All my kids have nicknames—Georgia the Wise Soul; Cassius the President; Othello the Rascal; Nain the Gift. And Penelope is the Rock Star. He’s the bandleader, the one who’s center stage and believes in himself more than anyone else. He’s the kid who can’t help but insert himself, announce himself, finessing his way into being seen. I often catch him in the living room perfecting the flick of his wrist in a jump shot, and then practicing the look of satisfaction on his face when the ball swooshes in. Honing flair down to the smallest movements—the eyebrows, the shoulders, the subtle gestures with his hands. And Nain is a bit of a peacock himself—struttin’, stuntin’, ballin’. Always in search of the next and the new. Together, they make a perfect pair.
Nain likes to practice skateboarding with Penelope, and eventually taught him to “skate goofy.” One day, hovering at the top of our brownstone stoop, I overheard the two cohorts in action. “Yo! You gotta skate goofy-style, Penel!”
“What’s goofy?” Penel inquired, his eyes huge.
“It’s when you do it like this”—and Nain jumped onto his board in the most counterintuitive way—with his left foot at the back of the board instead of at the front, like skating backward. He skated off down the length of the block, gracefully weaving in and out of pedestrians—often just missing them. Penelope exploded down the street toward his brother, abandoning his board. “Yo, Nain! You gotta teach me to skate goofy!”
This idea of doing it differently is like water to a dehydrated body for Penelope, invigorating him. Penelope wants to throw a curve ball, he wants to ride goofy—he wants to stunt, to strut, to ball out. And he responded to all that in his older brother Nain. Because Nain is a rock star, too—the kind of person who lives his life against the grain, and who wants to draw you in so deep that you’ll never let him go.
Nain, with his sidekick Othello, and his ever-present skateboard, keeps us “wavy.”
Nain knows things his younger brothers don’t—about basketball and music, about life. For the kids, he is, as Cassius recently said, “the coolest adult I know.” A kid with extra knowledge, a man-child who found his way into our “we.”
* * *
—
In my family, I was constantly learning that you can be right, or you can be with the ones you love. We are a sorted bunch, each of us with a different take on the world. None of us comes to the table with the exact same set of experiences, opinions, or beliefs. But I actually think that’s a good thing. I’d rather be a house of many minds—united by our differences and strengthened by our love.
Because the truth is that, at its heart, that’s what the Lab is all about: love. It’s breaking things apart and moving things around in order to see the people we care about more vividly. Together, as a family, we were learning to unpack big concepts, laying truths on the table and exploring them with honesty, dignity, and respect. The laboratory we were developing was about the art of debating, discussing, and disagreeing without getting rattled. The goal was simply to love each other more.
Even with all of our nuances—Cassius insisting on reason, Othello being all believing, Joe moving slower, me moving faster, Georgia and Nain being the champions—we always, ultimately, relied on our fierce, invisible bonds to move us forward: Toward truth. Toward freedom. And always, toward love.
Stars,
I believe in you. I see you. Try your best each day to find joy in the little things…these happinesses will sustain you through life. There is no need to know everything, but you must find the few things you care to know a little something about. Listen. Speak. Do. Love.
xxMama
TWENTY
Passing
WHEN IT CAME TO PENELOPE’S IDENTITY, Joe and I never considered our family “stealth.” The idea of being covert or anonymous never sat easily with us. It reminded me of “passing,” a term birthed during slavery and practiced throughout Jim Crow that refers to Black people who chose to live as white without the restrictions, dangers, and threats specific to Black lives.
People who passed were those born racially ambiguous—straight hair, narrow noses, light skin. In short, they could pretend to be white, and thus could claim life, liberty, and justice as white people did. They passed for survival: as a way to gain the jobs, housing, and education Black people were repeatedly denied—and to avoid being killed, beaten, and raped, as Black folks so often were during those times. But in exchange they were forced to turn their backs on their families, friends, and customs. Those who passed took on new identities and new languages, intermingled their DNA with that of new people—white people—and disappeared quietly into the white world, often never to be seen again.
In contrast, my family had always historically chosen to be seen, even those light enough to live quietly, unobtrusively as a white person. My grandmother Gloria marched for our civil rights and was a major leader in the movement. She and my mother and Aunt Lurma marched and sat in jails and then marched again, never stopping until the injustices were dealt with. My father walked into spaces that were forbidden to him, standing next to people bent on showing him that he didn’t belong. He was notorious for not giving a damn—often strolling into our posh apartment building straight from a tennis match, sweaty and confident, showing way more Black skin in his Arthur Ashe attire than any of those white folks were comfortable seeing. He made himself known and respected, on his own terms.
Joe and I likened the civil rights work our parents’ and grandparents’ generations did to what we were doing with gender equality now. More and more, we were talking openly about transgender with our friends and colleagues, even when they were too busy to care but politely listened anyway.
Within the safe environments that we created, it was true, we freely called ourselves a trans family. We wore the title like a badge of honor. But outside those safe zones—of school, of camp, at home—were spaces I knew I could never control, and situations that no amount of labbing it out could prepare us for.
