From the ashes I descend,
Rising among the flames,
As shades of red.
Orange and yellow,
Blend within the explosion,
Of my rebirth,
Claiming my life force once more.

My deep hazel eyes,
Drenched in golden brown,
Surrounded by a burst of jade,
Speckled with dark green,
Reveal my humility,
Compassion and genuine kindness,
Allowing you to behold,
The window to my soul.

The vessel,
Containing my spirit,
Conflicts with the feminine demeanor,
Exposing sincerity,
Comforting hands of a care-giver,
The voice of loyalty,
Gently escaping lips,
Tears of empathy,
Seeping with understanding,
Kisses of affection,
As soft spoken words,
Depict desires,
Hopes and the warmth,
Of pure love.

Mystery envelops my origin,
Becoming a mystical being,
With the ability to heal,
The potential to inspire,
Living proof of an alleged myth,
Yielding in protection,
As my plethora of feathers,
Shield the individuals I adore,
From darkness,
Attempting to swallow the light,
We yearn to discover.

Blind Thoughts of denial,
Shall forsake your eyes,
If you pass judgment,
Upon me,
For my cloak of skin,
Concealing my true beauty.

As a Phoenix,
I refuse to watch,
The children of diversity,
Suffer degradation,
Living in fear of discrimination,
Stifling the right to love another,
To dress in garments,
That correlate the body with the mind.

I shall rage to cease,
The hands of violence leaving bruises,
Ignorance stripping,
Breaths of air from a pair of lungs,
As homophobia,
Transphobia, and intolerance,
Deplete individuality from a heart,
Deserving liberty,
The pursuit of happiness,
A chance to survive.

The Earth returns my soul,
To reap the love,
Concealed in assumptions,
And sow acceptance into,
The fields of society,
As I continue,
To soar into a cerulean sky.

Why is it so cool to hate on a group
for their fashion sense?
Or that they like to be off the mainstream?
You are doing the same thing that
people were doing to the
grunge
goths
punks
hippies
beatniks
flappers

and they all did something with their counterculture.
Ever think that
ours is the hipsters?
Not really,
they've been around since The *** Pistols
actually
they started them.
They made it cool to go to a thrift store
and buy things out of comfort
then rip it up
change it so it looked brand new.

Punk
that made Hipsters.

But now they are just some fad
that people hate on.
Just because they like to talk about
indie bands
knowing them first
wearing band tee's of bands they listen too
wearing vintage and retro clothing
likes reading
being in a cafe
organic food
vegan.

Stereotyping a group is all people did.
Now I can't wear things or do things
because some ******* is going
to say
"Ha you're such a ******* hipster!"

Why don't we stop hating people on what they wear
because how do you expect to get past
racism
homophobia
sexism
ableism
fatphobia
transphobia
preju­dice
if we can't even get past how people dress?

What right have you
To tell someone they are not
Who they know they are.
You.
A person who seems so sure of themselves,
So comfortable.
Tells him,
Someone who questioned himself his whole life,
That he is not who he knows he is?

“Why can’t you just be a tomboy?”
Witty comebacks always come slow when gender is involved, especially with new questions. Surely not new to anyone else, but new to him, at least. Though, it wouldn’t take much to trigger a response, no matter how aggressive or shocked and sad that response might be. But this one, though. This was new. Having never been asked this before, he had no weapons to combat this, to shoot down the asker with a well-placed glare and a retort that would shut them up right away.
He did try, he really did. You have to give him credit for that.
But then his throat choked up, and he fled. The only thing he managed to choke out was that he was going to go now. That was it. Shut down so quickly. From fearless and untouchable to an anxiety attack shaking its way up his spine and into his hands.

“Why can’t you just be a tomboy?”
And there it is again, he thinks. That one sentence wrapping tighter and tighter around his windpipe.
It was a challenge hurrying down the stairs without falling, because the anxiety had him in such a tight grip that he could hardly breathe.
Then there it was, those dreaded bathrooms.

“Are you a girl or a boy?”
There was not time to spend fifteen minutes or half an hour or all day standing between those two things. With his mind screaming MALE, and his traitorous body screaming FEMALE, he ducked into the women’s restroom and stumbled into the handicap stall.

