Dear Sad Looking Girl In The Picture:
Hi, my name is Enomena. I used to be a boy named Stuart Donnely but got turned into a mermaid.
Your sad poem reminded me a lot of something I was writing in my kelp scroll diary just the other day.
about how sometimes it seems hopeless how humans can treat those who are different but it really isn't.
What I wrote had to do with how I missed my human parents and wished I could go back home but my adopted mermaid mom
says I never could because humans were all a bunch of mean stupid barbarians and would never accept me. Anyway this is what it said:
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If it was only up to me I might risk swimming into some bay and yelling “Hey everybody look at me, I’m a MERMAID!” and getting someone to call my parents to come get me.

The Mermaid Queen seems to think that doing this would be about the closest thing there is to suicide. That around people I would be nothing better than a freak, that they would throw me in a cage or dissect me or do whatever else their evil hearts desired, without any thoughts about what I wanted at all. She figures she knows everything there is to know about the “crawlers”, even though she’d come up with all this without ever having met or talked to one before me. And that’s about as close to a definition of prejudice as I can think of.

I figured I knew a lot more about humans than her, having lived among them for my whole life. And while I couldn’t deny there would be people who would feel no qualms about doing stuff like that to me (heck, those pirates had been ready to treat me like that when I was still just as human as them…) I also knew there were a lot of good people in the world too.

Plus I knew a few things about being what some folks would call a freak, from that whole being-a-girl-in-a-boy’s-body business, and the mean stupid things some people said and did about the fact of there being transgendered people like me, because of what we did to their sense of how things are meant to be about men and women, all neat and tidy and we came along and wrecked that for them. And it was scary to think that probably more people than not had this prejudice.

But you had to be pretty paranoid to not be able to see that society was moving toward people having rights and being taken seriously. If you looked that horrible thing that happened to you or somebody you heard about last week you might not see it, but if you take the long view you can. A hundred years ago women weren’t considered really citizens. And two hundred years ago African and Native Americans weren’t considered really people. It helps to look at the two-steps-forward and not those one-steps-back that also happen. To look at how incredibly cool my friend Douggie was to me when I came out to him just before we left on vacation, and not how grossed out and weird Mike and then Suzy got about it. A hundred years from now they’re going to look totally stupid and backwards, and Douggie will seem like somebody who knew what was actually what…

Queen Atlantea kept going back to what people used to do to the mermaids they caught, and how PT Barnum put the pickled remains of one on display for people to gawk at, but that was what- a century and a half ago? It really seemed to me like people wouldn’t be so quick to do that now. And if somebody tried, then if the ACLU or Amnesty International or somebody didn’t come to my rescue, then PETA would…
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And then I wrote a bunch of other stuff but after this it kind of gets off the topic of how you feel in your poem.
Maybe I'm just a kid who is half-fish but I really believe what I wrote. So please don't give up having hope for people
and that someday things might be better for you.
~~~best fishes, Princess Enomena

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