June 23, 2016

  Camille

  “…How do you feel about it?” Chloe asks.

  I’ve thought about it since I found her box. I’ve also wanted a daughter since I found out I was pregnant the first time, and in some ways, it feels as if she’s always been my daughter. The way she looks like my mom, the way she would repeat things I said, instead of the things David said, like the boys. The way she followed me around the house as a toddler, wanting to help me with whatever I was doing. The way that she’s so gentle and demure, without even realizing.

  I look at her and how much she needs. She’s small, thin. Shy. She doesn’t eat enough. She hasn’t known nearly the amount of love that she should have, for her entire life, stuck in the space between her inner life and the outside world. Lost, because no one has ever taken the effort to be there for her. And without even realizing it, she’s exceptionally hurt by the fact that at some point, David and the boys went from not particurly caring about her, to actively disliking her.

  Chloe’s question reminds me of that day buying furniture, when she quietly stated that she’d been reading The Bell Jar. It’s nervous, it tests the waters. It reveals something. She’s not closed off, as a lot of people think. Rather, she reveals things about herself by asking questions, through talking about different things in the world, describing what she retes to. She’s aware, on some level, that asking me what I think holds another meaning. She wants permission to be herself, and she’s nervous that she’ll never get it. Not just to transition— it’s about her style, the music and books she enjoys, being shy, being such an internal, thoughtful person, and being happy with those things. It’s not even about a conventional femininity. It’s about who she is, in so many ways, because she has never felt free to be herself, even in her own home. She’s so used to it that she sits here, in the passenger seat of her mother’s car, asking for permission. I could never fully give it to her in Raleigh, where even the repressed, compromised Chloe was contested by David.

  And I ache, thinking of how she was so afraid that she would be like the guys she went to school with, and how she’s all but said that she was afraid that she would end up like David and Sylvan. I ache because I can’t tell her that I was afraid, too. I can’t tell her that I sat, worried, at each milestone of the st couple of years, that she would one day wake up and decide to be another copy of her dad. I can’t tell her, the nervous, shaky Chloe in the passenger seat, that I had ever thought she was capable of it. The entire time, she was sad about the expectation of being devoured by the southern, masculine regime.

  “I think I’ve always wanted a daughter, and now I have one”, I say instead. And for the st little bit, she’s been holding something back, but she can’t anymore. She starts crying, and I hug her, as tightly as I can. I have to keep her safe.

  It’s been a long time since she’s cried. She’s either not needed to, or tried desperately to keep it in, so that she doesn’t risk more ridicule. “Thank you”, she says, quietly, her voice stuffy from crying. I finally have a daughter, and I want it to be fun. I want to grab her, and tell her she’s my daughter, and that I love having a daughter, over and over again. I want to free her from who she feels she was expected to be, and watch her become herself. I’ve been proud of the woman that she wants to be, But she’s hurting. She doesn’t even know how much she’s hurting.

  She’s covering her eyes with her hands, so I reach over and push her hair back to gently get her attention. “Do you want to go inside?” I ask as gently as possible. She weakly nods, so I walk around the car and open the door for her. She gets out, and I walk her up to the apartment.

  We enter, and she seems to stumble directly to the sofa, which she then colpses into, before curling up to feel safe. I carefully walk over and sit next to her, when she uncurls and leans on my shoulder, dimly lit by only the white kitchen light being turned on, in the otherwise dark apartment.

  “Thank you”, she repeats, from earlier. She has so much to let go of, so much that she’s been shouldering, and no one ever knew. She was so afraid for so long that if she came out to anyone, they would use it against her. Anything she gave them about herself, anything you could be shamed for, they would use to try to beat her into shame. Her dad and her brothers.

  It shows in the very way that she cries that she still feels like a child. As soon as she became conscious of the world, she felt out of pce. She knew she should have been a girl, and she lived, for so long, trying to exist as only a fraction of herself. It was hard enough for me, with sexuality, just from seventeen to thirty four. But Chloe only knows herself as someone who longs to be someone else.

  I turn, and clutch her head to my colr bone. “Hey, you’re safe, honey”, I tell her, slowly and gently. “You’ll never have to be a boy again.”

