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For Helena Grace, my steadfast reader and cheerleader
A quiet Monday lunchtime, and one of the rare January days where the sun gleamed low in clear, pale blue skies. Only a tiny zephyr of wind threatened any possibility of windchill, and in such favourable conditions some of the students found themselves reacquainting themselves with the school yard.
“Hi Russell,” the other boy said, greeting him as he came near; though of course he was one of the boys who was having to endure skirts and stockings, and persistent denial of his gender.
Russell looked about to see how close any of the other students were, if they should be within earshot of this secluded corner of the grounds, underneath the bare branches of a silver birch. “Hi, Ethan.”
Ethan’s eyes immediately hardened in suspicion, looking at him accusingly. They shared a home group together, but Ethan was often solitary, or confined himself to friendships with the enbies and the other trans masc boys, most of whom were regarded by the school admin and a majority of the teaching staff as girls, and were accordingly expected to comport themselves as such.
It shouldn’t ever have been us and them, Russell often thought to himself, but the cis students of the school hadn’t covered themselves in glory either, since the start of the school year. There’d been too much overt bullying and covert snitching, leaning into the authoritarianism imposed from the top, and a considerable barrier of distrust had been built up.
Are you one of the bullies?
Or, are you one of those who’ll sell us out behind our backs?
Or, are you one of the ones who’ll snitch on us trying to support one another?
There were only the two trans students in the second form, as Russell and Ethan both were in the same year—besides Ethan, there was a trans girl in another home group, who they shared a combined PE class with—and about a dozen in total across the entire population of the school.
“I know you probably have good reason to mistrust me,” Russell said. “I’m a bit of a coward, and I really haven’t helped, uh, standing up to the bullies.”
Ethan coolly looked at him for a while, before saying, “Well, apathy is easy. And I guess you’ve learned there’s an actual cost in going against the bullies.”
Russell nodded. “I have. I was sorry to hear about—” his voice dropped to a whisper, before he said, “—Jenny.”
Ethan met Russell’s eyes; all trace of warmth was gone from his face despite the pleasant and unusually moderate January day.
Russell waited for Ethan to respond, and when he didn’t, he added, “Do you know if she’s—”
Ethan spat out in little more than a whisper, “No.”
Russell looked down, slightly bowing his head; it was hard to look into Ethan’s eyes, now ice-cold. “Sorry.”
After a moment though, Ethan relented, “I… don’t know. We don’t know,” and it seemed obvious he meant the tight-knit group of enby and trans students. “We think she’s okay, from what we know? It was for her own good to withdraw from the school; she was being bullied into a shadow of herself. But we don’t know how she is now, except that being in a psych ward is probably, totally shitty for her.”
Russell nodded and said, “Yeah, it sounds terrible. Thanks.”
Ethan asked, “Why thanks?”
Russell examined his thoughts for a moment and said, “Uh, I’m still thinking you have no reason to trust me, and I’m… I’m self-criticising myself, thinking I’m going to ask a stupid question.”
“There are a whole lot of silly questions, sure, but expressing sympathy for Jenny wasn’t one of them.”
Russell felt a nervous smile creep across his face; he felt relieved that he hadn’t said something utterly, brain-damagingly inept. “Oh, good. Good. I was worried.”
Ethan nodded. “No need. But you do have another question, don’t you?”
Russell nervously said, “Uh,” and Ethan raised a single eyebrow.
“Hmm. Probably more than one, I can see,” Ethan said, for the first time in the conversation allowing his eyes to twinkle with humour. “What would you like to know?”
Russell was in something of a quandary, as he didn’t want to seem too eager to ask things. But he’d meant to ask Ethan some stuff for weeks, and he’d put it off, and off, and off; and then whispers about Jenny had gotten about, and faces around the school were a lot more grim than usual. It was well beyond time he should have summoned up some courage. He fidgeted a little and stammered, “I’m… slightly curious. I know there’s about twelve enbies and trans kids in the school, but it’s like… almost all of you are enby slash trans masc—”
“Yeah, u-huh,” Ethan quietly said.
“—and then there’s the one enby who the school considers as one of the boys, and lastly there’s just two trans girls.”
“One trans girl. I’m not expecting Jenny will return, to be honest. She’ll probably end up at another school somewhere. You’re wondering why the ratio is… well, in this school, it’s—no, it was—three to one?”
Russell uneasily shifted his weight, looking around to see if this long conversation with Ethan was being observed; possibly, but then he realised looking around would only draw more attention. “Yeah.”
