What do you do when the world expects you to be strong? So I have to ask myself what do I do with all this anger? What club do I have to join to feel I’m equal? My protest like my country isn’t a melting pot. My protest is a riot… Where were you when I dared to say that I mattered. I, not your token friend, your neighbor, or the one who creates and inspires every bit of culture to which the vultures seem to always devour. Me, the one with the funny hair, name, and who you can’t seem to understand.
— ebonyicons, Questions, 2017
I. Life
Before the theory. Before the framework and the footnote and the careful academic scaffolding — before any of that — there is the body. There is the specific, unrepeatable fact of this body, moving through a world that had formed its opinions about it long before it arrived anywhere. Long before I had language for what was happening. Long before I understood that the constant low hum of having to account for my own existence was not a personal failing but a structural inheritance — delivered quietly, consistently, without announcement, the way all the most durable violences are.
W.E.B. Du Bois called it double consciousness. This perpetual condition of measuring your soul by the tape of a world that has already decided, before you have opened your mouth, what you are and what you cost. Of seeing yourself always refracted through the gaze of those who look on in amused contempt and pity — who have, in fact, organized entire systems of meaning around the necessity of that contempt. What Du Bois gave us was a framework precise enough to survive a century of attempts to render it irrelevant. What it could not have fully anticipated is how many layers of otherness one body could be asked to carry simultaneously, and how the weight of each layer compounds against the others, until surviving ceases to feel like the floor and begins to feel like the ceiling.
I have a gift I did not choose. Call it discernment — the capacity to sense what is true beneath what is being performed, to feel the spirit of a thing before its surface has had the opportunity to present itself. It arrived early, before I had language for it, before I understood that not everyone moved through the world this way. What I understand now is that it was not coincidental. It was preparation. A spiritual endowment for a body that would need every resource available simply to remain intact in a world organized, in ways both dramatic and mundane, around its diminishment.
Sabrina Strings gave us the receipts. She documented what we have always known in the body — that the fear and contempt directed at Black flesh was not incidental to Western civilization’s standards of beauty and worth but constitutive of them. That delicacy, restraint, and legibility were coded as human, as worthy, as deserving of protection and dignity and the full extension of rights. And our bodies — full, ancestral, unruly, carrying centuries of what they have survived and continued nonetheless to produce — were coded as excess. As spectacle requiring correction. As a problem that the dominant culture has been attempting, across generations and through evolving methodologies, to solve. Judith Butler arrives and tells us that gender is not something you are but something performed, repeated and policed until it calcifies into what the world mistakes for nature. What happens, then, when the body performing refuses the script entirely — not from ignorance of it, but from a knowing so complete and so costly that refusal becomes the only remaining form of integrity?
I will tell you what happens. I will tell you that it begins earlier than most people are willing to sit with.
In her memoir, Brandy writes about her relationship at fifteen with a man of twenty-one. She does not frame it immediately as what it was — because adultification does not announce its operations. It simply runs. Georgetown’s research tells us what Black people have always understood through experience rather than study: that Black children are consistently perceived as older, less innocent, more knowing — measurably and systematically stripped of the protection that childhood is supposed to provide by virtue simply of being childhood. We are seen as having consented to things before we understood that consent was ours to give or withhold. Before we understood that our bodies were our own and not a commons that others had the right to enter. The world decides early and quietly that certain bodies are available — for consumption, for commentary, for use — and this decision does not post a notice. It becomes the water. It becomes the gravitational field. It becomes the reason a grown man believes a child is a reasonable choice, and the reason that child does not yet possess language precise enough to name what is being taken from them while it is being taken.
We call violence a fist. We call it a weapon. We call it the thing that produces a mark visible enough to photograph and present as evidence to a system that has, in any case, decided in advance how much that evidence is worth. But the adultification of a child — the cultural and institutional removal of their innocence, the world’s insistence that their body is already available, already knowing, already responsible for what is done to it — what do we call that? When it does not arrive as a single dramatic event but as a slow atmospheric condition, a weather system that shapes everything without ever quite producing the kind of evidence that the structures built to protect us recognize as violence — what do we call it then?
I carried that inheritance forward without knowing its name. I arrived at my own body not through an unobstructed path of self-discovery but through a series of encounters — mundane and catastrophic alike, separated by years and geography but continuous in their logic — in which the world made plain that it had already formed its opinions. I have stood at thresholds — not only doorways but the invisible thresholds of rooms and relationships and conversations — and felt the closing before the door moved. Felt the atmosphere contract around my arrival. Not for anything I had done but for the particular discomfort produced by a body that would not resolve itself into something the room already had a place for. This is what the normative gaze does. It does not see you. It measures the distance between you and its standard and calls that distance your problem.
Discernment told me what was happening before I had the vocabulary to confirm it. That is what it is for.
