The following essay is excerpted from Thalia Williamson’s memoir The Silent Part.

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She’s between the ages of two and five. That’s the best she can offer. She’s on a beach in Bali, and she’s walking beside her mother. There is photographic evidence of her walking on a beach in Bali, holding her mother’s hand, but she can’t be sure if the photograph captures the same scene as the one she remembers. Likely not. In the photograph it is day, and in the memory it seems to be night. In the photograph she wears a red t-shirt with green sleeves and red shorts. This t-shirt appears in most of the photographs from the era, as if it was her only t-shirt. Who knows. Perhaps she wore it at the scene of the memory, walking alongside her mother, maybe holding her mother’s hand, maybe not, perhaps running about, skittish, a small child with a limited sense of the world and her place within it, strolling safely through another land as good as if she owned it. It is likely, in both scenes, that other family members are present. Her father, we might guess, took the picture. But that is neither here nor there. On the night in question, a vendor sells translucent trinkets. Who is the vendor? What does their life look like? The girl gives this little thought. It’s like this whole world was made for her. A cool breeze blows. As they approach the vendor, the young girl sees another girl getting her hair braided. This girl looks beautiful. The young girl points at the girl getting braids. She says: Mummy, I want to do it. Can I? Her mother says no. That’s for girls.

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Bali was a holiday. Between the ages of two and five she lived in Singapore, a white girl with fair skin and blonde hair and a house so big she had to bounce a bouncy ball hard against the floor to make it hit the ceiling. Sometimes young couples would want to take a photo with her. She didn’t know what it was for apart from that her mum said her blonde hair was rare here. It made her feel pretty. Special. At her primary school the boys and girls all sat together, but she would only play with the boys. It was what her parents wanted and what the school wanted. The world had decided. And she was mostly fine with it, although the boys would sometimes pick on her. Something about her seemed to make them uneasy. Was it the fact that she was the only girl in their friendship group? One time she had to paint a picture of her mother in an art class and made a mistake on her mother’s face and tried to correct the mistake with another lick of paint and kept attempting corrections until her mother’s face became a green, blurry blob, like mold. Her mother, the one supposed to love and care for her, had become mold. She was loved and cared for by mold. Loving, seeking safety, from mold. She cried so hard they had to call her mother, which would make things worse because her mother would have to see the mold. And one of the boys, she remembers (does she?)—was it Chris? Adrian? did it happen at Adrian’s huge house the day that mum got mad and yelled at her in the car? did she cry because of Adrian/Chris/whomever or was it just because of mum?—that one of the boys was saying to her, Why are you being so sensitive? You’re acting like a girl.

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What was wrong with being a girl? What was wrong with crying? Why does crying make you a girl? Was it different if a girl cried than if a boy cried? Was she not actually a girl? She didn’t look like other girls. She was kept away from other girls. She often didn’t think of herself as a girl. Or she didn’t think about her girlhood. Didn’t dare. Others always called her a boy. Better, among the boys, to act like a boy, to mimic their values even if in secret she aspired to be like other girls, girls and women; even if she knew that everything she heard about boys didn’t apply to her—their strength, their smarts, their competence, or whatever—even if she would have to fake all these things and live always at the precipice of a threatening exposure; and even if she knew that everything she heard about girls—their frivolous sensitivity, for example—hurt her, became her, and shaped the same self for whom she craved that same exposure. Better to pretend. But why did they say that crying makes you weak? Crying hurt. Crying meant gazing at the pain without flinching, taking a nosedive through the storm’s eye. Surely avoiding pain would be the weaker choice? All these thoughts and more, between the ages of three and five, ran wordless through her bones; structured her personality; outlined the contours of her omissions and displays; structured her brain around dark, forbidden zones; mapped circuitous pathways to circumvent them. In short, the thoughts divided her in two. Real girl. Fake boy. 