  ***

  Another hour or two passes with Chloe pressed against me, as she cries, and cries, and cries. Occasionally, she repeats her “thank you”, and I pet her, like I used to when she was a little kid, as she expels all of the emotion built up for years. Every moment she’s looked bnk faced but stared down at her hands, picking at them nervously, shaking. Sometimes, you would interrupt her from this state, and she would look up at you, hair falling in front of her left eye, surprised but not smiling. The face of someone who had abruptly been pulled out of their inner spiral. Every moment that she was clearly struggling with something internally, which I would ask her about, only for her to tell me that she was just tired.

  She mouths off sometimes. She can be overly cynical, a real life Daria. She has a very blunt sense of humor, which she often defaults to, and tormented a bunch of her teachers with it, before she realized how she came across. She can seem distant to people, and honestly, she is, because they never try to engage her. But I look at her, with her roundish face and big eyes, and it’s difficult to see anything other than extraordinarily pure person that she has always been underneath, and has occasionally been on the surface, but was forced not to be. Sometimes I feel so, so close to her, and other times, I have absolutely no idea where she came from, but I love her, endlessly.

  Eventually, she tires out, I tell her I love her, and she goes straight to bed, weakly walking to her room and closing the door. Shortly after, I hear the muffled sound of a little fan she likes to have on while she sleeps. Everything is… so much , for her.

  Across the apartment— which, tonight, feels like a world away from Chloe— I take my makeup off, floss, and brush my teeth, breathing, after everything we talked about, and after comforting her for so long. When I get into bed, I look at the ceiling, and finally let myself smile.

  I have a daughter!

  June 26, 2016

  Chloe

  It’s a bright day outside, but there’s pretty much nothing to do or fixate on, so I’m lying on the couch in the living room, listening to music, bouncing back and forth between looking at my phone and idly pying with my hair. I’ve kept wearing my normal clothes, though it’s not as if they were especially masculine— I subbed the guy jeans out for a pair of slightly tighter girl jeans. Bck sweaters and converse stay.

  I came out, and cried, and it’s fine, but I guess I always thought that once I finally did, everything would just be like a domino effect. Maybe a long and painful one, but it was like, if I could find a way to be out and not get screamed at, then everything would start to fall into pce. It feels incredibly stupid now, like I thought that all I had to do was tell someone, and suddenly, I would righteously become a woman with all of the things a woman has. I’d tell Mom, and two seconds ter I would need a tampon, for my fully transformed body starting its first period.

  Instead, for the st couple of days, I’ve been wondering when something’s going to happen, if I need to talk to Mom, if she’s on it. But I’m nervous. I feel like if I question too much, if I push her, it will all dissolve. Maybe she’ll change her mind. Maybe she’ll think about school and having to go home for Thanksgiving, and decide no, that Gender is for me to solve as an adult. That still wouldn’t even be the worst story I’ve ever heard. I mean, yeah, she did say I won’t ever have to be a boy again, but who knows what that meant? And I was crying like a baby on the night of her birthday, which she’d probably wanted to be, you know, fun, maybe she was just trying to shut me up. I still feel incomplete.

  I haven’t heard from Lauren since I saw her on the st day of school, which is whatever. I never really hung out with her or any of her friends outside of school or during the summer. I was always mostly just a mostly agreeable presence who stuck around because we both had a band in common on the bus one day, and besides, no one else was talking to me, so it’s not surprising. It’s hurtful, on some level, but it’s not as if I never saw it coming. Especially since I told her I was moving away, and when she asked why, I told her I didn’t really know, that I just liked my Mom more, even though she knew why my parents divorced. For some reason, “well actually, I’ve been thinking that I should have been born as a girl for my entire life and that’s why I’m so weird, and I have to go live with my mom because it’s my only chance I’ll get to do it before testosterone floods my body and I become a fucking monster like all the guys here” felt risky. And maybe a little wordy.

  I feel bad that I can’t really connect with people beyond the surface level, that people don’t really think to keep me around— I think of how sometimes people leave a hangout early, and they get up, but everyone begs them to stay, and it brings the mood down when they’re gone, and I wish I were that sort of person. Lauren probably is, or will be. It’s probably better for her that I’m gone, and not following her around like some sort of dense puppy.

