The only other time I’d seen her look this nervous was when she showed me her Harvard application essay. It was about how in middle school she’d been obsessed with the news coverage of the Arab Spring, and that was what had made her want to become a professional political scientist so she’d have an excuse to study every nuance of social justice movements.
The essay was brilliant. Naturally.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
Toni didn’t look at me. Her smile had faded. “We should talk about something. It’s important.”
Oh, God. I knew it.
She was breaking up with me.
Why? I tried to think. There had been that party when I talked to Renee off in the corner for an hour. Toni got jealous sometimes about things like that, but she never got angry.
I must’ve done something else. What? How could I explain it so Toni would change her mind? Oh, God, oh, God.
“I think I’m genderqueer,” Toni said.
Oh. Was that all?
I breathed out. I was so relieved I just nodded. This wasn’t a big deal. All that mattered was that she still wanted to be with me.
“Okay,” I said.
TONI
“Okay,” Gretchen said, nodding.
I waited for the freak-out, but Gretchen just looked at me with raised eyebrows, waiting for me to go on.
All the sites said when you came out to someone as trans, you should explain what that meant in a lot of detail. Some of them said it was better to explain it in a letter or an email, because then the person you were coming out to could react in private and do research on their own before they tried to talk to you about it. I couldn’t write Gretchen an email about this, though. That would feel so fake.
“Genderqueer is, like, when you think you have both masculine and feminine qualities, and you don’t fit into either end of the so-called gender binary,” I said. “It’s like a philosophical disagreement with the idea that everyone has to live in either the male box or the female box.”
“Oh, right. I remember.” Gretchen smiled. “We did that whole big thing on it in the GSA, didn’t we?”
“Oh, yeah.” In junior year we’d read a collection of essays by transgender and genderqueer writers called Beyond the Binary. It was my idea. I’d already read it, and I wanted to have people to talk to about it. It was hard, though, because I pretended all my opinions about it were totally objective reading comprehension–focused thoughts, when actually I kept wanting to jump up and down yelling, “It all makes so much sense now!”
“I knew you were really into that book,” Gretchen said. “I wondered if maybe you identified with it some.”
“Yeah, I did. Like, a lot.” I nodded. This was going great so far. I took Gretchen’s hand and smiled. I hadn’t expected Gretchen to run for the hills at the news or anything, but I’d expected some surprise, at least. Maybe some shock. The sites said sometimes significant others didn’t take the news well because they were worried it made them gay. Or straight, as the case may be.
“So...” Gretchen said.
I waited for the questions to start.
GRETCHEN
Was I allowed to ask questions?
I was trying to be respectful. Well, I was also trying to remember everything we’d read in that book about what genderqueer meant, and everything Toni had ever said about it during all those long discussions. She’d said a lot.
That was last year, though. I hadn’t known there was going to be this incredibly major quiz on it today.
I wanted to ask what genderqueer actually meant in the real world. Toni had said something about the “binary” being bad, but did that mean she thought the binary was bad for everyone, or just her? Was she different now than how she was before, or was she still my same Toni?
Wait, was I even supposed to call her she anymore? The book said some genderqueer people like to use other pronouns, like sie and hir.
Was Toni still a girl? Was Toni ever a girl?
Wait. If Toni wasn’t a girl, did this mean she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore? What did that make her? Just my friend? I couldn’t call Toni my friend. It felt like saying she wasn’t as important as she was.
Wait. Maybe Toni really was breaking up with me. Maybe she thought she couldn’t have a girlfriend anymore if she was genderqueer.
No, that couldn’t be it. She was holding my hand. You didn’t hold hands with someone while you dumped them. Did you?
Wait. If Toni was able to see beyond gender and I wasn’t, did that mean I wasn’t as smart as she was? Because, well, the gender binary had never especially bothered me. I mean, I didn’t think it was fair that some people felt oppressed by it, but as for me, I’d always just felt like a girl. I had breasts and a vagina and I was perfectly content with them. I’d never really thought about my gender very much.
What if Toni didn’t like my body anymore, though? What if she didn’t like her body? Was I still allowed to like it?
Would we still get to have sex? If we did, would it be different now?
Had Toni been not liking the sex all along? She sure seemed like she liked it.
What did any of this mean?
I swallowed all my questions and fought to keep a smile on my face.