Ethan went on, “Okay. Simplest explanation, you cis boys bully non-conformity much more harshly; you don’t just abuse offenders, you punish them. Physically. The gender policing you lot have going on is far nastier and violent. Remember that meme about choosing which toilet to go to—back in the days earlier last year, when we actually had a choice about it?—and the options were, get yelled at, or get beaten up? It’s like that. That’s the 101 level explanation, anyway.”
Russell asked, “There’s more to it?”
“Of course there is. There’s always more layers to it, like an onion. Another layer of the bullshit, is that trans mascs like me can often be written off as… I don’t like saying it, but it’s as though when we try to be boys, we’re seen as mere foolish, deluded girls… ugh! I hate it. But the trans femmes, it’s like they’re seen as being super gay, which is much worse than just being the ordinary sort of gay, right? And you probably know already how badly gay guys are treated by the macho idiots in this fucked-up school.”
“Sorta, yeah.”
“Right. Trans girls don’t want to be in that kind of male-dominated social group. And by trying to be in the girls’ social group instead, it’s easy to paint trans femmes as predators. Invaders. Are you going to trust these ‘biological males’—” Ethan flexed his fingers as he quote-marked the expression with a look of derision on his face, “—being in the same space as your innocent daughters?”
Russell tried to hide his reaction; this was uncomfortable to think about.
“They say that ‘violent men’ are trying to ‘invade girls’ spaces’,” Ethan said, and Russell could almost see the implied quote marks from the inflection of his voice. “Note that using terms like ‘men’ and ‘girls’ like this, is deliberately meant not to match, so you’re supposed to read trans femmes as being more threatening than they really are. They should use the term ‘boys’, if they’re also talking about ‘girls’, but they never do. Anyway. So, it’s not surprising we only have—or had—three on the trans femme sort of, uhh, spectrum. Dale’s in their last year, they already had a perfect gender neutral name, plus it’s totally non-threatening what they are doing with their gender, because they’re still mostly masculine, but with some feminine energy too; they get a bit of homophobic bullying because they get read as being a bit too flamboyant for a guy, but being a senior student, and because they are six foot, no one’s going to try bullying it out of them. They have a much easier time as an enby than either Jenny or Emma.”
Russell nodded. “Right, I get that.”
“Jenny was under the radar for three years—and I think she cultivated a very small friend group, so few people knew her well, or that she was trans. She kept her nose down like you wouldn’t believe. Then all of a sudden she’s outed and she has to survive being thrown into the bull pit.”
“And she starts having, uh…”
“Well, calling it a nervous breakdown is probably minimising it.”
Russell swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, sorry.”
“And then you have Emma. She’s been the focus of so much bullshit since Day One, when she said ‘fuck you’ to the haters and came to school in her female uniform anyway. And she’s locked herself down so much, that she only relies on herself, and has precious little time for anyone else. She refuses to put up with bullshit, and she’s had so much of it thrown at her so far this year. I can see how much harder she’s had to become, compared with last year.”
Russell nodded and said, “Yeah, I get that, especially from PE where we’ve got the shared class with her.”
Ethan groaned. “Yeah, PE fucking sucks so bad; I’m not looking forward to it this afternoon, but at least the staff are on our side. I don’t have to do things with the girls if I’m feeling dysphoric. I just say the word to Mr Pellicott or Ms Jenson, and they find something else for me to do, separate. But yeah, Emma. Fucking hard as a rock that she wasn’t going to be playing male-only sports.”
“Yeah, uh, I know,” Russell said. “I want to go up to her and say I support her, but she looks at all the guys like we’re…”
Ethan again gave him a funny look as he trailed off, and he said, “Like you’re trash in human form? Like she’s going to kneecap you or break your fingers?”
“Sorta.”
Ethan’s sense of humour was back. “Do you want me to go up to her and tell her that you have these feelings, Russell? That you’re not actually garbage incarnate?”
Russell again reviewed his thoughts and prior worries, and decided to go for broke. “If you can convince her not to bite my head off if I try to have a conversation with her, I’d be so grateful.”
Ethan considered that, nodded, and looked down at his watch. “Hmm. Interesting. Okay: I’ll do that for you. No time like the present, either; it’s nearly time for class, five-to.”
Ethan started walking at a good pace towards the main block, and Russell caught up behind him after a moment. “Thanks.”
“Don’t come crying to me, though, if Emma bites your head off.”
Russell smiled at him, and said, “Noted.”
* * *
Monday 2 p.m. meant physical education class, and Ethan hadn’t really left enough time; they both grabbed their sports uniforms from their lockers and ran to their separate gym changing rooms to throw on their kit, each entering the gymnasium proper several minutes after the hour bell had rung.
