Queer as in Fuck You

(2023-2024)

First, you want to know who fucks me now.  You want to know if fucking is different now than it was before.   

You want to know how my husband could possibly bear to fuck me now.  You want to know what I might conceivably want from him.

**

I will answer you.  

But before that, I have some things to say.

I have waited thirty years to write this essay.  You can wait until the last page.

**

When I was twelve, I spent the summer away at a progressive, loosely supervised sleepover camp, where I met a girl named Abigail.  She was the exact same height as me, and had dark hair, cut unevenly and hanging just to her shoulders.  She wore little skirts and giant combat boots.  She was the coolest and most beautiful person I had ever seen.

One day, we were hanging out on the porch of our cabin with one of our bunk counselors.  The counselor was tall and lean and had short hair and olive skin.  The three of us were talking about who at camp was good at paddling a canoe, and who you wanted to avoid having in your boat at all costs.  Josh was no good in the stern, and Noel was okay as long as you said “stroke” out loud when you needed her to do a basic forward and “J!” when you needed to turn.  “You’re a strong paddler,” Abigail said to our counselor.

The counselor replied, “It must be the extra X chromosome,” grinning.  

I had basically no idea what she meant.

The counselor went inside the cabin, called away by one of the other girls, and it was just me and Abigail on the porch.  Abigail jumped up onto the flat top of the porch railing.  The cabin itself was perched on a hill, and I peered over the railing.  If she fell, it would have been at least twenty feet.  But Abigail was confident and nimble in her combat boots, and she walked toe-heel toward me.  I beamed at her.

When she got to me, she leapt down, landing heavily and flat-footed on the boards, head to head with me.  “I want to kiss you,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

And then we were kissing, and it was the best thing that had ever yet happened to me.

It was 1992, and she and I dated openly for the rest of the eight-week camp session.  I remember the fourth of July, when we were all allowed to bring our sleeping bags to the soccer field to stay up late watching the fireworks over the lake.

She and I placed our sleeping bags next to each other, but, excited, and still in our day clothes, got out of them to sit cross-legged, staring at the sky.  She leaned against me at first, and I pointed at each new Catherine Wheel, Bombette, and Brocade.  

“I’m sleepy,” she said, halfway through the show.

I nodded at her.

And then she put her head down in my lap, and closed her eyes.

I kissed her lightly, once on each closed eyelid, and that was the most intimate experience I would have for many years to come.

Did I come out at camp?  No one asked me about my sexuality.  Was that when I knew I was queer?  I knew I kissed a girl, but I didn’t really know that wasn’t normal.  Was I queer before that?

When seventh grade started a few months later, suddenly all the girls in my class were talking about dating, which boys they like liked and what they wanted to do with them, which base they had let which boy get to with them.

Sitting in her bedroom, listening to Melissa Ethridge and eating raw, unpasteurized cookie dough out of a bowl, I told one friend that I had kissed a girl.  “Okay,” she said.  “Cool.”

Two days later, I walked into science class.  In those old classrooms, there were many desks, cool plastic, attached to matching chairs and sporting a wire basket underneath in which to stash extra books.  Lined up in rows, they all faced toward the front of the room, where a blackboard dominated the wall.  Beneath it, a large wooden teacher’s desk held a giant computer monitor, which, when not in use, endlessly scrolled some screen saver.  Sometimes the screen saver was pictures of landscapes, sometimes it was cascading figures made of worm-like fluorescence, sometimes it was a square ping-ponging its way around the screen.  If you really knew what you were doing back then, you could program a screen saver to say whatever you wanted it to.

That day, I paused in the doorway of the classroom.  I was a small child, just turned thirteen and not quite ninety pounds.  I was wearing a pair of jeans that were too long, so the cuffs dragged on the floor, and a pair of high-top black Chucks, the white toe cap covered in pen drawings of strawberries and teacups and anarchy symbols. The room was half-full of students.  The bell hadn’t yet rung.  When I looked out over the class, most of the boys were wearing flannel shirts, or, despite the cold, white t-shirts; many of the girls had on oversized flannel shirts, too.  A few had on flowered blouses and one or two of the boys had on a polo with the collar popped.  I had rescued my mother’s long, scoop-neck, flannel nightgown from the donation pile and cut off the bottom so that I could wear it as a shirt.

What I noticed first when I walked into class was that a few of the student were looking bored, which was typical, and a few were looking smug, which was pretty typical too.  But also, several knots of students huddled together giggling, and whispering, and glancing at me.

And then, what I saw was what every student saw when they walked past the teacher’s desk to take their seat: a desktop computer bearing a screen saver, pink text on a black background, reading, “Amy L. Clark,” my name at the time, “is a fag,” over and over again.  I froze.  I could not move to take my seat, and it occurred to me that this was the worst possible reaction, because it meant that I was still standing in front of every student in the room, all of whom had presumably seen what was on the screen already.  A great rushing noise filled my ears.

Other students filtered in to the room.  I do not know how closely they looked at the screen on the teacher’s computer.  I do not know what reaction they had.  I was blind with fear and shame.  I finally took my seat and didn’t hear anything for another forty-five minutes.

When I walked into reading class an hour later, the same message was displayed on that desktop in that room.

I do not know if the teachers, in 1993, didn’t have the tech skills to fix it, or if they just didn’t care.  I saw that message every time I walked into any classroom in my school for a week.

At the time I am writing this, I have been teaching for eighteen years now.  I try to imagine myself as that teacher.  What I would do.  How I would feel.  I try to imagine this, and my brain turns away from it altogether.  To imagine myself in that position means to confront the fact that not a single one of my teachers did anything –scrambled to try to change the screen saver, told students it was wrong, got the principal involved, sought out my childhood self to see how I was doing, taped a fucking piece of perforated dot matrix printer paper over the screen.  It also means confronting the fact that I never expected them to.

When I was in high school, I came out as bisexual again.  In 1998, I was a high school senior living in a small, rural town in Maine.  I was on the staff of the literary journal and, for a while, the diving team.  Most of my extracurriculars couldn’t be listed on a college application since they largely consisted of selling brick weed out of the back of my 1982 Nissan Sentra and taking acid at the sand pits on the edge of town and then reading aloud from Salinger short stories.  I was an indifferent student, but out of sheer terror I made sure to keep my GPA up to the best of my ability.  I knew I had to get out, and college seemed like a possible path down which to flee.

In 1997, the governor of Maine, Angus King, signed legislature amending the state’s Civil Rights Act.  The bill the governor signed in 1997 added “sexual orientation” to the list of protected classes.  An addendum to the bill explained that the law would now protect against “Discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and credit on the basis of sexual orientation, except that a religious corporation, association or organization is exempt from these provisions.”

Almost immediately state and local organizations, spurred on by national groups like the Christian Coalition, started organizing to repeal civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people.  

At that time, I had not heard about the initial amendment to the Civil Rights Act, maybe because I was sixteen and preoccupied with making bootleg concert cassette tapes, hey-mistering strangers outside the 7-Eleven, swimming in the ocean off the town landing docks, and making out.  It is possible that I didn’t hear about it because the good progressives in the legislature didn’t particularly want it publicized at the time, lest it incur even more hostility.  Or maybe the news in fact came across my radar, and I shrugged it off as no big deal.  Oh, nice, of course I can have basic civil rights is an easier posture for a cool kid to take than oh my god, it never occurred to me that until today, I didn’t have basic civil rights.

But I did hear about it when the backlash started.  Everyone heard about it.  There were news articles and op-eds.  The radio was cacophonous with coverage: serious news stories about the law, both bad- and good-faith debates about the merits of including sexual orientation alongside race and sex, and morning show DJs making jokes about how many lesbians it takes to screw in a lightbulb and doing bits in swishy high-pitched voices.  There were yard signs.

At the time, I was dating another high school senior: James.  He had long blond ringlets, astonishing blue eyes, and a used Ford Taurus.  He also had a sprawling group of friends who drove trucks and listened to Stone Temple Pilots and owned knives and used racist slurs when reminding you not to get the joint wet when it was your turn to take a puff before passing.  Friends who hated me.  But James was good, and he and my best friend and I formed a tight protective inner circle for each other.  (Later, he and my best friend would have a brief early marriage; he now works for a non-profit that disburses money to human rights organizations in Maine).  He knew that I was bisexual and, to his enormous credit, neither pathologized nor fetishized it.  He thought my sexual orientation was interesting, in the way that my history of travel, or ability to play the bass clarinet (badly), or desire to be a published author was interesting.  Who knew what would come of any of that when we were grown?

Most people in school knew about me or, in the way of small towns, kind of knew.  Before James, I had dated a curvy, troubled, smart-as-fuck girl from my first-period study hall.  Because of this, someone had written “fag” in the dust on the back of my hatchback in the high school parking lot.  One boy grabbed me by the crotch repeatedly in the hallways between classes, hissing “dyke” into my ear (when I told my diving coach, she said, “what do you want me to do about it?”).  But that was, I thought, just the kind of thing that happened.  All kids got fucked with by their lockers and in the lunchroom.  It was the price of growing up, and the fact that the slurs focused on my sexual orientation seemed incidental; if it hadn’t been that, it would have been some other predilection or property of my identity.  

