the AWAKENING: Why Trans Person is More Real Than You

I am fifty years old and I have a life that belongs to me. That is not where this book starts. It starts with a telephone call, and a kitchen window, and a house I have not slept in since I was nineteen, and two people in it who are old now and failing and who never once managed to say the right thing to me. I went back. Not because it was the right thing to do. Because there was nobody else. This is a book about getting old as a trans woman. Nobody tells you it is possible. When I was young I could not picture myself at fifty, and neither could most of the people I knew, because a lot of them did not get here. I did. I have silver hair and I still take a pill every morning and I am still here. It is also a book about people who could not see me and loved me anyway, which is harder to be angry about than the other kind. And about the ones who did see me, a librarian, a woman who cut hair in a kitchen chair, a colleague with a casserole, and how little it took, and what it did. I have written it plainly. There are no speeches in it. The last page is a sandwich. I do not know who this is for. Anyone who left a house and has spent years deciding what to do about that. Anyone who was told, or believed, or was quietly convinced, that they would not get to be old. Some of the girls I knew would have been fifty this year too. We did. Some of us did.