#keepkissing

[Image: A black and white portrait of an individual standing on a subway platform. They have short hair and a jacket staring straight ahead. Pexels.com]

I want to tell you all a story. The year was 2005 and I was a high school freshmen at North Syracuse Junior High school. I was female, and known to be by most, but androgynous in appearance. I was under regular threat of assault, with varying degrees of ability to escape. Those who knew me called me a dyke. Strangers called me a fag. I don’t mean this as a metaphor. It literally happened on a semi-daily basis, in the halls of schools and on the streets of my town, a primarily white, working-class/middle-class, Irish and Italian neighborhood just north of the city of Syracuse. As far as I was a concerned, a battle zone.

I hadn’t heard of transitioning from female to male. I hadn’t heard the term transgender, or nonbinary, or genderqueer. I didn’t know some people identified as queer, or pansexual, or demisexual. I was a kid, and you were either a boy or a girl, gay or straight. I was neither. I insisted I was neither, and the world was continually punishing me for asserting such a nonsensical thing. But even without the language, I insisted. I corrected anyone who called me a lesbian, or gay, or a dyke, or a girl. Not because I thought there was something wrong with these things. It just wasn’t me.

I had the bravery in this atmosphere of intense, aggressive binary adherence to say, when asked, “I don’t know what I am. I’m just me.”