liked the word genderqueer at first because I was really vibing with queerness to describe my sexuality. Also, it felt like a really good fit because I don’t have answers yet, but I don’t know that I necessarily want or need answers. And then non-binary really took off as a word in the Zeitgeist, that everyone loved and wanted. And I really, really liked it for a long time. But then I feel like the kids ruined it. Not to put it all on the kids, but I feel like society at large got a hold of it, and bastardized it, and made it a thing when it shouldn’t be a thing. I feel like people started enacting these borders around it and categorizing it, and that felt so bad and wrong, and the antithesis of everything that it should be. Then, some people also really conflated it with the idea of being genderless or agender, and I’m like, “No…” I feel a lot of gender feelings! I don’t know what they are, or what they mean, but they’re there.

Sy: It was almost like people made non-binary its own binary point. And I was like, “Fundamentally, by definition, why are we still trying to point something?” I think something about non binary became more easy to accept by (cis and straight) people who were struggling to understand the rejection of the bon in the wrong body narrative.

Naveen:  Yeah, I feel that 1000%. I think the other thing that started really making me bristle a lot about having the word non-binary attached to me was that people started using the word Enby as a noun. E-N-B-Y. And it literally makes me want to vomit. There’s some people that love it, and use it, and wear it like a badge of honor, and I am so happy for them. It could not make me feel worse. It feels really reductive and really infantilizing. So I’ve come back to genderqueer, and it is so much better of a place for me. And I’m so happy because I don’t feel like I have to battle other people about, “Oh… Well, this doesn’t mean that for me.” Because this is borderless, and I love that. And it’s open to possibility.

Aden: I love that description so much, open to possibility. I was so excited to answer this question when I read the questions. Because, Archie, you’re the first person I ever met that used the word genderqueer to describe themselves. You were a starting point for me because I grew up super-conservative Christian in New Mexico. I moved to Nashville as a young adult. And the community here at the time was very binary. Bisexuality wasn’t even an okay thing. Within that lesbian community, it was very butch/femme, and there weren’t a lot of visibly trans people. And I also am in recovery from a really long-running eating disorder, so I was very disconnected from my body. Very disconnected, therefore, also from my sexuality. So I performed femininity because it’s how I was programmed.

And then I took my ex to Oregon, and we tripped mushrooms right before I dropped her off. And I had a vision of my more masculine, or androgynous, or just another aspect of myself I had felt locked from. And I met myself under the stars. It was so romantic. And then later that year I went to camp and met Archie, and met also just a ton of other amazing people doing gender in ways like I had never seen represented before. And that really started a journey. And I think I relate to genderqueer so much because it is a journey.

And I think Archie, you were talking about the reason you use genderqueer and queer is because it’s also a social and political thing as well. It really is about fucking up the system, and I love the intersections of those two things, of gender queerness and sexuality queerness. And I’ve just held onto that now. Genderfluid’s the other label that I really like besides genderqueer.

Archie: For me, genderqueer’s very active. Genderqueer is very much connected to my body. And I think that’s just from how I was introduced to the term, which was through an old 2002 anthology called Genderqueer: Voices Beyond The Binary.  That book was written by working class parents, theologists, sex workers, and writers, and people who were unemployed. And I loved what, Rad, you were saying about it, being connected to history. Because to me, I think that’s why it’s something I still really hold onto. I feel like non-binary is a label that’s been put upon me as my work has become more public. It’s an easy term for, I think, folks to understand. It also doesn’t have the word queer in it, so nonbinary feels safer for consumerism and capitalism.

Sy: I think there was this really interesting moment of time of where non-binary as a term got popularized. I noticed who started using non-binary versus Enby, and how it started to get used and I started to recognize where and how folks were taking up their place in this term. I definitely felt the loss of, “Oh no, I’m genderqueer. Do not call me non-binary.” I will fight people if they call me non-binary. Which, as someone who was doing LGBT center work, it was very awkward. So I need us to think about the ways that people place terms for themself, versus if we’re thinking to strategize around larger movements. There was such a move toward folks who weren’t classifying themselves as binary trans people-or rather, folks who were wanting to access certain, what we might call, touch points of transition. Whatever that looks like. And not wanting to have to jump through the same narrative hoops. There was a need for a term to speak to this experience.

