selfie caption from january 13 2020:

‘i am the kid with no name’

i am going to be the cause of death for my third grade teacher. and the angel who refers her heaven. there’s a time and a place for everything, but i cannot figure the time or place to organise my feelings about her and what her innocent words had done to me. i know i am both grateful and ungrateful. but alas, i am still very young. will any of these words matter once i figure it out. this is in no way, shape or form important to me.. once i figure out who i am… 

in the third grade, my teacher ms jan price, deconstructed everything i knew about myself through her lovely choice of language. innocent language, but ive never heard someone obsess over every syllable of gender like her. not even internet conservatives!!!! and i mean down to the syllables, obsessed. she told us which letters were feminine across latin languages and which were masculine. i concluded i had the most feminine name in the class. it broke my third grade fist-sized heart. of course, nowadays i realise plenty masculine names around the world can sound very feminine, but back then i never felt more crushed. i’ve hated my name ever since. a name so chalked full of meaning that has never been seen on a birth certificate or out of someone’s mouth before i existed.. Nobel Defender of Mankind.. the literation of both names my first name is based on. and i hate it.

my third grade teacher would also say things like ‘girls don’t like boys who cry’, ‘i need some big strong boys to do x classroom chore’, whatever else i can’t remember right now that is unnecessarily gendered and felt like spit in my face. but out of all that i also have a memory where i was excited during a lesson. it was the first english class i ever had, so me being me, i naturally fell in love with it… i could almost recall the entire lesson… but the part that sticks on me is the fact that during that lesson, she introduced us to the singular they pronoun. hoping i quote her accurate, they’re for ‘when you know a person is there, but you do not know their gender. like a stranger hiding in the bushes.’. this would be totally controversial to teach children these days. and yet, it was a little controversial for its time, too. in my head, though the teacher didn’t mention anything about trans people, i was getting ideas… i had (still have) a cute chihuahua plush with a fluffy, pink part around the neck… and coming home that day i played with it, as children do, but i had also lost ability to gender it. i was thinking too hard. not all the ‘pink is for girls, blue is for boys’ could’ve swayed me. gender didn’t feel right on my pink chihuahua plush. and it didn’t feel right on me either.

i wrote a short story for a mark in that class. used the singular they as much as i could fit in. then i went on to write my first ‘book’ in a journal i still own… but since my lesbian little heart only belonged to girls, i only wrote characters who were girls and expressed themselves as such. i have no evidence of my feelings from that grade, but i won’t forget for a long time…

when i started my first ‘social media’, (a writing website where i wanted nobody to see my face), i used the names of female characters that i liked to hide my real name. but then people started calling me by those character names. and though i didn’t like it, i didn’t know to describe myself any better. eventually, i said that i would use they/them pronouns, but nobody really seemed to listen to it. i used to not care. not until i made more friends online. then the she/her pronoun assumptions got super uncomfortable. i started taking the names of male characters, until someone eventually called me out that they felt it was inappropriate for me to do that. based on how i majorly consumed japanese media back then, i mainly took the names of japanese characters. and i understood that. i stopped having a name for a while. i spoke to friends way less. i had my own issues, not related to being called out at all. i just couldn’t name myself. nothing felt right in that department.

by that point, i had just woken up from a very deep darkness. i had not spoken to a soul my age since the third grade and been able to maintain that relationship more than a month. i had not given much thought to myself at all. i remember being 12 and looking at myself in the mirror, thinking ‘when did this happen?’, i skipped out on so many years. for sleeping. for my fear for my life in a bad home. because of depression. because of abuse. i was unadjusted to having a face and being a person. 

in the final moments of that darkness, a part of me crawled out. i was going to start middle school, i decided i want a new name. i told my mother about it. i had not had friends in a very long time, i did not grasp the concept of a nickname, though i had written a character with a nickname in my first book, it just slipped my mind (i remember the year it came back to me was a year later. it was a huge ‘eureka’ moment, then i got embarrassed and crossed out my happiness that i could shorten the character name into my own, ‘Mina’). i told my mom i want to go by Kai, which is a shortened ‘version’ (it’s spelt different) of a very feminine middle name of mine. my mom added a hyphen to name at my new school and it’s been there ever since. [first]-[full first middle name]. i seriously don’t know how she did it so fast, it’s on legal documents… but did it ever matter? no. because i never used it. nobody introduced themselves to me and i lacked the social skills to give it a go for myself. nobody ever called me by that name until 2022, when i met my first friend in too long.

i opened my laptop at her house, displaying my all-lowercase legal first and last name on the sign-in screen. she knew about my discomfort with both my first middle name and my first name. she’s trans too and told me she knows how to change the name on my microsoft ID. i didn’t know how to explain it to her… i felt so small when i told her ‘it’s a school laptop’. she didn’t seem to understand. ‘i know how to change it, but i don’t, to avoid questions at school’. the topic changed after some dead air. i write this because of that memory. i write this because it’s pathetic. i told her some of this a while ago. ‘i hate that teacher’, she said.

i don’t know if i feel the same. i don’t know if it’s worth hating some lady i spent one school year with and never saw again who did nothing but speak funny. maybe she was very happy with her gender and her societal role of being the meek, protected one in every step of her life (as she liked to imply), but i don’t think she’d turn her nose to trans people. she never striked me like that. i tried to find her social media accounts a few months ago, just to see, with all the things personality-less middle age adults like to talk about online these days, and nothing turned up. it was better closure than finding out she blogs on a website owned by GirlDefined or was actually just a decent human being with trans friends and cousins. or maybe she’s trans and changed her name, but whatever the case, i think that’s the best closure. it’s really a waste of time to dwell on some words i heard as a kid, but it is interesting for me to think about, personally. the more interesting part is wondering ‘if my life hadn’t paused after that, how would i be different’. that’s what i really want to know.