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As Maia continues to negotiate difficult and often confusing experiences around gender and sexuality, e also begins making somewhat more confident strides in the direction of nonbinary identity. Maia recalls getting a salon haircut at the age of 16, finally working up the nerve to lose all of eir very long hair. However, the hairstylist gives em a basic bob, not the short boy’s cut that e wanted. Fortunately, Maia’s mom is able to remedy this error at home, and Maia, much to eir delight, is now more frequently misgendered as a boy while out in public. Maia reflects on eir close relationship with eir sister Phoebe, who is also queer and who helps Maia navigate haircuts, clothes shopping, and more. When Maia is in tenth grade, Phoebe vocalizes that she thinks of em as “a genderless person,” and Maia feels seen by eir sister. Maia continues to lament eir state of gender confusion, and a colorfully illustrated timeline shows em coming out over the course of high school as bisexual, then as a lesbian, then as bisexual again, then as asexual, then again as bi. The difficulties of categorizing Maia’s sexuality are, nonetheless, a direct result of eir persistent gender confusion.

A work-study job at the library leads to more revelations about Maia’s seeming asexuality when a patron confesses that she broke up with her boyfriend to pursue a crush on Maia. Made uneasy by this declaration of romantic interest, Maia realizes that e already derives the most appealing aspects of dating from eir friendships and is much less interested in the other aspects, such as physical intimacy. These realizations lead Maia to wonder, with some dread, how many times e’s going to have to let down people who are romantically interested in eir. At the same time, Maia’s love of erotic gay fiction continues unabated, leaving em somewhat confused about eir own sexual inclinations. Even so, Maia takes notable steps in the direction of an asexual identity. While Maia had earlier nursed crushes on boys and girls at school, e turns down a more concrete opportunity to date a girl who has made her romantic interest clear, acknowledging that rejections like these will surely become a fact of life for em. Maia still hasn’t settled on a declared gender identity or sexuality, but as e begins to mature from adolescence into adulthood, more pieces of the puzzle gradually fall into place.

Maia also makes an important discovery about why e’s been adopting a more boyish or masculine appearance. Fascinated with the talent and flamboyant apparel of figure skater Johnny Weir, Maia introduces “the clearest metaphor I had for my own gender identity in college” in the image of a scale. On this metaphorical scale, Maia embraces masculine traits to outweigh the crushing impact of being assigned female at birth, though Maia notes that, in this endeavor, “the end goal wasn’t masculinity—the goal was BALANCE.” Had e been born a boy, Maia would have presented like Weir does, embracing culturally feminine traits such as nail polish, tassels, and floral clothing. In other words, the striving for gender balance would have tipped in the other direction. While Maia will later go on to update this metaphor, it proves instrumental in helping em work through eir own sense of gender-basedout-of-placeness. Maia doesn’t feel like a girl but isn’t necessarily a trans man because e doesn’t feel like a boy either, only presenting with boyish qualities in order to disrupt society’s perception that e’s a girl. 

The joy Maia experiences from imitating queer role models like Weir is, however, clouded over by less affirming experiences, the most traumatic of these being eir first Pap smear exam. Maia longs to ask the physician why e doesn’t feel like a girl and why e’s so attracted to gay male erotica. Instead, e stays silent and endures extreme pain, which leaves Maia in tears in the parking lot. Forced to reckon with a part of eir body that e feels no personal identification with, even as society at large assumes and compels this identification, this pain is as profoundly psychological for Maia as it is physical. It reinforces, at a visceral level, the gender dysphoria that Maia already feels while navigating social relationships in a gender-binary world, marking this sense of dysphoria with intense physical pain. After this experience, Maia resolves never to let anything enter eir body like this again. This difficult scene shows how traumatic the medicalization of gender can be for nonbinary individuals.

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