This too!

Big chunky quote from an excerpt...

“'Men,' Mom said sourly, as we listened to NPR detail Bill Clinton’s infidelity. They were holding us back, the bad dads and the mass murderers and child abusers, the wife beaters and the harassing bosses and the corrupt politicians. Not until I was much older did I realize how complicated her feelings were, that she loved men too, and that her anger was forged in that love: obviously for my brother, and her father, but also for the coworkers that stood up for her, the ex-boyfriends, the civil rights activists she marched alongside in the National Mall, listening to Martin Luther King Jr. announce that he had a dream.

Decades later, when I first had to tell her who I was, when I asked her to call me Thomas, the memory of the way she’d said 'men' replayed on a loop as I dialed. I’d picked the name as an offering, after her brother who’d passed. 'I love you,' she’d said, so simple and true, and I’d been so grateful for her, my mother.

All you need to know about her is that after I transitioned and despite everything, what matters most is that she never said 'men' that way to me again."

~ Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man
by Thomas Page McBee