Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of the class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as “dollface,” that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through—with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of stars—had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind.
