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X is the Best Letter in the Alphabet
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/magazine/letter-x.html
X is the Best Letter in the Alphabet
It’s now used to indicate sex and gender beyond the binary. But X has always been powerful.
Credit.Illustration by Hayley Wall
June 1, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
As a bookish child, I loved most of all an anthology of stories that sat high on my parents’ white bookshelves. At night, my siblings and I would gather on my littlest sister’s bed while one of my parents read to us. Once I learned to read, I took to raising myself up on my tiptoes to borrow that book and carrying it to the nubbly lime green couch in the playroom.
Can We Have Difference As Well As Community? forbes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from forbes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
April 2, 2021
When the world went into lockdown five months after I started taking testosterone, I thought it would be easier not to see people for a while. Maybe they wouldn’t hear my voice go scratchy or see up close the hormonal acne splattered across my face. Alone in my apartment, I imagined that all my difficulties in being seen and recognized as transgender-nonbinary would evaporate. No one would gender me except myself; my pronouns would be right there in the text box on my Zoom screen.
So I was surprised by how much my gender instead seemed to almost evaporate. No longer on the alert for how to signal a restaurant’s waitstaff that neither “he” nor “she” applied to me, or for whether colleagues and neighbors would use the right language devoid of anyone to signal my gender