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When she was five her family moved back to her birthplace of England. It was cold. Why did they bring her to this awful place where the air hurt your skin and didn’t stop blowing? Her school made her wear shorts in winter, and it was terrible, and she promised she would always remember how alive she felt and how big the world was to a child because all the adults around her seemed to have forgotten this or why would they make her wear shorts in winter. It was a Christian school. The boys and girls had class together but parted in the playground. Most of the students were white, peach-fleshed, ugly like her, but none of them had lived in Asia. When she said she was from Singapore, everybody laughed, and she at once thought she understood and refused to understand, so she gulped it down deep and kept it there, wherever it sank. She wasn’t from Singapore. Fine. But did they laugh at her pretending or because they thought being Asian was bad? She should take note. She’d learn. She didn’t like these people but wanted to be like them and, more than she realized, already was. But what was she actually? They made her stay after school to teach her how to hold a pencil and write letters on the lines. The pencil wore a special plastic skirt to help her hold it. She wanted to wear a skirt. She struggled. With everything, she struggled. The other children were mean. The English were mean. There was one blond boy who was tall and wide and a bully, and she couldn’t understand his speech, and he didn’t understand the questions teachers asked, and she dreamed she was him, her perception so blurred she couldn’t navigate the classroom. One time when her mum picked her up from the special needs class she ran so fast to hug her that her tooth flew out, and she filled her mum’s dress with blood. Other times, when her mother was late, she waited alone outside the school, her legs shivering in the cold, and she worried that her mother had died. She heard from the Bible in school assembly. She had to sing hymns in school assembly. She had to praise Jesus in school assembly. She had arrived as a stranger in a strange land where she looked and spoke like the strangers did and hated them all and herself even more. Was she strange? The English shared some barbs with the boys in Singapore: Why are you crying? Stop acting like a girl. Something had to change. It wasn’t going to be the world.

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The only thing worse than being a girl, she learned, was being a girl who was supposed to be a boy. Or being a boy who was like a girl. The girlishness of girls could at least be blamed on the fact they were girls, poor things. She had no excuse: It was clear, by now, already, that she was meant to be a boy or to live as a boy, even if it wasn’t clear why. She didn’t really know or think much about genitals, as far as she remembers. Or did she? Did she look at them? Did she play with them, that young? Of course it was clear why she had to live as a boy: she had a penis. But why did she have a penis? Why did she have to have a penis? She tried to comport herself as a boy. She made special compartments for her girlish desires. But what was a girlish desire? What was a girl? What was girlishness? What did those who attacked her see in her? Did they see a girl? The same thing she saw? Did they understand what she was before she could fully grasp it herself? But whereas she saw it as right, being a girl, they saw it as wrong, so that she, of course, one against an insistent many, came to agree that she was, in some fundamental way, wrong. A logical contradiction. A moral disgrace. Better to just be a boy. So why did it still hurt her when girls were demeaned? And why did she feel jealous when she heard them praised? And why did she feel like she was less than both, the girls as much as the boys? Were there others like her? Was she the only one? The Girls: What lucky, precious, strange beings. If only she could understand. If only if only if only.

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The eight-year-old girl, who has been at school in England for a few years now, is now trying to tell me something. Which is to say I am finally listening to her, to all those words that got pushed down and locked up, kept almost always out of sight. I’ve been teaching her, too, about all the things I’ve learned since she and I were one. She says that she gets why I’m asking her for memories, she appreciates it, and she wants to help. She is glad someone is there for her; no one had ever been there for her in this way. But she has been pushed down, locked up: she never got to see much, so there’s not much for her to show. The monster had mostly been in charge. The monster? I ask. The monster, she says. Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, she says. I’m talking about the one who pushed me down, locked me up—until you came along to listen—who saw my nature as a threat, who hated what I was, who tried to deny it was even there. It was a form of self-hatred, she says, because the monster was me, just another part of me, a fake-boy part of me, a part that hated me, the part that cared to listen to what others had to say. Poor girl. How articulate she’s become, stewing inside me all these years. I don’t want to fight her. I’m here to finally listen, to support her, to let her just be. But I have to tell her the truth: You never were the monster, I say. The monster was never a part of you. The monster was the world, the adults, family, the other children, the TV, the teachers, the syllabi, the intricate encoding of gender norms in clothes and toys and activities and insults, all of it, splitting you daily into fragments. You took the monster’s hatred for your own. You kept it like armor. It was a form of anticipation, an insight into the consequence of owning who you are. Wisdom, in other words. Foresight or intelligence. A psychic response to social oppression. What I’m trying to say, I say to her, is that as strange as it seems, the monster was there, pushing you down, locking you up, sure; but the monster only seemed like you; you learned the monster inside out; if the monster was a part of you then perhaps you could control it. You held onto its hatred if only to survive.

