Kat and Aly Wright are a queer married couple in Columbia. Kat is queer and nonbinary, and Aly is a bisexual transgender woman.
They spoke about their different – yet overlapping – journeys with gender and how they’ve supported each other along the way.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Aly Wright: I Have a distinct memory from when I was maybe three years old, carrying around a stuffed animal, and I remember telling my parents, “I'm his mommy,” and being corrected, “Um, well, no, you would be daddy,” and that just sat very wrong with me, but experiences like that were what shaped the world around me.
And so, the first real trans person that I saw in media who was being respected was Lana Wachowski. She had just come out, and she was on TV and was introducing Cloud Atlas and everybody treated her with respect. She was gorgeous. She was amazing.
And so, it was the very first time that I saw anybody at all that could possibly have been a role model for me. And instantly, this dam burst – this just wash of feelings hit me, and I knew right then and there that if she could do it, I needed to try.
Kat Wright: After Allie and I started dating, she was the first person who was close to me who really dug in when I was like, “Haha, not like other girls was a phase I had.”
And she was like, “Interesting. Do you think that's because you were queer, or do you think there was anything else going on?”
And I was like, “I don't know.”
“Roller derby helped me feel for the first time like I was in my own body, which was massive for me. I love Derby to this day just for that,” Aly Wright, who is a transgender woman, said. “I feel bad because my body—for all the progress that I've made and all the ways that I feel really good about it, especially compared to before I came out—sometimes I still feel really bad in my body. I look in the mirror, and it just does not match what my brain expects to see there. Or I get really sad because my body doesn't work the way most other women's bodies work. And not just that but, like, I'm exhausted at having had to think about this and deal with this my entire life. But especially most potently the last 10 years I've had to navigate the world with [this] trauma on my shoulders, these weights that I've been carrying. And so when that gets particularly exhausting, and I just start sobbing, Kat is always there to pick me up.”
And she's like, “Listen, okay, like, have you just sat and thought about it?”
And I was like, “Being a woman is hard, like, nobody likes it.”
And she's like, “Hmm, interesting, interesting take. It's okay if you're not cis also, like, there are a ton of options, maybe just think about them.”
And about a week later, Aly was back again, and I was like, “So, I've been thinking, and now I'm gonna cry because I'm having a gender crisis.”
Aly Wright: And I was like, “Okay, hon, yeah, absolutely, yeah,” like, “Let's have this gender crisis together. Let’s do it.”
Kat Wright: I was like, “I don't feel nonbinary enough” because I, when I get dressed up, I get dressed up feminine, and, like, I don't have these women experiences.
But what even is woman experiences? And also like, it just it doesn't feel, like, horribly wrong, but it doesn't feel innately right either, and like, I would rather be neither, or like, be able to switch between both, or like just be something else entirely.
And she was like, “That doesn't sound cis, babe. That doesn't sound super cis.”
Laughter
For me, it meant kind of casting off a lot of boxes and labels and being able to reject a lot of parts of womanhood that never felt like home to me.
Being able to embrace what I wanted, which was just to be a person first, and any kind of gender assigned to me by looking at me second.
![Willow Wilson sits on a chair in her living room on Friday, April 5, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. When Wilson was selecting her name, she said she originally had nearly 100 names to choose from on a Word document. For a while, Wilson said she almost committed to the name “Rumor” because it had a “cool, sultry” and “femme fatale” feel. “But I eventually settled on the Willow just because I think Willow Wilson is such a distinctive name,” Wilson said. “It's kind of like [a] Peter Parker, Clark Kent kind of vibe. … Not to sound too egotistical, but that is a very main character name, and I kind of liked that. And I liked that it was very earthy and crunchy and kind of, you know, hippie, a little bit. So, I think Willow was kind of like, where I was like, ‘Yeah, I like that: Willow Wilson.’ That definitely sounds like a lady who's about town and making the most of her life.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/7f71366/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1750x1158+0+0/resize/260x172!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F41%2F05%2F730cbb9e4211a4e6e37f185c7caf%2F20240405-bas-queer-joy-willow-wilson-0019.jpg)
