Mourning my trans/queer lives not lived. For Alex, La Rigby, and Alana

ALEX

Alex, my five- or six-year-old gender-bender. They would have liked to have been able to play with their gender, but they were too scared.

Most of all, they would have liked not to have to go to their first day of school as a boy. Maybe as a girl, as a gender-bender, as depicted in this picture.

It was 1970. I don't even want to imagine a trans childhood in Germany in 1970. Nevertheless, the pain of this unlived trans/queer life is there.

LA RIGBY

La Rigby, my teenage trans girl. She would have liked to show herself as the trans girl she was when she was 13 or 14 and received a bicycle as a gift for Lutheran confirmation.

For her, the bicycle meant freedom. But she didn't need the confirmation. With the bicycle alone, and, perhaps, above all with being seen as the girl she was, she would have been content (perhaps not happy).

Germany 1978. I doubt very much that it would have been a safe place for a teenage trans girl.

ALANA

On 17 September 2000 Alana wrote in my diary: "It's funny what you can do with a PC. It's so easy to change sex (gender), and I don't even look bad as a woman (...) A gender change is an interesting thing, and maybe I should try it once in reality (I have this desire to dress in women's clothes anyway, and maybe at least once I should give in to that)."

There were no words for non-binary then. Or, I didn't have them. But Alana would have liked to break out of the cage of masculinity, as she imagines doing at this international conference in India in February 2001.