The Maine state constitution provides for what is known as a “people’s veto” to prevent a law passed by the legislature or signed by the governor from taking effect.  Gather enough signatures, and the referendum triggers a ballot initiative to repeal the law.  In 1998, Maine would hold its first people’s veto election in more than two decades.  The ballot had only one question: “Do you want to reject the law passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation with respect to jobs, housing, public accommodations and credit?”

The lead up to this election was the first time I realized that it was not just individual assholes who could call me names and indifferent adults who let it happen.  It was the first time that I realized I had no institutional protections under the law.  When thinking about my queer identity, I felt at that time, for the first time, incredibly afraid and incandescently angry.

“I think,” I said to my boyfriend James, “that I have to start to talk about this.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“I think that being bisexual can’t just be a thing about me that is kind of okay if I keep it quiet.  I have to tell people, because this is fucked up and we have to do something.”

“Okay,” James said.  “Who do you want to tell?”

“I think I have to tell my parents,” I said.  James and I were of a generation and at an age that meant telling a parent something was the absolute last resort and the ultimate escalation.  

But James nodded.  “What can I do?” he asked.

I told James that he could be there with me when I told my mom, and he agreed.

One afternoon after school, James and I were hanging out in my bedroom, which we were allowed to do as long as I kept the door open.  

That day, it seemed to me that it was time to talk about this.  It suddenly seemed that I could not wait a second longer and still be able to breathe.

“Hey Ma,” I called down the stairs to the kitchen.

“What?” she answered.  She hated it when I shouted rather than walking into a room to ask or tell her something quietly.  She always hated it when I called her “Ma.”

“Can you come up here?”

When she appeared in the doorway, James and I were standing near a bookcase, shoulder to shoulder.  Behind my back, he held my hand.  “I have to tell you something,” I said to my mother.

“Okay,” my mother said, her eyes going steely.

“I’m bisexual.”

My mother exhaled.  “Okay,” she said lightly.  And then, eyes narrowing, “You know that doesn’t mean you can just have sex with whoever you want.”

In February of 1998, I was not yet eighteen, so I couldn’t vote.  But I did have a car, and so did James.  I skipped second, third, and fourth period to drive students to the polls, and James skipped fifth, sixth, and seventh.  I don’t even know which way some of those students voted.

The referendum passed, and the protections were repealed.  The director of the Christian Coalition of Maine (as Carver says, why should he have a name? what more does he want?) told the Washington Post that civil rights protections had to be repealed because granting them to homosexuals “would impinge on the liberties of many others and denigrate the civil rights of blacks and other minorities."

By the time I left the state for college, LGBTQ+ people still had no protection from discrimination under the law.

In fact, although a supreme court decision in 2015 gave LGBTQ people the federal right to marry, it was not until 2020 –22 years after I drove people to the polls in Maine-- that another supreme court ruling provided federal employment protections for LGBTQ people, and those protections still only apply to non-religious organizations that employ more than 15 people.  The same people who worked to successfully overturn Roe v. Wade have pledged that they are coming after these two next.

**

You want to know if I have a dick now.

I will tell you.  I love my dick.

**

I didn’t come out as trans until I was middle aged.  Trans and queer folks often say that the hardest coming out is coming out to ourselves.  But this was not what delayed me; coming out to myself was not hard for me.  Or rather, it was hard, but not because I had to reckon with who I really am and how I felt about that.  The hard part for me was reckoning with the truth of who everyone else is.

When I was thirty-two years old, I sat on my porch with my partner-at-the-time.  We were talking about feminism, or sexism, or sexual orientation, or something.  I don’t remember.  What I do remember is the knock-down-drag-out arguments this partner and I, with whom I agreed on maybe ninety percent of things politically and socially, used to have regarding that last ten percent of things.   

But this felt different to me.  In my entire life, this is one of only a handful of times when my rage at something someone said to me was so blindingly, searingly embodied.  

I remember what that discussion felt like in my chest, my belly, the muscles in my legs that coiled as if to flee, my hands that curled into fists ready to fight, the breath that caught, frozen in my throat.  

My partner had just introduced me to the term “gender identity.”

I had been raised by good feminist parents to be a good feminist girl who should become a woman who empowered other women.  I had been taught that boys and men could carry purses, and play with dolls, and grow their hair and paint their nails and love whomever they wanted and that that didn’t make them any less male.

I had also been taught that that biological sex was different from gender.  I was ten years old in 1990 when Judith Butler wrote “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” and while I certainly didn’t nestle that tome between Bridge to Terabithia and The Once and Future King on the bookcase in my childhood bedroom, Butler’s basic ideas percolated into the culture.  Butler wrote: “Feminist theory has often been critical of naturalistic explanations of sex and sexuality that assume that the meaning of women's social existence can be derived from some fact of their physiology. In distinguishing sex from gender, feminist theorists have disputed causal explanations that assume that sex dictates or necessitates certain social meanings for women's experience.”   Butler didn’t talk about gender identity.  Butler talked about biology and socialization and causality and coercion.

I do not know why I am trying to explain gender to you, except that sometimes there is no way for us to explain ourselves, even to ourselves, other than to indicate who we are not.

That day on the porch, I had known since I was six years old that biological sex meant, more or less, the bits between your legs, and gender meant the way you are expected to act.  When my partner told me about gender identity, he explained it as a secret third thing, an internal way of knowing your gender.  An innate feeling that whatever clothes you put on in the morning, your gender is yours and is immutable and provides continuity for you.

“That’s a fucking lie,” I said.  And my partner was more astonished than offended.  I simply did not have that feeling, so I assumed that no one else did either.  And if everyone, as I assumed, walked around like me most of the time --not feeling any kind of gender-- than introducing the idea of “gender identity” into the discourse seemed like a falsehood specifically designed to reinforce oppressive gender norms.  At the time, I explained it this way to my then-partner: “There’s no such thing,” I said.  “All gender is expression.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.  “Like,” he continued, “If I put on a dress, I’m still a man in a dress.”

“Well yeah,” I said.

“That’s because my gender identity is male,” he said.  “Not female.”

“No, that’s not why,” I insisted.  “It’s because there’s no such thing as men and women.  Sure, just putting on different clothes doesn’t change who you are,” I said.  “But, if you grew your head hair out, and got electrolysis so you didn’t have any face or body hair, and you wore a dress every day, then when you went out into the world, people would treat you like a woman.”

“That’s still not the same as being a woman.”

“Yes it is!” I insisted.  “Or anyway it would eventually become the same thing.”

What I was insisting on was one interpretation of Butler’s original argument.  All gender is performative, they said, which I took to mean that gender is all performance.

The psychoanalyst Robert Stoller is credited with coining the term “gender identity” in the 1960s.  He believed that gender identity is distinct from sex.  In fact, case studies he reported in his book Sex and Gender shaped the criteria he used to refer patients for “sex change” surgery, and the way he writes about sex and gender identity still influences the current criteria for who qualifies for what we now call “gender-affirming care” (of course, all care is “gender-affirming;” if you are a cis woman and you went to a doctor who refused to affirm your womanhood and treat you like a woman, you’d find that to be inadequate care).  

So it would seem that Butler is, some thirty years later, rejecting Stoller’s gender-identity stance.  But actually, the two are inextricably linked.  Stoller’s original idea was that some children “thought to be boys” look more feminine that other boys, and because of that, they are treated more like girls in society, and that because of that they identify as girls (and moreover, should be surgically and hormonally helped to be the girls that they and everyone else kinda thinks they should be).  So even Stoller, the baby daddy of gender, didn’t really believe that gender is some innate and immutable thing.  He thought that it was basically something that occurred in conversation with others, or as a result of what others say.

This is what I was trying to say to that partner all those years ago: that we can perform the roles assigned to us or not, and that’s our choice, and that we can be happy or unhappy with the way people interpret us, which is kind of our choice, but that’s all there is too it.  I wasn’t just trying to make an intellectual argument for the sake of winning points.  The idea that gender might be innate scared the fuck out of me.  If my partner then was right, and the American Academy of Pediatrics is right now, that forces me to confront the fact that I am so different from so many people, and being that much of an outlier, particularly when I lie outside of categories so many people believe to be fundamental to who they are and how society functions, can seem like a very lonely, very frightening thing to be.

Having that conversation reminded me of nothing more than being told, in kindergarten, that we were to line up every day by gender to go to the playground.  I wanted desperately to go to the playground, and I did not know which line to join.  I remember having a kicking, screaming meltdown at recess time for the first week of kindergarten because I could not in any other way articulate my rage that there were different lines, maybe any lines, at all.

It would be nearly a decade after that day on the porch with my partner that I first heard the term “agender.”  It would be two years after that that I said the word aloud in reference to myself.

I have heard many other trans people tell stories of the moment when they realized they were trans.  For many trans people, the moment they recognize who they really are, they feel a mix of terror, euphoria, and relief.   Something nameless has been given a name.  For some trans people the experience can be, at least initially, one of thinking something along the lines of: that’s what’s wrong!  I’ve been told all my life that I was a boy and then a man, and I’ve always been so bad at being male.  It’s not that I can’t hack it, it’s that everyone was wrong.  I was always a girl, and that’s why I was bad at being a boy!  It wasn’t me! 

