and wife. He would rub his open palms against my hair. My budding attraction to Junior would surface in words: I would repeat movie lines that I’d heard girls say to boys, things that made them act silly, like “I love you.” “I wish you were really a girl,” he once told me during one of our make-pretend sessions.
Though Junior was a few years older and could easily dominate me in a fight, I was smugly confident in my premature sexuality. What we once fulfilled by lying on the grass side by side quickly escalated to something more adult. Junior kissed me in the back of our house by the berry gate, where no one could see us. It was my first kiss and awakened me to sexuality in a way that my nights serving Derek never did. Junior’s unexpected kiss made me feel out of control, so I knelt in front of him and unzipped his jean shorts. He did not object when I tugged down his briefs and pulled him to my lips. My knees dug into the cool brown dirt and the air-conditioning vents roared, silencing Junior’s moaning. I made him feel good, and it felt good to be in control, or so I thought.
I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long ashe wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.
These trysts and my resulting questions about my gender and sexuality isolated me from my brother, who I felt could never understand me. I was blinded by an illusion that had me convinced that I was much more adult, more worldly, than Chad and thus had to carry burdens he could never grasp. Still, a part of me wanted him to understand me. Despite my isolation and uncertainty, he was my brother, and I looked forward to the routine of our evening communion, sleeping just a few feet away from each other.
“Hey,” I whispered one night after clicking the television off. “You still up?”
“What’s up?” he said, popping his head down to face me in my bunk.
“I feel like someone else sometimes,” I told him. “Like different from you and other boys.”
“I know that already,” he said, flashing his missing-toothed smile. “You don’t like boy things.”
“I guess I just wanted to tell you,” I said as he returned to his pillow. Though I didn’t have the words then to define what was going on and who I was, a part of me feared that Chad would look at me differently, and not love me anymore.
Years later, Chad told me he had “some memory” of Derek “touching” me in “some strange way.” He said, “I wasn’t fully sure if he was molesting you or not. I was too young,” and apologized for not doing something about what he’d apparently witnessed. I was struck that he carried guilt about something he couldn’t have done anything about. How ridiculous does it sound for a seven-year-old kid to sayhe wished he’d done something about the abuse his eight-year-old sibling faced? “I wouldn’t say that was one of the big reasons why you ‘turned,’ ” he said. “I can’t think of another word, but you know what I mean. It was always in you, and I knew you weren’t happy with being who you were when we were younger. You wanted to be a girl.”
I was apprehensive about writing about being molested because I feared others would make the same link Chad made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans—as if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance. What must be made clear is that my gender expression and identity as a girl predated Derek, and my expression as a child made me vulnerable
Though Junior was a few years older and could easily dominate me in a fight, I was smugly confident in my premature sexuality. What we once fulfilled by lying on the grass side by side quickly escalated to something more adult. Junior kissed me in the back of our house by the berry gate, where no one could see us. It was my first kiss and awakened me to sexuality in a way that my nights serving Derek never did. Junior’s unexpected kiss made me feel out of control, so I knelt in front of him and unzipped his jean shorts. He did not object when I tugged down his briefs and pulled him to my lips. My knees dug into the cool brown dirt and the air-conditioning vents roared, silencing Junior’s moaning. I made him feel good, and it felt good to be in control, or so I thought.
I knelt in front of Junior only a handful of times, but after each tryst, he made sure to point out that he wasn’t gay because he didn’t do it back. As kids, we understood gay to be bad, a label denoting weakness. Junior was fine with accepting the blow jobs as long ashe wasn’t the one being labeled, as long as we were pretending to be other people, as long as I kept quiet about our interactions. Even then I didn’t consider either of us gay; we both saw me as a girl in this context of our sexual playing, and there was nothing gay about girls sleeping with boys, I reasoned.
These trysts and my resulting questions about my gender and sexuality isolated me from my brother, who I felt could never understand me. I was blinded by an illusion that had me convinced that I was much more adult, more worldly, than Chad and thus had to carry burdens he could never grasp. Still, a part of me wanted him to understand me. Despite my isolation and uncertainty, he was my brother, and I looked forward to the routine of our evening communion, sleeping just a few feet away from each other.
“Hey,” I whispered one night after clicking the television off. “You still up?”
“What’s up?” he said, popping his head down to face me in my bunk.
“I feel like someone else sometimes,” I told him. “Like different from you and other boys.”
“I know that already,” he said, flashing his missing-toothed smile. “You don’t like boy things.”
“I guess I just wanted to tell you,” I said as he returned to his pillow. Though I didn’t have the words then to define what was going on and who I was, a part of me feared that Chad would look at me differently, and not love me anymore.
Years later, Chad told me he had “some memory” of Derek “touching” me in “some strange way.” He said, “I wasn’t fully sure if he was molesting you or not. I was too young,” and apologized for not doing something about what he’d apparently witnessed. I was struck that he carried guilt about something he couldn’t have done anything about. How ridiculous does it sound for a seven-year-old kid to sayhe wished he’d done something about the abuse his eight-year-old sibling faced? “I wouldn’t say that was one of the big reasons why you ‘turned,’ ” he said. “I can’t think of another word, but you know what I mean. It was always in you, and I knew you weren’t happy with being who you were when we were younger. You wanted to be a girl.”
I was apprehensive about writing about being molested because I feared others would make the same link Chad made, pointing to the abuse as the cause of my being trans—as if my identity as a woman is linked to some perversion, wrongdoing, or deviance. What must be made clear is that my gender expression and identity as a girl predated Derek, and my expression as a child made me vulnerable
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