The 57 Bus Read online

  Sasha didn’t seem to need other people much; in fact, they often said that the world would be better off without humans in it at all. The world inside their head was fascinating enough. They thought about numbers a lot, and shapes, and the size of the universe. They drew imaginary subway maps and worked out math problems on a whiteboard the family kept in the breakfast nook. They were interested in space and Legos and trains and the ancient Greeks and they noticed things most people didn’t, like the subtle shades within the green of a leaf, or the geometric shapes within a sculpture. They loved cats and had a habit of meowing. Sasha couldn’t say whether any of this was because they had Asperger’s, because, of course, they’d never not had Asperger’s. The only mind they’d ever been inside was their own.

  In sixth grade, Sasha started attending a tiny K-to-eight Montessori school with about twenty-five kids in each grade. They were in a mixed-age class of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders and there was just one other new kid that year, an apple-cheeked fifth grader named Samantha. She looked right past Sasha’s invisibility cloak and saw a kindred spirit.

  Samantha was a head taller than Sasha, with tousled blond hair, ivory skin that flushed easily, and wire-rimmed glasses. Her family moved around a lot, and at ten she’d already lived in five states and attended six different elementary schools. But she had never had a best friend. She was used to being an outcast, to feeling both smarter than other kids, and stupider. Her dad was a nanotechnologist whose laboratory was in their basement. He’d been giving her what he called “Dad Homework” for her whole life and she’d always gotten pleasure from demonstrating her intelligence. Yet she could never seem to learn the rules that other kids played by, the rules that defined how you were supposed to talk and how you were supposed to look and what you were supposed to be interested in. Rules that defined how smart was too smart.

  Samantha noticed that Sasha wrote their name on homework assignments in Greek letters. She noticed that Sasha loved math and costumes and imaginary worlds. She noticed how passionate Sasha was about everything—their conviction that the ancient Greeks were better than the ancient Romans, that base twelve counting was better than base ten, that cats were better than dogs. She noticed Sasha’s long eyelashes, and their curly, shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Samantha has a crush on me,” Sasha told Karl, with a kind of anthropological interest. And it was true; she did. It didn’t take long for the two of them to become inseparable. Sasha adopted Samantha’s way of talking—pronouncing “Fail!” when something was lame and “Lol!” when something was funny. They played Dungeons & Dragons and then left the twelve-sided die on the floor and invented magical battles of their own. They each adopted a tiny, invisible baby dragon—Sasha’s was named Cinnamon, Samantha’s was Pendragon. They invented stupid TV shows, unleashing a cavalcade of ever-increasing banality as they tried to out-stupid each other. They were so close that Samantha felt like Sasha was inside her head, thinking her thoughts before she’d even thought them herself.

  That closeness, of course, drew the attention of their classmates. As far as anyone could tell, Samantha was a girl and Sasha was a boy. The teasing was merciless. Everyone wanted to know if they were boyfriend and girlfriend, if they were K-I-S-S-I-N-G. (They weren’t.) It drove Samantha crazy. She once grabbed a classmate by the arm, yelling, “Stop making fun of us!” Her fingers hit a pressure point and the girl screamed in pain. Samantha felt terrible about it. But still. Why couldn’t everyone just leave them alone?

  It was part of that disorienting feeling she’d had for years, that feeling that everyone except her had been issued a handbook. Samantha knew it was important to be pretty and cute, but she had no idea how to be those things, or even why she was supposed to want to be. Her body was growing curvier. Breasts burst from her chest like twin cannonballs, but they didn’t feel sexy and good, they just felt heavy. She hid them under baggy T-shirts and sweatshirts and watched the other girls come to school in tiny skirts and spaghetti straps, wondering why everything was so much harder for her than it was for them.

  “Tell me how to be popular,” she begged one of the spaghetti-strap girls. The girl’s expression—her lowered eyes, the way she glanced around, seeking escape—told Samantha what a mistake the question had been. If you have to ask, it’s out of reach.

