by Rachel Gold
“Wedding nerves happen to everyone,” Mom said. “I’m sure Claire’s on her way.”
Dad grumbled, “You wait all day if you have to. You’re getting married today.” He waved at my phone, “Text your brother. Tell him pick her up and carry her down here.”
I’d already texted Mikey ten times with no reply, which made me think the room with the costume contest wasn’t getting cell phone service.
As I went to ask the minister her opinion, I saw a group of drenched people move through the hallway off the atrium, followed by another. They weren’t coming in from the rainy outside, they were jogging from the inside to the exit. In the distance, an alarm clanged. A group of half-drowned people in Harry Potter costumes dragged by in their heavy robes.
And there was Claire, running, holding her lacy skirt, Mikey next to her. Our friends Nico and Tucker jogged behind her. As always, Nico looked like a pretty person of indeterminate gender with curly dark hair, light brown skin and joyful eyes. Tucker rocked a classic butch button-down style and had her Mohawk in a topknot. Nico put on a burst of speed and sprinted to the front of the atrium.
“Someone set off the fire alarm. This whole wing of the building is getting soaked,” Nico told me and my parents. “Atrium’s safe though. But the costume contest is a sodden wreck. They did it on purpose, to screw up the judging.”
Claire, Mikey and Tucker had caught up by then. Claire turned her golden-hazel eyes to me. I saw pain, sadness.
“It’s Angel and Laura,” she said. I had no idea what that meant.
I told her, “We’re supposed to get married. Like, now. Who are you talking about? Is this about your mom?”
“No. Yes. Kind of,” she said. She pushed her hair back behind her ears. The short layers only got cuter from being damp. “This contest is for the most romantic couples costume. There’s a pair who’s doing a great Laura Kinney, she’s the new Wolverine, and her boyfriend Angel—but some of the others tried to get them disqualified.”
She looked like she was about to cry. Over costumes? This had to be about her mom. I got off the dais and took her hands. “Love, I don’t understand. Do you want to wait?”
“It’s not fair,” she said, tears collecting on her eyelids.
Nico put a hand on my arm. “In the comic books Angel is this tall, super-white blond guy and our Angel here is black and nonbinary and short, plus our Laura is trans. Some jerks are saying they’re not close enough to the originals. Like they don’t have a right to these characters too.”
At Nico’s shoulder, her hands in fists, Tucker said, “You should see Angel’s wings—so amazing. And they made the wings all by themself, by hand, every bit of wiring. Oh I hope they didn’t get wet.”
I’d seen pics of costume pieces Tucker had crafted for Nico. Of all of us, she knew best how much work went into that.
“You know they must have,” Nico said, putting an arm around her.
“Or they will as they’re evacuated.” Claire nodded to the windows where a light rain had been falling steadily all day. “The costume contest has cash prizes for the top three places. Angel and Laura are just kids. I’m sure they could use the money. And these people, trying to disqualify them, pretending it’s not racism and transphobia. In our fan community…”
She trailed off. This was very much about her mom and the new husband and our country. Claire couldn’t fight the way her mom had given in to her husband’s ignorance and insistence that she not attend her daughter’s queer and trans wedding. But here, today, Claire saw a chance to make one thing right; she was smarter than I was about picking fights she could win.
“How many more costumes did they need to judge?” I asked.
“Two or three more,” Nico said, adding with a grin, “I was going to make it to your wedding on time, I swear.”
“We do have a lot of room, chairs, a stage…” I looked to the minister.
“I can wait,” she said. “But I’d like to change out of this robe if we’re switching venues.”
“Do you want to?” I asked Claire.
She surveyed her side of the room: all the people from her writing group and our church and no one from her birth family. Her aunt Debbie, the reporter, had said she’d try her best to be here, but she’d been on international assignment for weeks and wasn’t sure she could make it back to the States in time.
“Can you find the judges?” she asked Nico. “Tell them we have a space for the contest.”
With a nod, Nico sprinted off down the hall. Tucker shook her head, grinning, and followed at a slow jog. Mikey shot me a questioning look and I waved him off after them.
“Move or reschedule?” I asked Claire. My heart paused on the last word. I didn’t want to go through these nerves again and I wanted to be married to Claire like yesterday.
She frowned at her dress, beautiful despite its dampness. “I don’t want to reschedule. Though if we did, maybe my aunt could make it. But…Mom can watch the video years from now when we have a bunch of cute kids that she can’t resist. I’m ready to do this now.”
“Me too. There’s got to be another place we can get married. This convention center is huge.”
“Hey!” Claire yelled to the audience. “Hesse-Davis Wedding party, we are leaving this space to the cosplayers and going to find another place to get married. Let’s move!”
We all gathered in the hallway, waiting for Mikey, Nico and Tucker to get back. Wedding nerves did not get better standing in a mass of people in a hallway instead of being on a stage.
I struggled to not send Mikey ten more angsty texts, when I heard his voice booming down the hallway, “Make way for Colossus!”
He held up half of a small tent awning, the kind that went over display tables, a back support pole in each hand. Nico and Tucker carried the front poles. And under the cover of the awning, protected from the sprinklers, walked Angel.
