This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair on May 13th, 2023 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

My people have been dying with every 8:30 NBC time slot
on Thursday nights since ‘94.
                            If you’re an interviewer afraid of landmines,
don’t you dare say the word intersex without looking us in the eye.
              We have more names to give than backs.
When this chest balloons into tits,
there is no laugh track to shrink it down.
                             All the hermaphrodite jokes end up on television
               because they aren’t money enough for Hollywood.
               So who will make me more man than punchline?
You see, I am merely a loaded gun shooting blanks.

INTERSEX BOY WATCHES EPISODE 179 OF FRIENDS FOR THE FIRST TIME

I think often about the rush to include/disclude trans people without any nuance; the knee jerk assumption of binary trans. I think about women who ‘pass’ so completely that people misgender them back to a misfit, assume their intention as playing at ‘man’. I’m thinking now about getting caught in that dragnet by default—dolphin to tuna. Unseen and unthought of, and yet dying still. What is your read on this moment? Would you rather sit this one out or see your people get loud?

It’s a good question, and maybe one I don’t yet have the right answer to. I think that’s why I wrote this book and my last book, if I’m being honest, to uncover what the right answer would be. Surprise, surprise, it’s still a work in progress! There are many layers to it, given how much of a spectrum everything is. The first question is: Are intersex people underneath the trans umbrella? I’m not even sure. For other intersex people, the answer might be more obvious, but I’ve used he/him pronouns (though I officially use he/they now) for almost my entire life and I’ve been (for the most part) a male-presenting person. DNA-wise, I’m none of that. At that point, I align myself with intersex folks first and foremost, and I don’t want to sit out any of our fights. I want to see my people get loud AND I want to be yelling right alongside them.

You cannot be two things at once without first being desirable enough to a blade unwilling to end you. No one has ever said He is intersex, so I want to fuck him. But maybe someday they will,

VAMPIRE OF THE NORTH COAST

I’m not sure what the question is here other than to say, I fuck with this feeling as much as my acespec allows it. Always there in the background, the want (need) to be wanted not despite, but because.

It’s just so human to want and be wanted, regardless of if it’s sexual or romantic or at a basic level of human kindness. I think wanting to be perceived as fuckable is more of an extension of, to me at least, wanting to be alive and present in someone else’s perception of their immediate surroundings. I’ve lived in this body long enough to know what the basement of being ignored feels like, and often the call is coming from inside the house. Perhaps I was projecting a bit of my own skewed self-misanthropy there, but the desire remains the same. 

A doctor first looked upon us infidels–
bottles of hope shaped like handguns,

wide-eyed and crying
and not yet curled inwards away from laughter–

and decided to selfishly kill
what we didn’t even know was there to begin with

JOHN CARPENTER’S HALLOWEEN, 1978

I’m not sure even now how much of the population at large understands just how detrimental accepted medical practices have been, and continue to be, for intersex infants, babies, children, and adults. Forced gendering, surgical intervention, and identity suppression are very real examples of the forced transing of children we hear all about and yet. What is it like to live intersex in this moment? What is the future of intersex justice with transphobia so much on the rise?

I can’t speak for every intersex person, nor do I want to, so I’ll keep it personal. Earlier in 2023, I tweeted about it being National Intersex Day. The day went by, and my mutuals were liking it and all was well and good. It’s pretty commonplace, at least on my timeline and in company with my acquaintances online, that I’m intersex. I put out a whole book about it two years ago and haven’t shut up since! But, I slowly started getting replies from people on there, almost all of them from the UK, and they were pretty nasty. 

It turned out to be other intersex people from across the pond who didn’t fuck with the intersex pride I was putting on display. Because I wasn’t reveling in a life of pain and was happy to embrace this identity, it was an issue to them. It was the intersex equivalency of TERFs, people not really cool with how being intersex has become a conversation with gender involved. I called my intersex beloveds “chromosomal cowboys,” which is a nod to something in both of my books, and those English brats HATED it.