That wasn’t my experience.  I was assigned female at birth, and I was always shit at performing femininity, but I was even more shit at performing masculinity because my positionality forced me to study how to act female, and my survival was predicated on being at least a half-decent mimic.  

Masha Gessen, a writer for the New Yorker who is trans and nonbinary says, “I've always felt, and after a certain point, was able to put words to it, that Gender is something that happens between me and other people. It doesn't actually happen inside my body. It's what people see, what I want them to see, what I feel when they see one thing and not the other thing. All of that is my gender.”  I know myself in that.

Someone recently sent me a clip of a presentation by Dr. Anne Pelligrini, who co-authored the book Gender Without Identity.  I was elated to hear Pelligrini say: “We provide a framework that refuses ‘born this way’ notions of queer and trans experience in order to show that [our] gender proceeds from its subject’s own auto-poetic process.”  In other words, we are all engaged in telling ourselves and others the story of our gender all the time.

But then Pelligrini says, “we do not, and cannot, control our own or another’s gender.”  Like, okay.  Yes.  You can’t pray the girl out of a trans woman any more than you can pray the gay away, and you shouldn’t fucking want to.  And that’s a good reminder of basic human rights.

But I’m interested in the idea that, collectively, as a society, we can and do control others’ gender; in fact, from where I stand, gender is nothing more than a mechanism of control.

I’m also interested in the idea that some of us, as individuals, can and do control our own gender, either as an act of reclamation (I will take back authorship of the narrative of me) or an act of refusal (I don’t care what you say I am).  

It turns out, though, that as far as I can tell, my abiding interest in gender as a fully autonomous choice (if under the constraints of powerful, coercive social expectations), and my stubborn insistence that we get to choose our gender, is shared by almost no one.

I can control my own gender because, to me, gender is pure performance.  I can control my own gender because my actual gender identity is agender.  I don’t have a gender identity, and so I can’t really understand the experience of one, but in order to survive I often have to pretend (As Imogen Binney says, “while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars”).

It took so long to figure out my own gender identity because I couldn’t feel it; there’s nothing to feel.  Trying to understand the experience of feeling like a man, or feeling like a woman, or even trying to understand what it feels like not to hate being asked to choose, for me, is like trying to understand what it would feel like to navigate by echolocation. 

And because I am a fundamentally hopeful person, I thought most people were probably a lot like me.  We’re out there of course, but, it turns out, we are a tiny minority within a tiny minority.

Most people, it turns out, have a fixed and immutable sense of their own gender, which strikes me as a real lack of imagination.

**

You want to know what my dick looks like.

There are a lot of things “dick” can mean.  Some transmasculine people get phalloplasty in order to have penises that look more like what we call cis-dicks.  You know what a cis-dick looks like.  You have maybe sucked one, or been penetrated by one, or seen one in a locker room, or witnessed one online.  There are, as you know, a great variety of cis-dicks.

When a baby is born, the doctor looks at the baby and, based on a few things, but largely on the size of what is between the baby’s legs, decides whether the baby has a penis or a clitoris, and therefore whether the baby will be called a girl baby or a boy baby.  I have never been able to find out who set the exact standard for baby dick sizes.

I did not get phalloplasty, because I don’t want one.  I also don’t want metoidioplasty.

Nonetheless, I have a pretty good dick. 

**

People often want to know why I use the term “agender” instead of the more common “nonbinary.”  I don’t use the term “nonbinary” because I don’t give a fuck about your binaries. 

This is another way of saying that when my friend Jennifer asked me what made me decide to inject testosterone into my body for the first time, I said, “Eh, it didn’t feel like a big deal.”

“You know that’s not normal?” she said.

And the thing is, I didn’t really know that?

It took me years of meeting different kinds of people, and reading different kinds of books, and getting better health care, and gaining a lot of new vocabulary, to understand that while many people, cis and trans, feel inside that they are a particular gender, I don’t, and that’s okay.  And moreover, that because I don’t, I can choose to align myself with the trans community.  I cannot feel myself to be a cisgender woman, and I cannot be a trans man any more than I can be a trans woman.  But I can, in fact, feel myself to be transgender.  Trans not as in transition.  Trans as in ongoing transformation.  Trans as in transitory.  Trans as in translate.  Trans as in transaction.  Trans as in transcribe.  Trans as in transcendent.  

**

You want me to describe my dick.

Picture a clit.  Everyone has seen clitorises; it is possible there are more images and words devoted to women’s bodies than to any other single subject (except, maybe, war).  Nevertheless, I’m not sure everyone can visualize the contours of a particular clitoris, let alone the beautiful variety of them, and that makes me sad.  It also, in a world so obsessed with the minutia of women’s bodies, strikes me as indicative of pervasive indifference to women’s pleasure as well as a result of a deep-seated cultural fear of women’s power and autonomy.  In any case, Google image search “clit” if you need to.  

After taking testosterone, different people have different levels of clitoral growth (we call this “bottom growth”), and I have, relatively, quite a lot.  My dick is, when fully erect, about the length of my pinky finger, and twice as thick. I try not to think too hard about the fact that I enjoy and take pride in my dick being bigger than my partner’s.  I don’t fully know what it means that, beyond the fact that it feels good, I love watching someone who knows what they are doing suck me off, their head bobbing up and down in a familiar porn-star rhythm.  

**

You are still interested in what my husband thinks about all this.

I was twenty-six years old when the state legally recognized my marriage to my straight, cis husband.  I have been a married person for seventeen years.  My marriage may not look like yours: my husband and I each have other partners, and my primary partner (the one who has a smaller dick than I do and who sucks me off so well) is a transman.  Nonetheless, my identity as a married person was made possible and desirable by the state.  

On my wedding day, I stood in front of two-hundred-and-ten friends and family members wearing a short, white, sleeveless dress with a gold silk band around the hem.  Our friend, who was the officiant, opened the ceremony by saying:  “The opening words to welcome us all here today are from "Goodridge Vs. Department of Health" by Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall: “Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations [....] Without question, civil marriage enhances the "welfare of the community." It is a "social institution of the highest importance."  [...] Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family [....] Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition.”  

Same-sex marriage had been legal in our state, Massachusetts, for two years, but was not legal federally.  Instead of wedding gifts, my husband and I asked for donations to the Human Rights Campaign.  

It was a pretty gay straight wedding.  So gay, in fact, that my aunt, an evangelical Christian, would not allow her children to attend.  Instead of a donation to the Human Rights Campaign she got us a set of pots and pans that I immediately donated to a thrift store that supports AIDS action.

My husband and I look like we are in a cross-gender marriage, and most people consider this a straight marriage.  My husband is straight and cis.  Although same-sex marriage would not be federally legal for another nine years after he and I wed, on the day of our ceremony, my husband and I could have been married in any state in the nation.  My husband and I got married because we loved each other very much, and we wanted to throw a huge party, and we weren’t going to say no to jointly filing taxes.  Even still, I sometimes wonder if getting married the way I did was a kind of consensual, rather than coerced, passing.  But what does consent mean under these conditions anyway?

Our love was real, and the legal and financial protections afforded to us by the state are materially extant.  But joining the tradition of marriage in this way was participating in the fiction that I consent to the role of the state in determining whose relationships deserve tax breaks and the administrative assumption of mutual decision making.

After my husband and I adopted our daughter (who was seventeen at the time), everywhere we went people saw us for a version of what we are: a traditional family.  Grocery store clerks told me how much my daughter looked like me, although she and I share no more genetic similarity than we do with any stranger.  People in elevators told my daughter she better listen to her dad.  Other moms offered to take pictures of our family when the three of us went apple picking.

 But everyone is kind of faking it all the time, right?

Six months after our daughter came to live with us, when we had made it through the second semester of her sophomore year of high school, and the long, blazing summer that came after, my husband still had some paternity leave, which he was taking a couple days a week.  On some of those days, I got home early from work, and my husband picked our daughter up from after school activities.  That meant that one day a week, every week for a month, I had an hour at home alone before I had to start dinner and have it ready for their return.

I did the exact same thing with my free hour every time.  I sat in a big, leather chair in my living room and read while drinking one glass of wine.  I read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and it took me a month to read because I only read it on those days, and I alternated the reading with watching the sun go down through my living room windows.  In The Argonauts, Nelson describes a friend pouring coffee into one of Nelson’s mugs, a photo mug made for her by her mother: “Wow, my friend said, filling it up.  I’ve never seen anything so herteronormative in all my life.”  Nelson explains, “The photo on the mug depicts my family and me, all dressed up to go to the Nutcracker at Christmastime. [...]  In the photo I’m seven months pregnant with what will become Iggy, wearing a high ponytail and leopard print dress; Harry and his son are wearing matching dark suits, looking dashing.  We’re standing in front of the mantel at my mother’s house, which has monogrammed stockings hanging from it.  We look happy.  But what about it is the essence of heronormativity?  That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish?  That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best?”

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of me and my husband and my daughter in various iterations of our holiday best, standing in front of fireplaces, laden Thanksgiving tables, Christmas trees, Happy Birthday banners, Mother’s Day balloons.