  Occasionally, I get up from the couch, and walk over to one of the windows, looking out at this little corner of Boston I’m becoming familiar with. It’s fairly quiet for the middle of a major urban area, and there’re all sorts of brick buildings that make me feel comforted. It feels perfect that Mom, Professor Camille Lambert, lives here. The bookish looking city is encouraging, and though I don’t quite feel like I’m a part of it yet, I’m at least close to it, and Mom is on my side. I’ve always gone back and forth and struggled to stick to a particur framing, but right now, it feels like me not fitting in is a set of problems I can solve, something that’s possible to fix. Sometimes, and especially in North Carolina, it felt like it was never going to happen, like I was born to be rejected and lonely forever. But right now, I’m in a better pce, where there are, presumably, more people like me around, and I have some sort of vague permission to be myself. If I keep not-spiralling, chances are higher something good might eventually happen. I think.

  Around two, the door opens, and it’s Mom, having run some errands and left this morning while I was sleeping in.

  “Hey, you’re out of your room!” she says, as if she’s made a pleasant discovery.

  “Yeah. I thought I’d try staring at this ceiling, for a change.”

  “Are you doing anything?”

  “Tangling my hair and then brushing it out again. Other than that, not really anything.”

  “Annette’s coming over ter, I think she’s bringing Liza.”

  “Oh, okay, I can try to find something else to do.”

  She tilts her head at me a little bit.

  “No, I mean… you can stick around, if you want. Be one of the girls. I can’t promise we’ll be interesting, but I’m sure Annette will want to talk to you about everything.”

  “You get more than one adult together and they start just talking about things they want to do to their house”, I say, reflexively. She ughs a little bit, while I process what she just actually offered me. One of the girls. Actually getting to be among queer women, as one of them, even if they talk for a little bit about the insurance rates of things that they own. I shake my head a little. “…Sorry. I’d love to.”

  “I’m gd”, she replies, smiling gently, and I go back to my room.

  I get ready as best I can, brushing out my hair, looking in the mirror and making a slightly cuter ponytail than I do normally. One of the things that has changed is that now I’ve sworn off those terrible cheap hair ties everyone uses, the ones that make me completely unable to think of anything other than the hair pulling, in favor of cw clips and scrunchies, now that I’m finally free of either raising a red (pink?) fg with someone, or having Dad get upset or make a joke at me or perceive me at all. It’s so hard to break out of the groove of avoiding things, even when the things I’m trying to avoid don’t really exist anymore.

  I hear the door open and start to head toward the kitchen. Annette looks exactly like what she is, a painter and art teacher, while Liza is tall, elegant, androgynous. Annette greets Mom, introduces Liza to her, and I walk in the room. “Chloe!” Annette excims, and hugs me. “This is Liza.”

  Liza reaches out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Chloe”, I tell her. The first time ever introducing myself as Chloe to someone, and it’s so, so nice not to have to say my stupid old name. Annette, almost hyper, jumps in. “Tell us everything!”, she says, as we walk to the living room and sit down.

  “We went out for Mom’s birthday the other day, and she told me she wanted to properly come out to me. I mean, I’d kind of gathered that she was gay, but she talked about it, told me about the girl she fell for in high school,”

  “You told her about Eva?” Annette asks Mom, surprised.

  “I… told her that there was a girl named Eva who I liked, that my parents did not, yes.”

  “So I asked her how she felt about being gay, we talked about it, and I told her I was trans, how I’d thought about it when I was a kid, and then… yeah”, I tell them.

  “That’s sweet”, says Liza. Her voice is lower in pitch— reserved, but friendly. She’s at the lower end of the energy spectrum, with Annette at the opposite end, and Mom probably somewhere in between. They’re a super cute couple, immediately and obviously— Annette talking a lot and being overly confident, but looking like a casual art teacher, while Liza is more gmorous, but reserved and thoughtful. “It’s great that you discovered so much about yourself so young. It took me much longer”, she says.

  “How did you come out?”