Russell noticed Emma was already in one corner of the gym by herself, working with ferocity on the separate exercise regimen that Ms Jenson had fought tooth and nail to allow her to have, segregated from both boys and girls. After roll call he saw how Ethan went up to Ms Jenson and had a quiet conversation with her, apparently with the effect of exempting him from being ‘one of the girls’ for the afternoon; while the boys occupied about a third of the large hall doing martial arts, Russell occasionally saw that Emma and Ethan were both going at separate elements of Emma’s routine, but close enough to have a quiet discussion going on between them. And the cis girls were elsewhere, probably playing something competitive out on the oval, considering the fine weather.
Russell didn’t exactly like the concentration on male-only sports, but the school had apparently drawn an incredibly hard line against mixed-sex sports over the objections of the PE teachers, and there were rumours the admin had speculatively looked at finding new teachers who made fewer objections and bent fewer rules.
There was also the spicy rumour that the week Mr Pellicott had suggested Emma play hockey with the boys, she had made it abundantly clear that anyone so pants-wettingly incompetent as to supply her with a hockey stick and then send her out to play on the hockey field against boys would need to call for several ambulances before the afternoon was out. And probably a police car as well.
During a breather, Russell’s gaze drifted to Emma and Ethan in their corner, and to his surprise, both of them looked sort of similar; the main differentiator was not the uniform, since Emma was avoiding the baggy kinds of male sports gear, or their physique; instead it was Emma’s shoulder-length hair versus Ethan’s short hair that set them apart. From a distance they both shared quite androgynous builds; Emma was clearly wearing a sports bra under her tank, as was Ethan, and—
Someone snapped their fingers right in front of Russell’s eyes.
“Enough staring over at the fruit,” one of the class dickheads told him.
A hundred minutes of PE was enough to have Russell thinking misanthropic ideas about most of his male peers, and that was before the ugliness that was having to shower in the ‘biological male’-only change room with these oafs. At least Mr Pellicott had zero tolerance for hazing going on behind his back.
Russell got back into his uniform and quit the gym as quickly as possible; another PE class survived without major amounts of disgust and loathing was about as good as it gets.
He was a hundred metres from the school when he noticed someone falling in step beside him. If it was who he thought it might be, he didn’t dare to look.
A warm alto voice sounded in his ear. “Ethan tells me you’re not irredeemable rubbish after all, and I should give you a chance. You should know my expectations by this point are so low, I have severe doubts about talking to anyone, let alone you.”
“Uh, hi,” Russell uncertainly said to Emma.
“We’re not at school. That’s ‘uh, hi Emma’, if you don’t mind, Mr Jamison.”
“Hi, Emma. Sorry,” Russell said, instantly apologetic.
Emma laughed. “Don’t apologise! I’m only rustling your jimmies—I have no intention of biting your head off. Well, not yet, anyway.” While Russell breathed a sigh of relief, Emma continued, “Why someone would give a child the name Russell Jamison when it’s such a gimme…”
They walked a dozen steps before Russell noticed, “This isn’t the normal way you go home from school. You catch the train, don’t you?”
“Very good, you’re right. As the most unpopular girl in the school though, I occasionally have to do things I don’t want to do, like walk the wrong way to the station.”
“Bullies?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re not the most unpopular girl in the school.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, but you’re wrong. Previously, it had been Jenny, but she won’t be coming back anytime soon, if at all. Which makes me the most unpopular.”
Russell absorbed that, and all he could say was, “Sorry.”
“I already told you—don’t apologise. I tried making myself more unpopular to stop the bullies concentrating on attacking her, but the fourth-form boys are fucking feral pigs. With few exceptions. The bastards just wouldn’t leave her alone, and now she’s gone.”
“I can tell you, I feel the same about a lot of the second-form boys, but I guess I’m saying something you already know.”
“Yeah, I know they’re feral as well, they just haven’t had as much time to become truly obnoxious. Anyway, why don’t we talk about something more interesting and uplifting? You, for instance. Have you thought about how your social standing is going to suffer when the gossip gets around that you were talking to one of the illegal boys in your lunch hour, and walking home with the most unpopular, illegal girl after school?”
Russell thought about that for a moment. “I hadn’t looked at it that way, but I really don’t care if the bullies don’t think much of me. It’s not a good thing for the bullies to think you’re in their good books.”
Emma laughed, “Oh, you sweet child. The bullies will see you as a target if you keep this up. They might think you’re ‘in love with the trannies’.”