Politically, I’d long resolved to hide nothing about Penelope. I couldn’t bear the idea of us passing as a “normal” family, or Penelope getting over as a “real” boy. I spent decades trying to be invisible, hiding behind my dynamic family, strong-willed men, domineering bosses. And now, as a grown woman in my forties, I had no desire to hide or blend in anymore. I’d worked too hard to be seen—we all had.
But fear can be a powerful adversary. No matter how much revolutionary blood runs through your veins or how much pride you have, one very scary interaction, one face-to-face with strangers who hold your freedom in their hands, can dial down even the most rebellious among us. For me, all it took was one weekend, while traveling across borders with my family, to instantly remind me just how intimidating being seen can actually be.
We were taking a trip to Canada with Penelope, Cassius, and Othello. Joe’s cousin was getting married, and I saw it as a good excuse to road trip together. I’d been pushing for some family time, and this seemed like the perfect event. Joe and I had been struggling during the months leading up to the trip, sleeping in separate rooms, arguing over our familiar list of disagreements: control, power, intimacy. I saw the trip as a salve. We’d be together for hours on the open road, blasting our favorite radio hits, laughing, and exploring.
Joe drove for most of the hours between Brooklyn and Canada, and after what seemed like days in the car with rambunctious boys emitting the distinct smell of potato chips and sweat, we approached the surprisingly short line of cars at the border checkpoint. While we moved along in the queue, Joe looked over to me and anxiously asked me to “prepare” all the passports.
“Not much to prepare, babe, they’re in my bag. Literally all of one second to grab them,” I said, opening my purse wide so he could see inside.
But I could tell Joe was tightening up. He got this way whenever he faced authority—police officers in particular. I expect it has something to
do with having his head pressed into the cement by an overexcited Boston police officer’s knee during an altercation outside a diner when he was in his early twenties. Since then, Joe has preferred to head in the opposite direction whenever police came around.
When we got to the front of the line and pulled up alongside the border patrol booth, I handed the five passports over to Joe, and Joe then handed them over to the officer inside. We watched as the man examined our pictures, one at a time, looking back into the car at our faces to verify what he saw in our passport books. The officer looked into the driver’s window, slowly sliding his eyes over Joe and me. Then his eyes moved back to the passenger window, scanning Penelope, Othello, and Cassius in the backseat. The man looked at the passports, moving his eyes across all three boys’ documents again, then looked once more at them in the backseat, eyeing the boys more slowly this time. He motioned for us to roll down the back window.
“Who is Penelope?”
Penelope politely raised his hand. The officer looked at Penelope’s passport for the third time, silently determining whether this child—the one sporting a Mohawk, basketball shorts, and a T-shirt—was the same “Penelope Ghartey, Sex: F” who was identified in the passport book we’d just given him. (Although we’d talked about officially changing Penelope’s gender on the document, it was a long and involved process, and we just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.)
I could see the man in the booth observing Penelope, looking him up and down, questioning him with his eyes. And while he did this, I had a visceral urge to leap into the backseat and cover Penelope’s body with my own so that the officer could not see, touch, or smell my little boy. I didn’t want him to have any access to my kid—I wanted him gone. Fighting the urge to scream obscenities at the man, I reached over the seat and held Penelope’s hand tight.
“You’ll need to pull your car over to the left, park in the lot, and come inside with me.”
We spent the next two hours in a very official-looking waiting room, unaware of exactly what was going on—but quite sure that something was. The officer disappeared behind a door with our identities, and all we could do was wait for him to come back and tell us what he had sorted out. While we panicked inside, the kids carried on unaware—absorbed in their gadgets and books, assuming that nothing about this disruption was out of the ordinary. Eventually, Joe and I were called to the counter and asked a series of questions: Where are you going? Are these your children? How old are you? We rattled off the answers, and then they asked about Penelope. We responded instinctively, protection mode kicking in:
“Yes, that’s our daughter. Yes, she is six.”
Our answers felt like a betrayal of what we knew to be true, of how we’d been living over the last several years. Using “she” felt shameful, because Joe and I knew better. But in the tension that filled that moment, we felt safer behind those two words—“she” and “her.” As proud of our son as we were, in the seconds when being seen directly conflicted with our being safe—when the fear took over—I no longer wanted to fight for Penelope’s right to be a boy. I just wanted anonymity.
Travel has been something I’ve taken for granted since I was a child. I’ve traveled all over America and throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, hopping on planes and crossing borders without a second thought. Without complication, suspicion, or delay, I’ve moved around the world freely, wherever and whenever I’ve desired.
And then this moment happened to us—our family marked as suspicious, our freedom to move delayed. I knew we would eventually be released, but I couldn’t help thinking about the mental annihilation it would cause Penelope if he, too, were forced to answer questions about himself, his gender—and maybe even his body—by strangers in uniforms. I knew we hadn’t broken any laws—that’s not what scared me in those moments. It was more the terrifying thought of Joe and me being stripped of our authority in front of our children—no longer free to take our kids on the family trip we’d planned months back, forced to turn around and head back to Brooklyn. On top of all that, the crushing fear that Penelope would think he had been the cause of all this chaos.
