If I Was Your Girl(65)

“Evening,” he said, flashing me a smile.

“Hi,” I said, taking a long, deep breath and closing my eyes. A silent moment passed as I readied myself for what was to come. “Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning,” Grant said. In the distance, a lone cicada made its call. “I wanna know everything, if you’re okay with telling me.”

“Okay,” I said, as I led him to the tree house. We settled in, not looking at each other, our eyes trained ahead on the sparkling water as it faded from the brightness of day to the dark glimmer of night. “I’ll start with my birth name.”

As I spoke I thought back to what Virginia had said weeks before, about getting anything you wanted if you let yourself believe you deserved it. For as long as I could remember, I had been apologizing for existing, for trying to be who I was, to live the life I was meant to lead. Maybe this would be the last conversation I would ever have with Grant. Maybe not. Either way, I realized, I wasn’t sorry I existed anymore. I deserved to live. I deserved to find love. I knew now—I believed, now—that I deserved to be loved.





A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

To my cisgender readers—which is to say, to those of you who are not trans: Thank you for reading this. Thank you for being interested. I’m nervous about what you might think of this book, though maybe not in the way you might think. I am, of course, anxious that people might not like it, but even more than that I’m worried that you might take Amanda’s story as gospel, especially since it comes from a trans woman. This prospect terrifies me, actually! I am a storyteller, not an educator. I have taken liberties with what I know reality to be. I have fictionalized things to make them work in my story. I have, in some ways, cleaved to stereotypes and even bent rules to make Amanda’s trans-ness as unchallenging to normative assumptions as possible. She knew from a very young age. She is exclusively attracted to boys. She is entirely feminine. She passes as a woman with little to no effort. She had a surgery that her family should not have been able to afford, and she started hormones through legitimate channels before she probably could have in the real world. I did this because I wanted you to have no possible barrier to understanding Amanda as a teenage girl with a different medical history from most other girls. Amanda’s life and identity would be just as valid if she didn’t figure herself out until later in life, or if she were a tomboy, or if she were bisexual or a lesbian or asexual, or if she had trouble passing, or if she either could not or chose not to get “bottom” surgery. Grant’s attraction to her in any of these scenarios would have been no less heterosexual, nor would Bee’s have been any less homosexual. It is easy to get hung up on these points if you haven’t lived our lives though, so I wanted to set those aside. I hope that, having gotten to know Amanda, you will not apply the details of her experience as dogma other trans people must adhere to but rather as inspiration to pursue an ever broader understanding of our lives and identities, as well as your own understanding of gender and sex.

*

To my trans readers: It’s okay if you’re different from Amanda. She isn’t real, and you are. I spent the better part of two decades trying to convince myself that I wasn’t something I knew myself to be because I didn’t fit a very specific, very toxic model of what society says transgender people are, and trust me when I say that my life story is radically different from Amanda’s. It’s okay to be trans and also gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, or anything else. It’s okay to be trans and not pass (and you can still be legitimately beautiful without passing), and it’s okay to be trans and pass and go completely stealth. It’s okay to be a trans man. It’s okay to be genderqueer, or to change identities more than once in your life, or to feel you have no gender at all. It’s okay to be trans and never pursue any of the medical aspects of transitioning, and it’s also okay to be trans and alter your body in whatever ways you want. There is no wrong way to express and embody your most authentic self! You are beautiful, and you deserve to have your body and identity and agency respected.

*

For trans people contemplating suicide, please, please call the Trans Lifeline at 877-565-8660 in America or 877-330-3366 in Canada. They are staffed entirely by trans people, they understand what you’re going through, and they want to help. For cisgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals contemplating suicide, please call the Trevor Project Lifeline at 1-866-488-7386. For all other people contemplating suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

I know it hurts. I know it hurts so bad you can barely breathe sometimes. I know because I’ve been there. Please don’t leave us. I promise life can be good, and we need you too much.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For teaching me to love a pluralistic world, for encouraging me to fearlessly express myself, and for accepting me as their daughter, I want to thank my parents, Toby and Karol Stroud. Thanks, too, to my sister Katie, who has always had my back, loved me unconditionally, and is the force that keeps my head on my shoulders. I’ve been blessed with an incredible extended family—thanks to all of you as well, for accepting me when I came out, and for the parts all of you played in getting me here. I also want to thank my children, without whom I never would have had the ambition to try something this difficult. And, finally, there is someone whose influence was integral to the soul inside of this story, and without whose prodding this book never would have been finished: Juniper Russo. Thank you.