And so, it’s to your point, Archie, around historical context, I’m like, “Oh, I remember when this happened as a movement” and also the way that trans histories have shaped current language patterns. It was a big move, and it also left other folks, other experiences, outside to fit. I will also say, and I will go here, that it was a very White thing. Non-binary is a very White term for me. And I think that’s where some of my personal resistance comes from, particularly around the term Enby. I’m like, “Okay, you can keep that.”

Naveen: Yeah, keep it.

Sy: I don’t want it! When I think about trans-ness and taking up space around genderqueer, as a Black trans person… It very much has been for me, my Blackness is always seen as queer, full stop, whenever. And so, regardless of where I fell on the trans/gender spectrum, I was always going to be seen as Black first and never anything else. Which I’m like, all right. Do it, love that.

I’m intrigued by the fact that this conversation is happening on Autostraddle. Autostraddle has had such a history of being a queer women’s lady magazine. And I’m going to be honest, I had to walk away from following Autostraddle content for years. The more out as genderqueer I was…the more I negotiated desires in different ways… And then of course, we can talk about race and how overwhelmingly white the website was… I was just like, “Oh, I don’t actually think I can be here anymore because I’m moving away from you, but you’re also not even letting me into the conversation.”

Archie: Yup. I recognize that. That basically starts to touch on my next question. In what ways has genderqueerness intersected with race, and/or class, and/or your work?

Aden: Growing up extremely religious, being the right thing and enacting gender correctly, is such a big deal to religious people. For me, part of my existence now is just reclaiming myself and my body from that. Part of being genderqueer means to fuck it all up. I can do whatever I want. I can perform femininity in my body, or I can reverse it, or do some mixture of the two, and combine that with being pansexual, and being sex positive, and pro-slut. Because that was so restrictive in my growing up. I was born and raised only to be one thing, that was a good Christian wife and mother. Anything else was completely secondary to that.

Looking back on my queer child self who developed an eating disorder at 10 because of the pressures and the trauma, I used to pretend to be every kind of gender in different scenarios. I just think about the different scenarios where that child could have felt like seen and recognized if they had more options. And just the years that could be reclaimed. All this time I spent in one tiny box trying to fit so hard.

Naveen: I feel like growing up, I didn’t quite understand it, but I was never really good at being a girl or the kind of girl/young adult woman that my mom wanted me to be. I tried really, really hard, and sometimes made possible attempts at it that fooled myself, fooled everyone else. Because I think I just got really good at acting. Since coming out as genderqueer, I don’t know that my mom will ever really admit this, or even necessarily thinks of this on a conscious level, but I feel like her expectations of me are less gendered, are less rooted in femininity. I think for so long, both she and I were trying to get me to fit in this box that I was supposed to fit into. And I just awkwardly stuck out. And once I said, “Actually, no. That box is incorrect”, I feel like there is less pressure for gendered performance, or ideals, or how I just carry myself when I’m around my family and stuff.

Rad: I’m thinking a lot about class right now. I grew up middle class, and I’ve been very, very fortunate. I’m very grateful for what my parents were able to give me. I consider myself to be very lucky and very privileged. But in the past 10 years of being out, I had to gain my independence from them in a big way in order to access what I needed to transition into myself. Part of that was entering into a working class status. That’s been almost half my life now. I derive a lot of influence from my class

I’m in the service industry, and those are extremely gendered spaces. And it’s really crazy, honestly, how you have to exist in them. [In the service industry] you really have to push and pull, and mold yourself, and constantly edit, and do so many gymnastics when you’re in a working class scenario.

But because of that, this adaptability quality… Which again, is so contextualized through history…I think of how many butches before me were in labored unions, and worked in factories, and were working until 4:00 AM doing whatever fucking weird, odd-ass job. I don’t know, like dairy-ing cows. That’s not a real thing, but whatever they were doing. And I just think about how much of themselves they not only sacrificed, but also gained access to because of how they had to mold and shape-check themselves into whatever spaces they were in. And then who they became when they were at the bar, or in the park, at the club, or shooting pool with their friends. And so, I don’t know. I just think about that shit all the time in terms of my gender.