I had no idea that this was even a thing. That was my own naivety I guess. I had seen acts of internalized homophobia and transphobia within the gay and trans communities constantly, but I never had considered the violence that some intersex folks might inflict on other intersex folks. My mentions on Twitter were bludgeoned by it; one man even went as far as doxxing me on his own page. It’s fine now, but I think the future of intersex justice is massively dependent on us treating our own kind with grace and love. How else can we ask non-intersex people to give us the same light if we are not copacetic with making our own for each other? It can be painful to live an intersex life, and it often is, and I think it’s 100% fine to profess how you don’t think that’s fair, or you don’t want to be prideful of it. But, haven’t we been taught that each of us walks the earth on different roads? That feels cliche to say, but, at this point, what else have I got?

I said I’d work on myself but maybe that meant
falling in love with the mirror again.

Fate does what it wants. I should know,

GRAY AND GOLD

I suppose this question is nominally interested in your intersexuality but also. How often does fate/predetermination feel like sentence? How often reprieve?

I think, when I was younger, it felt much more like a sentence. But that was likely a product of me being 20 years old and in a community with no other intersex people (that I knew of). It can get lonely, and sometimes destiny is ugly. But as I grew up and have met more people like me and been able to make more non-intersex people aware of me and my life, fate feels much more like a reprieve. That being said, I can’t change this part of me. But I don’t think I want to anymore. There was definitely a point, when I was constantly switching between methods of HRT, that I considered what life would be like without it. Sometimes I even fantasized about it. But, now, I’ve come to love how my destiny is unlike anyone else’s. Uniqueness isn’t a death sentence, and it took a long while to say that. 

Who was it that said TO COME OUT IS TO REMEMBER HOW JOY FEELS.
Because the truth is, here I am. And the truth is I have never felt so alone.

CHROMOSOMAL CLIT

Queerness as revelation, as one and done announcement of pride. Coming out as a one and done situation. The confidence currency of, “I told my mom and she said, ‘I know,’ and we cried.” I have to tell you, it’s all a little You’ve Got This! for me. In the year of someone’s lord twenty twenty three it feels like we come out to each other more often than others. Every day a new gatekeeping label to divide us, another ‘gold star’ or discourse on ‘Queer’, another trans women exclusion framed as “safety” dog whistling so loud blood rises in all non-terf ears. Call me pessimistic but I swear I’m just grieving. When you think about claiming your full you, how much of that work is needfully self love? How much do you hold hope for finding your people more broadly? As we go into pride month, what’s the lip service to actual community ratio you see?

That’s a great question and I wish I had a really good answer. I don’t think I had any ceremonial coming out moment. Truth be told, I just started writing poems about it and then those poems got published in journals. And that was my “here I am” moment. In a lot of ways, The Neon Hollywood Cowboy was a coming out party. And a lot of people read that book, yet I still don’t feel any more loved than I did before no one had read it. Someone once told me that coming out is more for the non-queer people in your life than yourself, and I imagine that isn’t true for everyone, but it made a lot of sense. Me coming out as intersex is just so my family and friends and readers can place a word on top of what’s going on in my body. I say I’m intersex and feel nothing most of the time. I still return to the bathroom once a week and put a needle in my leg. I still have to see an endocrinologist every six months and talk about my penis and how the testosterone is working. I have to say “I’m worried my hair is falling out from the hormones.” Other people know what to make of me now, sadly I’m still trying to do that for myself. The scary question is: Will I ever be satisfied?

I went so long not being held by anyone but the thought of you

WHEN I THINK OF YOU A HABITAT

No question, just fuck you. This line hurts so good.

Unrequited love is a bitch, ain’t it?