  “I was twenty. Home for spring break, when my dad walked in on my first girlfriend and I. He wasn’t thrilled. Got kicked out.”

  “I’m sorry”, I reply, and she nods in acknowledgment, and smiles. “It’s been a while. I’m pretty over it.”

  “I came out when I was sixteen”, says Annette. “It wasn’t fun. I knew since I was in elementary school, but didn’t really tell anyone until I met my first girlfriend. Which of course was Liza.”

  “We met three years ago”, says Liza, highlighting the fact that Annette was obviously lying, and ughing slightly.

  “What about you, Camille?” Liza asks.

  “Oh,” she begins, uncomfortably. “My mom found a roll of pictures of my first girlfriend hanging out. It went fantastically.” She’s leaving out a lot of the story, but I guess I can’t exactly bme her for not really wanting to discuss how she cheated on her husband in front of her once-and-maybe-present-but-we’re-not-sure best friend, with the necessary expnation that he wasn’t a great guy and lied to her while she was lying to herself.

  It would be, just, kind of ungraceful.

  “But I’m not upset about it. It led to me getting Chloe”, she says, looking over at me, smiling and proud.

  Sometimes I can’t even really process that she’s gd to have me, that she’s grateful for me and proud of me, even if I’m trans. I don’t want to imagine how Dad would take it, though I have, several times. It’s hard not to.

  Liza and Annette both smile at Mom’s open decration. “That’s so sweet”, says Annette. She turns to Liza. “Can we get a Chloe?”

  “I think odds are pretty slim that there’s more than one Chloe”, she replies.

  “Plus,” I add, “If I see another Chloe, I’m killing her. If I ran into a clone of me? I have to take her out before she decides I’m the clone and kills me ” I can’t help but add. Mom and Liza look at me a little weirdly, Annette promptly replies. “Smart.”

  “So are you transitioning? What’s next?” Liza asks.

  “I don’t know”, I look at Mom. “Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get this far. I’d like to” I reply.

  “I thought you’d tell me what to do”, says Mom, matter of factly.

  “Yeah, I’m known for my commanding personality” I reply, and Mom ughs a little bit.

  “I can ask Miles for a doctor to go and a list of resources if you want”, Liza offers Mom.

  Mom instantly looks a little relieved. “That would be perfect! I haven’t really known what to do exactly.”

  “I’ll send him a text and forward you the info”, Liza replies, happy to help.

  “I’m not exactly jumping for joy at the prospect of telling my Dad” I tell Liza.

  “Why?” she asks.

  I don’t want to throw Mom under the bus in front of this very helpful person who might not know everything, though I’m willing to bet Annette has probably told Liza about it. “Right now, he’s roughly Mom’s age. And Mom had me young”, I say, and Liza nods. “I have this theory that when straight men become middle aged, they get bored and if they don’t just straight up have a midlife crisis, they choose between two things to adopt as a new personality. Buying a boat, or grilling”, I continue. Annette ughs a little at the observation. “My dad will absolutely choose grilling”, I finish.

  “Ah, okay” replies Liza. I feel immature for the comparison, and the ck of a ugh, and suddenly, the stupid humor that I’ve constructed as a way to deal with everything feels pretty much hollow. But she knows what I’m getting at. I think.

  And then I feel stupid for my joke and the way I’ve started understanding things through stereotypes of people but convinced myself that being so reductive is okay as long as it’s some guy from the south who kind of sucks, and not like, someone who’s been marginalized. It still feels trashy. Something about it feels… masculine. So I change the subject.

  “And I don’t know what I’m going to do about school. Start high school as a boy and try to hide it the whole time, come out in front of everyone, and stand out in the way I absolutely hate, or try to read like a girl the whole entire time and never tell anyone. If I can even manage that.”

  It’s silent again. I’m murdering this conversation, demanding that the adult women in their thirties listen to me, speaking smugly about my life and myself obsessively.

  “You probably could”, says Annette, though she’s probably just being nice.

  “I think she absolutely could”, says Liza.

  “People used to see us together and assume she was my daughter, before she came out”, adds Mom.