Adopting a teenager from foster care was the most radical thing I could think to do.  To do so not only removes a person from the clutches of the state, it calls into question the very nature of family and radicalizes ideas about how we form bonds and what it means to love.  It means making an uncompromising and revolutionary commitment to a specific love that is not socially required.

Adopting a teenager from foster care is also the thing I have done in my life that brought me closest to being a normie.

**

My friend Sam, an Indian immigrant who is a cis, straight woman on the board of an LGBTQ+ organization, says: “I’m only interested in chosen identities.  Identities I have given consent to.  Identities I have worked hard for.”

**

Who we appear to be can become who we are.

**

Last year, my partner and I were in a Walgreens in New Hampshire.  They were perusing some vitamins and I was impatiently waiting for them to make their selection.  I looked around and saw two women enter the store wearing tiny cutoff jean shorts which revealed large and boldly-done Nazi tattoos that they were sporting proudly on their thighs.  “We have to go,” I said, pulling my partner out the automatic doors and to the car.  “Why?” they asked, annoyed that I had grabbed them by the elbow.  “Because there are people in here,” I said, “who would rather see you dead than walk out of this store.”

Earlier this month, a sixteen-year-old nonbinary student was beaten so badly in the girls bathroom of their high school that they died.

Yesterday, I went with my partner and another couple to see a play written by and about a trans man.  Just before we walked in, my friend said to their partner, “If something happens at this event, you run for the exit.”  I said to my partner, “If something happens, do not try to protect me.  The first sign of a gun, you run.”  

**

You want to know what it is like to inject hormones. 

The first time I injected testosterone, it was not into my belly.  It was during the pandemic lockdown, and at that time, I had been dating my partner for one month.  My partner has had a prescription for T for ten years, but they do not like injecting themself, so one day, a month into our relationship, they asked if I would do their injection for them.  It seemed like an awesomely intimate thing to be asked to do.

The first night we met, my partner and I kissed until our lips were swollen, I fucked them with a strap on, and they put their entire fist inside my vagina, but the idea of creating a new hole in their skin and pushing a plunger down until something was released inside them that couldn’t be taken back seemed more profound than anything we had yet done together.  Not only that, but the ill-studied and poorly understood substance I was to thrust into their body was the thing that, in fact, in some ways, made them who they are.  By injecting them, I would be participating in a ritual of identity formation.

The first time I injected testosterone, my hands shook.

The first time I asked my partner to inject me with testosterone, I told them I was curious about the ways in which we can and cannot claim control of our bodies.  “Like, intellectually?” they asked.  I shrugged.  “Let’s just give you a little baby dose,” they said.

**

 Which acts are self-determinative, and which are simply revelatory?  Is becoming who we are an act of choosing how to build ourselves up, or an act of carving away until we are whittled down to who we are?

**

The first time I stood in front of a classroom with the intention of introducing myself and giving “they/them” as my pronouns, my voice caught in my throat.  I thought about standing in front of my junior high school science class while “fag” flashed at me over and over again.  I started to shake.

I thought about the end of Gender Queer, the most banned book in the nation.  On the last page of Gender Queer, the image is of the genderqueer person enacting a literal erasure of self (wiping the blackboard clean after teaching).  The students have already left, and the genderqueer person, the teacher and author, is trying to justify eventually using correct pronouns in front of students.  “Next time,” e thinks.  “Next time I will come out.”  It is not a convincing ending.

I thought about how that tameness and capitulation and timidity did not save the author from condemnation.  I thought: you cannot “maybe” your way into who you are.  You cannot ask for permission to be authentic and free.

Still, I could not breathe.  For a moment, standing in front of that whiteboard, my vision went blank.

And then, I looked out over fifteen first- and second-year college students sitting in little chair-desks spaced six feet apart, their eyes huge above their surgical masks, and thought about how much fear we each carry with us.

“I’m Professor Clark,” I said.  “And my pronouns are they/them.  I can’t wait to get to know you.”

**

I am writing this at a time in which we are awaiting the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.  One candidate, who has a good chance of winning, is backed by the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025.  The Heritage Foundation has written extensively about the fact that, when this candidate wins the election, “pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, should be stripped of First Amendment protection and outlawed.”  They have said that, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.” 

I am trans, I am queer, and I am an educator.  It is likely that if this candidate wins the election, I will lose my job because the administration will enact a federal law, similar to laws already passed in Florida, that mandates that any institution which accepts federal funding may not teach “controversial” topics such as race, gender, sexuality, or class.  The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran an article positing that “If Trump wins, his allies are planning to overhaul higher education.”  I teach literature and writing, and I could not in good conscience do so without talking explicitly about racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and the intersecting and entwined oppressions perpetrated by the very few against the many of us, that constitute the history and contemporary state of our nation.  Aside from all that, all I have to do is what my college has asked of me --show up in my classroom and give my name and pronouns-- and I am already afoul of that law.  All colleges accept federal funding, at least in the form of federal student loan money, which means all colleges are bound by federal laws governing higher education.  Even the most liberal among them are more committed to staying open and receiving those federal dollars than to supporting people like me.  

This is not a secret conspiracy.  This is clearly and overtly part of the plan.  It has already started.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 300,000 teachers and other school staff, including librarians, quit or were forced out of their jobs between February 2020 and May 2022, with most of them citing the “culture wars” as the reason.

So I may lose my job.  My calling.  My livelihood.  I may lose my access to healthcare; several states right now have enacted or proposed bans on gender affirming care for adults.  There is a possible future in which I could be rounded up by the state and made to register.  If the worse man is elected by the time this goes to press, this document will undoubtedly be banned.

If the Heritage Foundation has its way, just the fact of my corporeal presence in the classroom will qualify as child abuse.  My body will be classified as pornography.

**

Who gets to decide what is true?

When the state attempts to control who can marry, who can access what healthcare, who can use which bathroom, and who can play on which sports teams, it is about coercion and control, but it is also about the nature and relevance of truth.  

Many people now agree that sex and gender are different things, which is another way of saying that gender is not a biologically-determined binary.  But so-called biological sex is not a binary either.  The truth is that there is no agreed-upon definition of biological sex.  As Anne Fausto-Sterling puts it in Sexing the Body, “choosing which criteria to use in determining sex, and choosing to make the determination at all, are social decisions for which scientists can offer no absolute guidelines."  

Do we determine sex by which chromones a person has?  By their gametes?  Their physical characteristics, and if so, do we give equal weight to external and internal characteristics?  Is it hormones that determine sex?

According to laws passed in twenty-three states, biological sex is immutable and of paramount importance.  In Texas, biological sex is determined by paperwork: a birth certificate filled out “at or around the time of birth.”  In Nebraska, in order for trans girls and women to compete on appropriate sports teams, they must meet the following criteria: “the student living as their gender identity; testimony provided by parents, friends, and/or teachers attesting to the validity of the student's gender identity; and verification from a health-care professional. Additionally, transgender girls must have completed one year of hormone therapy or had surgery, and demonstrate through a ‘medical examination and physiological testing’ that they do not have any additional advantages.”  World Athletics, the international sports governing body, rules that regardless of sex assigned at birth, legal sex, and gender identity, to compete as a woman, an athlete must “have continuously maintained the concentration of testosterone in their serum” at “normal” female levels for “a period of at least 24 months; and they must continue to maintain the concentration of testosterone [...] at all times.”  For international sports competition, hormones alone determine sex.

The focus on testosterone is cultural, not scientific.  In their book T: An Unauthorized Biography, Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis use the term “T talk” to describe the truthy-sounding false narratives around hormones.  “The root of all T talk,” they write, “is the sex hormone concept, whereby testosterone and estrogen are elevated as the primary hormones for males and females, respectively. With the sex hormone concept, T and its ‘partner,’ estrogen, are framed as a heteronormative pair: binary, dichotomous, and exclusive, each belonging to one sex or the other, and locked into an inevitable and natural ‘war of the sexes.’”  This is of course, as they show at book length, a fairytale at best.  Both men and women produce testosterone and estrogen, and there are many different types of each hormone present throughout the body, the effects of which are still not known with any precision or certainty.  In fact, women cannot ovulate without testosterone.  Karkazis and Jordan-Young analyze the evidence about T and athletic performance so you don’t have to.  Dr. Karkazis and Dr. Jordan-Young conclude that “it’s far too simplistic to say that testosterone is the single most important determinant of athleticism.”  And in actuality, studies of testosterone levels in athletes “fail to show consistent relationships between T and performance…[and] quite a few studies even find a negative correlation.” 

These anti-scientific rules are intended to protect women and girls from losing opportunities to people who have what is deemed an “unfair” advantage.  That’s an admirable intention for sure.  However, this completely disregards the fact that there is often more variability in size, shape, strength, and ability amongst people of the same sex than there is between people of different sexes. 

Should we hormone test every cisgender girl if she’s tall?  Who should inspect her genitalia and decide exactly how big her clit is?

By some measure, fully one percent of the population is intersex or has sexual differences from the norm, and some don’t even know it.  Do we require, in addition to hormone testing, a full chromosomal screening before enrolling in rec soccer?  Is it fair for the seventh-grade boy who is four-foot-five and sixty-five pounds, which is within normal growth range for that age, to have to compete against the boy who is five-three and one-hundred-thirty pounds, which is also normal for that age?  

