I’m Andrew Knips. I’m from St. Paul, Minnesota. 

I grew up in the ’90s and early 2000s and in a really, really loving, caring home. My parents provided me with really kinda everything I needed to feel safe and secure growing up, but that was also complemented with a lot of silence. There was silence around race, there was silence around gender. There was definitely silence around queerness. 

So I moved to Philadelphia after college, and I started teaching and studying race and racism, and that led me to studying gender and  had kind of started realizing, like, I wanted to start examining more about who I am, what it means to hold various social identities. 

And that led to me doing a lot of reading and writing and talking with my growing queer community. I started realizing masculinity is not something that I resonate with. It’s not part of who I am. It’s not integral to my identity, and I’m gender expansive. And queerness is… is more part of my life than was given permission to be when I was growing up. 

So I came out to my wife, I came out to a few close friends and colleagues, but I knew that, like, still needed to come out to family in Minnesota, where I grew up, and wasn’t really sure what that was gonna look like and what kind of response I would get. 

Jump ahead to going to Minnesota for Christmas. It’s Christmas morning. My niece is, like, ecstatic about having this new toy that she has, which is a, a little thing that paints your, you know, to paint your nails and, you know, it warms them and has all the different doohickeys. I don’t know all the terms. 

But she, she gets really excited and she comes up to my wife and she’s like, “Do… You know, can I paint your nails?” And my wife, I think knowing that, like, that’s something I would be interested in, gave me, like, a little… gave, like, a little space for me to jump in. 

And I was like, “What about painting my nails?” And she’s like, “Okay.” And so we, we come to the basement, and we get all set up, and we’re talking about, like, you know, what’s the pattern we should do, and we decide all pink with little, like, alternating snowflake, little white snowflakes, all the while having this wonderful time and having in the back of my head, like, “How is this gonna land when we go upstairs?” And like, “How am I gonna be received or how am I gonna be seen by my family?” 

So- Finish, go upstairs, everybody kind of gathers around. You know, ooh, like there’s some oohing and aahing at the, at the nails, at the, at the look of it all. And then it’s just done, and everybody goes back to what they were doing. Niece finds the next toy to go play with, and I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

And so a couple months later, I’ve been working on a Substack piece. I write and I have a Substack that’s about race and gender. Part of writing the Substack was gonna be my opportunity to come out publicly, to name that I am gender expansive, and also to change my pronouns to he/they and to, again, expand out the, the versions of myself more publicly. 

And I know that, like, I’m not gonna publish this until I’ve talked to my mom or shared it with my mom or just had that conversation with my mom. My mom is also a writer. And so I’m like, I’m gonna email her my– what I think is a near final draft of this piece and invite her feedback, and that’s kind of gonna be my way of coming out to her and, and letting her know about who I really am. 

And so send her the email, know that it’s gonna take, like, a little bit of time. but I’m, like, anxiously checking my phone. Later that day, get a response and sort of nervously, you know, go, go check it. Of course, sh- it’s a sweet response. One of the first things she says is, “I know that you’ve been exploring your gender.” And that was really affirming. There was relief there. I definitely felt seen.

Do I have the courage to be authentic, to be myself?

And I think really at the end of the day, like, I was telling a story to myself and asking this question, like, “Is my family going to accept me? Am I gonna be loved for who I am?” When really the question I should’ve been asking is, “Do I have the courage to be authentic, to be myself?” 

I give my mom a lot of credit for her response and for just her continuing a pattern and a trend throughout my childhood of love and care. And I give my niece a lot of credit too for just being the, like, little, I don’t know, the source of inspiration and excitement and enthusiasm So yeah. Now, when I get to paint my nails, you know, an affirmation of who I am. It’s about authenticity, and it also transports me back to the basement where, you know, I found that courage.