By Cass Peterson

I step up to the counter at the café to order. The young man behind the counter says with cheer, What can I get you this morning, Sir? Just a normal day. An “every single day.”

I polite­ly tell him my oat milk cap­puc­ci­no and a plain crois­sant order, but before I can finish my sen­tence, he cuts me off. 

Ma’am! He exclaims sud­den­ly when he reg­is­ters the soft­ness of my voice. His eyes dart away in nervousness.

And before I can respond, he barks again, with urgency, Sorry!

I patient­ly let him finish this overly famil­iar exchange, this string of words as known to me as my name itself. He is tem­porar­i­ly embar­rassed by his initial Sir “mistake,” so, he cor­rects with an assertive Ma’am and then follows with a des­per­ate but punc­tu­at­ing Sorry! We’re on this ride togeth­er. I just want to order coffee.

When I get in the taxi to head home after an excru­ci­at­ing­ly long day of work, the driver says, Good Evening, Sir, to which I respond in kind. He almost slams on the breaks as he fumbles, I mean, Ma’am. And then after a long tense minute, he regains his com­po­sure and sheep­ish­ly utters, Sorry. 

Sorry. But. I just want to get home. Don’t be sorry. I am not sorry. I am not offend­ed; I’m annoyed. I want to lean over the front seat and say, It’s okay, I’ve actu­al­ly met myself before. You haven’t made a mistake. 

This dis­so­nance, this daily dis­rup­tion that my body demands in the world feels like both an act of resis­tance to busi­ness-as-usual and a much needed, hopeful, gesture toward a future that I want to live in. My body cleaves time and space, causing a glitch, a pause. My shape pushes against the edges of what is already known; full of aspi­ra­tions for some­thing bigger, some­thing better, some­thing more expan­sive and imag­i­na­tive. I don’t want apolo­gies; I just want more space. 

A few weeks before he was sup­posed to travel across the country to stay with me for an unprece­dent­ed week-long visit, my father wrote me an email declar­ing that he was no longer coming because he was unwill­ing to argue with reality. During the process of plan­ning the trip, I had very gently asked him to TRY using they/them pro­nouns when refer­ring to me. It was one of those supreme­ly casual coming-out moments; I have been out as queer-as-fuck since I was eigh­teen years old. Now, at forty-three, my “ask” around gender-neutral pro­nouns is a small but impor­tant bid for recog­ni­tion and respect from the people in my life. 

Don’t worry, I told him in a Gen-X-Latchkey-Kid-No-Big-Deal tone to mit­i­gate anyone’s rising anx­i­eties about trying some­thing new. I asked him to try some­thing with me, low­er­ing the stakes as much as pos­si­ble. I did it this way, while fully aware that min­i­miz­ing one’s own needs is a primary default posi­tion for people like me, for the gender variant, for the gender outlaws. It’s one of the coping strate­gies we have learned to stay safe and try to belong in a culture that is often inhos­pitable and aggres­sive. Keep to your­self and don’t ask for too much. Many of us have become inci­den­tal experts at finding ways to hide in plain sight, con­stant­ly working to manage other people’s per­cep­tions of us. 

My body, in its organic resis­tance to being entire­ly legible, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly becomes a target for other people’s uncon­scious fantasy, shame, and hate.

My father’s infa­mous email landed in my inbox with short, pierc­ing lines about how I cannot make him argue with reality and that the whole “non-binary thing” was feeling too bur­den­some for him. He would prefer to imme­di­ate­ly decline the invi­ta­tion rather than to make an effort or have a con­ver­sa­tion with me about it. The premise of my father’s stance is that he somehow under­stands and beholds reality and that I simply do not. Accord­ing to my father, my expe­ri­ence, my life, lies outside of what is known and there­fore, what is real, and that my ask of him to acknowl­edge the terms of my own living is both absurd and unrea­son­able. 

While still reeling from shock, anger, and hurt, I tried to explain my father’s reac­tionary deci­sion to cancel our family gath­er­ing to my seven-year-old son who was looking forward to the rare visit from his grand­fa­ther. My son didn’t under­stand it, and I didn’t want to work too hard to make him under­stand it. On some level, I was heart­ened by his confusion.