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Tell them about the happy times, the eight-year-old says, the ten-year-old says, the twelve-year-old says. Why? I ask. Because there are so many happy times, she says. But why should I tell them? I ask. Because of what everyone is telling me, she says. You’re eight years old, they say. You’re from a good home, they say. Your parents are together. They have money. And you go to a private school. This is a first-world country, they say. Stop acting like you’ve been through some shit, they say. You’re just desperate, they say, for attention. Don’t they have a point, she asks? Maybe they do, I say. All of that stuff is true, I say. I mean almost all of it. You’re not acting like you’ve been through some shit; your challenges are real; you’ve been starved of attention, so you crave it. Respect your advantages, but don’t use others’ pain to avoid dealing with your own. The people who say these things to you, these people who are white, middle class, “first-world” British country kids like you, is it because they care about people poorer than them or people at state schools or people from the “third world”? No. They just don’t want to hear about pain. The little girl is silent. There are tears in her eyes. You’re asking too much of me, she says. I’m just a little girl. This is too complicated for me. And I say: You’re right. I’m sorry. We should take our time. I’m getting a bit confused here, too. I think I’m trying too hard. Why don’t we talk about happy times? We deserve to do that too.

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Now she is maybe four years old swimming in an outdoor pool in Singapore. She dips underwater, swims to the wall, rises up, grabs the ledge. Look, mummy, she says. I’m a mermaid, she says. I’m a fish. Her mother is talking to a friend. Very good, her mother says, giving only a brief glance before returning to her friend. Is this a happy memory? I ask. I really   don’t  know  anymore, the eight-ten-twelve-year-old says. You’ve described it like our mum is elsewhere, she says. Like she doesn’t really care. And you’ve crammed my head with so much stuff. I know you’re trying to help, she says. But I’m a child. And you’ve filled my head with all these adult ideas. Listen to the way I have started to talk. I’m so confused. So so so so so confused. It hurts. I’m sorry, I say (again). I’m doing this all alone. I’m working it out as I go along. But trust me, I say, this is going somewhere. We’re heading somewhere. Healing always hurts. Are we really trying to heal? she asks. I thought you were trying to tell a story, she says. An important story. Our story, maybe. Or something bigger, you hoped. And it looks like you’ve got stuck, she says. It looks like you can’t get past our early years in England. Why don’t you leave me be for now? You’ve let me know that it’s OK for me to know I am a girl, she says. And that’s enough. Now let me go and play. Let me make friends with the girls in the playground. Let me insist that I’m just like them. Teach them, if I need to. You can find me any time. And if you want to spend time with me, let’s use it to play. I’m tired of all this work. Haven’t I had to work enough?

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I wish it was that easy, I say.

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The truth is that because of the monster and the fallible ways of memory, ages five through twelve are a blur. She made friends, almost all of whom were boys. She loved video games. She would play WWF, Mario Kart, House of the Dead. She hated watching others play, always wanted to play herself, got jealous, felt bad for feeling jealous, felt jealous of others for their apparent lack of jealousy, their capacity for patience. If only she was patient, she would better fit in. Nothing much seemed to have much to do with gender, like if a scientific observer wanted to look at this girl at this time in her life and find evidence that her behavior or inner world oriented around a gendered reality at odds with how the world treated her, what would they find? At some point her friends were the popular boys. At some point these boys were her friends no more. She got quarantined to the playground’s misfit quadrant. The boys here punched each other’s balls. She hated the pain of being punched, but something about it seemed… right? What? She watched the girls play hopscotch or whatever. Do girl things. Open and close paper flowers. What would it be like to be like them? Sometimes she would feel jealous, would feel bad for feeling jealous. Other times she felt sensations that might be read as envy and transmuted them into something else: Attraction? Misogyny? She couldn’t repress the sensations themselves, only her interpretation. Her sensory field grew more confusing. Divided. Kept dividing.

