by Finley, 17 (he/they)
People often ask me,
“What does it feel like to be deadnamed?”
“What does it feel like to be misgendered?”
“What does it feel like to be trans?”
Well, now you’ll know.
To be deadnamed, to be misgendered,
It feels like a knife to the gut.
A knife so hot that it becomes cold again.
It feels like falling off the trampoline as a kid,
When the wind gets knocked out of you,
And you wonder if you’ll ever breathe again.
When you hear those wretched words,
That do not describe you,
Your blood runs cold.
A thousand thoughts run through your head at once,
Yet none at all.
You can’t correct them, it’s rude and impolite.
“Their heart can’t take the stress of knowing.”
They don’t mean to hurt, they don’t know, can’t know,
But it still hurts, every time.
To be trans is to be a spy.
You dress in clothes that make you unrecognizable.
You cut your hair and use makeup to change your face.
You add or subtract to your genitals,
so that nobody knows what you “really are.”
“But what are you really?”
That’s what everyone will always ask,
And it makes you wonder too.
What are you? Do you even know?
You tell us,
“Boys wear blue, boys are rough, boys don’t cry.”
“Girls wear skirts and pink, girls are delicate, girls are submissive.”
There is no room for error,
There is no room to deviate from the binary.
Everyone treats gender as a definite thing,
Black and white, night and day,
But it’s so much more than that.
“You’re confused,” they say,
And they’re right, but not for the reasons they think.
Finley is a queer and transgender author who likes to write about issues that concern him. He’s won several awards for other writings including a short story in middle school and poem “I am Finley” in a school contest, later publishing it in a national magazine. After high school he hopes to move on to become an archeologist and writer. Finley is from Illinois.
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