I really appreciate, Sy, what you said, about non-binary being very white. Because I’m a white person, so for me, I can only see it through a white lens. And I view it as very assimilationist. I watch all these people who are assimilating into what cis people like and expect and desire from trans people and it feels so dishonest, and it feels so selling short, in a sense.

And yeah, we have so much to expand upon that, except that I just also feel very adverse to a lot of labels in general. Because I do understand, and yet I don’t also at the same time. I wonder why we’re so obsessed with categorizing everyone else around us, when I would so much rather be able to come as I am and have everyone else do the same. And just learn everyone. Talk to people. Find out what you’re into, and what you love, and what gives you joy, and what you want to play with. And I think certain labels like Enby have encompassed so much assimilationist shit.  It’s like a box, and I’m like, “I don’t care about this.”

Sy: Rad, I think there’s something to what you were saying about working a service industry job, and dealing with the repeated daily interactions with strangers. I had the best service industry job in that I worked at IKEA. And that was probably one of the best jobs I’ve ever had in my life because I learned how to be genderqueer in public in a way that was like, “how can I be legible to the other queers? And yet also, not have someone call me a fag when I’m trying to sell them a light with my purple mohawk.

So I think there was this really interesting balance navigating trying to be recognized in my own community–which is it’s own hiccup as a Black person, now as a trans person, who’s on T, and had top surgery and who people sometimes read as cis (which I think is disgusting, but that happens). How am I trying to take up space and queer the lens? So this service industry balance of having the people who I want to get to know me, see me, while at the same time, be at a job where I’m literally just like, “Yeah, the bathroom’s that way. Keep moving”, all with minimal interference from violence, harm or just confrontations that I don’t particularly want to have with people.

So, there’s this moment of, “Yeah, whatever. Call me the wrong pronoun.” It’s going to bother the fuck out of me. And then I’m going to go to a bar with my friends. I want to be in spaces with other queer and trans people who see me. I’m going to get called a faggot in a good way, and then it’ll be fine. Because I know those are the people who see me, and at the end of the day that’s where my frame ends.

Aden: Hearing Rad and Sy talk about that really resonates with me, because I’ve spent a lot of time in the service industry too. Sometimes non-binary, it does feel like a thing that especially white, thin, middle class and up people have more access to. Then people in other situations feel they can’t access it. When you’re working in the service industry, you can’t usually choose how you dress. If you don’t have a super-thin body, people are going to assign gender to your body no matter what.

Rad: I just want to jump in real quick because for me personally, I think part of my issue is I don’t want to be recognized. Sy, you said the word legibility, and I do not want to be legible. And legibility is a caveat to androgyny. Androgyny has become a bastardized statement. Because when I think androgyny, I think Grace Jones. I don’t ever want someone to look at me and be like, “That’s a non-binary person.” I want someone to look at me and be like, “Ew! I don’t want to talk to you.” Good. Don’t talk to me. You shouldn’t. You should not want to talk to me. And that’s what genderqueerness means to me! Fuck you, don’t talk to me.

Naveen: I love that. I only hope to be able to capture that energy, but I am sometimes too nice. And I’m happy to answer people’s questions and let them ask questions because I have always found that my skillset is in teaching, and sharing, and getting people to understand these things. But there are so many times that I’m really just like, “I just want to be unapproachable.” I do not want to be the nice person who helps you get up to speed.

Archie: What about the queer in genderqueer? How does sexuality relates to genderqueer? 

Naveen: The term queer has always been so wonderful for me, precisely because everyone always wants to ask the follow-up question, “Well, what does that mean? Give me more information.” And I’m like, “No, you don’t get more information. There is no more information to be given! It’s queer!” I get to decide what that means whenever I want, in whatever situation I want.

Genderqueer pairs really, really well with queerness because my gender and sexuality feed off of each other. I’m sometimes a dyke, but I’m sometimes a fag. And most of the time I’m somewhere, both at the same time.

Aden: I really love that you brought that up. I love that I stopped being a lesbian in 2014 and opened myself to all kinds of people, all kinds of presentations. Because it’s the most fun thing, to be able to feel and learn things about myself based on the different people that I interact with.