It started then.
A barrage of everything that he had ever been asked because all that people saw were his body: *******, thick thighs, wide hips, a pear shape with curves in all the right places, and it made him sick.

“Since you haven’t had the surgery yet, aren’t you still technically a woman?”
“Butch?”
“****?”
“Are you a boy or a girl?”
“What are you?”
“This is my friend, he’s a transvestite.”

It’s too much, with the tomboy comment still rattling around in his exhausted brain.
And with each thunk of the back of his head against the tiled bathroom wall, he tried to shake them loose. But they wouldn’t leave. Why wouldn’t they leave? He knows that it isn’t true. None of those people know anything. Their questions are out of mostly out of ignorance, and not malice, but, gods, they all hurt so much.

He talks then, a harsh whisper making its feeble way out on the wave of each choking, silent, sob.
“I tried. I tried so hard. And I’ll tell you why I can’t ‘just be a tomboy’ because, ******, I was a tomboy. And you wanna know what that got me? Six years worth of scars on my arm and shoulder.”

He drags the remains of anxiously bitten-down nails down his arm now, over and over again, leaving angry red trails through the pale lines on even paler skin.
“I’ve know that I wasn’t a girl since I was seven. That’s pretty, funny, isn’t it? The not knowing, it almost killed me. I mean that literally, but sometimes swallowing forty pills speaks louder than words.”

The phantom voice, branded into his eardrums and stamped angry and red on the graymatter of his brain, speaks up again. “Why can’t you just be a tomboy?”

And he knows what the real question is now.
Why can’t you just be a girl?
Why do you have to be transgender?
Why can’t you just be happy as a girl?
Why can’t you just be a tomboy?

Getting up off the ground, scrubbing tear tracks from his cheeks and off his glasses, he presses the back of his throbbing head against the tiled wall, whispering to everybody and nobody, “SHUT UP.”

Recently
The person I am now dating
Has come to terms with
His own trans identity
When we met he looked like a girl
But I could sense something within him
Something that resonated with
My own confusing feelings of gender
I asked him if he was trans
And at that point
He used the term nonbinary
I felt really excited about this
Finally there was someone like me
Who definitely was not a woman
But never felt like a man either
It was actually just a space in his journey
And he eventually came out to me again
It's my first time having a boyfriend
Since coming to terms with my queerness
And I love him deeply
But it has not been easy
Mostly because of the fact that
His transition has led me
To come face-to-face with
My own repressed identity
I have to address and recognize
All of my internalized transphobia
Most of which is aimed at the mirror
Fueled by years of denying myself
While I am definitely not a woman
And have never felt like a man
A lot of the time I feel like a boy
And hope that I will pass as such
I am finally ready to really listen to me
And the needs of my identity
To resume my rightful path
On the road to being myself again

my body is a topic that trails the mouths of a family at dinner
it is the trail of saliva that leaves shortly after breaking a heated kiss
always leaving a bitter taste

but when did you taste me?
when did I crawl into your mouth full of cavities?

existing as I am cements chains in people's root canals
a topic for discussion
my life to debate
trans people being the forefront
it is so inconvenient and sinful
and yet its the flavor on their seething lips

kissing one another trailing more saliva
knowingly trading hate with ones mind and lips
integrating more citizens and normalizing their behavior

transphobia is the topic for discussion

It's dark and the light leaks out
like the change in my pockets;
like the blood from her nose;
like knowledge from my head.

And I can feel myself being
  swallowed by this systematic
long dark. I cannot remove myself,
  a gut-worm in the lower-mantle
belly. Watching video-cassettes of
  my birthday. I don't know what
happened to my birthday video.
  I don't know what happened to
my parents or what I did to happen
  to them.

The light leaks, again, and I
choke on my celebri-thoughts;
mentally-******* to the
waves I'd give on a book tour
or studio lot. Talking about some
movie that made some money,
somewhere in Santa Fe or L.A.

The news is channeling my president:
a swollen man that is the physical representation
that a lot of American people are parasitic;
lovers in racism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia,
homophobia; scared of everything except the 'straight-talking'
magnate they put in office. Not playing president; playing God.