How does one even begin to respond? How does one begin to defend one’s own sanity and sov­er­eign­ty? How do I not get pulled out of or away from the terms of living that I have had to fight a life­time to assert? I sit down to write a response to my dad, but it feels like there is nowhere to begin, and nowhere to go.…

I’m not sure if you know this but my entire life has been one big, con­tin­u­ous argu­ment with reality. My life has been a con­stant nego­ti­a­tion between what I have inher­it­ed from the world vs. what actu­al­ly makes sense to me. Daily life is a push/pull between the limits of how I am per­ceived and the expan­sive­ness that I feel. I want you to know that if arguing with reality were not a viable option, then I would not be alive. Your reality claims that I am false or imag­ined or just wrong. Your reality thinks of me as a fiction; but I prefer to think of it as mirac­u­lous, even utopian.

I was already trying to find utopian glim­mers in the second grade, while I was attend­ing Catholic school. At the time, each student had to for­mal­ly select a patron saint. My class­mates went around the room, Saint Mary, Saint Luke, Saint Francis, Saint Cather­ine. It came to be my turn, and I very earnest­ly said with all the devout­ness the world has ever known, George Michael. I choose Saint George Michael, please. I’ll take that guy, my sexy Cypriot King in his tight blue jeans and 6 o’clock shadow. He pos­sessed the ulti­mate butchqueen swagger and I knew I had to figure out how to be him; it felt like my life depend­ed on it. George told me I had to have Faith, Faith, Faith and I did! My teacher was imme­di­ate­ly con­fused and appalled, of course, because I had chosen a popstar and, perhaps more dis­turbing­ly, because I had chosen a man. But even though I was feeling an intense fric­tion from chal­leng­ing the system’s limited capac­i­ty, I also could not have felt more attuned to the truths of my own bur­geon­ing nature. This feeling of both chafing against some­thing while also riding a natural current, is famil­iar to me; like a dual con­scious­ness. Thirty-five years later, my patron saint is still George Michael, may God rest his beau­ti­ful soul. His lyrics lived inside me like sala­cious secrets. Like bones. Like roots. He gave me meaning. He gave me Freedom.

On the morning of School-Picture Day, after you and mom left for work, I broke into your bath­room, stole the mousse, and combed my hair to look just like George’s. I had been put in a “nice” red sweater and a French braid with a bow. But while waiting for the bus, I scram­bled quickly into the bath­room, undid the braid and somehow coiffed my thick bangs into an over-styled pom­padour. I took the sweater off and put a black shirt on. I popped the collar. I was already wearing dangly ear­rings, so I took one out and hid it under my pillow. Saint George Michael was ready for picture day. 

Weeks later, when you received the crisp white folder of pic­tures, you both looked bewil­dered and angry. I watched as mom quietly slipped the entire thing into the kitchen garbage. That night, I snuck into the kitchen, cut one of the small picture squares out, and hid it inside my small red journal. That picture of me was for me. 

My teacher would not let me settle on George Michael and urged me to pick someone else more “legit­i­mate” to rep­re­sent me in the after­life. Finally, she and I settled on Joan of Arc, the French anti-hero-warrior-martyr. Growing up, you used to make me watch The Passion of Joan of Arc with you. The 1928 French film was a spooky, silent, black-and-white melo­dra­ma. Every­one had big, histri­on­ic, afraid eyes. There was a tri­bunal of so many angry men and a young page-boy-looking Joan, fight­ing for her life, refus­ing to give in and say that god was not speak­ing direct­ly to her. The whole scene gave me nightmares. 

You and all of history believed she was indict­ed and killed because of her unwa­ver­ing devo­tion to god, but I always knew it was because she was queer. I knew it was because she was a boyish witch who had a private rela­tion­ship to her own higher power. She had a direct line to her own sense of the divine, and she was unwill­ing to disown it or apol­o­gize for it. Joan’s biggest sin/transgression was always her audac­i­ty to act like a man. My tiny, eight-year-old heart knew this as deeply as it has ever known any­thing. When I chose her to be my patron saint, I knew it was because she was going to allow me to wear pants and play with swords and not care so much about all the overly pre­scribed man­dates that were coming my way. I want you to know that St. Joan always allowed me to be the warrior that I am. But also, the saint.

After she was sen­tenced to death in the film, the credits started rolling. You looked pleased. I remem­ber wanting to ask you, Wait, who’s side are you on?

Dear Joan, 

So many of us queers have been booted out of ancient rituals and rites of passage, in the name of “god.” God has become syn­ony­mous with a pre­dictable con­sol­i­da­tion of power, and people like us have been stripped of our place in it all. Our wild­ness has been tamed and our spirits have been mangled.