And it’s also a good litmus test because sometimes a person will bring a certain aspect of my gender out, and that’s cool. But some people only want one thing for me, and they only want me to be that. If you’re not going to be cool with me showing up in a different presentation because of how that makes you look–this happens with dudes, but also with even butch people or other masculine identities–they’re uncomfortable if I’m not showing up femme. So yeah, I love that my genderqueerness helps me get rid of them and focus on the people that can feel the full spectrum of my self and enjoy it.

Naveen: I ditched the term non-binary because it culminated in feeling restrictive, and that was precisely what I didn’t want out of it. And I came back to genderqueer because it felt expansive, and it didn’t have finite edges. Originally, I loved non-binary because I was like, “Oh, it says it in its name. It’s not just binary, so it must be open to everything else, right?” Eventually, it no longer felt that way. It felt really alienating. And then genderqueer, old faithful, old reliable, has welcomed me back with open arms that do not make me feel boxed in at all. And yeah, allow me that freedom and space to play.

Archie: Any advice for folks coming into this space? 

Aden: You can just do what feels right to you, and you don’t even have to have a reason. You can change your name just because you want to. And you don’t have to explain to people, and you don’t have to have a reason that people can understand. For me, someone called me my name accidentally and it stuck in my brain, and I had dreams about it, and it felt good. So I kept it, and it still feels that way. And if at some point doesn’t, I’ll do something else. And that goes for anything about my gender. So that’s what I would want young people, or for people that are coming to this for the first time, to know.

Sy: The notion of play is really good. Find what feels good, and then do it. Try it once, find out if you like it. Try it twice, find out if it’s good. I think for me, leaning into whatever that voice is, and not necessarily making it fixed. Think about how we can continuously think about arriving, and departing, and arriving at gender again. And then departing and arriving again.

Rad: I don’t really like advice. But I guess if I could say anything: try to have fun. Try to take everything less seriously. Play is fucking awesome. It has to do with being a child. It has to do with just being free, and it’s so fucking hard to do that in the way that we live now. But if you can access that… Dig deep, lean in… Hell yeah! Have fun! Have fucking fun. And that’s what I try to lean into the most when it comes to queerness.

Sy: I’m constantly trying to play, and write, and figure out what legibility is. Not for anyone else other than myself. If I can’t wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror, and be like, “This is who I am today,” something is wrong. And that was the promise that I made to myself when I started hormones. That was a promise that I made to myself with top surgery. All of these things were things that I knew I needed to be able to do, because at the end of the day, I have my community, but also I make up part of my community. I need to be right with myself, so I could be right with my people.

These Portraits Depict the Radiance of Asian Trans Leaders

As a Vietnamese trans femme, the threat of a violent encounter looms over me constantly, like the swinging sword of Damocles. There is an invisible toll that many trans people are forced to pay daily. The price to be authentically ourselves means facing the most direct forms of violence in the wake of a brutal world. More recently, with the increased targeted attacks on Asian Americans, this real threat has seemingly increased twofold. Being far too familiar with the language of violence, it is important to state that these manifestations of hate are continuations of a historical legacy.

The same mechanics that perpetuate hatred against Asian communities are the same ones that endanger the lives of trans people. As both trans and Asian American activism each reach a so-called “tipping point,” we must sharpen our understanding of how the two are connected.

I want to dignify those in our community as trans Asians who are getting us closer to a liberated world. For this portrait series, I was inspired by Jose Barboza-Gubo’s own photo series, titled “Virgenes de la Puerta”, which elevated the role of trans women by depicting them as saints and religious icons. Each portrait is done in a different style – both to push my own personal boundaries as an artist, but to convey a particular character from the subject.

It is crucial to celebrate our lives as trans and Asian people, and uplift each other wherever possible. Within this particular moment, who else may tell our whole stories, beside ourselves?

Sasha Alexander

Artist, Educator, Healer

“As a nonbinary trans Black South Asian person and as an adoptee so many of my ancestors/names have been stolen from me. As a result of the state’s refusal to accept my right to information and upon the trauma that my ancestors navigated across oceans and lands, I do this work as a seed nourished by the sun and moon and water of their spirits and their struggle. I work as celebration in sake of their names, tongue, and histories for futures, pleasure, rest, care, accountability, and to nourish possibilities of mine and theirs; our histories woven. I do this work for Juan, for Phoenix, for L.L., for the many transcestors who loved me and guide me, for all of us who will be ancestors one day hopefully having made the world a little sweeter, more joyful, sustainable, and just.”

