Redefining Realness Read Online Free PDF

genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences.
    In my adulthood, Mom nonchalantly told me she wasn’t surprised about my becoming her daughter. “You were just always like that. Very sensitive, very mischievous, too smart for your own good, and always into my things,” she said, reminiscing about my early childhood, particularly the time her earring landed me in the emergency room.
    Mom and Dad were still married at the time. Living with them were Cori and me and our brother, Chad, a year younger than I. Cheraine didn’t come with us when we moved to Long Beach, California, my father’s new naval duty station. She stayed with Grandma and Papa in Hawaii. At age three, I was playing with my mother’s jewelry and placed one of her earring backs in my ear. The backing wasn’t secure, so it slid inside my ear, beyond a finger’s reach, and as a result of the discomfort, I screamed. I can still hear the suction from the tube the doctors put down my ear, which pulled out the gold pretzel-shaped backing, and I can still taste the sweet vanilla ice cream I got to eat for a week.
    These stories of my early expressions of femininity echo many people’s lived experiences with exploring, experimenting, and expressing gender. I’ve read and heard stories of trans people from all walks of life who remember playfully exhibiting their preferred gender behaviors and roles at age three or four without anyone’s prompting. Some were given freedom to explore their inclinations; the majority were discouraged from experimenting outside their prescribed gender roles and behaviors. This contributes greatly to self-image, how people learn gender, and the path they’ll eventually choose into adolescence and adulthood. Children who behave in line with their prescribed gender roles are cisgender or cissexual (throughout, I will use the prefix cis , which means “on the same side of,” while trans means “across” or “on the opposite side of”), a term used for people who are not trans and more likely to identify with the gender that correlates with the sex they were assigned at birth. Most cis people rarely question their gender identity because the gender binary system validates them, enabling them to operate without conflict or correction. This makes it difficult for the majority of people—including parents of trans youth and those close to trans people—to grasp the varied identities, needs, and determinations of trans people.
    Mom wasn’t a disciplinarian; that role was reserved for Dad, a boiler technician in the Navy whose booming voice filled our house with reprimands about why his son was playing with earrings. He admits now that he took it upon himself to change what he believed to be my “soft ways.”
    “I didn’t want to see it, man,” he admitted. “I tried to be tougher on your ass. I thought I could fix you.”
    It would take decades for my father to realize that I didn’t need fixing, and he should have been more focused on his marriage, which was plagued by infidelity, failed expectations, and youth. Mom was twenty-two when she met Dad at a nightclub on the Pearl Harbornaval base. She was partying with a coworker and was actually into one of Dad’s Navy buddies. I don’t know how she ended up talking to Dad, but I’m sure he was the pursuer, his gold tooth shining under the neon lights of the dance floor. Mom didn’t tell Dad that she had two little girls, products of her first marriage to her high school sweetheart, who at the time was in prison for theft. When Dad met Cori and Cheraine, who were five and three at the time, Mom told him they were her nieces. “I feel so bad about that,” Mom later told me. “It was easier to pretend that I was unattached, carefree. But your dad wasn’t innocent. He had his own baggage.”
    Mom was referring to the three kids Dad had left in Dallas when he joined the Navy after high school graduation. They had three different mothers, each of whom thought