STATION X.I

Growing up my closest friends, who I’m still very close with to this day, was a family of four kids – a girl, a boy, a girl, and a boy. They were entirely genderless, due to how close they were in age. Pronouns and body parts were thrown around in conversation interchangeably. When we played, we’d pretend to be the characters from our favorite books. It didn’t matter if our gender matched the character’s gender – we were very Shakespearean.

Traditional femininity never felt accessible to me. I begged my mom to let me wear makeup for years before she finally agreed. I wanted to badly to fit in with the girls who wore sparkly blue eyeshadow and touched up their mascara in the bathroom during passing period. By the end of high school, I’d learned to groom a passable presence. I’d wake up and do my hair, do my makeup, wear an outfit- not sweatpants like I’d wore to school every day from 3th grade to 8th grade. It was a disguise, a costume – I was in theatre at the time and acting felt natural to me.

By my undergraduate years, the act had become well-rehearsed. I joined a sorority. I went to the parties. I wore the dresses and bought my first pair of heels. The part the I enjoyed the most, was when girls in the sorority would ask me to do their makeup before a party. I loved playing with makeup – it was one of the only feminine activities I felt like I could do correctly because it exercised the skills I’d learned from painting. It was one of the easiest and most consistent ways that I would connect with girls. Crouched next to their desk in their dorm room, using the single eyeshadow compact and crusty L’Oréal sponge they’d handed me to apply brown to the crease, sparkly champagne to the lid and the brow. It felt like the most magical moment, where the usual transparent barrier that had stood between me and them all my life finally dissolved. I would be close enough to touch their faces, smell their hair. Witness the mastering of femininity I’d always struggled with. The makeup looked right on them – wrong on me. It was so strangely beautiful to be close enough to touch something that had always been out of reach.

But it was also in my undergraduate years that I read Judith Butler. Learned the phrase “gender performativity.” Met gender queer people. Learned from gender queer people. The things I learned would hang over me at night, asking me questions that I didn’t feel ready to answer. I’d push the questions away. I was too scared to drop the act.

After I graduated I committed to being a woman. I thought the act was perfected but it was tired. Messy. Missing cues and forgetting lines. I’d get comments from strangers asking me if I was trans. I’ve always had an adams apple, and a naturally masculine face. These comments stung so hard because I knew the performance I’d been giving was so glaringly wrong, so clockably obvious.

Then finally, everything went silent.

Then. Finally. EVERYTHING. Went. Silent.

I’ve felt that I’m non-binary since I found the word for it, back in 2013. I’d been too scared to explore what that meant. It was easier to seek affinity, to assimilate. But now it was 2021 and I was getting ready to go to school again. And the word that I had clumsily thrown around in private years ago was now burning inside me. The living thing, thrashing around, ripping and cutting up my insides, screaming and roaring in pain begging to be laid out, although it’s screams were so loud I couldn’t understand what it was screaming for.

It’s outside of me now. It’s quieter now. Its barbed tail doesn’t cut and tear. Its screams don’t keep me up at night.

But it runs untamed untamable. I ride it and it rides me. I lose my grip on its reigns and it runs ahead, towards unknown places I am not year ready for. Places I do not have the words for. When I call for it, I realize I can’t call it to come back.