Today, while sitting in the salon in my hometown and having the prerequisite hairdresser chit chat with the guy who’s been doing my hair since high school, the old “so, you got a boyfriend?” question came up.

These days, I don’t even try to stop my chuckle when I answer, “nope”.

We talked a little about why my river has run so dry for so long, and as he ran his scissors through my bangs, my hometown hairdresser goes “well, it’s probably because you’re a real person.”

This is not the first time I’ve been called real. And it’s not the first time this “realness” has been connected to me being single.

What are we to surmise from this?

Does being real immediately put me in some kind of realness cage? A desolate place where people who can’t be anything other than themselves are gawked at by the rest of the fake society? Is being real like having some kind of horrible birthmark on my face — something that frightens potential suitors away with its blatant obviousness? Are we real people like the cyclops kitten; so weird no one wants to get too close but can’t exactly look away? Read More »

So picture this:

You, being the sort of unconvential individualist that you are, discover that you’re the wrong gender. And in the process of changing your gender, you find yourself reconsidering your outlook on life, mostly in the form of your religion. So you change your gender and you change your religion and you get married and start a life. It might take a while for your parents to come to terms with it, but eventually they’ll accept you for you. Right?

Not so for Issa Fazli, a Muslim woman turned Christian man.

Issa, whose name means “Jesus” in Arabic, found happiness with a woman in New York, but each set of their influential Muslim Pakistani parents had a major problem with it. So you’d think the couple would have been suspicious when their parents offered to throw them a party back in Pakistan.

But they weren’t. And then their lives started to suck. Read More »