Love Lives Here

by Amanda Jette Knox

  Truth be told, I was more furious with myself. Where had they found those old pictures? Why hadn’t I been more careful in making sure they were deleted? Where had they found Zoë’s old name? How could we set such careful boundaries, only to have a publication walk all over them? I had royally screwed this up.

  I called Zoë at work, crying so hard into the phone that for a minute I could barely breathe. She was upset at the news but not nearly as much as I was.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is my fault! It’s my blog that caused all this.”

  “Your blog is doing a lot of good,” Zoë said calmly. “Some people are just going to be awful, that’s all.”

  “They used your old photos and your old name. Oh my God, Zoë. I can’t believe they did that. I’m so sorry.”

  “I can believe it,” she said. “Pre-transition photos get site hits. It’s not the end of the world, though. It’s not. It’ll be fine.”

  Still completely guilt-ridden, I let her go and started doing damage control. First, I noticed that most of the photos the article had used were being shared directly from my Instagram account. I opened the app and deleted them. Next, I wrote a cease-and-desist letter to have the before-and-after photo removed from the site. Finally, I put statements out on Facebook and Twitter saying my family had not granted an interview to the Daily Mail and did not give them permission to use any of our photos. Then I cried some more. Once again, I thought about whether I would have shared so openly in 2014 if I knew that our family would be facing a second transition in the future. The answer was a loud and clear no.

  A few years before, I had judged a family for pushing the boundaries of gender. Now it was my family being judged.

  * * *

  —

  Don’t read the comments. If there’s a more solid piece of advice in the internet age, I don’t know what it is.

  You stop being people when you become a news story. You become a piece of information, something for others to consider and form opinions about, like a political candidate’s platform or the designs at Fashion Week. Those reading the news sometimes forget that the people they’re reading about are actual human beings.

  I didn’t want to look at the comments. I knew better. Readers can say some deplorable things about queer people in the news, and they go the extra mile when it’s a trans person.

  Zoë was, by all accounts, a success story. She’d transitioned as an educated, middle-class woman who kept her family and career. Not only that, her marriage was stronger and her connections to those around her were deeper. She was not harassed on the street or ignored by the neighbours. She lived a very typical, happy life. This ruffled some feathers so hard the bigotry fell right out of them. Internet trolls went out of their way to find something to be mean about.

  I know a thing or two about trolls—the people who interject themselves into online conversations for the sole purpose of creating a stir or being cruel, often through insults and attacks. I know that social scientists have been studying them for the past few years and have concluded that most of them show worrisome traits. They seem to derive pleasure from knowing their words are hurting others. Trolls have always existed, but with the advent of the internet, they can get their jollies anonymously and in front of a larger audience.

  But trolls are not always avoidable. Friends and family members would see our faces pop up on their Facebook feeds and excitedly tag us in the comments beneath the piece we were being featured in. Hey, Amanda Jetté Knox! It’s your beautiful fam!

  Each time, the jagged shores of the comments section would beckon me like a siren’s call.

  “Land, ho!” Emotional Amanda would call out.

  “Nay, don’t go forth!” Logical Amanda would yell. “You know what doom awaits us!”

  “Balderdash!” Emotional Amanda would shout back, steering the ship toward the rocks. “What if it’s filled with positivity and we miss out on that?”

  “Fool,” Logical Amanda would mumble under her breath. Then she would retreat to the lifeboat to await the inevitable shipwreck.

  I shouldn’t have read the comments.

  “It looks like Gollum.”

  This was the first comment I read beneath the first article written about my wife’s transition. The picture we had shared with the publication was a sepia-coloured selfie of Zoë and me, and it was one of the few at the time that didn’t trigger massive dysphoria in her. She liked it. I liked it too. She looked lovely and at peace with herself, which was something I’d never seen captured in previous photos of her.

  We’re not stupid people; we knew sharing our story would leave her open to attacks. But we also knew the message we were trying to get out there was an important one, and this overruled most of the worry. When I saw that comment, though, worry came flooding back in. To see someone be so needlessly cruel to another human being wasn’t new to me. Just another day on the internet, frankly. But this wasn’t just another news story, and this wasn’t being said about just anyone.

  If Zoë saw this, what would it do to her?

  I closed the tab and decided not to say anything. I make a lot of decisions like this. Trolls come crawling out from under their bridges to say revolting things about us, and I make a point of never speaking a word of it to anyone—especially my family members. More recently, a group of transphobes shared some of our family photos on a Facebook page so they could insult us—including our kids. Yes, adults made a point of attacking our children’s looks and saying we had a “murky gene pool.”

  Everyone in my home knows the risks. We all know these things are said, but my family doesn’t need to see every hurtful word. Once you see that stuff, you can’t un-see it. One negative comment can linger in your brain for ages.

