By Sofie Llewellyn Riley
Featured Art: “Before Sunrise Locarno Beach” by Thad DeVassie

Autumn in Minnesota doesn’t look so different from Ohio. The trees are the same color, the farms the same distance from the cities. The congestion and construction are the same consistency, slowing traffic to a mucus-like crawl. If I were to close my eyes in the park beside the Mississippi River, I would hear birds that sounded like the starlings that sat on the pine branches in my childhood backyard. This is a trick I play on myself sometimes, to try and feel as though I am near where I am from.

“Biological sex,” “birth sex,” and “sex” mean the biological indication of male and female, including sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience of gender. [ . . .]

“Gender-related condition” means any condition where an individual feels an incongruence between the individual’s gender identity and biological sex. “Genderrelated condition” includes gender dysphoria.—Ohio House Bill 68 [Emphasis always mine]

Among the transgendered who move away from red states home is often a dirty word. The well-worn story goes like this: we are born to families who can’t, or won’t, see beyond the markings of our birth, the pink-and-blue balloons and nursery colors, who believe that everything is the way it looks. We are raised in ways that make us uncomfortable, but we hide the parts of ourselves which are contrary. From ourselves, sometimes; from our families, often; from the world, usually.

We find community wherever we can. At some age or another, we come out to be misunderstood by those who have raised us. We fight our way from their clutches, and we wind up in blue states, hardened to love and softened to everything else. We call our families, who call us by the names they gave us instead of the names we have chosen for ourselves. We roll our eyes, or are consoled by our lovers, or laugh it all off with a twinge lodged deep in our guts.

I will never be able to change the gender marker on my birth certificate. This became true of any such documentation from Ohio around two years ago, though I’m not sure of the exact date. When exactly my selfhood became fixed in space and time doesn’t interest me. Someone with the benefit of hindsight will find this date later. Perhaps myself, if I am so lucky to inherit hindsight. I tell my lover I will do a fuck-you tour of Ohio one day, that I will bring my guitar and my rage and pull down every pillar I can find with a Corinthian base. “Why should it be a fuck-you tour?” they ask me. “Why throw out the whole place? Queer people live there too.” I don’t have an answer for that.

No state institution of higher education, as defined in section 3345.011 of the Revised Code, shall use any application for employment with the institution that asks for, or contains a field in which an applicant may indicate, the applicant’s preferred gender pronouns.—Ohio House Bill 686

We are not supposed to long for home. What is home for many of us but a town with crosses in the yards, the school hallways where we heard slurs volleyed toward us for the first time, the old women on Sundays telling us it’s a sin of the flesh to want to be more than how we were gendered as infants? What is home but a writ stake in the ground telling us never to return? It would seem our true homes are on paper in houses of power. If we didn’t belong there, why would the cruel men write us into so much work?

My great-grandfather was a carpenter who built the wooden railings on the path to Old Man’s Cave in Hocking Hills State Park. (How rough I imagine his hands, how smooth the cuts of his lathe!) The place has since become one of Southern Ohio’s greatest tourist attractions, though I’ve always felt some ownership over the park because of those railings. The State of Ohio may own the land, but the railings were my birthright, every splinter a bequeathment.

No school shall permit a member of the female biological sex to use a student restroom, locker room, changing room, or shower room that has been designated by the school for the exclusive use of the male biological sex. No school shall permit a member of the male biological sex to use a student restroom, locker room, changing room, or shower room that has been designated by the school for the exclusive use of the female biological sex.—Ohio House Bill 183

No school shall construct, establish, or maintain a multi-occupancy facility that is designated as nongendered, multigendered, or open to all genders.—Ohio Senate Bill 104

What are we supposed to call ourselves when we have to leave? The word refugee seems wrong, not only for the legal definition—we are not (yet) fleeing our country—but also because we are not escaping war, or famine, or imperialism. Who am I to take that title from those whose homes my country has taken through more violent means? I have called myself, at various points, a fugitive, which seems increasingly correct as more laws are passed in Ohio limiting my ability to live there. (There is a $10,000 bounty on transgender individuals in bathrooms in Odessa, Texas. How long until this is true of Columbus, or Cincinnati?)

But fugitive also has its limits. A fugitive does not settle elsewhere, truly.

