Zach’s Man
By Elizabeth L. Brooks
They didn’t understand, back home, when I told them what I was. They’re not dumb, mind you. They know what the word “transgender” means. Neither are they inherently cruel; they wanted to understand. They tried. They read the literature, they went to the support groups, they asked the questions.
They tried. I have to give them that. They tried.
But they never could quite apply it to me. They didn’t understand how I could stand before them, round breasts making a curve even under the baggy sweatshirt, other parts hidden but there, without question; I’d been an infant in their arms and they knew how my body was made—and tell them that I was really a man. They never could understand how it was that I loved men, had spent my unexceptional and tumultuous ado