Surviving assault teaches you things about the body that no one should have to learn through experience rather than warning. It confirms what adultification began — that certain people move through the world in the genuine belief that they have access to you. That your refusal is a gesture, not a boundary. That your skin is an open invitation requiring no response from the person inside it. What I carried out of that experience was not, primarily, shame — though shame was generously and insistently offered by nearly every structure I turned to afterward. What I carried was a rage so clarifying, so precisely calibrated to what had actually occurred, that it functioned like a compass. I knew then what Assata knew. What she survived. What she named without softening. That they had almost convinced me their version of me was the true one. Almost. And I want you to understand how much that almost cost.
II. Liberty
The founding documents of this country declared life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all. What they did not say — what has required generations of blood and movement and legislation and more blood and grief still being processed in bodies still living to even partially address — is that these rights were never written with all bodies in mind. They were written for a specific body, a specific gender, a specific complexion of humanity. And for everyone else, liberty has not been a birthright. It has been a destination. Hard-traveled, never fully reached, and always, in every generation, under organized threat of being revoked by those who experience its expansion as their own diminishment.
I know this not only from experience. I know it from the data.
For my graduate capstone, I analyzed responses from over three thousand members of the LGBTQ+ community — one of the largest datasets ever collected on queer life in America. What I was looking for was simple and significant: whether educational attainment, the great American equalizer, the variable that theorists like Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue matters more than race in determining modern health and economic outcomes, actually equalized anything for people like me. The hypothesis was clean. The data was not. What I found, sorting through income thresholds and healthcare access and political engagement and retirement accounts, was that education did correlate with improved economic outcomes — but that it did not, could not, and does not function as the singular solution to the compounded barriers facing Black and queer people navigating systems not built for their survival. Intersectionality is not a theory I came to through books alone. It is a framework I arrived at by looking at the numbers and seeing my own life reflected back in the gaps.
The data told me what Melissa Harris-Perry had already named — that until we reckon with double consciousness, with the normative gaze, with the deficit thinking embedded in every institution that was built before it considered us, we are already behind. Already operating from a floor that was set below everyone else’s before we took our first step. Education lifts, yes. But it does not lift equally, and it does not lift far enough, and it does not change what happens to your body at the threshold.
My grandmother and my mother are from Leland, Mississippi. I want you to hold that geography — not as backdrop, not as the kind of Southern origin story that gets flattened into a single register of hardship and redemption. Leland, Mississippi. The Delta. The particular architecture of a place organized explicitly and without apology around the subjugation of people who looked like them — around their labor, their silence, their reduction to a usefulness that had nothing to do with who they actually were. And then I want you to understand what it took — not to escape, but to leave. Deliberately. Upright. To look at every situation that was asking them to be smaller than they were and to walk away from it without waiting for permission, without a destination already secured, with nothing more than the conviction that their lives were worth more than what was currently being offered.
That conviction is not a small thing. That is, in its own quiet key, an act of radical self-determination that the data cannot fully capture but that the body understands completely.
My grandmother pursued liberty. My mother pursued liberty. They did it not through a single dramatic gesture but through the sustained, unglamorous, daily practice of refusing to consent to their own diminishment — of leaving, again and again, whatever tried to reduce them. And in that living, in the example of their own becoming, they transmitted something that was never spoken aloud but arrived nonetheless, carried in the body the way all the most essential inheritances travel. That the next generation — my generation — would be entitled to something they had not quite been permitted to reach. Not only the right to leave what diminishes you. The right to pursue what restores you. The right, contested and unfinished and fiercely under attack, to happiness.
Black joy is not a passive condition. It is not the default temperature of a life lived in a body that the world has catalogued as spectacle, as available, as requiring management. Black joy is excavated. It is chosen against a significant and sustained body of evidence that the world would prefer your exhaustion. It is — as my grandmother and mother demonstrated across lifetimes, as the data confirmed in the quiet language of correlation coefficients — an act of will so sustained it becomes, across generations, a kind of architecture. Something you can stand inside. Something you can leave to the people who come after you.
But liberty, extended conditionally and retracted strategically, does not resolve itself into freedom. It resolves into vigilance. Into the perpetual choreography of making yourself legible enough to move through the world without incident — which is its own form of violence. The slow violence of the self turned inward. The constant expenditure of energy on management rather than living. My data showed that LGBTQ+ people of color were twice as likely as white respondents to attend six or more political events per year. I want you to sit with that. Not as a celebration of civic engagement, but as a question about what it means to live in a body that requires that much sustained political attention simply to maintain the right to exist in it.
Then I went to Mexico. Alone. One week. By choice, and also by a necessity I had not fully articulated to myself until I arrived. The necessity of a nervous system that had absorbed, for years and without adequate discharge, the accumulated anxiety of a world that could not decide what I was and found that indecision to be my problem. I stepped out into air that did not ask anything of me. I walked down a street and no one reached for their phone. I sat at a table and ordered food without first negotiating my right to be there, without scanning the room for the particular quality of attention that precedes something being said or done. For the first time in years my body was simply a body, moving through the world, unremarkable and therefore — briefly, heartbreakingly — free.
