Page 33 of Tailored for Them

Just then, my phone buzzed on the countertop.

Both of my parents leaned over to glance at the name before I had time to snatch it off the table.

“Who’s Nicole?” My dad asked.

I grinned at him before holding my phone close to my chest, relief from her response filling it.

I was insanely lucky.

My parents, as traditionally as they were raised, always had my back. When I was six years old and finally told my mom that I hated the dresses and skirts she would pick out for me to wear to school, she responded by cleaning them out of my closet and taking me clothes shopping for things that I preferred. Most of what I liked was in the boys’ section. At first, they thought it was because I had an older brother and wanted to be like him.

To an extent, I did. I love my older brother.

My dad got excited to have an energetic, athletic child like me, since my older brother was more into the arts and had no interest in learning sports.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I opened up to them again, letting them know that I didn’t like it when they introduced me as their daughter. I was too young to have language for what I was experiencing, but my parents tried to adjust the best they could. For a couple of years, they referred to me as he/him or “their other son.” I appreciated that because it gave me a chance to test it out for myself. To see if those words felt right for me.

It never quite felt right, though.

Over time, the words “he” and “him” started to feel off, a lot like “she” and “her” did. Like a square puzzle piece struggling to fit into a circle. It technically fit, but there was too much empty space left over. It felt like the square was too small for the space, a shape that only “worked” because it fell into the circle a little too easily. The puzzle of my identity felt incomplete.

I didn’t want to feel incomplete.

Like I was settling for the square he/him puzzle piece out of convenience. I wanted to find the piece of the puzzle that was designed specifically for my kind of circle.

It was middle school when my parents sat me down to check in. They wanted to know if I needed anything else from them, or if there was anything they could do to help me feel more comfortable in my skin. They started talking to me about puberty blockers and being transgender. They had just met someone else at my school who identified as transgender and saw similarities between that child and me. But that didn’t sit with me, either. I wasn’t upset about starting my period, probably because I was never raised with the harmful, “Now you’re becoming a woman,” rhetoric around menstrual cycles. My parents taught me anatomy through a very scientific lens. They never correlated gender with what was between my legs.

My brother happened to have a penis, and he also happened to identify as a boy.

I happened to have a uterus and vagina, and my parents wanted to help me figure out my identity any way they could.

I remember wrinkling my nose at them in thought, before I finally said, “I don’t think I’m a boy.”

My mom tilted her head to the side in both acceptance and thought, “So what do you feel like you are?”

I took a moment to test the words in my head before I decided to say, “…I think I’m just Taylor.”

My parents both looked at each other, smiled, and hugged me.

All of this was so new to them. To the people in our lives, and yet, they didn’t see that as an excuse to brush me off—like so many other queer kids experienced.

My dad found an LGBTQ resource center an hour north of us in LA and he reached out to them for support. Throughthe center, we were able to find books and articles about being queer, the gender binary, and support groups for other kids and adults like me.

It was just before I started my freshman year at high school that I finally found peace in being non-binary.

“So instead of referring to you as ‘he’ or ‘she’, would you feel better if we referred to you as ‘they’?” my dad asked. We were in his study, reading about non-binary individuals. The book I had in front of me had a lot of language that I wasn’t familiar with yet, but I was completely absorbed. The LGBTQ center had to order it in. It discussed ancient cultures that thrived before colonization and didn’t adhere to traditional gender binaries. I looked up from the book and responded to my dad.

“Could you test it out on me?”

My dad nodded, sat back in his seat, and pushed his reading glasses up his nose. “This is my youngest child, Taylor. They go to Orange Grove High School, and they like to play soccer and pull pranks on their older brother.”

Something warm and safe settled in my chest.

All I had to do was nod my head, and the rest was history.

Near the end of high school, after discovering that I wasn’tjustattracted to women, but a variety of people I vibed with, I formally came out to my family as pansexual. When I did, my parents and brother just nodded at me.

“Makes sense,” Tucker had told me, “You never cared what people looked like or what they identified as. But you’ve always cared about someone’s character.”

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