                    But in this version, I am the same age my mother was
            when she graduated college and my farts now smell
like my dead papaw’s used to. And the lexicon of this town, once soft-
rock ballads crawling from the throats of Camaro Z28s, is now an old
friend screaming “hermaphrodite fag”
              at me behind a skyline of clenched teeth.
And you can’t dance to the sound of a familiar mouth betraying you.

WHITE NOISE

I’ve pulled this section of WHITE NOISE for two reasons. The first being the very specific function nostalgia plays for those for whom leaving was more necessity than choice. The second, concerns itself with how that visceral is conveyed. Vampire Burrito is, from the first, a sensory experience. Proper nouns in abundance, date checks, and every thought anchored in sight, sound, and smell. Returning to the eight lines of I WILL LOVE YOU TOMORROW AS MUCH AS I LOVE YOU TODAY comes with the ease of knowing how low the couch cushions will settle and how do you do that? Tell us your tricks. How much of your world building is instinct? How much of it is deliberate craft?

I think if I knew the real answer, I wouldn’t do it. Which probably means it’s instinctual. I’m a bit of an oversharer, so giving too much detail is second nature to me. The real craft part is learning how to restrain yourself. There are certain stories in certain poems that never see the light of day because I know that, if I wrote them, it would be too much. A longer poem like “Cyclone Came and Went” is a good example of that. With something like “I Will Love You Tomorrow as Much as I Love You Today,” that was one of those moments, along with “Chromosomal Clit,” where I tried really hard to write a short poem and get my point across in eight or nine lines. World-building is my first goal in poetry. I want to accomplish what a 300-page novel does in a 100-page poetry book. I only write about what I know, or what I want to know. So it’s likely a hybrid of instinct and deliberation. 

a birthright of its own trauma, sewn up and gushing

THERE’S A ROOM WHERE THE LIGHT WON’T FIND YOU

Not even tweezers could be taught to pull love from that sky.

STATE BIRD

Yeah, okay. Oof.

We’ve long had a refrain at my house, ‘you don’t know what house they woke up in’. It helps us remember that everyone comes pre made to each interaction, that the making begins long before even birth. I worry so much that we’ve all lost humanity in our ability to distance ourselves from the rest. There’s a past where we’re smaller and know each other’s birthrights of trauma. How must we come to this one where those traumas forced us to leave it, left us loose in the world?

I’m pretty privileged in this regard, because I’m in a position to be able to go to therapy as much, or as little, as I need it. And that’s a luxury only afforded to a small subset of people in this country. I could nose-dive into a conversation about universal, adequate healthcare for all, but I’ll just streamline it into something more immediately accessible and not bound by governmental approval. 

Growing up, I surrounded myself with friends and partners who were, often, products of broken households, divorced parents, or abusive circumstances. For a long time I didn’t know why, but now, with the retrospect of being an adult many miles away from those people, I realize that that was my only real sense of community that helped me heal my own trauma. And the healing only came through familiarity. I didn’t siphon any sort of breakage from them in order to make light of my own. Coming from a place where communicating about feelings or worries was pussy stuff, it was easy to assimilate into someone else’s place of pain. It made things a lot more livable for me, because I didn’t feel so unique to everyone else. 

I think that’s why I wrote this book, if I’m being honest. The intersex stuff is all secondary, though it might not seem that way. I really wanted to explore what it might be like for a person who was raised with unkindness to then have a child of their own and dream of breaking the cycle. I think that’s the real answer to your question, that it starts with how we bestow grace on our children and forge a place of belonging where they can, always, share how they’re feeling. 

I say: It is my gender that killed all the buffalo and apologized with nickels.
It is this thicket of mediocre road rage that destroyed Pangea.

We also invented Coke Zero. How could you love any of this? Nobody
should.

CYCLONE CAME AND WENT

I want to live in this poem and by that mean, I do, and I hate it but then it often makes me hate me too. It’s never one weed thought alone but the seed that informed it, and the adult before that that readied the soil. It is forever to watch yourself spiral. To see it and know it and still watch yourself swirl. Form into function. How successfully do you think you’ve caught what you wanted? Do you feel the same about LIZARD BRAIN? How do we write this life into the world?