Angel’s glowing, golden wings spread to the sides of the awning and rose as tall as Mikey’s head. In the comic book, Angel’s wings were made of light, so this cosplayer had created long sheets of thin plexiglass that looked like giant feathers and illuminated them.
I’d looked up a picture from the comic books while we waited and indeed that Angel was very blond and white and a smidge taller than the dark-haired, also white Laura Kinney. Our Angel was short and round with dark brown skin and the same earnest, good-natured look on their face as comic-book Angel.
At their side, holding their hand, walked a slender, dark-haired girl almost as tall as me. She looked pissed off enough to be the new Wolverine. She had that rope-thin, tense, defensive, curve-shouldered look that I remember from my first few years being out, especially when I still had to present as a guy sometimes.
Mikey and our friends put the awning down as the group entered the not-raining-indoors atrium. Behind them came more pairs of people in elaborate costumes and three wet, angry people who must’ve been the judges.
“What parts of the convention center aren’t soaked?” I asked Nico, who also was soaked at that point.
“Only the south wing had the alarm. The center expo area and the north wing should be okay.”
“That expo area is huge,” Mikey said. “I saw it during the hockey expo. There’s got to be space there.”
We rallied our wedding party and headed outside. A straggling line of formally dressed people hugged the side of the building, trying to keep out of the rain. We came back inside through the grand entrance: a triple set of double doors.
Vast, high-ceilinged hallways stretched to the right and left, the alarm ringing down the left one. In front of us, a massive archway opened to a cavernous room filled with booths. Above the archway to the expo area hung a banner decorated with plant stalks and the words: Welcome Minnesota Crop Production Retailers!
I stopped, creating a traffic jam in the foyer.
“Holy wow,” Claire remarked. “That’s so not our demographic.”
“You don’t know that,” my dad said.
“South Dakota second cousins are all farmers. They demanded a video of this wedding.”
Dad moved around me and approached the young men standing on either side of the archway with brochures. I followed, as did Claire and the others.
“Hoping you can help me out,” Dad said. “My daughter’s getting married today, to this beautiful girl, and we got rained out. You must have some space in here where we could hold a wedding, don’t you?”
One of the guys winced, but the other nodded, gazing back along our formal, bedraggled group.
“You want the GeoDiscovery display. Head that way, you can’t miss it.”
Dubious, I followed Dad. We walked past two lines of smaller booths. Abruptly the room opened up and a field stretched away from us. It was bigger than the first floor of our house: starting with rows of tiny plastic plants just pushing through the soil, then knee-high, waist-high, shoulder-high.
Dad went to talk to the people standing under the GeoDiscovery sign.
I turned to Claire, “Do you want to get married in a fake cornfield inside a convention center?”
“I want to get married,” she said. “And that fake corn is kind of pretty. Plus we have elves. They’re going to make the fake corn thing work, I’m sure.”
“We could slo-mo run through the plants toward each other.”
“You don’t think that’s too corny?” she said with a smirk. I groaned at her.
Dad came back. “Next demo is in five minutes and it’s the last of the day. They say we can have it as long as we want after that. Also they’re wondering if it’s okay if they stay for the wedding.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, Jim over there’s got a gay son, wants to see how it’s done in case he gets a chance to stand up in his kid’s wedding some day.”
“Oh totally.” I waved at the grinning guy who had to be Jim and he waved back.
Nico pushed to the front of our mass of guests and said, “Hey, the contest is wrapping up in a few minutes. Angel’s texting me. Wants to know if they can come, and Laura, and a bunch of other people from the contest.”
“We have a lot of space,” Claire said. “And I’ll never turn down costumes at my wedding. Did they place?”
“Second,” Nico told her, beaming. “Five hundred bucks and, more importantly, the chance to tell the naysayers to get lost.”
While the GeoDiscovery people ran their presentation in the field, most of our wedding party went into the booths to find extra chairs. They got enough for everyone who wanted to sit and a bit of surplus.
The minister picked a spot and worked out where Claire and I should each walk in from. There hadn’t been a space in the Atrium for us to walk from and I liked this change. I wanted to get to walk down the aisle.
I thought that was going to be the best perk to moving the wedding, but it wasn’t. When Angel and Laura and two dozen other people in costumes and a few who probably weren’t in costume all showed up, they brought a familiar face with them.
“Aunt Debbie!” Claire yelped and ran to hug her.
“I got back in time!” Debbie announced. “But you weren’t in the chapel, so I guess God sent us an angel to bring me to you. Am I too late to walk you down the aisle?”
“Perfectly on time,” Claire told her.
Claire’s Aunt Debbie walked her in and then my dad walked me in and already everybody was crying.
I only wanted to look at Claire in her intricate dress, her face shining up at me, but she tugged on my hand and made me take a half turn and gaze across the brilliantly lit corn field.
Amid the little green plants, and the knee-high ones, were superheroes, elves, more than one real-life angel, my family, Claire’s and my chosen family, and her aunt. Behind them, a bunch of people had wandered up, many in ball caps, a few in overalls, some of them already wiping their eyes and trying to hide it.
