To my mother:

When I was born

I became a thorn in your pocket

You wanted me to be Anthony

I disappointed you

You raised me as Antoinette

My picture not even in your locket

You couldn’t protect me, they erased me

To my living sister:

When I grew up

You called me Toni with an “i”

You called my family the Adam’s family

Didn’t matter how beautiful I was

At our mother’s funeral,

you did not even tell the priest I even existed or was a part of your family

At our father’s funeral,

you would not even hold my hand

Oh, your shame and disgrace

Didn’t matter to you that I had become your brother

and did not die

You were happy to bury me alive

You now hide in the bottle

You couldn’t protect me, they erased me

To all of you:

You couldn’t protect me, they erased me

Erased not only by doctors at my birth

Erased from my birth certificate

Erased by counselors at three and four

Erased by my own family

Erased by psychiatry

Erased from forms

Erased from locker rooms

Hormonally erased

Erased by my own marriage

To me:

I tried to erase me too

Addiction

Self-destruction

A disgrace

An abomination

Hated

Hermaphrodite

Transgender

Despised

Taboo

Suicide

Now, how do I rise so beaten?

I can finally see myself now!

I will not submit

to a world that cannot see.

Mx. Anunnaki Ray Marquez

May 30th, 2018

Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite, who also felt beaten down by this world:

“Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!”
― Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite

“You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.”
― Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite