“Ew,” I say, knowing full well that I was thrilled when Mom felt I was far enough into my transition that she stopped making comments about me not shaving.

“Shush.” He smiles at me. “I just … sometimes I feel like I want to be a girl; I want to change my body, to be softer. Other times I like my body how it is; I feel like a boy … whatever that’s supposed to feel like.”

Wyatt sighs.

“And then sometimes I feel like nothing, like this genderless blob that’s just existing. I just … I don’t know. I see someone like you or Samuel being so comfortable in your gender and I …” He trails off again.

“You’re saying I transed your gender?”

“You’re not funny.”

But we both still chuckle, stealing glances at each other.

“If it makes you feel better”—I clear my throat—“I still have dysphoria. There are still days where I feel like I can see my breasts, or I feel like my cheeks have filled back out, or when I’m convinced everyone around me still sees me as a girl, or the little voice in the back of my head is telling me that everything I’m doing is wrong. Putting on these patches and getting surgery wasn’t some magic fix-all for the stuff going on in here.” I tap my temple.

“Do you really still feel that way?”

“Not always, but sometimes. And you don’t have to be a boy or a girl,” I tell him.

“I know. I know that gender is more complicated than that and that everything exists on a spectrum and that’s all good, but it’s still confusing.”

“For something that isn’t real, it does wonders for the mental health. Have you talked to your moms about it?”

“How am I supposed to go to them and be like ‘Hey, Mom, hey, Mama, I’m not a boy, not a girl either, don’t really know what it’d be like in between those two, but I don’t think that I’m that either.’ I think they’ll only be confused too. Supportive but confused.”

“Valid.” When I came out to Mom, I didn’t really know what to expect. She’d been aware of LGBTQ+ causes and made yearly donations to various organizations—though I never knew if I should read those as her actually caring or her wanting the brownie points and the tax write-offs.

And after I came out, she threw me into all kinds of programs and support groups revolving around trans teenagers; she started taking me to doctors and basically outed me to my gynecologist without so much as a second thought.