What these rules really do is reinforce bad cultural narratives about what women can and can’t do with the express purpose of maintaining the status quo.  It is not a coincidence that Black and Brown women athletes are disproportionately asked to prove their sex through invasive testing.  Gender and sex are raced and used to undermine or call into question women’s and people of color’s hard work, skill and achievement. 

Jaime Schultz, who teaches in Penn State University’s department of kinesiology, writes that from the very minute women were allowed to compete in sports, all women have been under scrutiny and suspicion of having an “unfair advantage,” each over the other; this is explicitly a way to harm and control all women (though some more than others).  Schultz further says, “Over time, people have looked at genitalia, they've looked at chromosomes, they look for a specific gene, they've looked at testosterone. And what we end up with is the understanding that there's really no clear cut definition of sex, because each of these iterations of testing has kind of collapsed under its own weight.”  

**

But I’m not going to pretend that hormones have no effect.  If I thought that, I (probably, maybe) wouldn’t take hormone replacement therapy in the form of injected testosterone.

Testosterone has caused the distribution of fat on my body to shift around.  That means that it looks like I have smaller hips than I did before, and my already small breasts are now so small that when I went to get a mammogram the technician asked if I had had top surgery (I haven’t lol).  It also means that I have more belly than I used to, and more chin, and less prominent cheeks. Testosterone does not build muscle or make me stronger.  But it is true that higher T levels mean that if I work hard to gain muscle it is easier for me to maintain that muscle.  This is particularly noticeable in my arms and back, which means that before I took T I couldn’t do any pull-ups, and now I can do three in a row, which my trainer reminds me is a three-hundred percent increase.  To be fair, though, I didn’t practice doing pull-ups before I started on T.  Based on my observations of trans-masculine folks, one effect of testosterone is an irrepressible desire to do as many pull-ups as possible and then tell everyone about it.   

Testosterone might have effects on the brain, or maybe on the way our brain expresses itself to us and then how we express ourselves to other people.  My partner, who is also AFAB, says that, more than anything else, starting T made them feel calmer and able to think more clearly.  One week, I took a double dose, just to see what would happen, and for the rest of the week it seemed like I had limited access to my emotions, like there were some feelings I understood I normally would be having, but they were just out of reach.  T might have made me less emotional, like a man.  Or maybe I just succumbed to the tempting cultural narrative that masculine people can just do shit without having feelings about it.  There is good anecdotal evidence that one of the main effects of HRT on the brain is that just taking action in service of oneself makes folks feel like we have permission to think and feel and act the way we would have if only we had a different gender, or if gender wasn’t a thing. 

Most cis people go their whole lives without knowing the level of testosterone and estrogen in their serum.  Most cis people do not like to consider the idea that by at least one measure they might not even qualify as the sex they were assigned at birth.  Certainly, it would be a whole task for most cis people to prove they could be on the appropriate sports team in Nebraska.

Although it is variable, in general, natal females have between fifteen and seventy nanograms per deciliter of testosterone in their serum.  Natal males tend to have between three-hundred and nine-hundred.

But here’s the thing I love to tell people about:  my partner, a transman, injects 60 milligrams of testosterone every week.  They have a flat chest and full beard.  They have male-pattern balding and so much chest hair that I find it in the sheets.  They weigh double what I do and regularly and with ease bench-press more than my body weight.

On the same day every week, I inject 40 milligrams of testosterone –1/3 less testosterone than them.  

We each get our levels checked regularly.  My partner’s testosterone level is three-hundred-fifty nanograms.  My testosterone level is one-thousand.

Sometimes, when the nature of biological sex comes up at parties, I like to point at my partner and then at myself and ask people which of us is likely to have a uterus.  Everyone I have ever asked has been wrong.

**

You want to know about regret.

Once I had been on T for a couple of months, my voice began to drop.

When I answered the phone, my dad asked: “do you have a cold?”  When I went back to Maine to visit, my sister cornered me in a screened-in porch full of relatives and friends and said, “are you intentionally doing something to lower your voice?”  When I said, “You can ask me anything, but I’m not going to answer right now,” she responded: “Is it not a simple yes or no question?”

The thing is, I knew that my voice was likely to get lower when I started HRT, but I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.  

Years ago, I had recorded myself reading one of my short stories aloud for some publication or another.  Someone with a good mic and a soundboard helped me out.  When the recording was done, we played around with it, mixing my voice in different ways, for a laugh.  At one point, we dropped my voice down a couple octaves, so my alto became a low tenor.  I gasped when I heard the first notes of my new voice.  And the first thought I had was: now that sounds like someone I can take seriously.  At the time, a wave of guilt crashed over me at what I took to be my own internalized sexism.

I’m still not sure that wasn’t what it was.

My voice began to change slowly after I stared regularly taking T.  At first, I only noticed it when I said certain sonorous words: ago, ocean, both, told.  After a while, I had that distinctive T voice.  That particular combination of muffled, nasal, buzzy sounds that people whose vocal cords thickened well past the typical age of puberty make when we talk.  Broader vocal cords require more air, and a more forceful exhale, to move.  People who start testosterone after early adolescence often have a hard time adjusting our breath, which is why so many trans-masculine people sound similar.  Once you start listening for trans voice, you’ll hear it everywhere.  When my voice started to sound like that, sometimes it felt like solidarity, and sometimes it felt like community, and sometimes it felt like loss, and sometimes it felt like freedom.

And then my voice dropped very quickly.  Suddenly and all at once I was a bass. 

I have always loved to sing, and I’ll sing anything.  I sing in the shower just to hear myself.  I often sing with friends, and my sister and I sing together at the holidays.

For almost a year after my voice began to drop, I lost the ability to sing at all.  I had no access to my head voice, and I couldn’t control my chest voice well enough to keep in tune.  When I tried to hit low notes, my voice would crack and splinter.  When I tried to hit notes that were at the upper end of my range before the change, no sound came out at all.

I panicked.  For all the things I loved about taking T and for all the joy I was finding in change, I wasn’t sure if it had been worth it if this was to be the price.  And of course, I figured, there had to be a price.  There had to be a punishment.  Nothing good, I had been taught, can come without a dear cost.

I was in so much despair that my partner got me singing lessons with someone who specializes in trans vocalists.

In these sessions, the teacher would ask me to hum “Happy Birthday.”  They would have me blow bubbles through a straw into a glass half-full of water.  We would practice the same three bars of a simple hymn over and over.  After two months of frustration, I quit the lessons, convinced that even if I recovered some bit of range, I would always sound off-key and desperate.

Many months later, I was cooking dinner with my husband and my partner, and one of my favorite songs came on.  I started humming while stirring the sauce, and then, I couldn’t help it, I joined in, full-throated, for the chorus.  And I could sing!  I could move my voice up and down and make it sound how I wanted.  That is a kind of rare joy.  It is the kind of joy that will stick with me.  Now, I am never not grateful when I sing and it comes out sounding good.  Not only did I regain my head voice and the full range I could sing in pre-T, my range extended considerably. 

In the past five years, my voice has changed.  When I go back and read things I wrote five years ago, I have to wonder who is speaking through and for me.  Who, I wonder, had those ideas and feelings?  Who used those words?  The sound of my voice has also literally changed.  I have learned to control it better, so that I can pitch it deep and full when I think about it.  When I don’t think about it, it still returns to a frayed nasal tone, but it’s undeniably low.  Either way, I sound like me.  

And last night, at a vigil for another murdered trans child, I lifted my voice with others to sing “Amazing Grace” and found that I have real range and tonality now, and that I could hear my voice distinct from and in harmony with those in my community.

**

Who gets to decide who we are?

When I travel out of state I bring my passport.

In Massachusetts, where I live, I have been issued an ID with an “X” as my gender marker.  Because of the policies of my state, I feel secure here insomuch as I can access appropriate health care, I am actually covered under civil rights law, and I feel reasonably certain that when presenting my ID at a show or a club, the bouncer will not cause a scene but just wave me on with the rest of the crowd.  I prefer taking public transportation to driving (so gay!), so I haven’t been pulled over by a cop since I got my new ID.  It feels like it will be a roll of the dice if I do.  Police in Massachusetts are more knowledgeable about LGBTQ+ identities and are more constrained by civil rights laws than in other states, but they are still cops.  Still, my odds of surviving interactions with police are clearly better here than in many places in the US (not to mention better than if I were a trans woman or a person of color).  There are now some states that I just do not go to.

When I do travel out of state, I bring my passport, so I can show an “F” to the TSA, bartenders in other bars, and in any circumstance where I might need identity documents.  This means that when I travel, I make myself look as close to female as I can without completely annihilating myself.  

All of this is to say that even if it becomes illegal to be trans or socially so dangerous to be out that to be openly transgender is not viable, I could pass.  I could walk through the world as a woman in order not to be killed.  I am “she’d” more often than I am “he’d” when I am out, and I could lean into that. 

When they balk at the changes in their children, some parents of trans or gendernonconforming children are, reportedly, asked, “would you rather have a dead son or an alive daughter?”  The point is that for some trans people, gender-affirming care and social and/or medical transition is a matter of life and death.  This is undoubtedly and demonstrably true. 

