by Rachel Gold
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Praise for Being Emily
Winner 2013 Golden Crown Literary Award in Dramatic/General Fiction
Winner 2013 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award in Young Adult Fiction—Mature Issues
Finalist 2013 Lambda Literary Award
Huffington Post’s 21 Best Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Books for Kids
“It’s rare to read a novel that’s involving, tender, thought-provoking and informative. Rachel Gold does all this in ‘Being Emily.’”
—Twin Cities Pioneer Press
“Rachel Gold has crafted an extraordinarily poignant novel in ‘Being Emily.’”
—Lambda Literary Review
“[Being Emily] feels incredibly honest, and there are moments of joy, anger, and sorrow, laced together in a way that will make you cry and laugh along with the characters. It doesn’t shy away from the hardship but it also doesn’t make the claim that this hard stuff is all a trans person’s life is ever.”
—YA Pride
“…it’s a wonderful read for any teen (or anyone else) dealing with gender issues or the question of nonconformity … [Gold] does a fabulous job of explaining what it means to know in your heart that something’s not right, that the body you were born with doesn’t match the true person inside.”
—Ellen Krug, Lavender Magazine
“Certainly, this book is going to be a fantastic resource for teens and youth who find themselves in Emily’s shoes. However, a book like Being Emily is also an excellent place to start for cisgendered adults who want to be allies to the trans community, or even people who are uncomfortable with the subject.”
—Twin Cities Daily Planet
“Being Emily is a wonderful, valuable and very contemporary book that I believe will change minds and save lives. I was very much affected by the story, which feels piercingly real in all its details.”
—Katherine V. Forrest, author, editor and
Lesbian Literature Trailblazer Award winner
Table of Contents
Cover
Praise for Being Emily
Synopsis
Title Page
Copyright Page
Other Books by Rachel Gold
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Epilogue
Author's Note
Bella Books
Synopsis
They say that whoever you are it’s okay, you were born that way. Those words don’t comfort Emily, because she was born Christopher and her insides know that her outsides are all wrong.
They say that it gets better, be who you are and it’ll be fine. For Emily, telling her parents who she really is means a therapist who insists Christopher is normal and Emily is sick. Telling her girlfriend means lectures about how God doesn’t make that kind of mistake.
Emily desperately wants high school in her small Minnesota town to get better. She wants to be the woman she knows is inside, but it’s not until a substitute therapist and a girl named Natalie come into her life that she believes she has a chance of actually Being Emily.
A story for anyone who has ever felt that the inside and outside don’t match and no one else will understand…
Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Gold
Bella Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 10543
Tallahassee, FL 32302
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
First Bella Books Edition 2018
eBook released 2018
Editor: Katherine V. Forrest
Cover design: Kristin Smith
Photograph credit: Sergey Smolyaninov
Cover Designer: Judith Fellows
ISBN: 978-1-59493-598-5
This edition has been augmented with substantial additional text and contains editorial changes from the original.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Other Bella Books by Rachel Gold
Just Girls
My Year Zero
Nico & Tucker
About the Author
Raised on world mythology, fantasy novels, comic books and magic, Rachel is well suited for her careers in marketing and writing. She is the author of multiple queer and trans young adult novels, including Just Girls, My Year Zero, and Nico & Tucker. She has a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from Macalester College and an MFA in Writing from Hamline University, St. Paul, MN.
Rachel also spent a decade as a reporter in the LGBTQ community where she learned many of her most important lessons about being a person from the trans community. In addition, she’s an all-around geek and avid gamer, and teaches a writing class for teens that is itself a game.
For more information visit: www.rachelgold.com
Acknowledgments
Deep gratitude goes to Stephanie Burt for making this edit fun and helping in more ways than I can name. A huge thank you to Katherine V. Forrest for editing this book twice and pushing for the new edition to be as good as possible! Also to Elyse Pine, MD, and Troy R Weber-Brown, MS, LMF, whose expertise has been so helpful and whose friendship I value.
Many thanks to the college and university professors who have taught this book in their classes, and particularly to those who invited me to speak to your classes or shared feedback, especially Lisa Hager, Laina Villeneuve and Brandy T. Wilson, PhD. And thank you to Cheryl A. Head for helping me bring more diversity to this edition.
