At the end of her senior year, on Class Day, Mae won a major prize for her writing. M started taking estrogen, worked with a voice coach, moved progressively further from the boy and closer to the woman, and by the next year had become Mae. Much of M’s writing that semester explored issues of gender and identity, culminating in a profile of a local drag performer who was he when out of drag and she when in: for the performer, drag was a costume, whereas for M, women’s clothes were neither drag nor a costume but a tentative step into a potential new identity. Back in the days before Yale’s freshmen became “first-years,” one of my freshman advisees was a gay man who translated Tang Dynasty poetry planned to learn Portuguese in order to read Clarice Lispector, his favorite author, in the original and often got so caught up in books, assigned or unassigned, that he missed meals.Īs a junior, while taking my advanced non-fiction writing class, my advisee began using they/ them pronouns and announced a new name-or, rather, a new initial-on Facebook: “So I’ll be going by M, because inside the letter M is a boy & a woman, the two of us together.” M grew longer hair and started wearing makeup and sometimes a skirt and a bra-not an overstated bra, a modest athletic bra-stuffed first with socks, then with rice-filled tights, and finally with silicone mastectomy prostheses.
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