Russell winced at Emma’s self-mockery; he knew the slur was rife around the school whenever teachers weren’t around to hear it spoken; and few bothered to report abusive language anyway, despite the window-dressing of a zero-tolerance harassment policy.
“Um,” he said uncertainly, not knowing what or how to respond.
“Relax. I’m allowed to do a bit of self-deprecation every now and then. It acclimates me for when the bastards really want it to hurl it at me, to try hurting me.”
After a moment, Russell replied, “I see. That sucks.”
“Sure does.” Emma’s reply was open-ended, but she retained the conversational ball in her court. After a long moment she added, “So. Ethan said you had interesting questions for him. Not the thoughtless kind of questions a lot of cis people have. And I’ve had my spies out before now, looking at you prior to today—yes! I have spies, didn’t ya know?—” Russell’s stomach clenched awkwardly at hearing this, “—because while you never stood up to the bullies—that much that you told Ethan was correct—you also couldn’t hide that you were very uncomfortable with all the ‘ra-ra-ra, trans freaks get the hose’ messaging that was going on.”
Russell had stopped being aware of where he was, precisely; he was reduced to being an automaton, blindly following the course that had been set into his mind’s auto-pilot, while his thoughts raced in a dissociative fugue.
“Why is that, exactly?” came the soft, feminine voice from beside him.
Why?
“Earth calling Russell?” Emma prompted him.
Russell was slightly lost, and stumbled over an answer. “I… I don’t… I’m not… it’s like I… no… it’s not…”
Russell continued stammering half-answers until Emma interrupted, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause a kernel panic. Can we reboot you and talk about safe subjects?”
Russell nodded, and somehow he managed to say, “Sorry. Yes, please.”
“Oh, good. Okay. Let’s reset, and ask you something straight-forward and non-challenging.”
“Sure.”
“Right. On a scale of one to ten, tell me how you feel about second form, compared with last year.”
“Oh, about negative a million,” Russell quickly replied.
“Congratulations, that is a correct answer. I also would’ve accepted any of the negative transfinite numbers, too.”
“Transfinite?”
“Yeah, transfinite. They’re invading your number systems, fucking with your ideas of cardinality.”
“Um?”
“Don’t worry, maths nerd jokes are one of my interests now, seeing as I’m banned from competitive sports for the foreseeable.”
Russell shook his head; Emma was bewildering him with ease. “Right. Yeah.”
“Let’s try a simpler question, then. Russell. Do you like girls?”
Russell stopped dead in his tracks. “What?” he said, a little too loudly.
Emma laughed. “I see we’ve definitely broken you out of your funk. Let’s be a little more specific. I don’t mean whether you like like girls. Girls are just… nice, right? A simple proposition for you to get your head around. Girls are nice.”
Russell was still facing ahead, and Emma had come to a stop just in front, so she leaned toward him, craning her head to indicate they should continue walking.
“Uh, yes, girls are nice,” Russell said uncertainly, not sure where Emma was leading him, as she again tried to coax him into moving.
“Yes. And being a girl is also sort of nice, right? Apart from the things that don’t make it nice, like the haters, for example. Misogyny, you know.”
Emma was now holding out a hand to him, probably to drag him into resuming walking, so Russell realised he should lead off. “Uh, yeah, I guess?”
They were soon back into a regular stride, and Emma said, “So here’s something for you to think about, Russ. There’s nothing the bullies can do to stop me being a girl. Because I already am a girl. All they can do is control the trappings, like, ‘you’re not allowed to wear a girl’s uniform’. Except, I am wearing a girl’s uniform—it’s a uniform which belongs to a girl, me. Of course I’m not allowed to wear a skirt, because the school admin are fucking obsessed losers, but it’s not the skirt or absence of it that determines whether I’m a girl or not. And the same holds for every other ridiculous thing they try to assert or deny that puts me in this or that pigeonhole.”
Russell nodded; he wasn’t exactly sure what Emma was trying to say, but he felt he had to say something, and muttered, “Right.”
“Ethan told me he had the feeling you were working your way up to a question like, ‘how do you know you’re trans’, and although it sounds like it’s a simple question, it’s actually quite tricky. Some people think it’s just a mistaken belief, like if I say ‘I’m a girl’, that there’s the possibility I could be mistaken, as though it was equivalent to something quite obviously wrong, like, ‘I’m an elephant’. You can see I’m not an elephant, I take it?”
Russell laughed, “Very much not.”
