"my daughter wears men's clothes: do you have a drug for that?"

so in 1998 my mother called a crisis line instigating a violent tackle by a pile of police who took me to a psych hospital to drug me to a comatose state for four months.
the terror of being tackled by police when i had committed no crime haunts me still.

when asked, mother says "but you wore men's clothes."

i have explained to her my theory that incarcerating and force drugging me was a homophobic hate crime----as the asylum functioned as a de facto anti-gay camp.

she never gets this. but wearing men's clothes was the primary crime. in addition to atheism and veganism. never mind it was the nineties and many cool girls wore men's clothes as a nod to grunge and sinead o'connor.  never mind i wore men's clothes also to send a clear message about my interest in women and disinterest in men.

never mind men's clothes are functional, and i was raised by my dad, and he wore men's clothes.

it's hard not to process this information in pain.
i was raised in an extreme Catholic religious indoctrination.
by 1993 or 1994 i stopped receiving the catholic "eucharist" on grounds i was a vegetarian.

so it was only a matter of time before my crime of irreligiosity caught up with me.
my little siblings witnessed this crucifixion of me in horror.
i was then chased around with pills.

if mother really wanted me to wear "women's clothes" she could have purchased some for me, but due to her old age and my father's increasing dementia, basic life needs were always over their heads.  i was starving through college, dumpster diving for bread. little did they imagine i might need money for food or clothes, so i made do with what i could find.

without a car i walked everywhere, and i visibly liked the improvement in reduction of sexual harassment i noticed when i graduated from catholic school plaid mini-skirts to "men's clothes."

i didn't like being sexually harassed on the way to catholic school.
men's clothes and a short hair cut were a breath of freedom from the oppressive genderization.

nevermind it was the nineties.
drugging your kids was a status symbol.
"my daughter wears men's clothes: do you have a drug for that? "

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