top of page
  • Etsy
  • Instagram

Gender? I Hardly Know Her!

I want to preface this piece with the fact that this was almost four years ago and since then my mom has learned to respect my identity and I love her very much.


I cracked my knuckles over and over, working each finger side to side at the second knuckle. I then went over them again, this time with a clenched fist, pushing each knuckle deeper into my palm until I heard a loud pop. I repeated the process on each hand multiple times. There was no end goal to the action. It was a nervous habit that I’d had since I could remember. My parents hated it. But no matter how many times they pulled my hands apart, they would always gravitate back together like opposite poles of a magnet.


I did this while pacing through what little space I had left of my room, weaving between big brown cardboard boxes full of junk. I was going through a specific script in my mind, running and rerunning the lines and possible responses as well as possible responses to those responses. 


Finally, it was time for my debut performance. I stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath, and walked downstairs. In the kitchen, my mom put groceries in the fridge while Sam, her useless boyfriend, sat at the dining table. I stood on my stage behind the open refrigerator door and waited, looking at the photos that clung to the stainless steel with business card magnets. My brothers were there and so were my mom and I, smiling together. She closed the door and the pictures disappeared from my view. The curtain had risen. I couldn’t put it off any longer. This was my opportunity.

“I’m transgender,” I said. “And [deadname] doesn’t feel like me anymore. I’d like to go by Charlie now.”


By then, gender had been the main thing on my mind for the last couple of months. It had first come slithering its way into my brain when I was fourteen or fifteen, but with my bustling high school career of making sure I never got anything below an A and also never hanging out with any friends, I was completely booked. I had no time for self-discovery. My identity wasn’t important anyway, that’s what college is for, right? So I happily slapped a genderqueer label on myself, suppressed all thoughts of gender, told no one, and moved on.


The thing about bottling something up for so long is that pressure builds. Back then my identity was fresh fruit preserved in sugar water. It was crisp and sweet, and I closed that bottle up tight to save it for later. At the time, I wasn’t well-versed in the fermentation process. I wasn’t aware that if I didn’t burp the bottle every once in a while, the pressure would just build and build and build until I opened it. And I didn’t. I didn’t open the bottle in small increments over time while my gender was brewing. I kept it all inside, locked in the closet until I had almost forgotten about it. And when I finally remembered, I blew the dust off of the glass and peered inside. It had been fermenting for years and it looked ready for consumption. So I opened it.


It’s funny really, how it happened. I was home sick from classes one November day with a fever. It was during my first semester at [insert pretentious, rich-kid, art school name here] and this was the first time I had missed a day. I was lying in bed with my blankets up to my chin, watching a Netflix original that was both awful and amazing at the same time. I think my burning body temperature had something to do with why this PG show was so life-altering for me. Either way, it was this good/bad show and its strapping male lead that led me to The Question. The one that, once asked, there was no going back from. 


Do I want to be with him or be him?


This was the question that opened the bottle. And I don’t know if you know, but I didn’t know then what I know now and this is that if you don’t burp the bottle, then the bottle explodes. And that’s exactly what happened. The bottle shook as it erupted its rotten fruit juice and I watched it in all its glory as it made a mess of everything around it. My mouth dropped in awe as the smelly liquid fizzed into the air and hit the ceiling, staining the white paint brown. And then it found its way back down and landed in my mouth. It was strong stuff, but it didn’t taste all that bad. I swallowed and I was drunk. But not the loud and giggly kind of drunk, but more like the stumbling over your own feet and slurring your words drunk.


Opening the bottle was the first step, but it didn’t have the answers inside, only the questions. One thing was very clear: I had a huge mess to clean. I was so confused and I just wanted to know who I was. I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos all with titles that were some variant of “How to Know if I’m Trans.” I wasn’t sure that I was a boy, but I suddenly realized that I wasn’t a girl. And with that came all of the signs from the past that pointed to this fact; fool-proof evidence that I had blatantly ignored. Like the fact that I bound my chest and had a plan to surgically remove my breasts since I learned it was an option. Or the time that I told my mom, “I’m going to actually try to be a girl now,” as if I wasn’t trying hard enough before and that if I only tried harder then I would be one.


I never used makeup, but I watched a tutorial on how to draw a fake beard so I went digging through my mom's makeup collection and I drew a shitty beard on my chin with black eyeliner. All fun and games. Just a little face-painting activity. But when I looked in the mirror I felt something stirring deep within me. It was almost like seeing myself for the first time.


Uh oh…


This only unlocked more questions. Did I want to start hormone replacement therapy? Did I want to change my name? Did I want to use he/him pronouns? I tried to calm my ever-growing panic.


