When Julian Gibson realizes he’s transgender, he doesn’t think anything has to change. His parents and friends still call him Julia and think he’s a girl, but so long as Julian can still hang out with his best friend Aiden and read sci-fi novels with his dad, life seems pretty good.
Then high school happens. Aiden ditches him, and a new girl, Maria, keeps cornering him in the girls’ bathroom. A full year after discovering he’s transgender, Julian realizes life changes whether you’re ready for it or not.
So Julian makes a deal with himself: if he can tell his secret to three people, it is no longer a hoax. What happens during his slow process of coming out leads Julian down odd pathways of friendship, romance, Christmas shopping, random parties, bad movies, and a realization about why kids still believe in Santa -- it’s sometimes better than discovering the truth.
Inside the library Julian moved in between the dusty 800 and 700 stacks. This project was supposed to be an essay on sea horses for his biology class, which then led into an English class discussion about the way in which the animal-as-metaphor worked in Moby Dick. The assignments Julian had for middle school always sounded hard, but they weren’t that bad. The teachers talked a lot about preparing kids for high school as if it was a secret mission or boot camp. But Julian had seen his mother go through piles of research for her degree, and even that, once you got the hang of it, wasn’t difficult. Most of high school was about just doing the work and handing something in so the teachers could grade and do their jobs.
Nothing in school was really that hard for Julian, anyway. With no siblings and limited TV allowances (thanks to his mother’s ruling), he spent most of his time alone in his room, reading books he had pulled from his parents’ many shelves or the library at school. It was rare that he needed to go to the city’s library like this for specific books. If he couldn’t find what he needed at school or at home, he could always fall back on the excuse of needing a different citation for his project. His mother especially loved that excuse. Research, above all else, was supposed to be ethical as much as it was informative. Really, what Julian was looking for tonight felt personal, almost too much to share on his permanent record or punch card for the school library.
In between the shelves, he found the first book on sea horses. He had been reading Wikipedia online (a source the teachers had actually blocked from his middle school) when he realized that male sea horses were the ones to keep the babies. As he kept reading, he found that certain types of fish -- for example parrotfish and clownfish -- changed their gender when their family structures were threatened. Using his scientific analysis, Julian realized the Disney movie Finding Nemo should have had Marlin turn into Nemo’s mother in the film after his mother was killed. But Disney was one for creative license, Julian knew. They had let the stepsisters in Cinderella keep their feet intact, even if that really wasn’t how it was in the original Grimm story.
All of this searching for underwater life had led Julian to the fiction section online. He had followed the never-ending morass of names and identifications on Wikipedia, and went from clownfish and parrotfish in biology to a novel called Parrotfish. When he read the write-up for the book, he discovered it was about a transgender boy who uses the fish to explain to his lab partner how he has always felt like a boy -- even if no one else thought he was one. Julian had stopped reading after that in shock.
Transgender? he had repeated in his head. What did that even mean? It didn’t take too much longer online to put the pieces together. He had known what drag queens were from listening in when his parents watched Will & Grace too loudly. And he had seen what butch lesbians looked like on the same show. But he had thought, as far as gender spectrum went, those two were the end. Maybe tomboy could be added in there every so often, but even that word made Julian uncomfortable. He had been called “tomboy” for years during middle school, sometimes as an insult and sometimes as a description of his clothing. But now at high school, the tomboy names had stopped. He was called “young lady” by his teachers and principal or “miss” by substitute teachers. It didn’t make sense anymore, but he had never really realized why.