Loan Tran

Storyteller, Educator

“Home is south. Big and brilliant and messy. It is where my people are, they are my refuge. Home is laughing and crying and apologizing and kissing and messing up over plates of food. It is me belonging to more than I could ever imagine, to more than myself. It is the miracle and hard work of family. Home: Slow Sundays, sitting in the sun and relying on the inevitable breeze to come.”

Andy Marra

Human Rights Activist, Strategist

“It is with profound love for my community that I have committed my life’s work to social justice so future generations of trans and queer people inherit a world that our ancestors could have only dreamed of.”

Fei Mok

Climate Policymaker, Artist, Community Organizer

“As settlers of color on indigenous land, it is important not just to acknowledge the history of colonization here on Ohlone land, but also our role as settlers and visitors. Our liberation as people of color is intimately tied with the liberation of black and indigenous peoples and this includes return and rematriation of land and reparations.”

Trang Tran

Healer, Food Historian

“When I think about what liberation tastes like, canh khoai mở (yampi root soup) comes to mind. A simple soup with earthly flavor and mucilaginous texture. The longer you simmer it, the sweeter and better it tastes.”

Richie Shazam

Model, Photographer, Media Advocate

“The goal of all of my work is to center the needs and the vision of my queer family. My work, whether it is my photography, modeling or show Shine True, is not only about representing queer and trans people. It is about building a space for us to flourish, heal and grow.”

Meredith Talusan

Author, Editor, Journalist

“It’s been difficult for me to envision the future for us in the wake of so many challenges to our communities, but what gives me solace is the knowledge that so many of us are descendants of peoples who believed not only in our humanity, but in our sacredness. Whenever I face challenges to my existence, I recall the spirit of my ancestors whose wisdom grew out of their existence beyond prescribed gender.”

Kiyomi Fujikawa

Community Organizer, Movement Builder

“I’ve found joy in building up the new worlds we want to see, creating new models out of our care, love, and commitment to each other. The experiments, the failures, the learnings are all a part of the process. I find the joy in the trust and grace that we’ll keep practicing tomorrow and the next day until we are all free.”

Kai Cheng Thom

Writer, Performer, Social Worker

“I’ve been going through a profound shift in how I relate to the world personally and professionally. This past year, I’ve stepped away from work as a conventional mental health professional and into the realm of coaching, conflict mediation, and group facilitation. I’ve had to let go of a sense of knowing who I am professionally and plunge into an unknown space in order to rediscover what I’m called to do with my life. And this professional transformation is rooted in a deep personal process as I struggle to bring the notion of ‘choosing love’ off the page, out of the theoretical, and into the world as an actual practice. It’s scary and I love it. I’m terrified and in some ways, I have no choice. I embrace this unfolding.”

Alex Iling

Sexuality Educator

“We can bring pleasure to our social justice movements by reimagining our own relationship to pleasure itself. Learning to create space for pleasure feels similar to creating space for hope, rest, and resilience. It reminds us of what is possible to experience and why we keep moving forward.”

What You Think A Woman Looks Like

 

I look like what you think a woman looks like.

Okay, that’s not fair. I don’t actually know you. What I really mean is: Every time I leave my apartment, someone calls me “miss” or “ma’am” or “lady,” even in trans-inclusive spaces. I am invited without hesitation and accepted without question into women’s circles. I offer my pronouns and receive immediate reassurance: I am welcome, my truth is welcome, my pronouns are welcome. Plenty of women who don’t look like me aren’t granted the same courtesy. Women in many of my friend groups casually refer to our group as “ladies” or “women” or, at one point, “girl gang.” Occasionally they remember me and apologize after the fact. More often, it doesn’t occur to them. I don’t blame any individual person for this. It happens with everyone, regardless of their heritage or gender. If I met me, I’d assume I was a woman, too.

It’s obvious that there’s an F on my birth certificate. My cheeks are full and rosy, my body all curves and flare: narrow waist, broad hips, small but prominent breasts. (Extra prominent because bras give me dysphoria.) For some people, that’s more than enough to make the assumption.