It is not universally true.  If I were forced to live in a gender that matched the sex I was assigned at birth, I would not jump in front of a subway train or wash down handfuls of pills with a bottle of gin.  I already know what that feels like --to be forced to live in a gender that matches the sex I was assigned at birth-- and it feels like speaking a foreign language in which I am conversant but not quite fluent.  It feels like having to translate all the time.  It feels like trying to walk with a small stone in my shoe.  It is exhausting and irritating, but, for me, it is better than being dead.

Sometimes, the threats against trans people feel like a long, slow suffocation.  “I feel like I can’t breathe,” my partner says to me while reading the news in the morning.  “It’s okay,” I say.  “It’s okay.”

At night, when I wake with a gasp, body rigid, breath fast and shallow, they pull me close.  “You’re safe,” they say to me.  “You’re safe right now.”

**

I love the strength of my arms.  When I look at myself in the mirror, I love my tiny tits and my slender, masculine hips.  I like the way I can, at forty-three, wear whatever I want, because doing things to my body was the first step in giving myself permission to look however I feel like looking.  I have tiny crop tops and baggy boy’s low-slung jeans I would have begged my mother to buy me in the nineties if I hadn’t known how futile that would be.  I have short athletic skirts and big working-man’s coats.  I feel a lot of joy when someone gets my pronouns right, or when I see on official forms that my honorific is “Mx.”

But also, I have body hair now.  I have a happy trail that truly does make me happy.  The hairs there are long enough for me to tug on, and I do so sometimes, to feel the ecstatic feeling of embodying something I always envied.  I grow sparse, patchy, dirtbag sideburns that I frequently admire in the mirror.  I also shave my legs every single day now.  I feel a shiver of shame every time I find a single hair on my chest, and every time I do, I think about quitting T before I get another one.  I scrape my face raw to eradicate any hint of my mustache and the bristles that grow on my chin a few hours after I shave.  I still question whether I have done the right thing in changing the chemistry of my body.  My cholesterol is higher now.  I hate the idea of me with facial hair.  I think about getting electrolysis, but even if I could afford it (I can’t), it’s such a permanent decision.  Yes, my dick will never be a cute little pink button-sized clit again, but what if someday I want a beard?  I shudder thinking of becoming a person who wants that.  I know I might someday want that.

Having mixed feelings about a behavior or decision is an inescapable and ubiquitous feature of being human.  

When I have mixed feelings about things related to my gender presentation, the feeling of unease is compounded by a feeling of guilt.  This is a choice I am making.  So the things I don’t like, that cause me fear or sadness or disgust, those things are my fault, I think.  But that is a false sense of control.

People are fond of telling me that I don’t get to pick and choose the effects of T, and they’re right.  But we don’t get to pick and choose the effects of anything else, either.  

How will your face age?  What color will your hair be when you are older?  How do you carry your weight?  What if you get hit by a car, or have a stroke?

**

I recently saw an autobiographical play written and directed by a trans man in which the trans man’s partner was alternately enraged and dismayed by his transition and so considered leaving him.  She was supposed to be sympathetic, I think.  And she was more sympathetic than the trans man, I guess.  But still.

After the play ended, we were invited to participate in an audience-wide discussion, billed as “act two.”  Many of the people in the (mostly older, white, cis) audience talked about their feelings of loss when a child, a student, an acquaintance “changed” genders.  And I wanted to say to every one of them: did you think that because you cared for someone, they would never change?  Did you think that your love obligated another person to be preserved in amber for your passive enjoyment?

Sometimes, the conservative argument against gender affirming health care takes the form of: but what if children make choices they later regret?  The problem with this argument is not just that, in reality, no one is handing out double-mastectomies or vaginoplasties to fourteen-year-olds.  The problem is that we let children make life-altering decisions every day: dancing ballet en pointe permanently alters the shape of a girl’s foot (my friend Jennifer swears she’s going to send that anti-trans New York Times columnist a picture of her feet, still affected by the ballet she stopped thirty years ago).  Quitting Chinese lessons at fourteen means it will be exponentially harder for that girl to access that part of her brain later.  Playing football means the boy and his parents are willing to risk the boy getting a catastrophic head injury. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, more than 4,800 nose jobs were performed on teenagers nineteen-years-old and younger in 2022 alone, almost all of them on girls.  That is a gender-affirming surgery insomuch as it is done on female children only to “correct” what is commonly accepted as “unsightly” in a girl.

The problem with the argument that by disallowing or delaying gender-affirming care for young people we are protecting them is that puberty is life-altering, much more so than puberty blockers, which are reversible.

Life, it turns out, is life-altering.

Everyone, at any time and at any age, might make choices we regret.  Living with that means taking responsibility for ourselves.  And once we do that, we can’t blame anyone else for who we are.  And once we do that, we are free.

**

The other day, I heard a trans person lament: “We’re always seen as a threat.  I don’t want to menace your family!  I just want to put on my little skirts and do my little crosswords and fold my laundry in peace.”

It is truly a grotesque and bad-faith argument that trans people are “grooming” children and that “woke ideology” is wresting personal freedom away from families.  It is the weaponization of the language of vulnerability by the dominant class –those who are most threating to most of us claim they are in danger from exactly the people they are menacing.  Straight, cis, hetero, white men talk as if having their feelings hurt by an individual is the same as being pervasively harassed and institutionally oppressed, or even being physically threatened and harmed.  

But we should admit that the increased visibility of trans people is dangerous to the rigidity of repressive gender norms.  We should fucking celebrate that with champagne.  And if the ability of children to self-determine who they are is threatening to traditional family units it is only because traditionally, parents have been encouraged to treat their children as property.  I am happy to fuck that right the fuck up.

I want to be a threat to the state.  I want to menace your family.

I don’t want, as the phrase goes, to be “gay as in happy.”  I want to be queer as in fuck you.  If in my lifetime I can, without anger or hatred or fear, trouble the status quo, then I am doing my job to get us all a little bit free.  I am doing my job, and yours too.  

**

My student Ellie wants to talk about coming out.  I am her advisor in a directed study we designed together.  We call the course “T4T.” 

The reading list is made up entirely of fictional novels written by out trans authors about trans protagonists.  Ellie, who is a twenty-two-year-old out, trans woman, meets with me once  a week to talk about books and identity and craft and legibility.

Ellie began her transition a few years ago.  Last year, when she was in a literature class I teach at the college, I asked all the students to write to me at the start of the semester, telling me their goals as a scholar, a creative, and a person.  Ellie wrote that her goal was to start on HRT; she wanted to take estrogen.  At the end of the semester, in her self-assessment, she noted that she had learned new elements of craft, honed her analytical reasoning, read more stories than she thought she would, and started HRT.

Now, she tells me, she is almost always read as female.

So now, she wants to talk about coming out.  She says she has a number of friends who are considering social or medical transition.  She says she tells her friends that after transition they’ll still have all the same problems they had before.  Transition will not solve all those problems.  She says it’s like having a checklist, and once you check one thing off –the big one-- the rest of the list doesn’t disappear, it’s just that it becomes easier to see how to get all those problems solved and to check those next things off the list.

I say, “what if transition is not about solving a problem?”  

“What do you mean?” she asks.

I say, “What if becoming who you are isn’t about fixing something?  What if becoming you is just that: becoming who you are now.”

Ellie is quiet, thinking.  Eventually, she says, “I think trans people are encouraged to believe that after transition, we’ve accomplished something.  Like: I was born into the wrong body, which was a problem, but then I fixed it, so now it’s not a problem.  It’s an accomplishment.  Like: I would transition and then I would be my true self.  Like, I’d have everything figured out so I could stop searching for me and just be happy and be better.  Better for myself and my relationships, better at my job, better for my partner, better at mental health, better at doing what I need to do.”

I tell Ellie that I think choosing to be authentic and free is not the same as trying to become happy and good.

Being unhappy sometimes is part of the human experience, and we should all relish our ability to experience the full depth of our humanity, and not attempt to curtail that.  

And I have never managed to be good.

Who gets to decide what “good” is anyway?  What if who you are, whoever you are, is not a problem to be solved?  Problem solving is not inherent in (let alone synonymous with) the search for identity and meaning, nor should it be the goal of becoming who we are or expressing how we want to be.  What if accomplishing anything isn’t the point?

I say to Ellie: “I think the typical queer narrative, of trauma overcome by coming out, is a narrative of oppression masquerading as a narrative of liberation.”

**

Sometimes people talk about coming out as if there is a before and an after, but of course we continue to come out over and over again throughout our lives, letting new people in on part of the story of who we are.

It’s even more common to think of transition as the fulcrum on which a life pivots, tipping over so that everything after is different.  But we are all, all of us, changing all the time.

**

Last year my daughter called me and asked if we were going to my aunt’s house for Easter.  My aunt sometimes has a big Easter feast, coming home after church to serve a huge, delicious meal to friends and family.  My husband and daughter and I had attended this a couple years in a row, but my aunt hasn’t hosted Easter since the pandemic.  I told my daughter that we hadn’t been invited to Easter this year, and I wasn’t even sure if my aunt was going to have people over.  “Well, you should ask her if we can go to her house for Easter,” my daughter said.  My aunt is an excellent cook, and she’s a really lovely person, too.  But I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.  It would be the first time I saw my aunt since I changed my pronouns and came out as trans.  She is an evangelical Christian with deeply held beliefs.  I had not wanted to tell her that I am trans, and since we don’t see each other that often, I didn’t feel like it was worth it. 