I’m very grateful to the many members of the trans community who were generous with their time, stories, and love. Especially my aunties Kate Bornstein and Rachel Pollack: growing up would’ve been muc
h harder without you. Also much love to my former roommate Scott, Debbie Davis of the Gender Education Center, and the members of GenderPeace, especially Elise Heise.
I also want to thank my family members who gave me emotional, editorial, and material support: my parents and brother, my grandmom Claire and my great-aunt Rhoda. I am blessed to have a family that’s even more excited about the 2018 edition than they were about the first edition!
Thank you to my amazing former coworkers for edits on the first edition: Wendy Nemitz, Dawn Wagenaar, Liz Kuntz, Christine Nelson, Kathy Zappa and Sara Bracewell. I’m also grateful to the members of my very long-running World of Warcraft guild who don’t care what gender I play, and who put up with me missing raids to finish the first edition edits—and to the many gamers who have created LGBTQ-friendly places in game.
A huge thank you to my amazing set of last-minute readers for the final round of edits the first time and my repeat readers: Jeni Mullins, Nathalie Isis Crowley and my dear friend Alia, who holds the record for reading the most drafts.
And of course I give my gratitude and love to a certain someone who kept bringing me soup while I worked: this would not have been possible without you.
For Elise Heise and all the Emilys in the world—past, present and future—we need you.
Introduction
This is the book.
I’ll start again. There isn’t just one book that explained me to myself—there never has been, and my gender, my embodiment, are far from the whole of me. Also, Emily is in high school. I was already a grown-up when I came out, to myself and to my loved ones, not just as someone who had feelings about gender, who once thought they might be trans, but who well and truly was.
And yet. This is the book: the book where I saw the part of myself, for real, full-on, that I had only seen in profile, or in half-light, for so long. This is the book that said to me, in fiction, what I had waited to hear, and strained to hear, and sought and not quite found, in other books, and in real life: yes, you’re a girl. Or: yep, you’re supposed to be a girl. Or: Okay, you wished you could be a girl, consistently, for most of your life; you resented, and wanted to alter, whatever marked you as a guy; you’re already a girl in some ways, and you can be a woman in the others, if you want. You’re not alone. You won’t lose everything. It’s not too late. Some people—people you are going to want to meet—already understand.
Maybe you know somebody who needs that story too. Maybe they’re just like Emily, or not like Emily; maybe they’re 12, or 18, or 68. Maybe you are that somebody. Or maybe you’re looking for a good story about some teens who aren’t like you. Rachel Gold has now told a few pretty great stories about teens and people not long out of their teens. This is the one that comes first.
Like all Gold’s novels, Being Emily shows us trans and queer young people trying to live with one another, and maybe to undermine patriarchy together, finding and building better lives. More than the others, though (with the partial exception of Nico & Tucker), Gold’s first published novel clearly and centrally belongs to the genre of the what-to-do YA, the information-bearing, instructional, linearly plotted novel that shows readers what we might do and how to get help if we see ourselves, or our friends, in its characters.
When the first edition of this book appeared in 2012, that kind of instruction was not only achingly needed (it still is) but—especially for younger readers—shockingly hard to find.
Being Emily is far from the first book—or first YA book—with trans girl characters, but it appears to be the first novel in English (it’s surely the first YA novel) with a trans girl’s voice at its center, the first one you could give a trans girl and feel good about the idea that she’ll see herself in it. (As I did; as I do.) Earlier novels made trans characters into magical helpers, or obstacles, or problems, or (at best) grown-ups who had already learned to inhabit particular urban queer subcultures. Emily is none of those things: she’s a problem for other people, but in the way that all of us can be problems for friends or families. She is not A Problem, but a person who seeks love and makes decisions herself.
That’s in part because we see through Emily’s eyes. Teachers warn beginning writers not to start with their narrator before a mirror since that’s a clichéd way to show us a narrator’s face. But Emily looks in the mirror and sees…nothing: “I refused to look at myself.” There’s only “the version of me that didn’t really exist,” the male version named Chris. It’s a joke, and more than a joke, about how we see ourselves—or try to see ourselves—in stories, as well as a point about what trans people (in this case, trans girls) weren’t seeing, and need to see.
Three chapters later she does see herself. In her locked bedroom, through the clothes she’s chosen rather than the body that she has been given, Emily “slowly became visible.” By that point we know we are inside a novel made so that trans girls can see ourselves: and it gets better. I reread Chapter Four this year (that’s the one with the duffel bag) in a coffee shop with Grimes’s “Flesh without Blood” blasting out of the ceiling monitors: I had to try hard not to get up and dance.