For others, it’s the long hair. Long nails. Long, flowy, colorful clothes. My wardrobe is a mess of odds and ends. In cold weather, I mostly wear black pants and men’s shirts, while the warm weather brings out a sea of colors and patterns. My favorite skirt reminds me of a garden: it is a long, shining green wrap skirt, plain on one side, shimmering with blossoms on the other. Mostly I wear pants, even in summer, but they are loose and brightly patterned, which Americans also associate with women’s clothes.

And the assumptions run deeper than how I look. I love cooking, and especially feeding people. I love talking to people about their feelings. (I’m a ghostwriter and a somatic coach, which means I spend a lot of time being paid to talk about people’s feelings.) I love kids and bunnies and lilacs. I swing my hips when I dance. I sing often and laugh loudly and cuddle frequently. I am the classic Mom Friend, complete with the constant exhortations to stay hydrated. Of course, none of these are exclusive to women, but they are certainly associated with them.

As an AFAB person in the U.S., being seen as nonbinary requires being seen as masculine. A rigid, colorless form of masculinity, defined primarily by what it’s not. Skirts, not allowed. Flowers, not allowed. Softness, not allowed.

Masculinity in India looks very different. Certainly, there are requirements and restrictions, probably more than I’ll ever be privy to, as someone neither raised in India nor treated as a man. But I’ve observed that men in India are expected to be expressive in ways men in America are not: to laugh, to dance, to hug.

My loud, muscular dad has always been considered manly. Like me, he sings often and is aggressively hospitable — in India, these are seen as masculine traits. (Women are also expected to be hospitable, but not aggressive about it.) My dad also takes great pride in filling his backyard with colorful roses, and no one has ever questioned the manliness of that.

Plenty of my colorful, flowing clothes are men’s clothes from India or Thailand. I have bright kurtas, Indian men’s tunics, and loose men’s pants from Thailand patterned with feathers or elephants that are also popular in India. In the U.S. these would be considered feminine, but in India they are somewhere between masculine and gender-neutral.

Indeed, to my family in India, I am shockingly unfeminine. I’m not as social as women are expected to be; I don’t say yes as often as women should. And I certainly don’t engage in any of the endless grooming and dressing expected of women. Even my long, wavy hair is considered unfeminine, because I neither straighten nor curl it.

If the aesthetic of masculinity in the U.S. is often defined by what is not allowed, the aesthetic of femininity in India is defined by what is required: makeup, “hygiene” (which could better be described as a war on hair), modesty, fitted clothes.

My nieces and their moms are always asking why I don’t do the things women do. Questions like: Why don’t you tweeze your eyebrows? Why don’t you wear makeup? Why don’t you dress up? Why don’t you shave? Why do you sit like that? Why do you travel alone? Why do you say ‘no’ so much?

Of course, they don’t consider the possibility that I’m nonbinary. India legally has three genders, and a broad swath of identities fit into India’s third gender, but the assumption by cisgender people is that the third gender primarily consists of AMAB people who present in a feminine way — a box I don’t fit into at all.

I used to ask questions back: Why not? Why should I? Why do you?

The answer tended to be, Because you’re/I’m/we’re A GIRL, so I stopped asking.

When I was a kid, it was easy. I wore shorts and a t-shirt, cropped my hair short, rode a bicycle. My little brother called me bhai — big brother. No one questioned this: if there’s one thing Americans and Indians seemed to agree on, it’s that a tomboy phase is no big deal, as long as you grow out of it.

The struggles started around puberty. I successfully argued out of wearing makeup, and I (briefly) surrendered to wearing bras, but the biggest battleground was jeans. I hated them. They itched, they pinched, they reminded me that my body was changing without permission. My dad took me shopping regularly for jeans, and I hated all of them. Sometimes they were too tight on my hips, sometimes they were too baggy on my legs, sometimes they fit perfectly, and I had no vocabulary yet to explain why that was the most uncomfortable of all. To this day, jeans feel like prison. They also, for reasons I’ve never been able to articulate, feel like gender.

I went to college on the other side of the country. Suddenly I had no family around to tell me how I was supposed to look. My campus had an enormous queer population, and maybe as a result of that, many of the cis straight people also freely experimented with clothes and gender expression. For the first time, I could look however I wanted. But I already had clothes, and no money to buy new ones, so I didn’t change my look overnight: I just put away the clothes I particularly hated, especially the jeans.

