Around the same time last year, I wrote this piece for the school newspaper’s Pride edition. Looking back, I was careful not to clarify which parts of me I accused language of failing. I knew even back then that my selectiveness was out of fear, or, if I’m really honest, shame. Of where the shame originated I am still uncertain; what was important was that despite the shame, I still chose to reckon with a part of myself I hadn’t yet acknowledged, let alone understood or shared. There was something small and jumbled and alive dragging my fingers across the keyboard and filling a blank page with words that accused words of failing me. In the minutes between classes and before bed, I typed every word of that essay with my back against a wall, the screen shielded from all eyes but my own, even though I knew from the moment I decided to write, I was going to publish the piece in its entirety under my full name.
After a long period of learning and introspection, I am finally willing to admit that it’s about gender. It has already taken fifty springs’ worth of books to even begin unpacking the term in all its biological and socio-anthropological contradictions, and while I’ll gladly recommend various sources that introduce the field of gender study, I do not mean to define or argue it here. What I want to say is that throughout history, experience and feeling and lived life has always preceded and will always precede the ever-evolving language for different identities, that before there was the words lesbian or gay or bisexual there were simply people who loved other people, and before there was the word transgender or non-binary there were people who felt things about their body and the gender society has assigned to them. Throughout human history, there has been countless experiences that are not believed to be real and instead medicalized as invalid, until language evolved to engage these experiences into discourse and thereby legitimizing them as valid identities that meaningfully inform the way we understand ourselves and others.
Let me change these words. What I want to say is that I divide my life into before and after I shaved my head in March of 2024; that I now know why I refused to wear any of the dresses my mother bought for me; that I now see how of all of the ways I’ve pictured myself through art none of them had been female; that there is finally a name for the strangling sense of disgust that flooded me when I put nail polish on my hands for the first time; that every single time strangers or friends refers to me as “she”, a voice quips in my mind that they’re wrong, I can’t tell them / I don’t know what it is but they’re wrong, there’s something they don’t know. I now recognize in my memory certain desires I’ve had since I was a child, desires that have been buried because there were no words to explain or justify what I felt–until the vocabulary was taught to me by people who felt the same way, people who now live content lives in ways I didn’t believe to be possible and, more miraculously for my younger self, being accepted for who they are and being comfortable in their own skin.
Fine, I’ll admit, no one can be that good of an ally. Yet, throughout the past year, the mental struggle to accept the truth has raged on with increasing intensity in the back of my mind. Half of my brain constantly accuses me of doing all this for attention, even though I’ve barely told anyone about any of these thoughts. This half of me says surely I’m just confused, and sometimes I don’t even mind being referred to as a girl or a daughter, sometimes I even do that to myself, and gender doesn’t really exist anyway since it’s a social construct and I should be against gender stereotypes, and how could I think of myself as something that cannot even be named natively in my mother tongue? I’m not really non-binary or trans because … because, well, I can’t be, because it’s weird and I’d have to explain everything to everybody over and over and over again and no one, not even my well-meaning friends and especially not my family, would understand what I mean when I explain any of this to them, and they’d make jokes I can’t brush off or ask questions I can’t answer and see me differently and I don’t wantthat and I’d just rather not, and I’m not, I’m clearly normal and I’m just lying to myself when I think I’m anything but a girl, a woman, a Miss.
But there is another half of me. This half of me finds my imaginary self standing in the imaginary corner of my spotless mind, and I watch as they take my imaginary hand and pull imaginary me to an imaginary mirror and point to it and ask me, with great gentleness and care, to look at you, all of you, and see.
It is for this other half that this essay exists. I write and rewrite a paragraph of this essay in the beginning of June, leaving it in the drafts for the better part of the month as life went by, and wrote this line on this final day. Half of my consciousness screams at me every time I open this page, telling me that this is a bad idea, but I am writing anyway. I am writing this piece for myself, for a version of me I have denied recognition to for a very long time, simply because what I write is true for me.
I do not want to be an activist. Everything I’ve written about is something very, very personal to me, and yet I still cannot stop pouring all of these gender thoughts line-by-line onto this little corner of mine on the Internet. Barely anyone knows this page exists, yet I find both fear and comfort in the fact that when I hit the publish button, this declaration will lie there in the open, unable to fend for itself from anyone’s curiosity. Perhaps it is because I have made choices in the past few days that will allow me to live more openly as a queer person than before in a future more and more uncertain each day, and even typing the word queer in relation to myself overwhelmings me with a twisted feeling that can only be summarized as shame. But where is this shame coming from? I was not born with it. I could only have internalized it from elsewhere, from well-meaning people who didn’t need to imagine the normal world as anything other than how it’s always been for them, and since change is inconvenient I am compelled to apologize for who I am.
I do not want the shame internalized in me for longer than it already has. I don’t want to be an activist, but I am not writing these words just for myself: after all, there were people who made me feel less alone on this journey of meaning, and ideas in my head cannot help anyone until they are out, and maybe, just maybe, what I write will help someone else as well, whoever they are. They say that you eventually become the person who would have saved you in the past. Perhaps this is what this piece is. Perhaps this is who I wrote this piece for, for someone like me who needs words to survive.
I am a writer, and I know where words fail us. There is no language for me to write these thoughts in Chinese as fluently and accurately as I do in English, and I fear I will never be able to. But words have immense power over how I understand who I am, and it was and still is essays and quotations and paragraphs and sentences and words that helped me navigate this uncertainty we named the human life.
Because of words, it seems, I am here, not proudly yet, but still here.
Happy Pride, everyone. I wish for both of us to be brave.
For additional reading, I recommend Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon’s autobiography Gender Failure and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer.