There are many American readers for whom The Price of Salt would still be a revolutionary, shocking, immoral novel, the kinds of readers who have never, to their knowledge, met a lesbian or bisexual or pansexual woman before and who imagine us all as monstrous caricatures.
After he handed me these canes, and after I used them to beat him over the next few days, I marveled at the revelation: canes are sticks. Suddenly, I saw everything differently. The dowel that opens the venetian blinds. The scrub brush for the dishes. The paintbrushes. The thick lead rope for the horses. The stack of kindling for firewood. I could use anything as an impact toy.
The ability to save and go again, well. That’s a privilege, to shape the world like that. Says the flower. Fucking flower. Because yes, I did. That is exactly what I did, and Fox knew we would. Because he is banking on our morals. Because he is explicating to us another way to be a person. With the genderless protagonist, the protagonist named after the player, the game puts the player in its world. And the game doesn’t forget the decisions the player makes, even if the player tries to.
It took watching I Don’t Wanna Be A Boy to show me that the negative attitudes towards trans women have always been pervasive in society, that from 1994 to 2016 there hasn’t been much change in how society views us. But it also taught me that we share a sisterhood of sorts. No matter what time and what place, trans women of color are connected by our similar experiences.
I love moms. I love my mom. Moms created the whole damn world and they run the thing, too. Motherhood is powerful as fuck. Yet, every time I think about being looked at as a mom, I can feel myself shrinking away from the idea. I can feel my other identities as a queer femme, a writer, an activist, a nonprofit director, a leader, a teacher, a badass bitch being forcibly subdued and overshadowed by the looming identity of “mommy.” I can visualize all those parts of me, of who I am and how I see myself, disintegrating into glitter dust, scattered to the wind like ashes.