Emily also sees herself in roles created by works of art, works that she can share with other characters. When Emily-as-Chris and Claire are “flopped out on her bed together reading a poem and talking about it, I forgot that I had to play a boy and got to be a person for a while.” That’s why she has to come out, but also why she doesn’t want to come out: “I couldn’t risk losing that.” I’ve been there too.
What’s better than poetry, if you need a body other than the body that the world has insisted you have? Role-playing games, of course: Emily is a reader, she saw herself first in the Oz books, but she’s also, deeply, a gamer. Gameworlds allow her “to step into a world fully female.” Gameworlds, too, are spaces we can inhabit “where you yourself are never quite yourself/And did not want nor have to be,” to quote the great cisgender (non-trans) poet Wallace Stevens. Gameworlds are like ours, but not; novels are like our life, but not quite our life; we can escape into them, or learn from the analogies we find in them, and if they are good enough, we can do both.
Being Emily can let you do both. It can also show you what it’s like to change your mind about what’s possible. Claire tells Emily (whom she knows as Chris), “It’s not like you can turn into a girl or anything.” Maybe this Claire doesn’t know; or forgot, that trans people exist, which is plausible for a bright high school junior in exurban Minnesota in 2008. The Claire of 2018 might say the same words, but mean something else. Maybe: “it’s not like you can turn into a girl.” Trans people might already exist, for her, but elsewhere, as exotic grown-ups, on TV.
And it’s important to know what Claire knows. For every reader who sees herself in Emily, there is at least one who sees their own picture in Claire (possibly because their Emily gave them the novel). Being Emily says to the Claires, and also to the dads, that we know they are trying; that they are not bad people because they can’t do everything Emily wants, make every recommended adjustment, at once. “Could she ever stop thinking of him as ‘him,’ she wondered?” Maybe she could, but not without forgiving herself for having to try, and for sometimes getting it wrong. As for the sexy parts of their connection, Claire doesn’t know if she wants to stay with Emily; she doesn’t know what she wants. And that’s okay.
Nor does she know what God wants. People who insist, because they’ve been hurt by religion, that religion as such is hurtful or homophobic or transphobic or exclusionary or useless, are almost as wrong as people who call all bicycles evil because they were hit by a bike. That said, there are a lot of bad bicyclists: a lot of us have been hurt by what living humans think that long-dead humans, and the God or gods that they worshipped, enjoin or forbid. Claire doesn’t just model how a cisgender friend, or lover, accepts coming out as trans (gradually, patiently, with time off for herself); she models faith. “Her work was to have faith, and not be a blaming jerk like Job’s friends.”
Most novels have cha
racters who behave like readers. Emily is one, and Claire is another: she has to learn to read Emily correctly, almost as cisgender readers learn to read—and learn about trans people from—Being Emily. Natalie, however, is more like an author: she already knows what many readers will learn; she invites the reader-figures on a journey, and her invitations drive parts of the plot. She’s there to help answer—but cannot, on her own, answer—the questions we ask. Now that I know who I am, and have some idea where I might be going, will my loved ones come along? Will I be physically safe? How will I know? Can I trust the professionals who say they have my interests at heart? “What’s it like taking the hormones?”
The general answer to all of those questions is: unless you try, you’ll never know. And Emily—with help—learns how she can try. She tries to become herself, which means that she tries to be seen as herself, not only in her own eyes but also in the eyes of others. If you don’t care how you’re seen in the eyes of others—if you’re resigned to a life where nobody sees the real you—maybe you need to find other others. Maybe you need to find your Natalie: someone who has been a few steps ahead, or shown others a way.
If you are an Emily, unless you are very unlucky, coming out as trans will let you make new friends, and the pretransition friends (and colleagues and maybe lovers) who stick with you—your Claires—may take a while to learn that you won’t abandon them, that you can (and you will) run out of hours in the day, but you will not run out of love. The Claires of this life have done a lot for the Emilys, especially early in the coming-out process. If you are an Emily, remember to give your Claire their own space and time for self-discovery, hours or days or months when he or she or they can be the protagonist and you can be the ally. That’s a novel I’d like to read too.