Being self-loating or deprecating in poetry is not new news. But I think it is rarely done from a place of accountability. And I’m sure someone will read “Cyclone Came and Went” and say “He’s not giving us the whole arc of the story,” and they’d be right. But the truth is, if I wrote about every bad thing I’ve ever done, my mom would have nightmares and I’d go mad. You can talk down on yourself as much as you need, so long as it doesn’t detract from the tenderness of the story you’re trying to portray. For “Cyclone Came and Went,” I wanted to try and make sense of whether or not I deserve to be bisexual after saying the F-slur and playing Smear the Queer at school all the time. And of course, the short answer is: Of course I deserve to be bisexual in spite of that. Our past selves do not dictate what direction our souls take. 

I think with “Lizard Brain,” I was trying to chronicle my own headspace after releasing The Neon Hollywood Cowboy two years ago. Did I do enough for intersex people in the book, or was I too self-centered in my own experiences? Does anyone think what I’m going through is actually real? You’ll never be able to answer for anyone else but yourself, and it took me two books to learn that. It probably takes people much longer, so I’m thankful for the brevity in my case.

Just a bunch of no good nobodies always grasping at light

LOOKING FOR MOTHMAN

So much of this book is about absence and empty and lack. I’m thinking about fertitlity and anatomy but also about BACK WHEN WE and the please give my life meaning desperation of that. Tired maybe to talk of the poet as wanting but what is poetics if not an outcry of want. What is your relationship to fullness? What would you tell tiny you to do with that gap? 

Fullness sounds nice, but I’m a little scared of it, if I’m being honest with you. Fullness sounds like an endgame, and no one wants that. Once I have everything I need, what more could I possibly do with what little space, if any, I have left to give? I’d probably tell younger me to kiss more people and drink more water. But, as cliche as it might be, I’m weirdly cool with everything I’ve done up until this point. Without any of it, there’d be no Neon Hollywood Cowboy or Vampire Burrito! Not that I need those to be happy, but they’ve definitely been vessels for me to make sense of things when I didn’t have the emotional capacity to get someone else’s opinion on them. I’m not full, even though, at this very moment, I have very little left to say in poetic form.

And that name, it means Gift of God in whatever language isn’t this one

PRUNTYTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA

they will only say you are gone
once they mistake you for living
                              on your own terms

404 ERROR

There are all these poignant, all too relatable, moments of grief in this collection. I’m curious about your choice to make us sit in them. I feel a pressure to write trans/queer/mad life joyful, defiant. Something about spending my days in the TransMad of press work no doubt, but my own brain is grief filled more often than not. It gets better, or does it? What draws you to writing the mess in-between?

The messy in-between is the best part, to me. I love the sticky spot in the universe between grief and relief. It’s a better place to be than the other two options, I think. There’s a curiosity within that; a moment of possibility. I can be whoever I dream of being in that in-between. I am an in-between down to the bone, all the way to the DNA cluster that dusts the energy beneath my limbs. There’s also, dare I say it, hope in all of that. Uncertainty is an intersex person’s best friend; it’s a fit of potential before the world slams a perception down upon you.

It gets better, always. I think we’ve known that, yes? I think, at the end of The Neon Hollywood Cowboy, that idea of a happy ending was a bit muddied. And that was probably a subconscious reflection of my own uncertainty, because I finished that book at the apex of the pandemic in 2020. It was hard to feel anything but broken when the world beyond me felt just as fractured. When I was finishing Vampire Burrito, I consciously ended it in a place of hope and joy. If no one else is going to write me into that place, then I will do it myself. As exhausting as that can be, I have never not been the driver of my own doomed Uber. Might as well make a pitstop at a McDonald’s and grab a large Coke before I get stuck in traffic and the stereo takes a shit.