My best friend, a white cis girl who rarely wears makeup, who wears her hair long because it makes her feel like a princess and always paints one nail a different color than the others because Cosmo told her it would pop (it took months for me to figure out if she was being facetious), introduced me to the joy of long skirts. The first time she lent me one of hers, it was a revelation: a floor-length peasant skirt with enormous rainbow stripes. It was soft and colorful and it fit, no matter what shape I was. I remember standing in the college courtyard, spinning and spinning, and marveling at how the fabric lifted and fell, never restricting my movement or clinging to any curves I wasn’t comfortable remembering I had. To this day, floor-length skirts feel like freedom.

For years of college, I borrowed her clothes regularly. She bought me a floor-length peasant skirt similar to hers, in bi flag colors, and I romped around in it gleefully, even in the winter, over very thick leggings. I tore and re-stitched it many times before fully wrecking it during a snowball fight, stomping right through it with my boot as I clambered out of a pile of snow. I was oddly delighted by the loss: what a fun way for a skirt to die.

When we graduated, my friend bought me the beautiful green wrap skirt that is my favorite piece of clothing. I haven’t torn it yet, but if I do, I hope it’s for an equally fun reason.

I never really wanted to come out as nonbinary. I’d already gone through the exhaustion of being an AFAB bisexual with a cis boyfriend and of being a person with multiple invisible disabilities and of being multiracial but not quite looking like any of those races. I didn’t especially want to go through defending one more aspect of my identity.

Then my office started asking us to put pronouns in our email signatures and to introduce our pronouns at the beginning of meetings. It had been easy enough to just never say anything one way or another, but actually writing she/her felt like a betrayal of something deep. So I put they/them at the end of every signature, introduced my pronouns as they/them at the beginning of every meeting.

No one treated me any differently, mostly because no one seemed to believe me. In my theoretically queer-friendly office, no one ever remembered my pronouns on the first try. When people listed the women in the office, my name was inevitably mentioned. My very last email to my former boss, sent after I had already resigned, was the single line, “Friendly reminder that my pronouns are they/them and have been for over two years now.”

Of course, I tried the short hair and the men’s clothes. I was pretty into them, especially when my hair was just the right length to go fwoop whenever I shook my head. But the part I wasn’t into was not wearing skirts for a full year. I missed them. I missed color. I felt restricted again, in a way I hadn’t since high school. My plain black pants always felt too tight. When summer came, I looked at people in lovely flowing skirts, purple and pink and tiger-striped, and wished I was wearing them.

And then I got mad at myself, because who was stopping me? Theoretically, coming out as nonbinary should have meant freedom, but I’d just shoved myself into a different box, desperate to feel like a “real” nonbinary person the way I’d never felt like a real woman.

So I took my skirts back out.

Coming out to my friends was a relatively easy process. My friend group is mostly Ashkenazi and East Asian, mostly queer, and heavily nonbinary. Some of them forget my pronouns more often than others, but most of them remember most of the time. Only one friend actually said to my face that she didn’t believe me: she said I just didn’t like the restrictions that come with being a woman. As far as I’m aware, no one likes the restrictions that come with being a woman.

Slowly, steadily, beautifully, people across the world are fighting to shift the boundaries of what masculinity and femininity look like. They’re fighting to acknowledge that masculinity is not exclusive to men, nor femininity to women. Some will say nonbinary people hurt that cause: that by rejecting the gender assigned to us, we’re rejecting the battle to broaden gender for everyone. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I reject this argument. Prescriptive, exclusive views of gender hurt everyone. Nonbinary people are hardly immune from restrictions or expectations. Ideally we reject those restrictions and expectations, but I want everyone to do that. I want everyone, cis or trans or otherwise, to seize the same freedom I did.

Recognizing that I was never going to fit comfortably into my American peers’ idea of masculine or my Indian family’s idea of feminine meant freedom to throw out both scripts and write a new one. I laugh, cry, cuddle and bask in color in ways men in the U.S. are not expected to — and I think men in the U.S. should, too, if they feel like it. I don’t tame my hair, voice or opinions the way women in India are expected to — and I don’t think they should, either, if they don’t feel like it.

Someone’s always going to be unhappy with the way you look, talk, and act. That someone shouldn’t be you.