“So, when I say, ‘I’m a girl’, what is it that I’m referring to, which makes me sure? I wasn’t always sure. When I was younger I felt something was wrong about me, but I wasn’t sure what it was, and by the time I was eight I wondered, is the thing that’s wrong is… that I’m actually a girl, and not a boy? So I thought about things that made me a boy: was it my name? No, when I’m old enough I’ll change that. Was it my clothes? No, and I grew out of my boys’ clothes and got other ones, though Mum still thinks, four years later, that this is just a phase I’m going through. Some sort of phase!”
Russell nodded, but he wasn’t sure whether he was following Emma’s argument.
“I’d like you to keep this to yourself, yeah? I also asked myself, is it because I have a boy’s body that I’m a boy? And funnily enough, my body isn’t exactly typical. In some ways it’s typical for a girl, because when I turned eleven I started… no way of avoiding saying it. I started growing breasts. So I’m not saying that’s why I’m trans; I’m saying that it’s not convincing to say you’re this or that, just because of the way your body is. Because not all bodies are the same, and you can change your body.”
“You can?”
“Well yeah. But the NHS here want to make that process as difficult and humiliating as possible. Another thing for you to keep to yourself. Most of us are on the way to starting puberty and we can’t get treatment any more—no blockers, no hormones, since last July. It’s so fucked up.”
Russell nodded.
“So the thing that makes me a girl is up here,” Emma said, tapping the side of her head with a finger. “I wanted to be a girl, so I am—and that’s the only really important thing. It’s why I won’t be a boy, no matter how hard the school tries to make me play boy’s sports, or however long the waiting list for the fucking gender clinic becomes, or if I have to wait till I’m an adult to be able to start. I’m a girl up here in my mind, and everything else about me that isn’t right can be changed, eventually.”
“Wow,” Russell said. “It’s as simple as that?”
“It is… but then you have to deal with all of the other stuff, that people only see what they want to see, and sometimes they’re wrong.”
“Hmm,” Russell mused, “I had an odd moment at PE today, where I was looking over at you and Ethan while you were doing your workout—and your bodies looked like really the same, like uh, androgynous and similar? But somehow it was clear you were a girl doing a workout, and Ethan, even though he sort of looked like you, he was definitely the boy. And then someone said a horrible slur about you both and I completely lost track of where I was going with my thoughts.”
“Yeah. Another idea that’s important. We’re all a lot more similar than we think, but this stupid society says we have to pretend we’re completely different, almost as if we’re different species, so we can’t possibly change; it’s too hard to change. Or some people believe it’s actually impossible, when it’s not. Then when you show someone the similarities, they turn around and say, well, if you’re so similar, then it shouldn’t matter to you if you’re this way instead of that way, if the differences are so small! But they do matter. They do.”
“I think I get it.”
“Yeah. Ethan thought you would.”
They walked in silence for a short while, and Emma said, “This is nearly home for you?”
Russell nodded and said, “Uh, just around the next corner. I had one more question.”
“You still have a head intact on your shoulders, so your questions have been good. Don’t blow it with this one.”
Russell laughed nervously. “How did you think of Emma as your name?”
“Oh, I couldn’t make a decision, so I asked Mum to pick a letter of the alphabet for me, but she chose D, and when I said she couldn’t choose D, that D was out, she said ‘E then’. And then I asked Dad what girls’ names he liked that started with E, and the one I liked best was Emma. And I haven’t thought of anything better, so I’m still Emma.”
“It was as simple as that?” Russell asked in amazement.
Emma shrugged. “Sometimes the actual thought process behind the decision-making isn’t that important itself—just that you actually make a decision. You can always make another decision, you know, if you change your mind later. I just have never needed to change my mind. Being Emma makes me happy, simple as.”
Russell frowned a little at that, but they reached the corner and paused.
“So my house is up there,” Russell said, “and I think you’re now closer to the next station on the line.”
“I think so. Anyway, it won’t be too difficult finding it. Thanks for the talk, Russell. I’ll let you keep your head another day.”
“Thanks, Emma. I appreciate it. Oh, and still having my head intact.”
“Haha, yeah. See ya.”
Emma turned and crossed the street, while Russell went in the opposite direction around the corner, still thinking about the arbitrariness of Emma’s naming method—it seemed the oddest way of coming by a name that you might be stuck with for years! For life! Was she mad to have relied on what seemed like pure chance?
But maybe it was the point to just make a decision. Forget all of the hand-wringing, the worrying, the second-guessing; just be bold and choose something—choose who you want to be, choose a name and see what works.
See if it makes you happy.
A boy named Russell walked up to the front door of his house and pulled it open—but moments later, it was a girl named Sarah who chose to walk through it.
Naarm, 22–24 July 2026