Skirt (Symbol)
Sasha wears a skirt, often with a shirt and vest on top, to demonstrate that they can wear both feminine- and masculine- associated clothing. The skirt is a symbol of their genderqueer identity. The skirt is also taken up as a symbol of solidarity for the students of Maybeck High, who hold a "Sasha Skirt Day" where all the kids in school are encouraged to wear a skirt regardless of their gender identity. The way the news media initially mischaracterized Sasha's skirt as a "kilt" exposed the bias towards gender norms.
57 Bus (Symbol)
Slater establishes the 57 bus as a symbol of Oakland's diversity and a vessel of intersection for all classes, races, and genders that live and work in the city. She writes, "The 57 bus travels through both kinds of neighborhoods, traversing an eleven-mile path from one end of the city to the other. It begins at the northwest corner of Oakland and lumbers diagonally through the city, crossing the middle-class foothills where Sasha lived and where Richard went to school, and then chugging along MacArthur Boulevard for 120 blocks" (7-8).
Binary (Motif)
Slater starts the discussion of binaries in Part 1 while describing Sasha's search for appropriate terms to describe their gender identity. By Part 4, the reader is abundantly aware of the roles binaries play in the lives of both Sasha and Richard and how hurtful and damaging it can be to be labeled in terms of a binary when one identifies outside of that binary. For Sasha, that means being called a man, boy, or a he. For Richard that means being labeled a criminal, guilty, or evil. Part 4 begins with a section titled "BINARIES" which lists off several reductive binaries in single-line groupings. This structure returns as a motif later on when Slater describes the way the justice system sees offenders:
"The truth was, the legal system had its own unassailable logic, a logic that couldn’t be shifted. Guilty vs. innocent. Prosecutor vs. defense attorney. Victim vs. offender" (243-244).
1001 Blank White Cards (Symbol)
Sasha and their friends invent a game while at Maybeck High called 1001 Blank White Cards, where they create different game cards to riff off of inside jokes and add them to the pile. Over the years, the cards reflect the kids' personal journeys, pronoun changes, name changes, quirks, and obsessions. When Sasha returns home from MIT and makes a digital copy of the deck, they reflect on the cards as a sort of personal history of the group. The game is a symbol of their growth as people and their time at Maybeck.
Clipboards (Symbol)
Sasha convinces their dad, Karl, to change the way he divides his kindergarteners up at the end of the day when they line up for dismissal. Traditionally, Karl had one clipboard for boys and one for girls. Sasha suggests finding a way to divide them that doesn't depend on gender. At first, Karl doesn't see the point. He can't imagine that at their age, his kindergarteners are already questioning their assigned genders. But the following year, as he sets up the clipboards, he considers Sasha's point. He divides them up by the first letter of their last names instead. "Three years later," Slater writes, "Karl’s classroom included a boy who sometimes liked to dress as a princess and a girl who talked about maybe being a boy someday" (51). The clipboards symbolize the small steps that can make all the difference in making people more comfortable with their identities.