But I am recom­mit­ted to these shad­ow­lands. And to the lumi­nos­i­ty. I am com­mit­ted to sacred spaces. Ritual spaces. Healing spaces. This is our domain. Queers have always reigned over the pas­sages between life and death, the bardos, the cracks in con­scious­ness that reveal them­selves when you’re truly lis­ten­ing. We have always existed in liminal spaces as mediums, trans­la­tors, and shamans. Can we remem­ber this, togeth­er, in our bold protests, in our fevered stand against lega­cies of dom­i­nance and tyranny? We are war­riors and we must be armed with open hearts, open hands. We need to soften under all this armor, in order to truly take back that which belongs to us. We need to embody ritual spaces of our own, define them on our own terms, make magic, share magic, and honor our sub­al­tern visions and aspi­ra­tions. We need to tend to and protect the pre­cious bonds of love that are not dic­tat­ed by the cer­tain­ty of blood or law or money or reli­gion. We need to commit to one another—this Ever-Extend­ing Chosen Family. Let’s reject that which mis­un­der­stands us but lean into that which has always known us. The sacred. The divine. And all the in-between becom­ings. I’m so sorry they killed you. I am just so sorry.

Your response to my pronoun ask is con­fus­ing because you never had any problem with me as your lesbian daugh­ter. I remem­ber when I brought my first girl­friend back home and you paraded me around our small rural town, saying, This is my daugh­ter and her lover. You were delight­ed by the word lover, as if you were con­jur­ing the sex I was having; like two silly girls at a sleep­over, glee­ful­ly kissing and acci­den­tal­ly scis­sor­ing. Girls Gone Wild. My silly little sapphic sex life. You liked the clear posi­tion it put you in, proud dad of a lesbian daugh­ter. You got to feel entire­ly safe­guard­ed in your mas­culin­i­ty and didn’t have to think at all about mine. You got to settle into the fact that you have a daugh­ter, while ignor­ing the reality that you also have a son. You wanted to under­stand me as one thing while I have always been many. 

I am not sorry.

You didn’t have to con­sid­er the ways that my queer body is mutable or the ways it changes shapes accord­ing to the con­tours of my desire. You didn’t have to account for the fact that in all my imag­in­ings and ges­tures, I can conjure a cock that always gets hard and never cums pre­ma­ture­ly. I can be a boy/girl/man/woman/beast at the blink of an eye. I can be a stern leather daddy in one moment and a demure pillow princess in the next. I can be a Bengal Tiger or a Great Horned Owl. I can play all the notes. I can. And I do, when I am living, when I am fucking, when I am fucking living. The shame I am expect­ed to feel on behalf of people like you just fuels me more. It just makes me hun­gri­er for an infi­nite number of ways to feel turned on. 

Your beau­ti­ful grand­child calls me Baba because I am not his mother, and I am not his father. And also, I am both. I heard him talking with one of his school­mates after class one day and his friend asked him what a Baba is and he very thought­ful­ly said back, A Baba is like a mom who is also an old man. Yes. A per­fect­ly accu­rate read from the mouth of a child. I am a mom who is also an old man. I am both and neither. If a seven-year-old can see me plain as day­light, why can’t you? 

It takes both courage and imag­i­na­tion to see me.

Mean­while, back in my daily nego­ti­a­tions with the nar­row­ness of the world, I must face the starkly violent reality of public bath­rooms. There is an ornate chore­og­ra­phy that I have to perform to not illicit harm from others, while in the bath­room. You have never had to watch me figure out all the ways I have to comport myself in order to just take a piss, safely. I am not received well in women’s restrooms, despite my best efforts to always take my hat off, bat my long eye­lash­es and hum to myself in a soft soprano voice while I pee. I am not received well in men’s rooms either. I am met with side eyes and grunts of dis­ap­proval.  Some­times the clothes do not make the man. And so, I usually choose the women’s room because I am just a little bit less afraid of women than I am of men. When I take my young, long-golden-haired-nymph-like son to the public bath­room with me, we look like two ambigu­ous, pre-pubes­cent inter­lop­ers who both acci­dent­ly stum­bled out of the forest and into the women’s room. People look at us like we are covered in moss and unicorn horns. We just have to pee. But I know he can feel my entire body con­tract under everyone’s gaze, and I know it unset­tles him. 