  They’re probably all just being nice. The baby who needs to be kept safe, the never eating, emo teenager, who has to be lied to, or else she might hurt herself. Before I know it, I’m picking at my hands again, though I’m trying to do so less, because I’d like to paint them soon. I want to be elegant and girly and perfectly composed.

  “Really?” I say, looking up, quickly checking everyone’s faces.

  “Yeah”, Annette says. “Maybe just need some makeup and clothes and stuff like that. The whole ‘performance of femininity’ thing.”

  I wonder how serious they are, and what they’re paying attention to. If they’re just looking at my face, or my interests, to the extent that I have any. The way some people seem to see me as passive, demure, and morose. The odds are that they’re not considering the bone structure beneath my face, my gangly limbs, mannerisms, and complete inability to shut the fuck up when it actually matters.

  “Really?” I ask again. I don’t mean to sound so earnest and starry eyed, but I do.

  “Oh. For sure”, says Annette, and I look around to see everyone nodding.

  “Oh,” I hear myself say, as if I have another thought or another part of the sentence, but it isn’t coming to me.

  They’re either, again, just being nice, or I can’t perceive my own face correctly. Sometimes in the mirror, I feel like a linebacker, someone whose face is just shy of being brutally masculine and mannish.

  They look at me, waiting for the next part of the sentence, and then I think they realize it’s not coming, and suddenly, I feel like a lobster who’s just realized that it’s in a pot of boiling water. Everything is a problem, every solution is painful.

  “How is the house?” Mom asks, giving me an out. They take the bait, and Annette details how she decided to paint the living room herself, because she graduated with an art degree, so how hard could it be?

  I stick around for a little while, and then eventually go to my room. I y on the bed and listen to songs on repeat, hypnotized by the patterns and melodies, and I think of the incredibly stupid joke that I made. Why did I have to say that? Why do I have to be this way? I’m not ready to spend time around women and pretend to be one of them yet. If I ever will be.

  Occasionally, I look in the mirror and I see a guy staring back at me, only slightly obscured by my vein attempts at androgyny. I’m a fucking idiot for thinking this was enough.

  I y back down, and stare at the ceiling of my room some more, slowly feeling myself go from upset to merely defted, After Life of the Party pying in my head for the millionth time.

  Eventually, Mom knocks on my door a couple of times, before gently opening it.

  “Hey, what happened?” she asks, worried.

  As I think, she watches me intently, and again, I look down at my hands. The sort of thing where I’ve had all of these feelings for a long time and I finally have to talk about them, but I don’t know that I can look her directly in the eye and be so vulnerable, so open about everything. Time passes. Too much time, and she’s wondering if I’m even going to say anything at all, and almost about to give up and walk away, when I hear myself start. “I don’t feel like I’ve suffered enough”, I say. “All the Fiona Apple and the Diving Into The Wreck and all the 1970’s feminism— and it’s all correct. It all makes sense to me, when I can understand it. But I haven’t suffered from being a woman. I don’t have my period, I don’t have a uterus, I’m not stared at and turned into an object. No one’s ever been sexist to me. I don’t have a particur meaning attached to being a woman. It feels like it’s obvious to me that ‘woman’ is the thing I should be, I can’t give it a meaning. I don’t know why I should be a woman, or why I feel the need to be one. I mean, you heard Liza’s story. You probably already knew Annette’s story. Even you. You all had these rough things happen to you and it made you into these… people, who are real, and… I don’t know. I don’t feel like that. I don’t feel like I can cim to be a girl.”

  More time passes. I expected her to be more prompt with a response, as she always is, because she’s a genius and has usually thought everything through. But I look up at her, and she’s looking at me, both concerned and thoughtful, when she finishes thinking through what she’s going to say.

  “Chloe”, she says, somewhere between ft and friendly, as she smooths down her skirt and sits down on the corner of the bed. “You’re fourteen. ”

  “Oh”, I hear myself say, and I feel even worse, wrapped up in my own head. I suddenly see myself in my own mind’s eye, someone acting too big and old for their bony, childish looking body.

