Squids and Things

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

People go off about transphobes not knowing any better because they're 'old' and today my 90 year old Grandad gifted me one of his fancy suit jackets, complimented my terrible beard, and continued his extremely wholesome habit of calling me "sonny me lad".

So. Yeah.

I spent years terrified of coming out to him because he was in his 80's at the time so I wrote him a letter like "I'm a man, Gramps" and he was so proud he showed the letter to his neighbors and phoned me and opened with "So how's my Grandson?" and has never got a pronoun wrong.

Eventually I worked up the nerve to visit them, mainly to see and console my grandfather, but also because I couldn't bear the thought of losing all of my family because of who I was. I hadn't intended to come out, but when my grandfather asked me about the rift between my parents and me I ended up sitting down and crying as I came out to my grandfather, my great aunt and two of my second cousins.

My grandfather is definitely very neurodivergent and didn't seem to entirely grasp the concept of me being transgender, but he still told me encouragingly that it was not his job to tell me what I should do with my body, and that he was proud of me. My cousins both held me and told me they thought I was brave and would support me no matter what.

But I will never forget what my 92 year old, very southern, very religious great aunt said to me that day. She took my hand and called me by name, as I wept, before she leaned over to me knowledgeably and went, "There were some people I knew as a girl who were- they were born girls, but in their hearts they were really boys. And you could tell from the way they moved and acted… but their families wanted them to be girls. But I have always known people like you, and they were made that way because God wanted them to be that way and be true to themselves.

"I have loved you since the moment I saw you and I will still love you! You are becoming who you are, and that's good, because God made you that way! You are happy and I am happy! I am glad to have a nephew! I love you!"

And to add. When my wife came out as trans my mother worried that my grandmother, who is turning 90 tomorrow, would not understand.