I got kicked out of school after the first grade. It is not as badass as it sounds. One rule of my elementary school was that every family had to live in the neighborhood. While I still lived in Chicago, I didn’t live in the Gold Coast, or the north edge of Downtown. We gave the address of my childhood best friend, whose former-model-grandmother had two apartment complexes within the same building. It worked, until someone came over to my actual home and told the administration that we’d been lying. My dad tells me that they’d felt snubbed when I wasn’t allowed to go to their house in return.

I often wonder if this is the same girl that gave me my conception of femininity, who made me feel masculine from the very start. Because I conceptualized my brother as not me, I thought t...

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