This is what my grandmother walked away from Mississippi to find. This is what my mother protected every time she left a situation that was costing her more than it was returning. Not the drama of liberation but the quiet, radical ordinary of existing without justification. I understood, sitting in that quiet, that I was living inside the longitude of their courage. That the small, temporary sovereignty I was tasting had been purchased across generations by people who never waited for the world to decide they deserved it.
Discernment, in Mexico, had nothing to surveil. It rested. And I understood from that rest how long it had been working.
III. The Pursuit of Happiness
We are living in a moment of heightened visibility for trans and non-binary people. Visibility — and this is what the discourse almost universally fails to reckon with — is not safety. It is not acceptance. It is not even, in any automatic sense, progress. Visibility means you can be seen. It does not specify the intentions of what sees you. And in this particular moment, at this particular pitch of political temperature, what sees us has become increasingly explicit about those intentions. The legislation is not subtle. The language being used in legislative chambers and school board meetings and opinion columns about bodies like mine is not ambiguous. It is the language of the normative gaze made policy — the insistence that certain bodies are a problem requiring a solution that was never arrived at in conversation with the people inside them.
I am non-binary in that moment. Not as a theoretical position. Not as a label applied from the outside. As the daily, bodily, sometimes exhausting practice of inhabiting myself fully in a world that has organized considerable resources around the project of convincing me that full inhabitation is selfish, disruptive, dangerous, a provocation. I came into this identity not as arrival but as return. The slow and costly and necessary journey back toward a self that had been waiting, patient and persistent, beneath years of performed legibility. Beneath the accumulated weight of other people’s comfort, other people’s frameworks, other people’s quiet but insistent demand that I resolve the discomfort my existence produced in them. What I found in that returning was not peace, not immediately. What I found was a self that had survived everything the world had offered as argument for why it should not exist — and was still, improbably, reaching.
My capstone research asked whether educational attainment could serve as the great equalizer for LGBTQ+ people the way theorists suggest it does for the general population. The answer the data returned was measured and precise and, to me, deeply personal: no. Not fully. Not without the additional framework of intersectionality — the understanding that race and gender and sexuality and class do not operate independently but compound, accumulate, and interact in ways that no single variable can neutralize. Liberty, extended conditionally, remains conditional. A degree does not change what happens at the threshold. It does not change who reaches for their phone when you walk past. It does not change the legislation. It does not change the body’s need, after years of sustained vigilance, for one week in another country just to remember what rest feels like.
And here is where I want to slow the essay down. To stop moving and simply stand in the room with you. Not the reader who arrived already in agreement, already prepared to share this and feel good about the sharing. I want to speak to the reader who considers themselves good. Who does not think of themselves as someone who participates in harm. Who has perhaps never stood at a threshold and been the reason it didn’t open — but who has, in a room where that was happening, found other things to attend to.
You know what I have described here. You have encountered it, in some form, in some register, in some life adjacent to yours. The body that could not enter the space. The question asked with the comfortable certainty that an answer was owed. The room that reorganized itself around an arrival without announcing that it was doing so. The silence of those present. The way that silence accumulates, over years and across bodies, into something that does not look like violence from where you are standing but lands as violence in the body receiving it. The research confirms it. The testimony confirms it. The data and the poem and the text message sent from a rooftop in Mexico on the eve of a birthday all confirm the same thing: that what is being done is being done, that it has a name, and that not naming it is itself a choice.
The pursuit of happiness — this right that my grandmother walked toward, that my mother extended toward me like a hand reaching across generations — is not, for a body like mine, a given. It is not the default condition of a life waking up non-binary and Black in a country currently engaged in the project of making that particular combination of identities more legally, socially, and physically precarious. It looks like Mexico. One week of my nervous system remembering what quiet felt like. It looks like the text sent from a rooftop on the eve of a birthday, feeling for the first time in years the fog beginning to lift. It looks like a graduate thesis analyzing the systems that shaped me, written by the person those systems tried to shape into something smaller. It looks like this essay. The decision to write, in public and without apology, from inside a life that certain forces would prefer remain unnarrated.
Discernment — that gift, that spiritual inheritance, that preparation for a body the world would make difficult — tells me that this moment is not permanent. That what is under attack has survived attacks before. That my grandmother knew something about the persistence required to outlast a world that prefers your silence, and that she passed that knowledge forward not in words but in the posture of a woman who has decided that her life belongs to her.
I am claiming — in this body, in this moment, in this time of escalating visibility and escalating threat — my right to pursue happiness. Not as a gift. Not as a concession granted by a system deciding, in its own time, that I have waited long enough. As what was always, already, irrevocably mine.
But I want to leave you with the question my grandmother never had the luxury of asking out loud, that the data cannot answer, that no framework fully resolves — the question I am asking now, in her name and in mine, of everyone who has read this far and recognized themselves somewhere in it.
You know what is happening.
What will you do?
ebonyicons 