A fugitive is always running from the law, forever on the lam, Bonnie-andClydeing to the next stop down the road. As many laws as there are that pertain to me and the rest of my community, we are not (yet) at risk of immediate arrest if we return. To be a fugitive is to resign the right to claim any place as home, a depressing thought. A fugitive dies lonely, which I refuse to do.

I see my Cleveland askew sometimes in the spaces between Minneapolis buildings, in the twice-baked bricks and the quality of air. A river city is different from a lake city because a river is different from a lake. A river city’s character is mobile, its qualities rapid. To have two cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) on two sides of a river defies the laws of displacement. How to travel back between one and the other when both must maintain their flow? So much silt throws itself up on the banks in the riverside parks that the cities have decided should stay under tree cover. Given enough time in autumn, green space becomes red-brown-gold becomes negative, a lack.

Sometimes, driving down the road, I’ll think I see the street I grew up on, pointing toward the city I love most. This has happened throughout my life, no matter where I’ve lived. Most Midwestern towns of a certain size have a street called Cleveland Avenue.

No school, interscholastic conference, or organization that regulates interscholastic athletics shall knowingly permit individuals of the male sex to participate on athletic teams or in athletic competitions designated only for participants of the female sex. —Ohio House Bill 6

On the day after the election, my roommate told me he was renewing his passport in case he needs to flee. He remains worried, rightly so, that his right to marry will be taken from him, that his love will become criminal. I don’t know how to tell him that I have already done what he is preparing for. I don’t know how to make him understand that I am living the thing he is afraid of. He speaks of running and I want to say “Listen, it’s not that bad,” but I don’t want to lie to him.

Still, I was lucky to be able to move in with him in Minneapolis at all. I left Ohio in my Honda Fit, not hiding in the back of an apple cart. I have friends (women, married to each other) who fled Ohio for a small town in upstate New York, only to be run out by those who would only see their trans daughter as a misled son. (Yes, even in New York, even with its sky-blue statehouse, even there.) They returned to Ohio and will be leaving again soon for some other blue haven. I was fortunate to have freedom to choose where I wanted to flee, a fact that overwhelms me.

“Adult cabaret performance” means a performance in a location other than an adult cabaret that is harmful to juveniles or obscene and that features topless dancers; go-go dancers; exotic dancers; strippers; performers or entertainers who exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s or entertainer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts, or other physical markers; or other similar performers or entertainers who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest [ . . . ]—Ohio House Bill 245

The cruel men will tell you gender is not a performance and then ban cabarets. I wear jackets, and rarely don dresses, but my hair is long, and my face grows slender. Will a cabaret come to mean my body or my face? Is the grocery store now a venue for my seduction of the innocent? I should be careful not to shake my hips too violently when I reach toward the top shelf for eggs.

Look upon my genitals then, if you are so insistent on examining them! Here, I’ll even place them flat against my hand for you to gaze upon. Marvel at their externality, tremble in fear of their gonadic shape. Are you offended, cruel men, that they will not stand at attention when they see you? Would you rather I sit on the business side of a camera? If there were a screen between us, just once, would you let me come home?

No, of course you wouldn’t. How silly of me for asking.

There was rust everywhere on the street where I lived as a child. On the backs of the stop signs, on the cars parked in front of the abandoned vacuum cleaner factory. Sometimes I dream that I have grown rust on the back of my ear, or beneath my fingernails. I wake up fearing that there is rust inside my mouth, coating my tongue like a fungus.

I was never outright told it was sinful of me to be as I was. I tell myself I hid too well, but the church ladies must have suspected. I assumed enough about sin to keep myself tucked behind close-cropped hair and quarter-zip sweaters. There were so many sins to keep track of. Eating too much, loving too earnestly. I took them all seriously, though I shouldn’t have. The only one I needed to focus on was the sin of idleness, lest I stay stuck among the rust.

My lover will not return home to Missouri. I will not return home either. What are we if not fugitives? We are not running from the billy club or the dog, but from the gavel and the pen. Eight years and longer, the tide has built and has not yet broken. I check maps of laws to see where I am safe to travel. Every month, another state closes itself from me. I would have leapt across the hills of South Dakota. I would have lain naked in the deserts of Texas. I would have gone home, perhaps, if I could have.

Michigan Representative Josh Schriver: “In terms of endgame, why are we allowing [gender care] for anyone? If we are going to stop this for anyone under 18, why not apply it for anyone over 18? It’s harmful across the board and that’s something we need to take into consideration in terms of the endgame.”