  Something was wrong with her, really wrong. She was angry. She was sad. She was afraid. She wanted to die. In sixth grade, she said so in class. Her teacher told her parents, who took her to a therapist.

  One day Samantha told the therapist about a video she’d seen on YouTube. Two young women stood back-to-back performing a slam poem called “Hir,” rotating to face the mic as they gave voice to a girl named Melissa and the boy inside her named James.

  Sometimes she wishes she could rip the skin off her back,

  Every moment of every day she feels trapped in the flesh of a stranger.

  Watching it, Samantha felt something chime inside her—a bell vibrating in resonance. Before puberty, her physical body didn’t seem to have that much to do with who she was. People used to mistake her for a boy, but she had felt proud to be a girl. But now being a girl was like being stuffed into a heavy, constricting costume. She could barely breathe in it. The rules of the universe were fixed: You look a certain way and so you have to act a certain way and people are going to treat you a certain way. There was no way to alter it.

  “I think I might be … transgender?” she whispered to her therapist the next week.

  “I don’t think you know what transgender means,” her therapist replied.

  The bell that had been chiming inside her fell silent. She’s the expert, Samantha thought.

  It would be another year before she told anyone else.

  GRAN TURISMO 2

  Sasha and Samantha were playing Gran Turismo 2 in Sasha’s basement. Samantha was in seventh grade; Sasha was in eighth.

  Samantha took a breath. “I have something really important to tell you.”

  Sasha’s eyes were on the screen where their two cars were racing. “What?”

  “I’m transgender.”

  She told Sasha about the way she’d been feeling and about the response she’d gotten from her therapist the year before.

  “You’re the only one who knows what you feel,” Sasha said. “If that’s the word for what you feel, then stick with that. Now, what’s the important thing you had to tell me?”

  Five years later, a handsome, apple-cheeked young man named Andrew would look back at that conversation as one of the most validating moments of his life. “It wasn’t that I was expecting Sasha to react poorly, because I know Sasha, and Sasha is easily one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and also one of the kindest,” he recalled. “But taking a risk like that and having everything be okay afterward felt so good.”

  Back in seventh grade, Andrew rarely spoke about gender with Sasha after that one conversation. He wouldn’t tell his parents he was trans for another year. For a while he convinced himself that being a girl would be okay, that being trans was just too hard a life. When Sasha was in ninth grade, Andrew was their date to the Maybeck prom. He wore a bottle-green dress and bloodred lipstick, and his hair was dyed coppery orange. But it was still just a costume—the dress, the lipstick, the hair, the body. By the time he started high school in the fall, Andrew had already begun his gender transition.

  HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT GENDER YOU ARE?

  Sasha and Andrew were hanging out in Sasha’s bedroom. It was the winter of 2012. Sasha was a sophomore at Maybeck High School, and Andrew was a freshman at a public high school nearby. Sasha was at the computer, showing Andrew the ins and outs of the board game Diplomacy.

  “Andrew?” Sasha said. “I don’t know if this is rude or not, but I was wondering how you realized you were a guy?”

  “I just knew I wasn’t a girl,” Andrew explained. “I just knew that was not who I was at all.”

  Andrew had recently been hospitalized after contemplating suici
de. Even though he’d started high school as a boy, his trans status was a topic of constant rumor and gossip. People at school kept coming up and saying awkward and nonsensical things like “I heard you got a sex transplant?” And then his mother had a psychotic episode and his grandfather died and it was just too much all at once. Now, as Sasha explained that they also were questioning their gender, Andrew felt a rush of relief, similar to the one he’d felt when he came out to Sasha.

  “The fact that someone like Sasha, who I respected so much, was also going through this—it was another thank-God moment,” Andrew remembered later. “Like, I’m not such a weird person.”

  Not everyone had that reaction though. For most people, the question was kind of mysterious. “I just know,” Sasha’s father, Karl, said when Sasha asked how he knew he was a man. “It’s who I am.”

  That seemed to be true for most people. They just knew. Whether or not the appearance of their body matched the gender in their mind, there was some core understanding: my identity is this.

  But Sasha didn’t feel that. Didn’t feel strongly This is what I am. Didn’t feel strongly This is what I’m not. Other people seemed to have a file in their brain marked Gender. Sasha ransacked their own brain looking for the file, but it didn’t seem to be there.

  So what did that mean? The idea of not having a gender wasn’t frightening to Sasha, but it wasn’t a relief either. Maybe this is just a phase, Sasha thought. Maybe I’m just overthinking things.

  But maybe not. Maybe the question was its own kind of answer. Maybe the place in between was a real place.

  “For me at least, genderqueer includes an aspect of questioning,” Sasha explains. “The fact that I was questioning my gender meant that I was genderqueer.”

  Still, Sasha kept probing. On Facebook, they posted a status update asking, What is your preferred pronoun?

  “Your Highness,” Karl quipped. But afterward, he asked Sasha what the question meant.

  Sasha explained that there were other choices besides he and she, choices like it, or they, or more recently invented gender-neutral pronouns like ne, ve, and ze or xe. Listening, it became clear to Karl that this was a topic Sasha had been thinking about a lot.

  Not long afterward, Sasha was talking with their parents about someone they’d met online who identified as genderqueer.

  “Are you genderqueer?” asked Debbie, Sasha’s mother.

  “Yeah,” Sasha said.

  That was the extent of the conversation. But that night, Sasha posted on Google+: Just came out as genderqueer to my parents. Basically, I don’t identify as masculine or feminine.

  Reading the post, and the congratulatory comments that followed it, Debbie and Karl were left scratching their heads. Apparently something big had just happened, but they weren’t entirely sure what it was.

  What did genderqueer even mean?

  GENDERQUEER

  Debbie and Karl had always had a good relationship with Sasha. As a family, they joked around a lot, but they also talked seriously about the stuff that mattered. And clearly this gender stuff mattered to Sasha. Only it was kind of hard to figure out why. Was this about sex? About love? About changing your body?

  “I’m trying to get my head around it,” Debbie said two years after that first conversation. “I understand coming out as gay or even trans, but this is harder for me to understand.”

  She and Karl were sitting side by side on the claret-colored sofa in their living room, framed by the bay window behind them. They live in a snug green bungalow in Oakland’s Glenview district, about a mile from Oakland High School. Debbie, who works as a bookkeeper at a private elementary school, has a mobile, expressive face framed by blond chin-length hair. Her gestures are broad and comic. Karl is shyer and more quiet. A former college radio DJ turned public school kindergarten teacher, he has a gentle, thoughtful manner punctuated by a dry wit. He wears his silvering hair short on the sides and has a rainbow friendship bracelet tied around one wrist.

  Debbie’s mind kept going to the sex part. Who did Sasha want to sleep with? After Sasha announced they were genderqueer, she asked for clarification. “Who are you attracted to? Do you have sexual feelings for men?”

  But that wasn’t the issue for Sasha. They weren’t all that interested in having sex with anyone, actually. And anyway, terms like homosexual or heterosexual made no sense if you didn’t identify as one gender or another.

  Most of us see gender and sexuality and romance as one big interconnected tangle of feelings—this is who I am, this is who I’m attracted to, this is who I love. But as Sasha began exploring the topic online, they found that some people had developed language for combing the tangle into individual strands.

  In these online conversations, the word sex referred purely to biology—the chromosomes, organs, and anatomy that define male and female from the outside. Gender was the word for what people felt about themselves, how they felt inside. Sexuality was the category for who you were physically attracted to. Romantic was the category for who you felt romantic attraction to. And there was a whole array of distinctions within each category as well. It was like a gigantic menu, with columns and columns of choices.

