Cyrus Grace Dunham

A genderqueer coming-of-age story of stunning frankness and passion, from a remarkable new talent. When I figured out how to spell the words I held in my mouth, I wrote them over and over until they filled up the page. "I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay I'm gay." Then I ripped the paper up and flushed it down the toilet. Cyrus Grace Dunham (who happens to be Lena's sibling) has always known that they didn't fit on either side of the gender binary. As a child, they used to slick their hair back and pose in front of the mirror, "lifting my chin up like men in magazines" and privately calling themselves "Jimmy." But they had no language to express their profound sense of alienation, until relatively recently, when they embarked on a search for a new name. Writing with disarming emotional intensity in a voice all their own, Cyrus Grace chronicles a childhood in a family of artists with larger-than-life personalities, bouts of gender dysphoria and obsessive-compulsive disorder, soaring romantic adventures, and faltering first forays into adult life, all the while exploring the complex family relationships that lay our foundations, constrain us, and inform our capacity to love. Signaling the arrival of a boldly original writer with a knock-out "page presence," A Year Without a Name is a searching, lyrical memoir of coming to terms with genderqueer identity as well as a heartrending portrait of the terror, excitement, and uncertainty of youth.

A Year Without a Name

Lindsay

Almost immediately, I was ready to devote myself to her. Devotion is the closest thing I've known to a stable gender, insofar as our gender is a set of rules we either accept or make for ourselves.

Whenever my bodily claustrophobia grows unbearable, I seek new lovers, new locations, new friends. So be it. Novelty is the longest-lasting short-term coping system I know of.

Thought I'd been passively occupying the singular gender neutral "they" for two years, I still couldn't summon the certainty to ask for it. When it was used in relation to me, I accepted it. I accepted "she" as well, though it registered as a sharp reminder that my attempts at something other than femininity were failing. Asking to be regarded in a specific way required the courage to claim an identity. I preferred to observe what people wanted me to be and politely follow suit.

Calling something a lie implies that one has the truth in one's mouth and swallows it.

I hesitate to call the exhausting day-to-day of embodiment "dysphoria," that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness. I struggled to believe my own discomfort. I just felt crazy. And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to do something about it.

How to know if the problem was gender or personhood. How to know if the problem was gender or me.

I watched when I was too anxious or depressed to do anything else. I didn't even watch it to get off, just to be calmed by the manifested and rhythmic need of the top, and the docile willingness of the bottom.

My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.

But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacophony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender;  If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as comorbid rather than contradictory; the surgery itself is born from a legacy of mainlining gender-deviant people into having bodies that conform to white, colonial myths of manhood and womanhood; the surgery was developed from a legacy of medical experimentation on the bodies of intersex and gender non-conforming children; the fact that I can access the surgery is dependent on my ability to perform the mental "capacity" to prove that I am sane enough to get it; those unable to perform "health" are excluded from the very same surgery.

And some people still believe this: that the will to rename oneself is naive at best, grandiose at worst. That naming oneself is akin to playing God.

But what is the alternative? To let other people play God? To accept the constraints of a given name, as if acceptance is always humble?

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