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The between-five-and-twelve-year-old girl is on a bus setting off for a school trip. She sits alone, and in the seat in front sit the messenger and the popular girl. Once the journey is underway the two girls turn around, forming a pincer around her, and start asking questions.  She  only  remembers  one  of  the  questions. Can we see your penis? they ask. Why? she asks. Because we’ve never seen a penis before. OK. Here. Ew. Gross. She sits in silence alone for the rest of the journey wondering why she had said yes and why it had felt exciting before she said yes and awful after and worse still after she’d shown the thing. Then she doesn’t think about it and a few days later she is found in the bag racks before school starts; she is smashing her briefcase—the children carry briefcases in this English private school—against the wooden beams of the racks, against the other bags, splintering the wood, sending fragments of plastic from the case’s casing all around the room. A teacher finds her. She thinks she’s in trouble, but the teacher is concerned, shows a great amount of care, which in turn concerns the girl, distresses her, because what if she has to tell the teacher the source of her distress, which source and which distress she doesn’t anyway understand? The teacher later tells her eldest brother about the incident, and the eldest brother comes to speak with her. She has some vague sense that the briefcase incident is connected to the bus incident but can’t quite grasp it, wants to express it, can’t understand why all of it feels icky and so bad. But then she kind of does express it. She plants her face into her brother’s side and cries, and her brother’s blue blazer grows damp with tears.

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She was afraid of her brothers. Not entirely their fault. They were the model of what she was supposed to be. They were boys. The eldest was such a leader, the middle was so smart, and she was, well… she was sensitive—she remembers her mother once saying all this to another mother while she was right there, holding her mother’s hand, in obvious ear shot. She wanted to be called sensitive like an artist is sensitive, like her perceptions were richer or sharper than others’. She would have preferred to be called talented. She knew that sensitive here meant simply that she had strong emotions, she was oversensitive, she was reactive, she would sulk if there was so much as tomato sauce on her pasta, she would tantrum when mocked, she washed her hands so much the skin peeled off in ever-expanding circles in the center of her palms, she was easily brought to tears. Smart girl: she didn’t have all the language I do, but still, she understood what her mother meant. She knew also that, true to the implication of her mother’s words, she was, indeed, skilled at crying, so good that she found a function in team-based playground games: she could, by now, bring on the waterworks at will and would set them flowing when the other team gained an advantage so that her team could call a fowl and regain the game. She remembers feeling proud that she had turned a characteristic behavior to her advantage: The distress she felt at how rough it was to play with the boys now became something useful, even valuable. She learned to integrate this behavior so that it could find an appropriate place within the rules and regulations of her gender. These acts of contortion would come to form the basis of what she would mistakenly come to think of, for decades, as her personality. 

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The further into the self we go, I tell little Thalia, the further out we’ll reach—she is sitting on my knee; she is running loops around me—until we’re no longer affixed to the self alone but can trace the web that weaves it. She runs into a playground, itself an apparition born of her approach, and jumps onto the spinning wheel and pedals it to speed. But it seems, I say, like right now, our shame, this monster, is keeping us—both of us—locked in a solipsistic zone that blocks the bigger picture. She jumps off the spinning wheel and, after a few steps, stumbles, since our still world now, for her, is spinning. What can we do, is what I mean, I say, to get out into the wider world, to break from memoir into history or histories or philosophy or maybe truth or better yet into praxis, into something—whatever—that is more than just us? She runs and trips and lands on her knee, and it is speckles of red and peels of skin and crescents of tears and globules of snot in synchronized excretion. I want to believe, I say, that this is where we’re going. But also, I say, more simply—because this is where I feel we have to begin—I just want to learn to love you, to love myself through you, to see all of this pain as grounded in something more than sensitivity and self-imposed madness, and to pull back the curtain on what gender did to us. She’s back on her feet, and after a few light sniffs, she runs up to the spinning wheel and gets it going again; she holds fast to a pole and leans back so low, so low, that the gravelly gray blur beneath would have caught her shirt had the spinning wheel’s draft not whipped it clear, swept it up across her skin, made one smooth hill across her spine. Be careful, I say. You might hurt yourself, I say. It is dangerous, I say, to go so fast. But I’m off in my own world. She hasn’t heard a thing. And before she has a chance to fall, the gravel fades, then the sky, then the wheel with all its poles; and as her grip slips through the fading air, she dissolves into the void.