When­ev­er there is an option to go into a single stall Family Restroom with a sign on the door with a pic­togram of a man/woman/baby, I rush in and lock the door behind me. Because I am my own man/woman/baby. I am also my own family. And I know that not that long before this, some­body else with a sim­i­lar­ly trans­gres­sive body locked this same door and sighed in great relief when they got to momen­tar­i­ly avoid the Sir, Ma’am, Sorry of it all. They also just wanted to pee.

A few years ago, when I was living in a small rural town, I was outside my new home water­ing a flower bed when the neigh­bors across the street saw me for the first time. What appeared to be the-man-of-the-house pulled into his dri­ve­way, stepped out of his pickup truck replete with a huge MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN bumper sticker and started yelling from across the road. I thought some­thing was wrong, that he was in trouble, so I turned off the hose and stepped closer to hear him. But as I did, I began to realize that he was yelling at me. I was the trouble, it seemed. You fucking faggot, go home! He shouted. I couldn’t fully fathom that he was talking to me. He went on, You think you’re a dyke, huh? You just need me to come over there and show you what a real man is. I’ll fucking show you. At this he ges­tured towards his gen­i­tals and sort of thrust it out at me, like a literal fuck you.

I was too con­fused to even yell back, so I just started to record him with my phone. I wanted to make sure this was really hap­pen­ing. Shaken, I went back inside and con­tem­plat­ed calling the police but I called you instead; maybe for advice, or maybe because I was scared that such a threat of vio­lence was just across the street from me. You got on the phone and I told you what hap­pened: that this man whom I don’t know had just threat­ened to rape me, to make me normal and accept­able, to set me straight.

You told me to bake him a pie and go over to his house and try to make “nice.”

Wait, who’s side are you on?

Now even more in shock, I hung up the phone and called the police depart­ment to doc­u­ment the inci­dent in case I ever needed to get a restrain­ing order. (I did need to get one, by the way.) I under­stand what you were doing. You wanted me to do my old trick of making myself more palat­able for someone else. You wanted me to shapeshift into sub­mis­sion, into an apology. But I know all too well how to get a bully to spare me; to move in such a way as to not trigger all his own unre­solved self-hatred. I know how to expert­ly restore someone’s attach­ment to their own power and dom­i­nance. But. Fuck that. I’m not going to abandon myself to make someone else feel better, anymore. I am not a martyr. I don’t think mar­tyr­dom is holy; I think it’s just a tactic for keeping people in their place. It’s an insid­i­ous strat­e­gy for main­tain­ing the tyranny of the status quo.

I’m done baking people pies and trying to make them feel better about who I am. Those days are over. They have been over for a long time. 

I know you thought it was a right­eous idea; maybe you were think­ing about your old pal, Jesus. You wanted me to go over there and turn the other cheek? It was in this moment that I real­ized with some degree of cer­tain­ty that Jesus must have been a transwoman and that she was killed because of her audac­i­ty to act like a woman. I’m sorry, but that turn-the-other-cheek shit is not new or radical for women. Women have been turning the other fucking cheek for thou­sands of years because they never had another choice. It’s not some noble pros­tra­tion, it’s just called life. It’s called sur­vival. I’m pretty sure that when Jesus started talking about loving all people as we love our­selves, all the men around him were like, Hey Jesus, why are you talking like such a little bitch?!  But she didn’t stop. And she didn’t start acting like a real man, so they mur­dered her.

Hey Jesus, I’m so sorry they killed you too. I am so sorry they killed you for being too femme.

I am non-binary, which has the word NON in it, as in: non, nega­tion, absence. I have carved a life entire­ly out of neg­a­tive space. I want you to know that I am happy dwelling here in the argu­ment, resid­ing in the margins like a moth­er­fuck­ing pioneer. I’m not looking for a way out.

I am non-binary, which has the word NO in it, as in:

No thank you, I’ll play by my own rules. No, I am not a man or a woman. No. No thank you. I will not choose. I will not sub­scribe. No, no thank you. 

Our yes’s are only as good as our no’s, they always say. I believe them. I believe in them. Please call me they/them. It’s not that hard; I just used it in a sen­tence. Please see above.

