PicoBlog

February 26, 2024

I don’t want to write about this. In fact, when I wrote my editor at The Bollard earlier today to ask if I wasn’t, by my calculations, already two days behind on my deadline, and he responded that yes, I was,  but that he “could use the extra room,” meaning that I’d be doing him a favor by NOT writing my column, I was given a full pass to settle down beside my honey and watch Succession.

But that’s one of the great troubles that comes with having a trans kid. The world, nowadays, has always got your child in its cross-hairs. In the meantime, JJ is getting straight A’s and spending their free time improving Cornelia’s habitat, the crested gecko they recently received for their 15th birthday. Cornelia now has a suspended, hollowed-out coconut shell in which she can hide, as well as a plentiful array of branches she can climb. To think that there are politicians out there who openly regard kids like my JJ, a hilarious and precocious teenager, as “filth” makes me want to throw up. Not so much from disgust, but from fear.

The monthly newspaper of my life doesn’t get to take a break from this particular issue. I’ve written here many times about the need for gender neutral bathrooms. It’s been my hope you might understand how absurd this situation is, and how easy it would be to solve.

But now I hope you might now understand how deeply terrifying my plight is. And please know that it is not even my plight. I am the parent of a trans individual who needs a gender-neutral bathroom. Like Starbucks: yours and my favorite place to get that late afternoon pick-me-up. Creating more gender-neutral bathrooms is most certainly not the end of the world.

Whereas not having access to a nongendered bathroom was, in fact, the end of Nex Benedict’s world.

Maybe you’re like me, so sick with fear you don’t want to talk or write about it. As if writing about it will make it true.

But it is true.

A 16 year old nonbinary teen, and a righteous person by all accounts, was beaten to death in a high school bathroom in this country. Today on the phone, my mom says, “Oklahoma is terrible.” Maybe if Oklahoma is terrible then our whole country is terrible. My Aunt Cheryl, 79, who is childless and resides in an assisted living community, does an admirable job at staying on top of the news. On our regular Sunday phone call, she said she’s waiting for the autopsy report, so she can know what really happened. I want to say but I don’t: Aunt Cheryl, I love you very much, but if you can’t figure this one out, please fuck off and return to your Scrabble tournament. It’s true that I’m bitter.

I don’t want to write about this because I can’t bear to even think about it.

In the pictures, Nex’s knowing smile. The clarity of their gaze. They were, by all accounts, artistic, a straight A student, ready to take the world on. I love what Sue Benedict, Nex’s adoptive mom, told The Independent: Nex “did not see themselves as male or female. Nex saw themselves right down the middle.”

Nex Benedict was exactly like JJ.

JJ is exactly like Nex was.

Maybe there is no room in the latest issue of The Bollard for that.

Maybe that’s what my editor thinks.

Maybe I need to own the fact I missed the deadline. Maybe I missed the deadline because I am upset, because I’m having a really tough time writing about this!

To move forward, I need your help!

I ask you, readers, to help me by helping my child. Learn more about trans identity, about trans issues. Help me by protesting restaurants and stores and schools that don’t have gender neutral bathrooms. All you need to do is say something. Make a point of talking about trans lives (and deaths) in regular conversation. And should any of your loved ones reveal themselves to you as trans, embrace them. No, do better. Hug them so hard their ribs hurt. We’ve got to stay close together to make it through what are now looking at: the kinds of times we never predicted we’d know. Any one of us could be deemed disposable.

And, yes, we will cry. Crying makes a whole lot of sense right now.

This is a pic of a watercolor JJ made this past weekend. They love art.

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