“Beloved friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate love…” the minister began and I turned back to Claire.
Author’s Note
I’ve been wanting to revisit Being Emily for a few years now. Already when it was published in 2012, language in and around the trans community was changing at a rapid pace. In 2013, the DSM-5 changed the diagnosis many transgender people required for medical transition from “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria.” At the same time, the media was exploding with stories about trans people (though much too often not by trans people).
Being Emily is set in 2008 and this hasn’t changed. But I decided, since this is fiction, that I can be somewhat anachronistic. In this new edition, you’ll find language much closer to what’s being used in 2017-18. In addition, the story references scientific studies done after 2008. The setting and pop culture references are still very much 2008-9.
I found in this edit and partial rewrite that I’d tried some things in the initial version that didn’t work. Now I know how to do them better. This is the reason for the major changes to Claire’s chapters later in the book.
Editing Being Emily has also been a personal revelation. Writing and stories are how I get the world to make sense to me—how I interpret my life and the actions of other people for myself. That has a lot of upsides, but the downside is that often I don’t fully know how I feel about something until after I’ve written one or more books about it.
When I first drafted this novel, in late 2004, I told myself it was the product of having a very good imagination and spending a lot of time in the community of trans women. It was easy for me to identify as a cisgender woman ally when Being Emily was first published. I’d identified that way on and off for years because I thought the only choices I had as an assigned-female-at-birth person were to be a cis woman or trans man. Given those two, I’m closer to cis woman.
And I am a woman some of the time, just not all the time. Going back through Being Emily, I saw the places where I’d described gender dysphoria from my own experience of it. While we haven’t had the same experiences, Emily and I are more alike than we are different.
I began writing about trans girls in part because during my twenties and thirties their experience was the closest I saw to my own. I hadn’t found people just like me, but when I met Kate Bornstein, Debbie Davis, Rachel Pollack, and others, I was able to be more comfortable in my skin. They made a place for me in the world.
In her intro, Stephanie Burt says, “…we are inside a novel made so that trans girls can see ourselves.” I knew how much trans girls needed to see themselves because I also needed to see myself.
I came out very young as a lesbian, starting when I was thirteen in the mid 1980s. By age sixteen, I was out in suburban Ohio, even though I did not know a single other lesbian. But I knew they existed. I knew I would find them.
At the same time, I was role-playing characters who blended male and female, or were aliens who shapeshifted (including changing sex), or were nongendered space dragons who could turn into humans. But I had no words to talk about my gender outside of these imagined worlds or outside of historical references—brief mentions of Native American two-spirit people and genderless beings in ancient Sumer that I’ve spent thirty years chasing down in academic literature.
I didn’t know if there was a community of people who experienced gender the way I did, or what they might call themselves or how to find them. I didn’t make a conscious choice, but because of where I grew up and how, it was safer and more effective for me to come out as lesbian. And once I did, I mostly stopped thinking about my gender. I just folded it into lesbian because that identity, to me, included gender diversity.
I’d been bullied a lot as a kid so finding a community that wanted me, welcomed me, and took care of me was lifesaving. Thank you, lesbians and bi women! (And, huge bonus, this community included all the people I wanted to date and still includes most of my favorite people.)
Turns out some of the bullying stemmed from me not doing social cues “right,” including not performing “girl” properly. When I was seven, my
family lived in Germany for a year. I came back, for third grade, to the same school and social group I’d been with in first grade. But everything had changed. Before I’d left, it seemed to me we were all kids playing together. Somehow, during the year I’d been gone, my friends had become boys and girls.
I didn’t understand why these people I used to know so well were behaving so strangely and why they’d turned against me. Before going to Germany, I was a kid. In Germany, I was “the American.” Now I was supposed to be a girl. But I didn’t understand what that meant for me. No one had given me a copy of the girl handbook and the few pages I could figure out didn’t really fit me.
I didn’t feel like a girl or a boy:
I hated dolls and loved blocks and stuffed animals.
I loved nail polish and had no interest in trucks and cars.
I loved Star Wars action figures and battles with friends, especially when we fought physically against each other.
I hated playing house and instead played “college students” with my best friend.
I loved numbers and analytical games and dragons and unicorns.
I loved stories and words and letters more than just about anything.
I did not love riding horses, but I loved a girl who did, so I learned to like it.
I loved girls and women, even though I was told I wasn’t supposed to.
I loved superheroes and comic books and role-playing games.
I loved God and each year that love is greater and more vast and I was always clear that God loved me.
What gender is that?
I’m still working on a succinct answer and suspect there may not be one. But these days I often say (and like): genderqueer, genderfluid, nonbinary lesbian and (thanks to my brother for this one) gender malleable. I like all the pronouns, but most commonly use she/her and they/them. Thanks to these words, I’m finding other people like me and there are a lot of us!
We’re still crafting the public spaces and lenses required to see people in the full spectrum of gender diversity. I’m excited to see the stories that continue this work and I intend to write more of them.
