My mother didn’t remember how many times she broke my heart. I hadn’t known that he’d buried his bootlegging money in the woods and thrown my grandmother against the wall when she tried to dig it up. “And you were always so different,” she said, “different from the whole world.”She hadn’t known that in 1996, I became the only out person in my rural Appalachian high school. View all New York Times newsletters. My mother gave up what she had always known about gender in order to gain a son.

Source: New York Times January 28, 2017 19:27 UTC