More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There are an infinite number of ways to be queer and trans, and my story speaks to only one.
These memories shape a nonlinear narrative, because queerness is intrinsically nonlinear, journeys that bend and wind. Two steps forward, one step back.
Shame had been drilled into my bones since I was my tiniest self, and I struggled to rid my body of that old toxic and erosive marrow.
Still, I wanted to laugh with her, I mean being queer is funny and bad right? The word “homosexuality” simply uttered in health class would give way to a cacophony of snickering. All the sitcoms I watched when I went home from school reinforced this. Whenever a joke was made, or I made one, it stuck; shit in the treads of my shoes.
Research has shown that transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are four times more likely to struggle with an eating disorder.
As an adult, I would say, “I just want to be a ten-year-old boy,” whenever dysphoria belted out its annoying song, a pop hit that you know the words to and don’t know why.
Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind. The depth of that closet, the trove of secrets buried, indifferent to the consequences. I was punished for being queer while I watched others be protected and celebrated, who gleefully abused people in the wide open.
“My keys are always in my pocket, that is what I tell myself,” explained Drew. “If I’m not sure, if I’m hesitant and scared, I simply remind myself that I have my keys in my pocket and I can leave at any point. You can just leave.”
No scarcity complex or illusion of constant linear growth.
We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from.
Like the many ways in which I have been difficult for people—my abrupt shifts, shutting down mixed with the instinct to run, being dishonest because I felt so irrationally frightened.
Even though I am extremely lucky, this narrative where trans people have to feel lucky for these crumbs—that we fought hard for, and still fight for—is perverse and manipulative. Here is the thing—I almost did not make it, the now I finally have I did not see, and all I knew was permanent emptiness, a mystery I would never solve.
Poor Mark contended with bursts of grief and anger, at all the time lost, at all the self-hate, at all that could have been.
