Triple-kay - Kay X3

A few years ago a roommate abruptly decided to move out to live with her boyfriend, and I ended up spending half a year sharing an apartment with someone I had never met before: an Egyptian girl with very limited English.

She was confused by my appearance and asked me “boy or girl?” It took me a while to understand what she was saying, but eventually she got the point across, and I told her that I was a girl. She seemed unsatisfied, and I explained that I was transgender. Unsurprisingly, she didn’t know the word.

We ended communicating by typing our respective sentences into Google Translate. Unfortunately, whatever the Arabic word for “transgender” is, it wasn’t a word she knew either. Eventually I ended up typing in “I used to be a boy but it made me unhappy so I decided to be a girl.” She stared at it for a moment then asked “You are happy now?” I said yes, and she smiled and looked thoughtful.

A couple hours later she came up to me and said “You and me, we are sisters,” and gave me a hug. “You say you are girl, you are girl.”

the thing about being nonbinary is that you really do start to forget that other people have such strict walls around what is and isn’t allowed for genders. i thought we all agreed that we made that up. could you climb out of the cave real quick and feel the sunshine for a minute.

I see those "every family has that one cousin who's severely mentally ill", but considering how my mom once made me promise not to tell the extended family that I had attempted suicide a week before my cousin's confirmation party (like they literally picked me up from psych ward to attend it, I changed from hospital clothes to party clothes in a truck stop bathroom on our way there) because "it would just upset people for no reason", I'm starting to suspect that some families are 100% mentally ill but everyone's pressuring their kids to not show any symptoms in front of the big family in order to save face.