Freedom means cre­at­ing the terms of one’s own life, rather than just playing out the ones that have already been assigned. Freedom is the courage it takes for me to live as if the world is also for me. I promise you this is not just some over-invest­ment in iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. I know that I am bigger and more nuanced than a mere pronoun. A pronoun does not orga­nize or define me, but my courage to ask you to get it right, does. My gender/identity is the same as it’s always been. But what is dif­fer­ent is my ability to ask for what I need and to not just dismiss it because it always has been dis­missed. My request that you see me, in a more precise, more legible way, does define me. It’s the asking that defines. It is the cathar­sis. It is the healing. 

A few years ago, when I told you that I was having top surgery, you respond­ed by saying, Hmmmm, have you spoken to a pro­fes­sion­al about this? My tongue sharp­ened inside my mouth, ready to pour venom into the igno­rance that was creep­ing toward me in the tall grass of our con­ver­sa­tion. I wanted to snidely respond that Yes, the surgeon is indeed a pro­fes­sion­al. I’m not having some back-alley hack job. But I knew what you meant, or what you were insin­u­at­ing: that the sound­ness of my mind was in question. 

Did you forget that I am the pro­fes­sion­al? Did you forget that I have my own office and my own patients who pay to come talk to me so that I can help them try to make better, more aligned choices in their lives? I work with queer people—queer artists, queer writers, queer pro­fes­sion­als, young lost queers, fab­u­lous famous queers, trans queers, non-binary queers, femme queers, masc queers, BIPOC queers, queer sex workers, queer couples and queer polycules—the full pan­theon of urban queer­ness shows up in my office, on a weekly basis. People pay me to help them live inside the con­flict, with some grace and agency. 

Of course, I offer people the med­i­cine that I, myself, need. Of course. Isn’t that always the way? Do we not lead our­selves toward our own tran­scen­dent dreamscapes?

Did you also know that I have written hun­dreds of pro­fes­sion­al letters so that my patients can receive gender-affirm­ing surg­eries and treat­ments? I am lit­er­al­ly a pro­fes­sion­al gate­keep­er that can wave my little licensed-by-the-state-of-New-York wand to declare someone eli­gi­ble for access to the health care that they need and deserve. I abhor that the system requires this kind of gate­keep­ing, but I am also happy to be working on the inside for my people. This role feels extra charged and impor­tant now as our nation is aggres­sive­ly trying to dis­man­tle our access to health care and to the gender-affirm­ing strate­gies that we need and are finally receiving. 

Protect Trans Kids. Protect Trans People. Now.

How strange that all my work in this world is lost on you in this moment. Your inquiry has reduced me to a child playing dress up. An infant making big scary adult choices. How hard do you have to squint to not see any of this? 

I am not a hero. (Or maybe I am, actu­al­ly?) I’m just a person who was born with the (un)fortunate karmic knot of having to learn how to honor myself against all the odds. The “odds” being firstly my parents and then, the world. But what I have lacked in for­ma­tive love and support, I have gained in spir­i­tu­al tenac­i­ty and a grav­i­ta­tion­al pull toward hope, and toward utopian ges­tures of pos­si­bil­i­ty. I have to bet on myself. 

I am betting on myself.

After your refusal to come visit and to try using they/them pro­nouns, I asked you not to be in touch unless you were leading with an apology. I let you know that I was angry and hurt and that I was not inter­est­ed in being in contact unless you could under­stand that and ini­ti­ate some gesture of repair. I didn’t hear back from you for months, not until my forty-fourth birth­day, when you decided to put a card in the mail to me. And when I received that card, I opened it to a long, hand­writ­ten mono­logue about all the things you had been up to lately. It read like your own per­son­al newslet­ter with no mention of the rupture or of my hurt feel­ings. No mention of my request to not be in touch. When I fin­ished reading it, I turned it over and looked at the front of the card, only to realize that on it was a black and white picture of a woman wearing a dress and a full face of makeup, playing base­ball. Is this how you see me? Is this what you would prefer? 

I put the card in another enve­lope and returned it in the mail, sending it right back to you, because it’s no longer my job to enter­tain your inac­cu­rate visions of who I am. I am not a recep­ta­cle for your fragili­ty. If you can’t join me in cel­e­brat­ing the won­drous truths of who I am, then, please, at the very least stay out of my way.

Utopia is a posture, a con­scious­ness. It’s the will­ing­ness to listen to one’s own voice against a noisy back­drop of chaos and coer­cion and endless suf­fer­ing. Utopias don’t just happen. You have to imagine them. You have to invite them. And you have to speak them, out loud.