Growing up, I was a boy. At least, that’s what they told me. Life was presented in binary code. Parents and teachers weren’t like us. “No, they’re adults! Y’all’re children. Boys are boys and girls are girls.” — whatever that means. “But there is a difference! Boys wear blue and girls wear pink. Boys are dirty and girls are clean. Girls wear their hair long, boys wear their hair short.” The more they’d go on, the less it made sense… I wore dark blue and didn’t care much for hot pink but I didn’t like short hair or being messy. I liked gossip and making up stories — all the other boys liked sports and cars, and playing slap – yer’it. Soccer was fun, but both girls and boys played soccer… and anywho I didn’t think about it much, because they said I was a boy.
Then came smelly armpits and hair growing all over the place. I stretched a little taller and pimples popped up all over my face. I was weird but not too weird, I guess. The really weird kids always sat alone. Friendships changed. Now there were girls hanging around the boys. In elementary, girls and boys didn’t really play with each other outside of school much. Except soccer. More differences arose between girls and boys, quickly pushing those in the middle one way or the other. Girls wore lipstick and made their eyes look darker, they wore dresses and bows and glitter. Some boys wore black and slim jeans while others wore colors and baggy pants but they all kinda looked the same. Some things were allowed, some weren’t. Earrings were okay but not painted nails?
The differences multiplied. Or were they integral? Being discovered? Everyone fell into groups: pretty kids and ugly kids, punk kids and emo kids, athletes and popular kids, nerdy kids and gangsta kids, church kids and sinners. My friends wore skinny jeans and had long hair –– people called us names and we’d have to fight. Sometimes they were too big so we pretended we didn’t hear them and hoped they’d leave it at that. Sometimes we ran. Sometimes we couldn’t run fast enough.
They said I wasn’t a boy, but I didn’t think about it much because I liked girls and isn’t that what it meant to be a boy? It all started to blur… someone told me that a boy in my class like-liked another boy. I was confused what he meant… boys could like-like boys? Does that mean girls could like-like girls? Whatever the case, I didn’t think it was a very nice thing to say about someone ‘cause he said it very meanly, like when men called me and my friends names. Did that mean he wasn’t a boy anymore? But… he looked like a boy? Does that mean I might not be a boy? “No,” my teachers always put me in the boy groups so I must be a boy, right? But then, why was it I didn’t feel like a boy? Why did I dislike their interests and their company?
I dated a girl for a while and left all the boys behind. By the time we broke up almost all my friends were girls, or boyfriends of the girls — but, of course, they were only temporary. One day, as college neared one of the ex-boyfriends, Harold, told me he like-liked boys. He whispered it in my ear excitedly, “Ever since elementary –– ever since I could remember,” and he was a boy, I was sure of it. I liked him, because he wasn’t like the other boys. I liked boys like that, the ones who weren’t so rude and cocky and mean. Knowing that about him threw my self-perception into question. If boys could be like girls and girls could be like boys, what made me a boy? Or a girl a girl? I acted more like the girls, except when around the boys. I didn’t feel good to act, but I was scared straight. I wasn’t scared of the lifted trucks and the brass knuckles of the bullies that had broken our noses and bruised our ribs but of my friends and family and neighbors. I knew to test taboo meant to risk expulsion.
In college, I found art and artists and music and clothing and photography. Some boys and girls stayed the same but in others the differences became exponential, blending and bending into a plethora of categories. I even made friends that were guys. We drank and smoked and discussed ideas and feelings and cried together and talked about sex and crossed streams. But it was only when the liquor hit that we expressed anything at all. We never kissed, even though we might’ve wanted: constricted, repressed, self-censored.
I graduated and moved across state lines, from a suburb on the land of the Tongva to a proper city on the land of the Duwamish and Suquamish. It was far more open and accepting of difference. I lived with six extraordinary young women: garden-tending frolickers, bedrotting fashionistas, cat-kidnapping journalists, bed-shaking free expressionists. Yet even here, there were pressures and taboos, albeit inverted somewhat they were borne of the same forces. The new rules seemed like rehashed versions of the old. I had left a place I was too queer for the straights and had come to a place I was too straight for the queers; entangled in the questions that seemed to offend both. I was attracted to men, but only men that were like women and I wasn’t attracted to women that were like men. So what even made a man a man? Or a woman a woman? Some named themselves women, some named themselves men –– but how did they know? What criterion were they using? Was it all… in the gut? How did they separate themselves from the pressures all around them? From their own fears and uncertainties? I envied their resolve of self-knowledge and their tenacity to exist exactly as they wished.
I was conflicted… suppressing girlhood because I liked women and I wanted them to like me back, and unable to embrace boyhood because I thought it ugly and mean. Yet the more I tried to abide by a binary, tilting my head to the side, if only in slight, to seem straight –– the further away I became from others and myself: waning in anguish without the language to explain it.
I moved again to the land of the Huchiun, and lived a year with masculine men; boxers with chiseled abs and loose jaws who talked footwork during a fighting match and carried old lady’s groceries for them across streets and into kitchen cabinets. I learned to see another side of man — the strength of shelter, confident yet caring. There was something admirable in their gait and safeguarding touch. Masculinity no longer filled me only with disgust but as its form distinguished it kept just as distant from the whatever that was me; at the center of someone else’s Venn diagram, but longing to step beyond it — testing the boundaries of my confinement as I pleased; wearing dresses and painting my nails blue & pink; becoming myself; untethering from opinions that offended my soul; unmasking –– slowly, surely. From city to city I bounced until I found myself here on the land of the Narragansett and Wampanoag. I curtsied into community with jaded academics, mystic poets, autistic trans anarchists, and others not fond of unearned authority or unjust laws, social or legal –– who saw the false in all dichotomies and sought every chance to disobey and break any rule void of merit! They taught me about kindness & cruelty, life & death, dark & light, feminine & masculine, u & i. Then handed me bolt-cutters and said, “you decide.” So I set myself free, finally able to see how all is continuum, merely shorthand for degrees of difference –– neither either nor or, but and! and! and! –– even me! Growing up, they said I was a boy –– but they were wrong, I am Phe.