  GENDER, SEX, SEXUALITY, ROMANCE: SOME TERMS

  Because language is evolving rapidly, and because different people have different preferences, always adopt the language individuals use about themselves, even if it differs from what’s here.

  TERMS FOR GENDER AND SEX

  agender/neutrois—Doesn’t identify as any gender.

  androgynous—Identifies as a third gender that blends male and female characteristics.

  bigender/gender fluid—Sometimes identifies as male and sometimes as female.

  cis/cisgender—The opposite of transgender; gender matches their birth sex.

  gender questioning—Is unsure about where they belong on the gender spectrum.

  genderqueer/nonbinary—Gender identity doesn’t fit neatly into male/female categories.

  intersex—Born with sexual anatomy, organs, or chromosomes that don’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. Replaces the outdated and offensive term hermaphrodite.

  trans/transgender—Feels their gender is different from their birth sex, whether or not they have physically changed their body or outward presentation. A transgender man is someone who currently identifies as male. A transgender woman is someone who currently identifies as female.

  TERMS FOR SEXUALITY

  asexual—Not physically attracted to anyone.

  bisexual—Physically attracted to both men and women.

  cupiosexual—Doesn’t feel sexual attraction, but is still interested in sex.

  graysexual—Mostly doesn’t feel sexual attraction but does occasionally.

  heterosexual—Physically attracted to people of the opposite gender.

  homosexual—Physically attracted to people of the same gender.

  pansexual—Physically attracted to people across the gender spectrum.

  TERMS FOR ROMANTIC INCLINATION

  aromantic—Not romantically attracted to anyone.

  biromantic—Romantically attracted to both men and women.

  cupioromantic—Doesn’t feel romantic attraction, but is still interested in romance.

  heteroromantic—Romantically attracted to people of the opposite gender.

  homoromantic—Romantically attracted to people of the same gender.

  panromantic—Romantically attracted to people across the gender spectrum.

  quoiromantic—Doesn’t understand the difference between romantic and platonic love.

  SASHA’S TERMS

  In the end, these were the terms Sasha felt described them best:

  Agender.

  Gray-cupiosexual.

  Quoiromantic.

  Also: Vegan.

  BECOMING SASHA

  Discovering the existence of genderqueer identity felt like discovering a secret room. All this time there had been just two rooms: male and femal
e. Now it turned out there was another room—one that could be furnished however you wanted. The more time Sasha spent in this room, the more comfortable it felt. But the person who lived in this new room still had a boy’s name—Luke. By the second half of sophomore year, that name clearly no longer fit.

  One afternoon, when Andrew was hanging out at Sasha’s house, the two of them began looking at unisex names on Wikipedia.

  Jamie. Shannon. Taylor.

  Fran. Jackie. Kris. Bobby.

  Kai. Parker. Quinn.

  Sasha.

  Sasha was the Russian nickname for both Alexandra and Alexander, which was Sasha’s middle name. And Sasha was crazy about all things Russian. The name was perfect.

  Gradually, Sasha asked their parents and close friends to call them Sasha instead of Luke. That spring, Sasha wrote a piece for the Maybeck school zine, The Pineapple, about their exploration of gender. They used their new name as the byline.

  Most people at school had no idea who this Sasha person was. But as students and staff made the connection between Sasha and the Person Formerly Known as Luke, they absorbed the information without much comment. “It wasn’t really drama,” Michael recalls. “It was just a change.”

  Ian has two moms, so he was pretty comfortable with LGBTQ stuff. He remembers his thought process going like this: Okay, not male. Okay, not female. So, neither? Okay. “That was the process and it took about ten seconds,” he says. “Then it was over.”

  “I just rolled with the fact that Sasha was agender,” Teah says. “I think it was my first experience with it, but I was raised by hippies.” At another school, a student who stepped outside the usual gender categories might have been the topic of gossip or debate or at least a few raised eyebrows. But Maybeck’s small student body already included one student who was agender and two who were transgender.