I'd hate to get political, though. I'd hate to ramble on
and on about something I don't know enough about to
**** myself over. I can feel myself picking up steam.
I can feel myself getting redundant but embracing the
bruised ego and poor technique. Loving the entrails
spilling out of the splits of my fingertips;
more beautiful than the brains I bashed on the sidewalks
of old Morgantown. Morgantown, a town so kind you
are gently destroyed by its over-crowded masses,
dying to be different or drunk -- I suppose that's not very
different than most places.

But let's get back to these trees that I haven't even talked about.
Let's get back to the kitchen table with the hollowed hard-drive,
with wires and cords flopping to the sides, like a
gutted spaghetti eater with poor stomach acid.
How terrible. I'll never forgive myself for that last line.

I feel so rudderless. So cynical with a touch of cliche.
I keep pushing back that age for success, thinking
that I have the luxury of choosing. My vocabulary is
limited. My intelligence is assumed; probably a void,
where delusions manifest and asian **** rewinds and plays,
  rewinds and plays.

Your opinion shouldn't be more important than my reality.

You said, in small text:

<p>OKAY. Let’s talk about this. </p>

<p>✨CW: transphobia, mental health stuff, strong language✨</p>

<p>[Reblog the hell out of this post. It’s about to be important].</p>

<p>I woke up this morning to my girlfriend, my partner-in-crime, my best friend, my favorite bean, sending me this photo. She couldn’t believe that it was real and thought that I was playing some sick joke. </p>

<p>Good ******* morning. </p>

<p>Listen up, whoever you are, you entitled little ****. Your opinions, attractions, desires, whatever they are - they DO NOT MATTER. Assuming, based on the context of your post, that you identify as a guy, let me just say this: </p>

<p>You are a small man. You’re using the guise of anonymity to objectify a radiant woman whose depth and breadth you can’t ever begin to comprehend - and I’m not just saying that because she’s mine. You’re also transphobic as **** - and clearly don’t understand that trans-ness and genitalia are actually (and often) far removed from each other. </p>

<p>I’d like to think that I don’t need to explain why the comment “your girl ain’t a girl no more” (in addition to being grammatically terrible) is NOT acceptable, but in case I do, here is MY two cents on the matter of MYSELF. </p>

<p>I fought for this body. I bled for this consciousness, I shined light into places in me that I didn’t know existed and found depression, dysphoria, trauma, and loads of anxiety. I nearly died for this body. If it hadn’t been for a select few people who saw me for the love I was worth, I wouldn’t be alive to write this post. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a fact. </p>

<p>I’m telling you, stranger, this because there is more behind your words than you know. Each time you take your privilege and cishetero advantage for granted and allow misguided, bigoted words to fall out of your disgusting face-hole or fingertips, you’re reminding me of how I almost died for this body and consciousness. How my girlfriend and countless others like us have been subject to vast physical and mental torment for our queerness, our trans-ness, our SELVES.</p>

<p>I’m addressing you not as you, but as the mass of people you represent. I’m posting this on behalf of the 22 trans people who were murdered last year because of ignorance like yours. I’m posting this on behalf of feminine-identified people everywhere who deal with the wrath of objectification, sexism, and violence that your very actions embody and permit. </p>

<p>

I've got some of these, too!

Here are my two favorites: It's okay if you change your mind.
It's okay if SHE wants to come back.

I am going to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you guys again. Hi. My name is Boaz Priestly Stout. But I mainly go by Priestly. I am a transgender male. My pronouns are he/him. And, I have felt this way since I was 7, so I can assure you I will not "change my mind."

Because, even saying that implies that being transgender is a choice. Well, news flash: IT'S NOT! I mean, do any of you honestly believe that I would choose this for myself? The constant dysphoria, not being able to pass as male, the misgendering and dead-naming, and general transphobia are hell. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. This is not a choice. It is who I am. And, I have fully embraced it, because, it is better than the alternative of living life with this big secret that eventually destroys me. I am not going to be a statistic. I will not be one. I will not.

I am a boy. My name is Priestly. I am a boy. I AM.