Eh, I’m sure I’ll have it all figured out within a month, I thought to myself. HA! That’s a good one. Gets me every time.


I decided to test out the name Charlie at school. It was the name of the actor who initially sparked The Question, causing the bottle to projectile vomit its identity crisis contents everywhere. 


Now, I’m sure it is obvious that I didn’t stick with this name, as that is not the name attached to this piece of writing. And I will get to that, but you have to be patient. I’m still setting the scene for the punchline, okay? And I’m going to have to explain it to you too, which usually makes a joke less funny, but in this case, I think it allows for the perfect delivery. Just calm down and let me do my thing, jeez. 


Anyway, I was testing out the new name at school and experimenting with pronouns too. People seemed to be good about it. It was a pretty queer-populated school after all. But it was about a month later, after a painful Christmas of she/hers and [deadname]s that I decided I needed to start telling my family. 


I figured that I should tell my mom first. She had always been the most accepting when it came to sexuality. Even though I had never officially come out, everyone assumed that I was a lesbian and I didn’t deny it. I had dated girls in the past, but I also had a couple of relationships with guys too. My mom had taken me to my first pride parade and often bought me queer things like a shirt with a rainbow across the chest and the words “GAY AF” written in bold underneath.


At the same time, I had wanted to move out of her house and move into the dorms at school for my second semester. I often felt detached from people at school because I lived fifteen minutes away with no car. And I figured it was a good opportunity to come out to my mom right before moving out. That way if she did have a bad reaction, though I doubted she would, I had an escape route. A safety net.


So there I was, in the kitchen with my mom (and her boyfriend, who just happened to be there, sitting awkwardly at the table). I noticed the clusters of gray in the roots of her hair. It seemed like every time I noticed them there were a few more. She closed the fridge door and I dropped the bomb.


“You don’t like your name?” she asked.


“It’s not that I don’t like it, it just doesn’t match the way I feel anymore,” I explained.


“So you want to change it?”


“Yeah. I would appreciate it if you would try your best to call me Charlie instead.”


“But I named you [deadname]. It’s special.”


This certainly wasn’t the reaction that I was expecting. It felt strange. I wondered why she was so caught up in the name. It wasn’t like I was named after a family member or something. Why was it so important to her? It was just a name.


This was how the conversation continued. We were going in circles. She wasn’t understanding, but she wasn’t exactly telling me I was going to Hell either. I think we were both just as confused about each other’s perspective. I was suddenly glad that I had decided to move out and that I had waited until the day before to tell her. 


The next day, in the same spot where we had had our conversation the day before, my mom brought it up again.


“Why the name Charlie?”


“It’s the name of an actor that I like,” I replied.


“Oh. Well, I asked Jess what she thought about it last night, and she told me that that’s what Stephen named his penis.”


Pause. 


I don’t think you understand how fucking insane this sentence is. Let me break this down for you. Jess was my mom’s best friend who happened to be a lesbian and Stephen was my mom’s late husband, who committed suicide after multiple attempts to end my mom’s life. How did my mother’s best friend know what her husband had named his penis, you may ask? Oh, it’s simple really. She only dated him for THIRTEEN YEARS. My mom’s best friend, who was a lesbian, dated her late husband for thirteen consecutive years before he met my mom. 


So my mother not only immediately outed me to her best friend who, not to mention,  was also my supervisor at work, but she learned this nugget of information and thought to herself: I need to tell my child this! And proceeded to rush home to convince me that I couldn’t change my name to Charlie, because my dead stepdad, who killed himself, claimed that name for his dick.


I was astonished. Astounded. Dumbfounded, even. As well as every other synonym in the book. I don’t even remember my reaction in that moment, whether it was one of disgust or confusion, or if I just outright burst into laughter. But I remember the shock.


“Why should that matter to me?” I asked her. But it mattered enough and that’s why she told me. Because she wanted to find a way for me to stay her [deadname] for as long as possible. The conversation returned to the same place it had gotten hung up on the day before. And so we went in circles until it was finally time to leave.


I moved my few boxes out of my room and into the car. I picked up the last box and held it from the bottom as I lugged it downstairs. It was heavier than I thought and I had folded the flaps in instead of taping the bottom. As I slowly felt the next step with the top of my foot before placing my heel down, I imagined the contents of the box falling through the bottom: plastic dishes, art supplies, and crystals clattering down the stairs in a beautiful symphony of utter chaos. I related to the disaster, but I wasn’t sure if it was because it felt like what had just unfolded, or because I felt like I needed to throw things down the stairs. Maybe both. But it didn’t really happen and I didn’t throw anything either. I made it to the bottom, the box still intact.

Comments


bottom of page