Felix Ever After

by Kacen Callender

For trans and nonbinary youth: You’re beautiful. You’re important. You’re valid. You’re perfect.

#TransRightsReadathon

“Hey,” he says, “so your name’s really—?” He deadnames me. He might as well have punched me in the gut.

Some people say we shouldn’t need labels. That we’re trying to box ourselves in too much. But I don’t know. It feels good to me, to know I’m not alone. That someone else has felt the same way I’ve felt, experienced the same things I’ve experienced. It’s validating.

I always see it on the news. The ways the government is trying to erase me, the ways politicians try to pretend transgender people don’t exist, even though we do exist, and always have, and always will.

I know that, as a trans person of color, my life expectancy is in my early thirties, just because of the sort of violence people like me face every day.

Pain sparks and fury burns through me. It’s no one else’s right to say who I am, or what I identify as—but not everyone believes that.

To know that there are people out there who hate me, want to hurt me, want to erase my identity, without ever even seeing me or knowing me, just like there are people out there who hate me for the color of my skin—it’s enraging, infuriating, but it also hurts.

“I’m not flaunting anything. I’m just existing. This is me. I can’t hide myself. I can’t disappear. And even if I could, I don’t fucking want to. I have the same right to be here. I have the same right to exist.”

I hope Felix can do for even just one reader what Adam did for me: that a reader picks up Felix Ever After and learns more about themselves and their identity, and that becoming who they truly are is a possibility.