  To make things worse, there’s usually no way to win with trolls. If you defend yourself, they get off on it and keep pushing your buttons. If you report their account or delete their comment, they just create a new account, rally their little troll friends and replace that deleted comment with dozens of similar ones.

  I’ve been told several times I need to grow a thicker skin. But that won’t happen, and it’s by conscious design. Sure, if I had a thicker skin, I could numb myself more easily to uncomfortable emotions. To turn off that caring, however, I would need to turn the pain inward. I did that for years, not wanting to deal with things that had happened to me as a child or avoiding a closer look at how unhappy I was in my marriage. I used food and other distractions to tamp down the pain. It only caused me more pain.

  Author Brené Brown discusses this numbing behaviour in her books and videos. Her warning, which is based on both research and personal experience, is that trying to numb some feelings will numb them all. “We cannot selectively numb emotions,” she writes in The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. “When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive ones.”

  We can’t pick, in other words. We must turn it all off or leave it all on; there is no in-between. Our brains don’t have an intricate way to filter feelings like that.

  As much as I admire Brené and totally want to be best friends someday I didn’t need to read her book to figure that out. I’d lived most of my life that way, which is why I refuse to do it any longer. I won’t “armour up,” as she puts it, to step into the arena. It will only hurt me in the long term. I won’t become a shell of the person I really am. If I do that, I’m letting them win.

  Instead of turning it off, I have two key reminders I use when I’m blindsided by hate. I try to teach them to my children.

  First, other people’s feelings, reactions and opinions are theirs to own and not mine. We each have a unique personality and experiences that have shaped our responses to what’s happening around us. I have no control over how another person will react to a situation, and I can’t be responsible for everyone’s feelings about me and my family. I have no idea what othe
r people are bringing to the table. Is it a nice ham? Internalized rage? Who knows? My job as a writer, speaker and advocate is to present my family’s collective lived experience as a teachable moment. Whether other people choose to learn from that is up to them. Some will hang out in the back of the class and shoot spitballs no matter what I do. We’re not all wired the same way, and recognizing this makes it easier to deal with the more disappointing responses.

  Second, a lived experience is always more valid than an experience never lived. Many people like to share their opinions. That’s fine. But I’ve learned that not all opinions are created equal. If people of colour share their experiences with racism, that will always be more valid than white people telling everyone what they think of racism and its effects. Why? Because we can’t fully know what it’s like to go through something unless we’ve gone through it ourselves.

  The same is true when it comes to straight and cisgender people sharing opinions about queer people. When folks who have no lived experience make disparaging comments about my marriage to Zoë, her decision to transition and our support for our transgender teen, it makes it easier to disregard their opinions. I can have opinions about New Zealand, but I’ve never been there, you know?

  Reminding myself of these things works most of the time, but not always. Occasionally, an anxiety attack, a short free fall into despair or a cry on someone’s shoulder will follow. Once, after a targeted hate attack, I spent an evening crying and eating pizza in the basement while watching Meg Ryan movies. Another time, I adopted a rescue kitten. (Hey, you do what you need to do!) Eventually my brain remembers to do a validity check on those nasty, unfounded opinions and then it’s over.

  I also keep a running list of people I can rely on to catch me when I fall. These are the people I can say literally anything to in a difficult moment and know they’ll stick around. The list is short, in part because trust takes a long time to build, and in part because not everyone is willing or equipped to sort through my years of emotional baggage. You need to have gone through a lot yourself to be able to handle this overflowing suitcase I’m lugging around.

  The hate aimed at me and my family is ongoing. I constantly remind myself that people who say needlessly cruel things about other people reveal more about themselves than they do about their targets. Yes, the internet can be a brutal place, but it’s also one of the best platforms we have to create change on a global scale. So I remain visibly online with my family’s blessing, telling our story and hoping to help that change along for the next family in transition.

  And while the internet can be vile, it can also be amusing. What I found most surprising about the conversations surrounding my relationship with Zoë is how focused others were on my sexuality. It was the topic du jour every time an article about us was shared. I watched as people posted questions, made assumptions and debated what this meant for me, the wife of a transitioning spouse. It was surreal to watch discussions about me happen without me.

  What does this mean for the wife who isn’t trans?

  She can’t be happy like that. She’s straight.

  How do you know she’s straight?

  Well, they’ve been married for almost twenty years. How could she not be?

  She would have to be bisexual or pansexual. There’s no other way this makes sense.

  Maybe they’re staying together for the kids.

  Some marriages are platonic. I bet that’s what this one will be like now. You know, separate bedrooms?

  She’s just trying to convince herself she’s happy.

