Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 47287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 236(@200wpm)___ 189(@250wpm)___ 158(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 236(@200wpm)___ 189(@250wpm)___ 158(@300wpm)
Warmth glowed in Cassidy’s chest.
"You like my beard?"
River nodded.
"I like everything about how you look. I mean …"
They shook their head like they hadn’t meant to admit this.
"I worried it might make me look …" Cassidy frowned, not wanting to sound ignorant. "Um. I worried it might suggest that I’m masculine in a way you might not like," he settled on.
"Hmm." River cocked their head. "Can you explain more?"
Cassidy pulled the truck into a clearing beside the road.
"Want to lie in the truck bed and look at the stars?"
"Okay."
Cassidy pulled the wool blanket off the back of the seat and lowered the tailgate. They lay on their backs and looked up at a velvet dark thickly spangled with stars. Cassidy wished he knew the constellations well enough to point at the sky and whisper its organization into the shell of River’s ear.
"Okay, so, please tell me if there are better ways to say what I’m thinking. I like my beard. But a lot of guys around here have beards and they’re conservative, and they hunt, and they believe that masculinity means certain, fixed things. I don’t share any of those qualities, so I worried that maybe you’d see my beard and think I did. Does that make sense?"
Cassidy’s heart pounded. He desperately didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend River or seem ignorant or foolish.
River was staring intently at the stars, the slight wrinkle of a frown between their brows. They nodded.
"Yeah, it makes perfect sense. That’s how the signifiers of gender go, often. You like something—a hairstyle, a color, a garment—for aesthetic reasons, but that thing is tied to other people’s assumptions along binary gender lines. So your own aesthetics are under this pressure from a bigger cultural narrative. And you can’t control the perception that someone is gonna have of that thing, only know that they’re perceiving you and try and take ownership of those signifiers. But you never really know how big the chasm is between your aesthetic investment in that haircut or outfit and how each person perceives it."
Cassidy’s head was spinning.
"So, uh. I guess you’ve thought about this before."
"Big time. That’s why I asked my brother for help with an outfit. I, um. I wanted to look nice for our date, but wanted to look nice in the way I like. And I wasn’t sure how it would be perceived. Turns out Gus was more of a help than Adam was."
"Well, you look really nice. I love the way you dress."
River looked at them.
"You do?"
Cassidy nodded.
"Yeah, it’s … flowy?" He looked at River more closely, wanting to find the words to properly honor their style. "Kind of in different proportions to more traditional clothes?"
River’s smile was instant and radiant and Cassidy felt it in his guts.
"Do you want to know a secret?" he asked.
"Yes.”
"Well, I don’t wanna oversell it. I guess it’s not really a secret." He was stalling. "I’m nervous that I’m gonna mess up and offend you in some way I probably won’t even understand. And I don’t want to mess up."
"Mess up how?"
"I don’t even know how to explain it, exactly."
River sat up. "Or maybe you don’t know how to explain it without potentially offending me?"
"Yeah maybe that too," Cassidy admitted.
"Maybe you could just say it however and we can talk about if there’s a better way to say it after I understand?" River asked.
"Okay." Cassidy sat facing them, tugging the wool blanket over them both. "Um. I know you use they/them pronouns. But I’m not entirely sure what that means for you. And I want to be respectful but also I don’t want to ignore your gender because I’m not exactly sure what it is. So … yeah."
He held his breath, anxiously awaiting River’s judgment.
"It’s perfectly okay to ask people their pronouns or how they identify, Cassidy. It’s not rude, if it’s genuine. And it’s much more respectful than making assumptions."
"Okay, cool. Then can you tell me more about …"
"How I identify?" River prompted gently.
"Yeah. If you don’t mind."
"I don’t mind. This is a super normal conversation that trans and gender nonconforming people have all the time. It’s only cis people who don’t talk about it. Which is part of the problem, I think. Because not talking about something presumes that everyone agrees about how to describe or define it. But of course that’s not true. You can take three women and ask what they think is feminine and get three different answers."
Cassidy nodded. Nora had said similar things in the past.
"People’s convictions about what is feminine and what is masculine—and the notion that they’re fixed, different things—is the root of so much transphobia. Kind of how misogyny is at the root of homophobia. 'Men acting like women,'" they said, accompanied by air quotes.
"Huh. I never thought about it like that."