by Jacob Tobia
But by the summer after second grade, the bullying went from being quiet, surreptitious stuff to being overt, ruthless, and cruel. As my brother prepared to start middle school, his hormones were picking up, and he was becoming more and more aggressive in his masculinity. So were his friends at school and the other kids in the neighborhood.
Growing up, I’d managed to come into ownership of a grand total of one Barbie. I knew it was dangerous to have, that I would be done for if word got out in the neighborhood. So I did my best to keep it hidden from my brother and the other kids. I only played with it when I knew I could be alone, when the door was closed and no one was watching.
One day, when I came back inside from playing in the woods behind my house, I heard peals of laughter coming from upstairs. Unknowingly, I went to see what was so funny. When I got to the top of the stairs and looked in the playroom, I was horrified. In my brother’s hands was my Barbie.
“Look what we found,” they taunted. “Oh, and we gave her a little haircut.” I looked at her head, and to my horror, her long blond hair was almost entirely gone, cut and pulled out in reckless chunks.
The gates of hell opened, transforming me into a demon. I charged toward my brother, screaming.
“GIVE IT BACK! GIVE HER BACK!”
I grabbed at my toy and managed to get a grip on it, but was disarmed by a swift jab to the stomach. I recoiled in pain and lunged again, but my brother and the other boys dodged out into the hallway.
“You want your Barbie back, Jacob?” they teased.
I stormed out of the playroom; it quickly became a game of keep-away. The boys took over while my brother snuck off to the bathroom. He came back holding a container of floss high over his head. “Give me the Barbie,” he commanded.
By then, I was too exhausted to fight. I’d given up, and try as I might to stop the tears, I’d started to cry. The only thing worse than being a boy who played with Barbies was being a boy who cried because of his Barbie. I knew I had to get out of there before I broke into full-on sobs. I ran out of the house and hid under the deck, where I could finally let out what I was feeling.
A few minutes later, I came back in with my game face on. I couldn’t let them know they’d gotten to me. Walking up the stairs, to my horror, I saw that they’d wrapped a piece of floss around my Barbie’s neck and hung her from the banister—a brutalized effigy of my femininity. I wanted to cry all over again, but I knew that they were likely hiding around a corner, waiting to ambush me with more taunts when I reacted with weakness.
So I didn’t react. I didn’t even finish walking up the stairs. At the age of seven, I simply turned around, walked calmly back downstairs, fetched a pair of scissors, cut my mutilated Barbie free, took her back to my room, and locked the door behind me.
I tried not to tell my parents about it; the only thing worse than being a sissy was being a sissy and a tattletale. But at that age, I was shit at containing my emotions. Later that day, my mom asked me what was wrong, and the truth burst out of me before I could stop it.
“Matt destroyed my Barbie,” I croaked, eyes welling up, shame and devastation rearing their heads in equal part.
“He what?”
“He cut off her hair and then his friends hung her from the banister.” The tears finally broke.
“He what?” she fumed, in shock.
We walked up to my room together, grabbing my Barbie from under the bed. All tattered, chopped hair and deformed plastic, she looked terrible.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mom cooed, holding me, “I’m so sorry. I’ll be right back.”
My mom stormed into the other room. I couldn’t hear the precise verbiage of the dressing-down she gave my brother, but my mom doesn’t yell very much, so the fact that I could hear her voice booming through the walls at all meant that my brother was in deep shit. I cradled my Barbie, her dented face gazing back at me.
A few minutes later, my mom came back with my brother in tow.
“Matt has something he’d like to say to you, right, Matthew?”
“I’m sorry,” my brother grumbled, lackluster and embarrassed.
“And?”
“And,” he mumbled begrudgingly, “I have to go with you to the store to help you pick out a new one.”
In a world that delivers very little justice for gender nonconforming kids, that felt good.
* * *
—
Unfortunately, even after my brother shopped with me, the bullying and public shaming didn’t relent. After they targeted my toys, my brother and the boys in my neighborhood began going after the fact that I was friends with girls. They went from making subtle jokes about it to aggressively making fun of my friendships. Ironically enough, they would make fun of me by suggesting I had crushes on the girls I hung out with. It was cruel because it was so obviously not the case.
Oh, where are you going Jacob? To hang out with your girlfriend Paige?
Are you in love with her? You must be, because you hang out with her so much. Do you want to kiss her? Or are you hanging out with her because you’re a girl, too?
It was relentless. Each time I hung out with Paige or Katie, I had hell to pay. In the beginning, I tried to resist their taunts, thinking that if I could just ignore them, they might go away. They didn’t.
Jacob and Katie sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.
Oh, Jacob, you still like coloring books? You’re such a girly girl.
You don’t want to play football? What are you, a sissy? Oh yeah, you are.
Why do you like crafts so much? Only sissies know how to braid.
As summer progressed, things just got worse. This time my brother’s friends at the YMCA summer program were to blame. When they saw my brother’s attitude toward me, saw that I was already vulnerable, they began piling it on. I became pretty much the sole target of the fifth-grade boys. The taunting was endless.