  Is this the same Amanda Knox who was charged with murder in Italy?

  That one still happens all the time. Two people can have the same name, internet. I couldn’t help but laugh. What else can you do when the world is trying to figure you out?

  I also regarded this as another teaching moment. I wasn’t going to clarify my sexual orientation because it didn’t matter. (Can’t people just love other people? Do we have to put a label on everything and everyone? Love is love, folks. Simmer down.) But truth be told, a part of me had some figuring out to do in this department. Something deep inside had been stirring even before Zoë came out. Something that had been buried for most of my life.

  I love the idea of bisexuality—or pansexuality, its more modern counterpart. Falling for hearts, not parts, is a lovely way to live. For a while, I identified with that concept. It seemed to fit. I was married to someone I thought was a man, and her transition to living as a woman did not spell the end of our romantic relationship. That screams bi or pan, right?

  Except I wasn’t sure that was true. Something about it didn’t feel right, but the idea of exploring it made me deeply uncomfortable. I wasn’t ready to take a closer look yet. So I kept the commenters—and myself—guessing. Maybe they would sort it out for me.

  TWENTY-THREE

  reality

  COMING OUT CAN set you free. But freedom is an adjustment. Our entire family was discovering what this new normal looked like, and how the world saw us now.

  A couple of days after Zoë returned to work, she had a meeting with a male co-worker to discuss some project deadlines. They both walked into a large boardroom and sat across from each other, he looking the same as the last time and Zoë looking entirely different. Before they got down to business, the co-worker spoke up.

  “Can I be honest?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Zoë replied.

  “This is weird for me.”

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s understandable.”

  “I don’t have a problem with it or anything, I really don’t,” he assured her. “But if you feel like something’s going on, or if I slip up and accidentally use the wrong name or pronouns, please know it’s just me trying to adjust.”

  “It’s fine,” Zoë replied warmly. “Thank you for being so honest.”

  The co-worker visibly relaxed, and they went on with their meeting.

  For the next few weeks and months, people at work would slip up, periodically using her old name in a meeting or calling her “he” or “him.” She was patient, gently correcting them when she needed to and reminding them they need not frantically apologize for every misstep; she knew they were trying.

  But not everyone tried. There were several men in another department who seemed to take issue with her transition but would never speak up about it for fear of being reprimanded. They were never exceptionally friendly prior to her coming out, but now they avoided her entirely. If they were chatting together and she walked by, they would go silent, casting disagreeable glances her way.

  There were a couple of women, too, who regularly shot looks at Zoë. They seemed particularly uncomfortable when they saw her in the washroom. The feeling was mutual. The last thing she wanted was to be in a confined space with someone who didn’t like her there.

  Thankfully, most of the women in the company made her feel welcome. Whenever she entered the washroom, they would be sure to greet her with a smile and a quick chat, as they would with any other familiar female colleague. The few who appeared initially unhappy seemed to relax after witnessing a few of these interactions. Zoë was being accepted into the sisterhood, as it should be. Some were a little slower in that acceptance, but the keeners in the class were showing them how it’s done.

  Not long after returning to work, Zoë was at a male co-worker’s desk, laughing and joking around as they often did a few times throughout the day. The man paused, mid-conversation, and said sadly, “You know, I’m really going to miss this.”

  “What do you mean?” Zoë asked.

  “This,” he said. “You and me. Our friendship.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she replied. “We’re still friends.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it’s going to be different now. We won’t relate to each other in the same way.”

  “I’m still the same person,” she assured him.

  “I know. But our interactions will be different.”

  Z
oë knew what he meant. He recognized that in our society, men and women interact often in different ways than people of the same gender do.

  “I think you’ll find our friendship is a whole lot better now that I’m not hiding a part of who I am anymore,” Zoë stated confidently.

  In the end, she was right. Their relationship wasn’t negatively impacted by her transition. It became more real. They’ve only grown closer since.

  * * *

  —

  Hollywood was also feeling a lot closer than it used to be. We received a request from a casting agent in Los Angeles who wanted us to audition for a new reality show on a major US network.

  The premise of the show sounded promising: it would tell the stories of a handful of families, each going through different changes, such as transition or adoption. But we were hesitant. Reality shows tend to be anything but realistic; the quest for ratings often dictates what stories are told. More drama equals more viewership. We were up front about how mundane our family life is. “Things have settled down a lot,” I explained to the casting agent. “We’re very boring. At this point, we’re a typical family that just happens to have two trans people in it.”

  “That’s exactly what our client is hoping for,” she told us. “The producers want to see the typicality because it will normalize trans experiences. You can show America how happy you can be through these changes.”

  Well, that sounded lovely. But we still weren’t sold.