Ohio Representative Gary Click: “That’s a very smart thought there. I think what we know legislatively is we have to take small bites.”

Schriver: “I’m not saying anything in the way of dismissing what you’re saying about children and puberty blockers, that’s all very valid and necessary, I’m just saying moreover in addition to that, we have to be looking at the endgame simultaneously, maybe even using that to move the window to say that this isn’t just wrong 0-18, it’s wrong for everyone and we shouldn’t be allowing that to happen.” —Recorded Twitter Space Meeting, transcribed by Erin Reed, Jan. 27, 2024

Where am I in all this churn? My mother’s family had no trouble seeing me as I am, and my father’s family came around after a spell. When I picked my name it came to me as though delivered from on high. If I had been born right, they would have given me the name I chose anyway, so there were very few beats for them to skip. I was walking among them already for years, an imposter in an ill-fitting eggshell. There is a guilt, sometimes, that I could even dare to long for home when so many of my friends were driven away by their families long before they were driven away by laws. I probably call my mother too often, but she doesn’t mind. Or if she does, she hides it well.

Recently, the Ohio Parks Department switched out my great-grandfather’s railings for green metal ones. I only went to Old Man’s Cave once after that to slide my hands along the new railings. They were too smooth, and I felt too far from myself to return after that.

I wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom in the university I went to. There’s a law about it now, though it’s unclear whether I would be liable for using the bathroom, or whether the school would be liable for letting me. Enforcing these laws is never the point. Such laws are bricks, building up behind us, walling us out. Today, universities; tomorrow, businesses. The cruel men would bar us from the restrooms in our own houses if they could. Soon, we will have nowhere left to piss but the street.

Won’t that be a sight? Our bodies are already made to retain everything: the perceptions of others, crushing solitude and ecstatic closeness. What’s a little water between friends?

The flesh itself is sinful, so the cruel men swear. We are all but worms, I have heard them say, and the body leads the soul to ruin. Is it any wonder that it is forbidden for the soul to shape itself? For the body to choose what it will become? My God, the whole house is being built by those who have never examined the walls of their own hearts!

At morning and at night I swallow pills that let me partake of my own creation, which is itself a heresy. I play God with the form of my breasts, my thighs. Through my endocrine system, my flesh is sanctified.

It is of grave concern to the General Assembly that the medical community is allowing individuals who experience distress at identifying with their biological sex to be subjects of irreversible and drastic non-genital gender reassignment surgery and irreversible, permanently sterilizing genital gender reassignment surgery [ . . .  ]—Ohio House Bill 68

My doctor tells me not to put my life on hold for politics to wait for surgeries. There are ways around the laws if need be. She gives me pointers, should the worst happen, about how to keep my bones from rotting due to lack of sex hormones. If the gavel catches up with me here, I will have to inject small doses of testosterone, she says, having no way to produce it naturally. Antidote for one is venom for another. Everything real exists in the time between dosages.  My lover tells me that I am beloved. We lie together under the twinkling lights of their room. Our sex is insurgent; their kisses on my forehead a revolt.

There is revolution in the way they pluck hair from the corner of my mouth.

The cruel men are shaving the heads of trans women in the prisons of Florida. In conference rooms and Zoom meetings, they are speaking of what is to be done with us. If we are killed in restrooms, and no one is around to hear it, how long will it take for them to dredge up the names the dead have forsaken? This is the question I ask most: How long, how long?

Are we what has happened to us? Not fugitives or refugees, but displaced, as if from a hurricane? History strikes some like a natural disaster, and the rain has been falling on us for a while now. How long will I long for a home that has rejected me? Those hills are not mine. Perhaps they never were.  My God, I pray. My God, don’t let me die lonely.

Rivers run everywhere in the Midwest, carrying sediment, depositing it where they will. I have come to Minnesota, from whence the rivers emerge, to anchor myself in the headwaters so I cannot be carried away. What is home but a barb stuck deep into the silt, daring the current to move you? What is life but a shout into the valley, and the echo that returns?

The Minneapolis autumn churns around me. I look out my window and watch leaves fall as they would in the hills of my ancestors. When I close my eyes, I hear a starling call.

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Sofie Llewellyn Riley is a trans writer, a musician, and a once and future Ohioan. Her work spans literary speculative fiction and personal essay, and can be found in Witness Magazine. She lives in Minneapolis with her cat and her growing collection of instruments.