Before I tell you about the time I didn’t run,
I need to tell you about the times I got caught.
I was in high school, living in the Arcade Creek section of Sacramento, California.
My stepdad was ex-military.
A stickler for the small things.
Especially how a “proper” bed is made.
I wasn’t thinking about that when I hid pieces of myself under the mattress.
And I definitely wasn’t thinking about it the day he decided to make the bed himself.
Most people would probably assume what got found was something like a Playboy.
It wasn’t.
It was a bra.
A pair of panties.
A slip.
Pieces of me.
Not found that day, but hidden elsewhere, were perm rods and a boxed home perm kit.
I never used them; I didn’t have the courage.
They were found later.
That, too, was turned into something it wasn’t.
A joke.
A transaction.
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Something I could be mocked for, or made to pay for.
Even then, I knew it wasn’t real.
Those clothes were something I could wear under everything else.
Under the armor.
Invisible.
Safe.
Until they weren’t.
I didn’t run.
I wanted to.
If I had somewhere to go, I probably would have.
But I didn’t.
So instead, I did something harder.
I told them.
In my mom and stepdad’s bedroom, I tried to explain something I barely had the words for myself.
I told them I felt like a girl.
That sometimes I wore those things.
They heard something else entirely.
They heard sex.
They heard shame.
I told them I wasn’t a crossdresser.
That I was a girl.
In my head, that meant everything.
At the time, it was the only distinction I knew how to make, between me and the people I saw on talk shows.
I didn’t understand yet that most of them were probably just like me, just further along in a story they didn’t get to control either.
I was crying by the time I finished explaining.
And my mom said she was glad I got caught.
Because now I could stop.
And then she said it.
The sentence that never left me.
The one that embedded itself somewhere deep enough that I still hear it, even now:
“Well, you’d make an ugly woman anyway.”
That was the moment.
Not the clothes.
Not getting caught.
That.
For the record, I dated women growing up.
Not because I was what people assumed, but because that part of me was always real.
Turns out, I’m a lesbian.
I’m in a lesbian marriage now.
We attend spaces like Lezapalooza, the kind of place I never thought I would be welcomed, and yet, I am.
There were parts of my journey I didn’t understand at the time.
Parts I still unpack.
But that sentence?
That stayed clear.
Always.
Years later, before my mom passed from lung cancer, something shifted.
Or maybe she was trying to shift it.
I had my hair long then.
Usually pulled back, still hiding in plain sight.
Still wearing armor, just a different kind.
I went home for a visit. I cannot remember if this was for my stepdad’s funeral or something else.
But she looked at me and said she wanted to take me to get my hair done.
Not cut.
Styled.
I told her I liked it how it was.
I didn’t go.
And I still think about that moment.
All the time.
Was that her trying to say something she didn’t know how to say?
Was that her way of undoing what she had done?
Would she have pushed for short hair,
or helped me get the perm I was too scared to give myself?
I’ll never know.
What I do know is this:
No matter how far I’ve come,
no matter how much I’ve built a life that reflects who I actually am,
there is still a voice that sometimes cuts through it all.
Clear as the day I heard it.
“You’d make an ugly woman anyway.”
And maybe the hardest part of all of this,
is learning how to stop believing it.
Coming Next: The Time I Didn’t Run
Because the next story,
that’s about the time I didn’t run.