This experience was a warning: Freedom can be revoked just like that by people imbued with the authority to act based on who they think you are—and who they’re convinced you’re not. In a few quick, frightening seconds, one’s freedom can be taken—just snatched away like a dollar found on the street.
Quietly in our hotel room that night, Joe and I began processing all that had happened at the border.
“I don’t know, babe, I was so mad at the officer for staring at Pleppy like that. I mean…I literally wanted to bite his head off.”
I stood in front of the tiny closet in our hotel, trying to sort out the boys’ clothing for tomorrow’s activities while the three of them slept in the bed next to ours. Exhausted from the drive, they had conked out early. I smiled at how cozy they all looked, our three little lion cubs, curled around and over one another for comfort.
“Yeah, I hear you. It was the way he was looking at him that worried me, like he was going to do something…” Joe’s voice trailed off. “I don’t know what, but something…”
I looked over at Joe sitting on the corner of the other bed, next to the boys, and then at our bed, where he and I would be sleeping. It would be the first time in a while that we would lie together. I hung up the shirt I was holding and moved closer to where he sat, wiggling myself in between his legs and placing my hands on his shoulders. From that vantage point, looking down on his face, I could tell just how worried he was. I ran my fingers through his hair, noting the few gray hairs and the thinning patch in the center—both relatively new appearances. He wrapped his arms around my legs.
“Honestly, Joe-Joe, I’m also furious with myself for not changing Penelope’s gender marker on that damn passport months ago, like we talked about. We’ve really got to take care of that—like yesterday.” My voice sounded only halfway committed to the daunting idea of walking into the passport office and saying “Gender marker change, please.”
“As soon as we get back home we can start that process. But for now let’s use a different name for him in public. Something that sounds more boyish.” He looked over at Penelope, then up at me. “Maybe something like Li’l Joe, or Joe Junior, or Joe-Joe!” I burst out laughing at the suggestion.
“What’s so funny?” Joe could barely keep a straight face himself. “It’s obvious he looks up to me. He’d be proud to take my name!”
“Maybe pull back on the vanity—just a tad bit,” I teased. “I mean, I love your name—for you. But Joe-Joe for Penelope?”
Face-to-face, body to body, and with an intentional lightness we’d forced upon the situation, trying our best to strip it of its ugliness, we decided together that in public Penelope would be called Penel or P—nicknames we’d always lovingly called him over the last years—to attract less attention. It would give us the layers of protection we needed, some armor to buffer us from the interrogating eyes and the unwanted scrutiny.
The next morning, we didn’t share with Penelope anything about our conversation; it would be our covert action to move seamlessly toward a little more discretion when the situation called for it.
“Good morning, Othello. Good morning, Cassius. Good morning, P! Who’s up for a little boat ride through Niagara Falls?” It was as simple as that.
But even as Joe and I were devising our plan, deep down I knew that we were only buying time. The hatred and confusion, the judgment, the questioning, they would never go away. We knew that a buffer would never be enough.
We had not been entirely successful, had not found the right balance between safety and progress, between off-radar and unequivocal freedom. And perhaps we never would. The border situation was behind us, but it wasn’t at all, not in the least, resolved.
TWENTY-ONE
A Boy Named Penelope
; WE NAVIGATE OUR WAY through the casino maze: past the smokers and slot machine players, the blackjack and roulette tables. It’s eight o’clock on a Saturday morning and we’re at Atlantic City’s Tropicana Casino & Resort: Joe, Penelope, Cassius, Othello, and me. The Tropicana is a vision of seedy opulence, all winding staircases, beveled mirrors, and heavy gold chandeliers. Waxy palm trees line the hotel lobby and are plunked down sporadically throughout the casino interior, their leaves rustling gently in the air conditioner breeze. With the hotel’s salmon-colored tiling and soft white walls, it’s as if New Jersey’s own Old Havana has been resurrected right here on the boardwalk, minus any of the original’s charm.
Clearly, we’re not in Brooklyn anymore. Looking around, we appear to be the only Black trans family on earth.
We’re here for Penelope’s first big karate tournament, the War on the Shore, an annual event that draws crowds in the hundreds, from as far away as Japan. For months, Penelope and his teammates have been preparing for this day. They’ve spent hours practicing in front of the dojo’s one long mirror, while their teacher, Master Bill, weaves between them, making corrections. This is Penelope’s big opportunity to showcase his skills beyond our New York safe zone—beyond our carefully cultivated community in Brooklyn. Here, Penelope will be given his first taste of competition on the Outside, with the threat of an unfamiliar opponent—body to body, skill to skill.
* * *
—
Penelope was barely five years old when we first enrolled him in Master Bill’s class. He’d been struggling to see himself in the body he had been given, his frustrations coming out in wild spits and spurts. At home, he tore through each room—slicing at the air and kicking his legs in front of our living room mirror, wrestling his brothers to the ground, unloading his wrath on our couch cushions, and karate-chopping everything and everyone around him, in imitation of the superheroes he admired in the movies. It quickly became apparent that all that energy needed to be redirected somewhere, and I thought formal martial arts training might be the outlet.
The Bold World Page 28