Day 13: "As They Like It"

Nicole Graev Lipson (Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2023)

In this twenty-two-day series, we are counting down the days to publication (October 22, 2024) with a brief passage from each of the twenty-two essays included in The Best American Essays 2024. These excerpts were curated by Best American Essays Editorial Assistant Cheyenne Paterson and are presented in the order of the volume’s table of contents.

“Do I consider, as my daughter’s body reshapes itself under her winter layers into woman form, that perhaps this isn’t a passing phase at all? Do I wonder, when I behold her avatar, what deeper, unspoken longings it might contain? I do—more and more every day, I do—for in 2021, discussions of gender identity are everywhere: in curricula and lectures and PTA meetings and falls in the latter category. I should not wonder aloud—as Paul and I have in private—whether the drastic uptick in transgender youth might in part reflect a rising preference for gender-bending as the particular teen reinvention mode du jour, the way I briefly became a goth in 1992, or speculate that all these name changes must be hard for teachers to keep track of.”

—Nicole Graev Lipson, “As They Like It,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2023.