How to Elicit an Unreasonable Reaction

1) Birth the subject in a suburban town in east Texas, in a community that completely and totally denigrates queerness. Let's call this place Pearland, as an example.

2) Really work hard to butch them up, because something is clearly amiss on that front.

3) They will realize they are trans, but will not have any context for what to do about that and so they will:

3a) Internalize prevalent narratives about the pitiful and perverted nature that trans people have inherent to their being.

3b) Vacuum-seal themselves in the closet.

3c) Learn to disassociate from everything around them.

4) When they're at their most anxious, having realized they are trans but not knowing what to do about it, send them to spend a summer in a town which (unbeknownst to you) is a sort of a haven for queer people in general, trans women in particular. Let's call this place Ithaca, as an example.

5) For the first time they will see trans people living their most fulfilled queer lives, adhering to beautiful structures of community and vulnerability which they have never been exposed to before. It will feel revelatory.

6) They will work tirelessly on the chance that they could possibly get back to that summer place. They will completely bail on their previous life, leaving truly everything behind, and you will be included in that everything.

7) Over the course of nearly a decade in that place they will transition, learn who they really are, fall in and out of the sort of love that they used to think would be totally inaccessible to them, and establish a community of support that feels closer to family than they've ever gotten.

8) When they come back to visit you for the holidays, after you've tentatively reconciled, tell them that you can't understand what they see in Ithaca, that it's just a snowed-in rust-belt hippie-infested nowhere place and that they should move back to Pearland to be with their 'real' family.

This will surely elicit an unreasonable reaction.

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Now, here are ~600 more words to hit the word count but still submit this as flash fiction.

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