  “I don’t mean to undermine you.” She saw what I was thinking. “I understand everything that you’re saying”, she says. “But you’re beating yourself up for not being an adult, and not having had an entire life’s worth of things happen to you. Think about it. Annette was seventeen when she came out to everyone. Liza was twenty. I was seventeen when Eva and I started dating each other. You’re younger than any of us were, there’s still plenty of time to suffer.”

  I smile, but she didn’t say it with that light tone at the end of the sentence, indicating that it’s a joke, and she doesn’t respond to my nose exhale. She’s completely serious.

  “And…” she continues. She looks a little rattled, like she’s unsure if she should be saying what she’s about to. “I haven’t talked about this before, because it wouldn’t be healthy, and it’s not your job to worry about what happens between your dad and I”, she starts. “But you have been hurt and mistreated for being girly.”

  “It’s not the same,” I reply.

  “Not exactly”, she agrees. “But you’ve still been punished, in some way, for being feminine. The way Sylvan talked to you, the way your dad talked to you.”

  Oh. She saw it, too.

  “He used to argue with me about it. There were a couple of things that you did, that he didn’t like, because he thought they were girly, and he would always bme me for not just ignoring you or telling you to stop. For a while, he thought that the reason you were a little feminine is because you were so attached to me. But the reason you weren’t punished harder for being feminine is that I tried very, very hard to make sure you weren’t, because I believed it was wrong”, she finishes.

  “I didn’t know you noticed it.”

  “I’m sorry”, she says, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I never said anything because I didn’t think you needed to know about us arguing over you, and I felt like your dad already said stuff loud enough most of the time, anyway, I didn’t think you needed more of that. And I thought that you were just being you, I didn’t know you were transgender, and for a lot of it, you were too young to even really understand.”

  “It… happened that long?” I hear myself ask her, before I can process what she means, fully.

  She thinks, deciding again on if she’s going to say it, how, and if she thinks that I can handle what she’s thinking.

  “It’s been happening for your entire life.”

  “I guess that goes back to how you weren’t really surprised” I think aloud.

  “There are two ideas that are sort of interacting with each other”, Mom starts. I look at her, and can’t help but smile: she’s entering teacher mode, and it always makes me look up to her even more than I already do.

  “One of which is that femininity is often made to be less than masculinity. It can often be seen as the opposite of everything masculinity traditionally is: weak instead of strong, yielding instead of controlling. But that’s logically fwed. The existence of two things doesn’t make them opposites”, she says. It makes sense.

  “The other is that femininity is imposed on anyone who is born a woman. It forces expectations and a specific personality on people who don’t want it. Sound familiar? It’s what patriarchy does: not only does it demand that all women be a certain way, it also demands that men be a certain way, or they’ll be punished with accusations of being women, or fake men”, she continues.

  “You received that punishment because you are feminine, you gravitate to that naturally. You’re not pretending, Chloe. You’re a girl”, she finishes.

  I feel kind of stupid for starting the whole conversation. Mom looks directly into my eyes, and I look down at my hands, to pick at some part of them, before she puts her hand over mine to stop me from picking it.

  “Don’t beat yourself up for wanting to talk about it. It makes you very mature and thoughtful, at fourteen, while you’re still figuring yourself out, to consider the ways your own identity might interact with the outside world. Few people do that. I sure as hell didn’t. It makes me proud of you”, she says, gently, before hugging me tightly.

  It’s like Mom actually knows how to deal with me, she can read both the emotional problem and the intellectual problem at the same time, and how they interact.

  “I love you”, I hear myself say, quietly. It’s a little bit awkward, after all the feminism talk, but she knows me. For the first time in over a year, I feel like, maybe, I don’t have to worry about trying so hard, like I can just be me around her, not anxious about if I’m talking to people correctly, or if they’re going to like me, or if I’m missing something. That’s how it feels talking to most people, like I’m missing something and it’s not quite connecting.

  With Mom, it feels like she’s meeting me there, like she cares, like I’m not a complete failure and repulsive piece of shit for just… being. Being different, I’m told.

  “I love you”, she replies. “You’re a good daughter.”

  She asks me if I need anything, and when I tell her no, she hugs me, and gets up to leave the room. Time goes by, and I remember what she said at the end of one of her points.

  There’s still plenty of time to suffer.