āI remembered what it was like to walk a gauntlet of strangers who stareātheir eyes angry, confused, intrigued. Woman or man: they are outraged that I confuse them. The punishment will follow. The only recognition I can find in their eyes is that I am āother.ā I am different. I will always be different. I will never be able to nestle my skin against the comfort of sameness.ā
āBut very quickly I discovered that passing didn't just mean slipping below the surface, it meant being buried alive. I was still me on the inside, trapped in there with all my wounds and fears. But I was no longer me on the outside.ā
āWhen I was really small I thought Iād do anything to change whatever was wrong with me. Now I didnāt want to change, I just wanted people to stop being mad at me all the time.ā
āGod,ā she said, āby the time weāre old enough to have sex, weāre already too ashamed to be touched. Aināt that a crime?ā
āI want to understand about change--I don't just want to be at the mercy of it. I feel like I'm waking up inside. I want to know about history. I have all this new information about people like me down through the ages, but I don't know anything about the ages.ā
āAll the girls and women looked pretty much the same, so did all the boys and men. I couldn't find myself among the girls. I had never seen any adult woman who looked like I thought I would when I grew up. There were no women on television like the small woman reflected in this mirror, none on the streets. I knew. I was always searching.ā
āI thought about the long road Iād traveled. I had never stopped looking out at the world through my own eyes. Iād never stopped feeling like me on the inside. What if the real me could emerge, changed by the journey. Who would I be? Suddenly, I needed
to know. What would my life be worth if I stopped short of finding out? Fingers of excitement and fear tightened around my throat. Where was I going now? Who was I becoming? I couldnāt answer those questions, but even asking them was a sign to me that tumultuous change had been boiling just below the surface of my consciousness.ā
āI learned that strength, like height, is measured by who youāre standing next to. I was considered a scrawny guy in the gym. [...] Yet sometimes when I stood in front of my own mirror at home, I saw a powerful me. I couldnāt hold onto the image, though. It slipped like a globule of mercury from under my index finger.ā
āMaybe that was the lesson I tried to teach myself with each repetitionāthat power is something qualitatively more than strength. And that the world was wrong about me. I had a right to live.ā
āThat's part of how starved you've been. I think you're afraid this is the last beautiful thing that's going to happen to you, and you want to hold onto it.ā
āI do need words, Frankie. Sometimes I feel like I'm choking to death on what I'm feeling. I need to talk and I don't even know how. Femmes always tried to teach me to talk about my feelings, but it was their words they used for their feelings. I needed my own words butch words to talk about butch feelings. [...] I feel like I'm clogged up with all this toxic goo, Frankie. But I can't hear my own voice say the words out loud. I've got no language.ā
