Lily Cooney was fully committed to social justice. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the now-26-year-old writing tutor marched proudly in Black Lives Matters protests through the streets of Portland, Oregon.
But the culture in which she was steeped began to take a toll on her mental health. As a white person, she felt responsible for America’s racist legacy of slavery, and worried about her relationship with her Asian American girlfriend. “I felt like I was hurting her, harming her, just by being white,” Cooney told me.
Though she knew she was a lesbian, she began to identify as nonbinary, a result of her understanding that being a “cis woman” was “associated with colonization and white supremacy and oppression.”
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