"I identify as a trans woman, or just plain woman. In everyday life, of course, it’s woman, but if people ask, I tell them I’m trans. I don’t hide it exactly, but I don’t wear it on my forehead either. The first time I realized there was something fishy going on was in second grade and we were having a school play and doing Heidi. I wanted the lead part and the teacher said, “No, that’s only for girls.” And of course I knew I was a boy, but I didn’t realize that boys couldn’t do things like that. At the age of fourteen, I was left alone in the house for a summer and went up in the attic and found some of my mother’s old clothes and discovered I enjoyed dressing in them. After college, I went abroad to Denmark and decided to try denial. You just get busy with other things and then you don’t have to worry about your identity.

I met a woman that summer, Edith, that I eventually married. After we were married for about a year and a half, I realized, “This is not working, I need to be who I am.” So I outed myself to her. In those days, of course, the only label we had for it was transvestism. By 1980, when I was forty years old, I knew I wanted to transition, but I didn’t tell Edith. Somehow I got wind, I think through a television show, that if you wanted to transition you are required to get a divorce first. They didn’t want to foster lesbian couples being married legally. So, I wasn’t going to do that. I was too much in love. The two of us were married altogether forty-six years. So I waited, and then in 1993, she found out she had cancer. Of course, then I knew that this was not a time to transition. She died in 2008. I came out publicly as transgender in 2012.

After Edith died, I was alone here in the house. It just got empty, very empty, very fast. And so I knew I needed to do something. I met Stephanie, a transgender woman, at the Emerald City Social Club. She was homeless at the time, so I said, “Why don’t you move in?” And then we started taking in other girls, too. Since then, I’ve had over thirty girls go through the house at one time or another, some for shorter periods, others for longer periods. I think it’s a worthwhile effort. I’m trying to give people a little bit of safe space and respite from the anxieties of homelessness.

As you grow old, you fear the unknown. You can end up needing care. By inviting people to come stay with me, I have someone to at least look after me on a daily basis and make sure that I’m not falling through the cracks. This whole house has served in some ways as a model because, as far as I know, it’s the first trans house. The model is simple: if you can, open your house to others. As I say, we don’t have a homeless problem, we have a hospitality problem. We can still be effective doing what we can even if we regret it’s not enough."

Amy, 77, Seattle, WA, 2016

“whats the matter weasley? getting an eyefull?”

(party in the eighth year dorm and everyones had a lil too much firewhiskey,,)

bonus:

Untamed Fall Fest day 8: Lan Xichen

want

“I don’t like it.”

Draco stares at him. “You don’t like it?”

Harry shakes his head. “I thought I did once. But I just….”

“Don’t,” Draco finishes for him. 

“Yeah.”

“Hm.” Draco shifts on the couch, folding his legs underneath him, resting his chin on the back of the couch, toying his fingers through the pillow tassels. 

Harry sits absolutely still and watches him, waits for him to say something longer than a couple words at a time. The heater is humming and clicking the same way it’s been doing all autumn, and the wireless taps out an indecipherable rhythm from the far corner. 

The apartment is quiet and comforting in the way it always is, better than it always is because Draco’s here tonight, and they don’t usually come to Harry’s because the clicking heater annoys Draco. All the same, it’s nice. It’s being here instead of at Draco’s that gave Harry the strange burst of courage to tell Draco what he hasn’t been saying since they started dating five months ago. Which is that he doesn’t like sex. 

Draco sighs and Harry blinks. “Can you explain it?” Draco asks. “I want to understand. I’ve always known I wanted to… with someone. Have sex, that is. I suppose there’s no reason to skirt around it.” Draco isn’t looking at Harry, he’s looking down at the olive green pillow tassels, but his feet are still folded up under his bum and his shoulders face Harry, so Harry isn’t worried. Not yet. “You don’t want sex?” he asks, to confirm what Harry’s already said twice. 

“No,” Harry says. 

“And you don’t like it?”

“Not really. It kind of grosses me out.”

Finally, Draco’s eyes lift to Harry’s. His eyebrows run straight across his face, his mouth relaxed. Harry isn’t sure if Draco is calm, or if he’s only pretending to be so he won’t scare Harry off. 

“It doesn’t gross me out,” Draco says, his eyes still settled on Harry’s face. “I like it. I like being close with someone. I like knowing that every part of me is close to every part of someone else. It’s about intimacy, and feeling good.”

Harry swallows. This is the part of the conversation he’d been worried about. Not because he thinks Draco will judge him, or shun him, or think he’s weird, but because it isn’t what Draco wants. Draco wants this, and he likely wants it with Harry, and Harry doesn’t want it, so where does that leave him?

“Right,” Harry says, and clears his throat. 

Draco’s eyebrows tip up at the corners. “Harry,” he says softly. He reaches his hand out, and his fingertips brush over the veins winding over Harry’s knuckles. “Don’t look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m stabbing you repeatedly with a blunt knife.” Draco smiles a little. “I’m not leaving. I don’t think you’re wrong.” His thumb rubs the back of Harry’s hand, like a soft breeze soothing down the waves of the twisting rivers of Harry’s blood thundering through his veins. “I’m here. Right here.”

