Some Strange Music Draws Me In

by Griffin Hansbury

My shape, that enigmatic packaging, had its own design and cared nothing about anyone’s objections, including my own. However the message came, the world confirmed what I felt, that my body was off in its most essential calibrations.

polyester. In that sameness, even with my big bones and heavy feet, I hoped to fail less obviously at girlhood. Something to look forward

In the mornings, instead of coffee, she heated Tab in a microwave oven and drank it from a mug decorated with a Ziggy cartoon: “Hang in there. Today won’t last forever.” This summed up Ginny’s philosophy of life, in which each day was to be endured until its hotly anticipated end.

was weak, like my mother always said. I tried

“The girl I used to be.” Just one note about that. I can say this about myself, but you can’t say it about me. That’s how it works. When you say it, you’re doing something to me. An act of casual aggression. A verbal depantsing. When I say it, well, it’s mine to say. Girl, in this context, doesn’t mean to me what girl means to you. It’s a flickering kind of boy-girl, a girl-not-girl that isn’t not-girl.

but understand that when I was a kid, I was starving for elders, older trans people to show me I could exist and did not have to die

She didn’t understand the differences between trans men and cis men, didn’t see the disparity in our payloads of privilege, and she probably believed, as many otherwise well-meaning people do, that to acknowledge the difference, to say trans men are men and also more complicated, hello, more ontologically fraught, is to commit an act of transphobia when it’s the opposite. It’s affirming our complexity.

as gentle as I would have liked, “I’m sorry if

I preserved this transgender question under cellophane. That would have been at least a year before I began to know myself, before I met Sylvia, and this brings up the mystery of knowing, how we can know a thing without thinking it, and how that unthought knowledge leaves traces, fragments of the truth before it’s fully born.

“All these words are trying to name the experience of non-binary gender, which of course is valid, I mean, it’s been around for thousands of years, but in their limitless profusion, the labels risk devolving to the narcissism of minor differences.

“I just worry about a community that’s more invested in hyper-individualism than, you know, community,” I say.

“You’re mansplaining,” Autumn says, tapping a note into her laptop, no doubt a demerit for her report to the dean of Diversity and Inclusion. “I’m a trans man,” I say. “If anything, I’m transplaining.” “Trans men are

manhood. How did the expansion of gender lead us right back into the binary?

spill. Jules tugged at the grass, picking out strands until she found one to prop between her thumbs. She blew into it, making a sound like a balloon farting wet air. “Knock it off,”

I was glad when he died. Before that, it was like, even when I was in New York, I could feel him. Like you’re in the woods and you know there’s a wolf out there, tracking you, waiting to attack. And then, poof, the wolf’s gone. You feel that, too. The relief of absence. From miles away.”

I wanted to apologize to the kid the way I wanted to apologize to the World’s

I wish I could have trusted my best friend, but I’d learned early that even the people who are supposed to love you can turn on you.

People don’t say this often, but queerness can save your life. It forces you outside, where you have no choice but to find other resources. When you come from a rough place, queerness can set you free. It’s the regular kids who stay stuck. Donna keeps nodding, saying yeah, uh-huh,

potent. Autumn doesn’t care about my history and I can feel her trying to box me into a present-day shape. I won’t let that happen. When she pauses her lecture to turn onto the day camp’s campus,