“You ask her,” I said to my daughter.

Twenty minutes later, I got a text from my aunt, delighted with my daughter.  She said she hadn’t thought to do an Easter party this year, but that it was such a good idea she had immediately contacted twenty people and set the whole thing up.

So, on Easter Sunday, my husband and I drove out to where my daughter was living and picked her up to make the trek to my aunt’s house.

When we got there, the long table was set with purple cloth napkins and my great grandmother’s china, with little piles of Cadbury mini-eggs scattered around the flower arraignments and candles.  There was a huge cake on a sideboard, and some kids running around in their Sunday best.  All of the other families had just come back from church.  I dug a Whiteclaw out of a cooler on the porch.

My aunt has a side hustle as a caterer and baker, and she knows that I am also an accomplished cook, so she asked me to help her in the kitchen, and I gladly joined her.  One of my favorite places to be at a party is in front of a stove, stirring something, or pulling a tray out of an oven.  She asked me to take care of some vegetable sides while she carved the ham into huge slices, which she layered on a platter.  As I turned the heat up under some carrots, my back to her, she said, “I am just in so much despair about the way the world is going.”

My shoulders tensed.  “Yeah,” I said noncommittally, facing the stove.  

“You’re a mother,” she continued, “so you know what I mean.”  Her kids are in their late twenties, and my daughter is twenty-five.  “What can we even tell our children? “ she said.  “How can they have hope?”

“I know,” I said, because I do.  But I was braced for her to start talking about the trans agenda threatening our kids, or perverts running libraries, or pride flags in the schools.  Mindful of the fact that my own child was in the other room, talking to my aunt’s oldest about books and so glad to be here, I scrambled to think of things I could say that would neither totally destroy me nor get us kicked out of Easter dinner.

“I am just so angry,” my aunt said.

I turned around, sauce spoon in my hand, and saw that she had tears in her eyes.

“The planet is literally on fire, and there’s another school shooting every month.  And the politicians are going after librarians?  There’re kids in body bags, and they think trans people are the danger?  How can anyone who cares about pronouns when the world is awash in genocide call themselves a Christian?”

I was so stunned all I could do was nod.  I said something about the possibility of change, of things getting better.  The carrots boiled over.

She went on to tell me that her son’s best friend is a trans woman.  Her son had, as far as I knew, always been deeply conservative.  His best friend socially and medically transitioned at twenty-eight, and managed to keep her faith, her wife, and her Christian best friend.

I said nothing about myself for the whole Easter dinner, and when it was over, I hugged my aunt and my uncle and my cousin, I gathered up daughter and got in the car.  As we pulled away, my overwhelming feeling was of shame.  I had an opportunity to really see my aunt and to let her see me, and I didn’t have the courage to do it.  An hour into the drive, I pulled out my phone.  I texted my aunt a photo I had taken of everyone at the table and wrote: “This was really lovely!” And then: “Also, I actually have changed my pronouns to they/them.  I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, and I’m sorry I wasn’t sure that you’d be cool with it.  Talking to you today, you and your whole family are such good allies.”

She responded with the best thing anyone has ever said to me after hearing me come out.  She wrote: “Thank you for sharing that with me.  I’m sorry if anything I have said or done in the past made you feel like it wasn’t safe to be exactly who you are with me.  I hope I have learned and grown and evolved throughout my lifetime.  I love you.  I have always loved you and always will.”

We change.

**

I am talking to my T4T student, who says she always wanted to be a tomboy.

She says she has a friend who, if he could, would be FTMTF.  

She says, “no matter what sex I was born as, I still would have been trans.”

When we read Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and Paul remembers a girl in grade school who wore a t-shirt that said “anything boys can do girls can do better” and how much he coveted that shirt, my student Ellie and I agree that we are both just like Paul.  Ellie, like Paul, wanted to be that girl wearing that shirt.  I wanted to be the boy coveting that shirt.  I wanted to be the boy wearing the girl’s shirt celebrating my girlhood as a boy.

Ellie says that she sometime used to feel like she can’t say those things: that she wanted to be a tomboy, or that her friend wants to be FTMTF.  That for a long time she thought she couldn’t be trans, and now she knows that she would have been trans regardless of her body, that she is a woman, but she is also trans before any other gender.

She felt like she couldn’t say any of that because those things sound so messy.  She worried that these complexities play into right-wing stereotypes of trans people as unstable and as people whose gender identity is changeable, and therefore not legitimate.  She says that when she first figured out that the thing that was going on with her had to do with gender, she still thought, “Well, yes.  Transition helps lots of people like me, but I must be the exception to the rule.”  She thought that, though she was suffering, she should suffer more before even considering transition.

In a recent article about her transition, Bernie Wagenblast says that in her late fifties, she found a trans support group and: "I started [going to] it with the hope that it would be enough, and I wouldn't have to go any further."  When I read that, I choke down a sob.  I think about all the harm that word, “enough,” has done in the world.

Ellie says at one point she worried she wasn’t trans enough.  “You mean like trans trans?” I ask, laughing.  “Yeah, I worried about that a lot too,” I say.  “Like, what I’m not a real trans?”  She laughs right back at me.

Even still, it occurs to me every week that Ellie has a much better grasp on how to be a person than I did at her age.  She is terrified to sign her first apartment lease, which she will nonetheless do in two weeks, but also, at twenty-two, she often knows how to talk about what it feels like to be a person better than I do now, at forty-three.

Much later, Ellie will say to me: “You know, he was wrong.”  

“Who?” I will ask. 

“Your partner, who said that gender identity is the feeling inside that people have that they are male or female.  That’s now how we talk about it now.”

As her professor, I know I should remind her that her generation is diverse, and to speak for all of them is a hasty generalization, which is a logical fallacy.  On the other hand, if anyone is going to speak for the youth, I hope it is Ellie, because if they all turn out like her, then I have a lot of hope.  “Go on,” I say.

“That’s too much pressure,” she says.  “To feel like a gender.  We say that gender identity is ‘identification with a certain societal conception of a gender role.’”

I’m not sure if this idea feels any more true to me, or whether I like it any better, but it does make me wonder why the fuck I gave so much weight to what my ex-partner said to me those many years ago; he is, after all, just some fucking dude.  

***

A popular meme mocking trans and queer people has the author purporting to identify as an attack helicopter.  You want me to call you what? Is the implication.  Your pronouns are what? the meme asks.  Oh yeah, it answers, well, my pronouns are “Attack Helicopter.”  My sexual orientation is Attack Helicopter.  My gender identity is Attack Helicopter.

Okay.  My gender identity is Attack Helicopter.

I am not the only one.  In 2020, Isabell Fall, a trans woman sci-fi writer, published a story, which was nominated for a Hugo award, called “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” in Clarksworld.  She was so badly harassed by social justice advocates calling her homophobic and trans-exclusionary, including queer and trans people who did not know her subject position, that she asked the magazine to remove her story and ultimately ended up hospitalized for a time.

So fuck you.  My gender identity is Attack Helicopter.

**

You want to know how an attack helicopter has sex.

I said that I came out as bisexual as a child.  That’s not a term many people use any more.  My students, and even my LGBTQ+ peers, are much more likely these days to identify as pansexual or some such term.  Of course that is the more accurate term for me, because it includes sexual and romantic attraction to not just men and women, but those in between, cis folks and trans folks, and those who don’t know how they fit into that rainbow.  Ideas about sex and sexual orientation break down at some point when you are a certain kind of trans.  If I am neither male nor female, what does it mean that I have sex with a straight, cis man?  That I also have a friends-with-benefits friend who is a cis woman who likes to touch my tits?  That my primary partner is a transman?  For a while I dated a trans man who only dates women but who refused to think of me as anything other than a man, even when he was fucking me.

**

You want to know how I live.

When I travel out of state with my partner, we each bring a copy of our advance directive paperwork.  We do this because we are not legally related, and if one of us were to end up in the hospital, we want to be absolutely certain that we would have access to each other and the ability to make medical decisions on each other’s behalf.  We do this because we are queer and trans and cannot be assured of respectful or even life-saving care in a medical setting.  When my partner ended up in the ER one night, I stayed by their side the entire time, laying in the gurney with them for fourteen hours as a physical reminder to every medical professional there that this person, my partner, is loved.  That someone was watching.

An advance directive names a medical care proxy in case you cannot make your own medical decisions or are unable to adequately communicate your decisions to doctors.  Advance directives also contain information about how much and for how long you want extraordinary measures taken to save your life.  The idea is that you fill it out with the person who is your medical care proxy so that they clearly know, before an emergency situation, your health priorities.  Filling out this document with your proxy means talking about how long you want to be on life support if the chances of recovery are eight percent, fifty percent, ten percent.  What about just a ventilator?  A feeding tube?  How many times is too many times to shock your heart?  How much brain function can you lose before you are no longer you?  How much will you allow your body to change?

When my partner and I downloaded these forms, we were thinking of the stories of people who got COVID and had to be put on a ventilator, and the decisions their loved ones had to make for them because you cannot talk while you are intubated.  