One week, they targeted my shorts. At that point in my life, I preferred wearing running shorts—the kind that hit you mid-thigh—instead of basketball shorts—the kind that went over the knee. It felt like one of the few feminine things I could get away with. Maybe I couldn’t wear skirts, but at least I could wear cute shorts. I walked onto the bus one day and they started singing, in front of everyone:
Who wears short shorts?
Jacob wears short shorts!
Who wears short shorts?
Jacob wears short shorts!
I lashed out, yelling at them to shut up, to stop it, but the more I protested, the more vicious they became.
Oh, look at those legs!
Damn, Jacob!
Wow, they’re so short.
Yeah, they almost look like girls’ shorts, y’know?
When I realized that fighting back only made it worse, I crawled to the back of the bus, sat down, pulled my knees to my chest, and burned with equal parts anger and shame.
The next week, it was no longer my shorts that were the issue—it was my body. My brother’s friend Joseph led the charge on that one, originating the taunt that would haunt me for the rest of the break.
One day on the playground he walked over to me, looked me up and down, and said, “Jacob, your belly is getting awfully big. Are you pregnant?!”
I froze.
I had a little potbelly as a kid. It’s just how my body was naturally shaped at the time. I still kind of have one, if you look closely, but I know how to dress around it more effectively now.
“How many months are you? You look like you’re going to pop any day now!” He reached for my stomach. “Can you feel the baby kick, Jacob?”
I lunged backward, smacking his hand off my stomach. I was molten lava.
“SHUT UP, JOSEPH!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “JUST SHUT UP!”
By then, the entire group was watching.
He rubbed it in. “Oh, sorry, I know how cranky girls get when they’re pregnant.”
That was it. I hurtled forward, fists at the ready. When I was about to get to him, I had a brief moment of doubt. What would happen to me if I actually punched him? I was in karate, sure, but could I really punch a fifth grader?
The moment of doubt cost me my hit. Joseph extended his arm, caught me on the top of the head, and began pushing me backward as I flailed my arms, desperately trying to land something. I lunged forward one or two more times, but it was no use. I backed off and Joseph stood there, a smug twinkle in his eyes. I’d done exactly what he’d wanted. I’d taken the bait. I’d let him get to me. I’d lost my cool, and he looked that much stronger for it.
Why no one ever intervened to help me, I’ll never quite know. Why none of the counselors noticed that I was being brutalized, I can’t quite say. During my adolescence, adults never seemed to help me. They never seemed to care. Something about the “boys will be boys” mentality, I guess.
That day, I decided I would never lose my cool to a bully again. I decided I’d have to find another strategy to overcome them. So, for the rest of the summer, I just took it. I let them say whatever they wanted to. I became stone, went spiritually comatose, let go of the idea that I deserved to be happy.
* * *
—
Third grade was the year that everything snapped. I’d decided that enough bullying was enough, and if I couldn’t be myself without being tormented, I’d simply be no one. I voluntarily cut off my friendships with Paige and Katie. I stopped wearing the cute shorts I loved. I stopped being vocal or outspoken around the neighborhood kids. I stopped spending time with kids my own age almost altogether. I played video games with my neighbors every now and then, but I remember spending day after day reading alone in my room or longingly watching the other kids bike up and down our road.
To top it off, that year I lost the consistent kindness of having a good teacher. My third-grade teacher was mean, addicted to Diet Coke, and the proponent of a tough-love strategy that was wholly inappropriate for dealing with third graders. Where I needed a kind mentor, I received a stony disciplinarian. Where I needed affirmation, I received criticism. Where I needed warmth, I received only ice.
I wish that I had some poignant story about the moment I officially gave up on being feminine, about the moment I gave up on feeling happy in my skin, about the instant when I decided that the shame of being gender nonconforming was finally too much, but I don’t think gender works like that.
When I was a kid, I didn’t know how to handle all the anger I felt toward the world. Whenever I got really angry, when my emotions got intense enough, I didn’t punch somebody or take it out on other kids. Instead, I directed my anger inward. I destroyed things I loved, things I’d made. One day, my mom made me so mad, I went straight up to her room, took a clay pot I’d made for her in art class, and smashed it to smithereens. Another time, I got so mad that I ripped all my favorite drawings from my sketchbook and tore them to shreds. I had nowhere to turn my anger, so I turned my anger on myself. Self-destruction was the only coping strategy I knew, the only one that didn’t seem to get me in trouble.
I want to acknowledge that I’m breaking my promise not to make this book too heavy. I’m going to go a page or two without cracking a joke. I don’t mean for this to be unduly grave, but it’s the only way I know to honor this time in my life.
Because self-destruction was the only coping mechanism that made sense to me at the time, at the age of eight, I often thought about killing myself. And I’m not talking abstractly. I’m talking vivid fantasies of suicide; fantasies that I never told my parents about; fantasies that I never told anyone about until I sat down to write this book.