Harry looks at him, all the things that Draco is. Silvered strands of hair glowing orange in the reflected light from the fire, dropping over his cheekbones, tangling around his ears. His eyelashes, too dark for the rest of his face, shadowing over his eyes. The jut of his collarbones through his shirt, the bony knobs of his knees and his elbows. His hands, warm and big and real. 

“I’m listening,” Draco says. “I want to know.”

“Okay,” Harry says. “Okay.”

There is quiet in the moments and the space between them. A waiting quiet, a peaceful quiet. Harry sits in it, revels in it, the fact that they have it, before he speaks. 

“I used to think that I would want sex,” Harry begins. It’s easier to stare down at his own knees as he says this, so he does. “I’m attracted to men and women, their bodies. I like their arms, their shoulders, their hands. I want their stomachs, and their chests, and their legs. Their thighs and their heels and the underside of their jaw.” Harry shakes himself a little. “That’s too general. What I want to say, is I want those things from you. I’m attracted to those things about you.”

Draco’s breath catches, Harry hears it. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but carries on with the speech he’s been whispering to his reflection for months, waiting to say it aloud for someone - for Draco - to hear.

“I want to trail my fingers down your stomach, and bury my face in your neck, and hold onto your hips. I want to kiss your thighs, the small of your back, the inside of your arm, the palms of your hands. I want to do those things to you, and I want you to do them to me.” Harry pauses. He’s never said anything like this, so blatant, so loud, so clear. 

Draco, in all of the new sweet goodness that Harry has found in him, lifts one of Harry’s hands to his mouth and kisses it. 

“But I don’t want sex.” Harry breathes slowly, in and out. “Genitalia makes me feel gross. It makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want it. I don’t want anything to do with it. And-” Harry takes another slow breath. “It took me a long time to figure that out. I didn’t know anyone who felt like that, the way I did. People either wanted to have sex, or they didn’t. No one felt desire for someone… but didn’t want to have sex with them.”

Harry glances up from his knees. Draco is nodding, his eyebrows drawn together in the middle, and his hands still holding firm to Harry’s. 

“You know what, Harry?” Draco says. 

“Yeah?”

“I’m in love with you.”

Harry’s throat goes dry. “You- what?”

Draco turns to Harry, holding his hands and looking straight into his face. “I’m in love with you. So, so incredibly in love with you.” The calm look on his face dissolves, and Harry sees Draco, truly. “I don’t care if you want sex, or if you don’t. I don’t care that you drink cheap tea, and you don’t wipe the steam off the mirror when you shower, and that you never let me tidy your hair after your naps.”

“Tidying never works,” Harry mumbles. Draco grins at him. 

“Those things don’t bother me in the slightest.” Draco shuffles closer to Harry on the couch. “Because it’s you. Because-” Draco laughs, his voice cracked and full of air. “Because I’m in love with you.”

Harry’s stomach twists around and drops, and his heart thuds, and the rivers of blood winding over his knuckles are pounding, pounding, pounding. 

“Harry?”

Harry can only nod. Words have abandoned him. 

“You are perfect.”

“’M not,” Harry mutters, shaking his head so hard his cheeks wobble.

“You are perfect for me.” Draco tilts his head and looks at Harry so earnestly and sweetly, that all of Harry’s thoughts and doubts tumble down him and away in dizzying cascades. “I love you.”

Harry doesn’t say it back. He tips over, falling into Draco, his head tumbling into Draco’s stomach and then his lap, and he doesn’t say anything. He winds his arms around Draco’s waist, and he presses his face into his stomach, and he cries a little and whispers thank you, thank you over and over again. 

He doesn’t say it back, but he knows that Draco sees it. In his breath, and the turn of his head, and the press of his fingertips, Draco knows.

One of the most powerful moments I experienced as an ancient history student was when I was teaching cuneiform to visitors at a fair. A father and his two little children came up to the table where I was working. I recognised them from an interfaith ceremony I’d attended several months before: the father had said a prayer for his homeland, Syria, and for his hometown, Aleppo.

All three of them were soft-spoken, kind and curious. I taught the little girl how to press wedges into the clay, and I taught the little boy that his name meant “sun” and that there was an ancient Mesopotamian God with the same name. I told them they were about the same age as scribes were when they started their training. As they worked, their father said to them gently: “See, this is how your ancestors used to write.”

And I thought of how the Ancient City of Aleppo is almost entirely destroyed now, and how the Citadel was shelled and used as a military base, and how Palmyran temples were blown up and such a wealth of culture and history has been lost forever. And there I was with these children, two small pieces of the future of a broken country, and I was teaching them cuneiform. They were smiling and chatting to each other about Mesopotamia and “can you imagine, our great-great-great-grandparents used to write like this four thousand years ago!” For them and their father, it was more than a fun weekend activity. It was a way of connecting, despite everything and thousands of kilometres away from home, with their own history.

This moment showed me, in a concrete way, why ancient studies matter. They may not seem important now, not to many people at least. But history represents so much of our cultural identity: it teaches us where we come from, explains who we are, and guides us as we go forward. Lose it, and we lose a part of ourselves. As historians, our role is to preserve this knowledge as best we can and pass it on to future generations who will need it. I helped pass it on to two little Syrian children that day. They learnt that their country isn’t just blood and bombs, it’s also scribes and powerful kings and Sun-Gods and stories about immortality and tablets that make your hands sticky. And that matters.