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Chapter Notes:

One: war smoke catharsis
- Genderqueerness encompasses your life experiences. Your ambiguity. Your ability to show up in a certain role AND not be limited to that instance of showing up.

Five: my genderqueer backpack
- Genderqueerness is an accumulation of the things that define your past identity with the meaningful new resonating moments you've picked up over the years. It's not throwing away who you are but making room in your backpack for the different aspects of yourself.

Eleven: life threats
- "Femininity in all forms is still a joke in many places around the world. And, in my case, to be what the world thinks of as a 'man' who is feminine is one of the worst sins." Even in philosophy, there was not only a categorizing of women as weak, or emotional/more irrational, but uneasiness with the idea of femininity itself. Now we still only accept femininity when it serves us.

Thirteen: what am I?
- There was and still remains a fear that the experience of being a woman is being erased. This was a conflict within the trans community, which pressured trans men to present as butch lesbians or tomboys. It is interesting and sad how there can be difficulty reconciling (1) expanding the borders of acceptance and (2) preservation.

Sixteen: purple nail polish
- "My reflection in the mirror looked pretty much how I expected it to—neither particularly male nor female. It was just � neutral. The problem was other people. Strangers looked at me and saw a woman...." !!! Always having viewed yourself as different, but maybe it was just... androgynous.

Seventeen: uncharted path
- Including this story was probably for readers or parents who need to hear this perspective of a parent. I found that a lot of doubts the mother had were actually thoughts I've had about myself, so I could resonate with the narrative in this way. Perhaps including this perspective was for necessity and not cohesiveness? Maybe Bailey wasn't old enough? Was that disrespectful though? I was also kind of scared reading this one. Don't know why. The car experience was shocking, but in general, the tone of the story was just a bit familiar to me. "The details were excruciating to learn; hearing that your child doesn’t like something about themselves is never easy, but when it’s about the very body they were born into � it broke my heart." Idk but this scared me.

Twenty-Four: an outsider in my own landscape
- Media depiction of androgyny as white, slim, tomboyish, tough, double-take
- "Sometimes I just want to be a person, not my gender." (241)

Thirty: rethinking non/binary
- "When nonbinary identities are idolized as the postmodern, fashionable, or intellectual, who is left out? Imagining gender in terms of relational power reveals a need to rethink where we invest our community's resources."