When I was pushed to the brink of loneliness and gender agony as a third grader, when I didn’t know how to communicate with the adults in my life about what was going on, I channeled my anger at my own body, my own existence. When the world made who I was feel impossible, I began to see my own body as an impossibility. For years of my life, I told myself this was normal. That kids just thought about killing themselves sometimes. That every third grader had experienced that. In order to move on with my life, I had to normalize it. And besides, I told myself, it’s not like I ever really tried anything.
While it’s true that I didn’t make a real suicide attempt at that age, I am horrified by the memories that come back to me. I remember lying in my childhood bedroom for hours, fantasizing about what it would feel like for a knife to enter my wrists. On the rare occasions that I was alone in the house, I remember pulling our biggest knife out of its holder and staring at it for a few minutes. I remember running a butter knife along my wrist, careful not to leave a mark, just to see if anything would happen, just to see how it felt, scratching my skin.
I’m not sharing this with you to be dramatic. I’m not sharing this with you to suggest my life has been the most difficult or that I’ve overcome the most adversity. I’m not sharing this with you because I feel this trauma is what makes my story matter or makes my trans experience any more important than anyone else’s. I’m not even sharing this with you because I feel this experience makes my story unique. On the contrary: Contemplating suicide at a very early age isn’t remarkable for a trans child. So many of us did.
I’m sharing this with you because I want the world to understand that depriving a child of the ability to express their gender authentically is life threatening. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that gender policing is not some abstract, intellectual concept; it is a pattern of emotional abuse that came from every direction and singularly robbed me of my childhood. I’m sharing this with you because I want you to understand that telling a boy not to wear a dress is an act of spiritual murder. Most of all, I’m sharing this with you because it is true, and things that are true need to be said.
There is a fable about frogs that I remember hearing as a kid. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will realize that it is in danger and immediately hop out. But if you put a frog in room-temperature water and heat the water gradually, bit by bit, the frog will stay docile, floating happily, scarcely realizing it’s being boiled alive until it’s too late.
The desecration of my gender worked something like that. If my gender had been taken from me all at once, I would’ve fought for it. I would’ve screamed and shouted and stamped my feet. I would’ve hopped out of the boiling water. But it was taken from me so slowly, pried from my adolescent hands so gradually by so many different people that I didn’t even notice the water around me becoming lethal.
One day I was swimming happily. The next, my identity was boiled alive.
* * *
—
It may surprise you completely, or it may not surprise you at all, but at the darkest time in my childhood, church was my saving grace. My church was the only institution that got me through it all; it was the only community where I continued to find affirmation in the darkness of my dysphoria. Other than my mother’s arms, it was the only place where I felt unequivocally and unconditionally loved.
Chapter 2
Nerds and Wizards and Jesus, Oh My!
Today, if you walked past a six-foot-tall cutie like me rocking five-inch-heeled black leather boots, dark purple lipstick, and a five o’clock shadow, your first reaction probably wouldn’t be, “Well, someone loves Jesus!” Based on prevailing stereotypes about gender nonconforming people and Christianity, most folks probably wouldn’t assume I’m a particularly “churchy” person.
Well, you’re wrong. I am too a churchy person! Not, like, too churchy, but I get around. Like any good Christian, I go to church approximately two or three times a year: once on Christmas and any other time that I go home to North Carolina to visit my parents.
In my adult life, I’m a chilled-out, millennial
-as-fuck Christian. You know the type: loosely believes in God, but tries not to use the label “agnostic” so they won’t seem like an asshole; believes in the spiritual teachings of Jesus, but is unsure whether the whole “God impregnated Mary” thing makes sense; believes in the concept of the Holy Spirit, but believes equally strongly in the power of crystals. That type of millennial Christian.
I wasn’t always mellowed out about it, though. My church was a primary community for me for the entirety of my young life, so much so that when I met queers in college who talked about their “chosen family” of people who were not biologically related to them, I was like, “Oh yeah, you mean your church family.” St. Francis United Methodist Church was my first family of choice, filled with nonbiological aunties, awkward cousins, and adopted grandparents. They taught me important lessons about how to live in the world, how to love, who to be. Whether I like it or not, there are cute church songs, precious Bible stories, and little nuggets of good old-fashioned Christian shame scattered throughout the foundations of my life. And in my mid–elementary school years, when the rest of my world was filled with bullying, isolation, and damning silence, my church was one of the few places I could find affirmation.
St. Francis United Methodist Church is a midsize church in the burgeoning suburb of Cary, North Carolina. On a busy Sunday, there will be anywhere between two hundred and three hundred members gathered to worship, and on Christmas and Easter, double that number. The architecture says quite a bit about the progressive lilt of the church. The sanctuary is in the shape of a giant ring with an octagon in the center. Large, circular windows frame the North Carolina pines outside. Green carpeting and marble, golden brown oak, and interior courtyards give the sanctuary a warm, earthy vibe.