One of the websites we looked at that had free advance directive forms says, in bold and hopeful letters: “It’s about how you want to live.”

 People have a hard time thinking about their own death, so medical care paperwork is often rebranded this way.  Don’t think of it as how you want to die, think of it as making clear to trusted people your own choices about how you want to live!

That gives a reassuring, if false, sense of control and autonomy.

Being queer has sometimes been construed as having to figure out for oneself how we want to live.  When traditional milestones of cis-hetero-normative lives are not available or attractive to you, you have to find different ways of thinking about what you want in life.  bell hooks talked about “‘Queer’ not as being about who you're having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but 'queer' as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”  Ocean Vuong said, “Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, 'Is this enough for me?'" 

**

You still want to know if my husband and I fuck.  I will tell you soon.   We are nearing the final page.

**

I have just finished reading a story one of my students recommended to me.  The story is “Horse” by Amy Bonnafons.  In the story, there are two women, one who wants to get pregnant and the other who wants to be a horse.  Near the end of the story, the first woman is expecting a child, and the second is almost completely a horse, which means that she will leave her human concerns and desires and connections fully behind her after her soon-to-be-complete transition.  The pregnant woman is mourning the imminent loss of her friend, who will no longer be her friend, because she will be a horse.  She wants to recall a time when the two of them were in this state of expectant wanting together.

The woman who will be a horse thinks: “That seemed like such a long time ago; the needles had done their work, we’d launched ourselves onto opposing trajectories. Did we still need each other? If not, did this mean we had failed to love each other, or that we had loved each other well?”

**

My husband and I were together for nineteen years and married for seventeen years when he asked me for a divorce.  We had been practicing ethical non-monogamy for fifteen years.  I had been with my partner for four years, and my husband had been with his partner on and off for six years.  I had come out as trans and started T three and a half years prior.  Between us, we had two houses, two cars, six jobs, a huge group of friends, a twenty-six-year-old daughter, and a grandchild due to be born in three months.  When my husband asked me for a divorce, I had been writing and rewriting this essay for a year.

This is the part of the essay I didn’t want to write, because I don’t want to put another sad trans narrative out into the world.  I don’t want you to think that being trans is trauma and sacrifice, or that trans people can’t have long marriages and happy children and grow contentedly old.  I don’t want to put another divorce story out in the world either.  It’s been done; I am bored of divorce stories.  

I had intended to write an end to this essay that was about how, when we are forced to think differently about the world because the world was not designed for us, we get creative, and creativity is a powerful generative force.  When we think creatively about how we organize our relationships, we are capable of radically reorganizing fundamental expectations so that it is possible not just for each of us to get what we want, but for more of us to get what we want and need.

**

I loved my husband.  We were good at being married.  We always made sure that our relationship had the strong foundation of marriage: someone to make the bed while the other brewed the coffee, someone to take out the trash when the other tackled the recycling, and someone to have safe unprotected sex with when the desire arose.  We renovated houses and built a family and a life brick by brick.

When he asked me for a divorce, he said: “I didn’t sign up for this.”

And I almost laughed.  None of us signed up for any of this.  That isn’t what marriage is, particularly when you get married young.  You don’t sign up for any given outcome, you sign up for figuring it out together as you go along.  Life, it turns out, is life altering.

**

When we were adopting a teenager from foster care, the stupidest well-meaning question people repeatedly asked us was: how can you make a family with someone you know nothing about?  I always pointed out that there is no one you know less about than a newborn.  Your infant could be a math prodigy or a murderer or Nobel laureate or a Young Republican, or your infant could contract an illness or have an accident that leaves her profoundly disabled; or, she could be a person who would have become any of those things if only something small but pivotal were different at any moment in her life.  And thinking that it is possible to control the trajectory of another person’s life, even one who you gave birth to, is not just foolish, it’s selfish and dangerous.

When he told me he wanted a divorce, my husband did not say he was ending our relationship because I am trans, and he doesn’t want to be married to a trans person.  What he said he didn’t sign up for was the fact that I spend three-to-four days a week with my partner.

Of course, that is maybe the one part of this big, rich, improbable, unusual life that he wants to leave that he could in fact be said to have signed up for.

When we had been married for two years, my husband and I found ourselves on a deck overlooking a water feature in a home in Westchester County.  It was the family home of the woman who had, just moments ago, married the person to whom I gave my first ever blow job, in the boys’ bedroom at a bed and breakfast on a church field trip while four other boys feigned sleep and “Satellite” by the Dave Mathew’s Band played on a boombox.

On the deck, my husband and I talked about the wedding.  My oldest friend had married a woman I was meeting for the first time that night.  She was beautiful, charming, and clearly delighted.  

My husband and I talked about our own wedding.  We had a perfect wedding.  

By this point, two years into marriage, we did not have a perfect marriage, but we had a stable and loving one.  

Earlier that night I had embraced my friend’s dad, who had briefly been my religious education teacher when my friend and I were very young.  The former RE teacher brought his daughter, my friend’s half-sister, to the wedding.  I met her that night for the first time.  In fact, my friend’s father had met his own daughter for the first time just recently.  Many years earlier, he had been in Senegal with the Americorp program.  He had a relationship with a Senegalese woman who, unbeknownst to him, became pregnant.  His daughter was born after he left, and had recently gotten in touch with him.  She was thirty years old.

The mother of the groom was also there, with her new husband.

So my husband and I started to talk about all of the different ways to have a family.  I don’t remember exactly what we said to each other, sipping champagne and looking out over the night and back in through the French doors at the other guests.  But we talked about possibilities which: at that age, and with a lot of imagination, were endless.  We talked about what mattered, and what didn’t; and what mattered to us then was love.  That was the night we decided to open our marriage.  We did so carefully and thoughtfully, and we have taken care for fifteen years to do it in ways that worked for both of us.  What mattered was love.

It is still what matters to me.

But I get it.  People change.

**

What matters to me is love as a force for freedom.

There were many times in the past fifteen years where I did not feel free, or during which I paid an enormous cost for my freedom.  I wanted to have it all: the respectable marriage, the unconventional family, the love, the excitement of possibility, the strong ties that hold but don’t bind.  And in all of that to be who I am.

For a long time, I believed that love was only real if each person in the loving relationship had to depend on the other.  I thought the only bonds that were sincere were those forged in obligation. 

But love can offer more than mutual indebtedness.  Love can offer us freedom.  

Love can let us become who we are, every day.  Love can give us the space to try new things and to be wrong and to refine our values and to change into the best version of ourselves, and to be seen reflected back to ourselves, as exactly who we want to be and who we are constantly becoming.  This is love as a force for liberation.

I do not need my husband at all.

**

You want to know what my body means.  My body is not a metaphor.   It has no meaning.  It belongs to no one but myself.

**

I still think each of us can have whatever we want if we have a lot of imagination.  The only debt I’m interested in now is that which we owe ourselves and all others: to think generously.

**

After my husband tells me he wants a divorce, my partner and I eat big cheeseburgers.  We hold each other.  We buy new throw pillows.  We fuck.  I find a way to call my daughter, to tell her that it is going to be okay, and that I love her.

And then my partner goes away for a week on a trip they have previously scheduled, and I am alone for the longest period of time I’ve been alone in a long, long time.  Or actually, I’m not alone.  Two nights I have friends over to the apartment my partner and I share.  One night I meet my writers group at a bar.  One night I go see a friend’s child’s softball game and then go out for drinks with my friend.

But I am partner-less for seven days, and, while I’m glad it’s not forever, it feels good.  I am good at just being me, by myself.  I had forgotten that for a while, and it’s worth remembering.

**

I think of my advance directive paperwork.  Given everything, the question now is not how we want to live, but:  how do we want to die?  I asked earlier how, given everything, we can hope.  (I didn’t; that was my aunt).  These questions are related.  We have to have hope.  Because the alternative is not just certain and early death, but complicity in, and consent to, our own extermination.  I am going to die putting hope into action.  I am going to die as me.

**

I had intended to write an end to this essay that was about how queerness can make us creative enough to say “fuck you” to the oppressive institutions and expectations that have always served the very few at the expense of the many of us (who are not straight or passing, cis, able, wealthy white men).

Queerness did invite me to do that.  It has not enabled me to fix or reform or abolish those systems.  What queerness really did for me, and what matters, is help me understand that I not only can live outside those systems, I can thrive as who I am.  Once I claimed one thing about myself, it showed me that I can claim my whole self for myself.  And I never have to feel bad about that again.

Queerness taught me that the end of this essay is not about my ex-husband, or my partner, or my kid, or my parents, or my friends, or my job.  It is not about the law or about what you want.  Queerness shows me every day that this essay is about me.  That I get to be about me.

**

I will put this question to you now: how do you want to die?

I want to die fearless and free.  I will go down fighting and fucking.  I will not be the wisp of smoke left in the air when a candle is extinguished.  My gender is a wedding ring, a baby bottle, an old photograph and an at-home injection kit and a dead transmission and a dildo and an empty whiskey bottle and a membership to the Museum of Fine Arts and rosary beads and a hand-made quilt and crop top and a phone call to a friend.  My gender is a motherfucking Molotov cocktail.