Felix Ever After

These chapters establish Felix’s fears and goals. He worries that he is not worthy of love and respect, and he plans to resolve this by getting into Brown University, an Ivy League school. He thinks to himself, “Getting into Brown would be like giving a giant middle finger to the Declan Keanes of the world—the people who take one look at me and decide I’m just not good enough” (16). In other words, Felix is pursuing Brown because he believes the school’s prestige will convey onto him, proving that he is also worthy of respect. At this juncture, Felix’s sense of self-worth is tied to external markers of success; part of his personal journey will center on learning to find acceptance and validation within himself.

Through Felix’s emails to his mother, it becomes clear that her departure from the family underlies Felix’s core belief that he is unlovable. All the daily micro aggressions, such as Marisol rejecting Felix for being trans and Declan calling Felix fraudulent, compound this belief. Felix’s anxieties about love reveal that he has internalized these repeated rejections from the world. He believes Brown will solve will solve the issue of respect, but solving the issue of love proves trickier.

The novel also explores Felix and Ezra’s socioeconomic statuses, introducing themes of class, identity, and intersectionality. Ezra can consider alternatives to college because he can fall back on his parents’ money, while Felix is under intense pressure to get into college on scholarship. Although Felix gets annoyed by Ezra’s privilege, it is clear that Ezra loves Felix unconditionally, as he constantly stands up for and validates him.

When Declan calls Felix a fraud in Chapter 1, this adds another dimension to the theme of identity. What is left unsaid in Declan’s statement is that Felix is fraudulently a guy because he is transgender, not cisgender. Marisol echoes this sentiment when she calls Felix a misogynist for choosing to be a guy, which again implies that Felix’s identity is an act of deception. Most notably, whoever puts the photos of Felix on the gallery wall is trying to paint Felix as a “fraud.” This act of violent transphobia is meant to show who the aggressor considers the “real” Felix, exposing his deadname and photos of him pre-transition.

Felix internalizes this idea of fraudulence too. He wonders if he is a fraud because he’s a poor kid attending a rich school: “Now my dad’s fighting to send me to a private school filled with rich kids […] Declan Keane’s voices echoes in my head. I’m the real fraud” (18). There is also the sense that Felix feels like a fraud within the trans community for continuing to question his identity despite already coming out as trans. Given that many of the St. Cat’s students introduced in the first three chapters are queer, this shows that transphobia is prevalent within the queer community.

In Felix’s relationship with his father, there is a tension between gratitude and settling for how things are versus asking for more. Felix is constantly disappointed by his father using the wrong name and pronouns for him, but he feels like he can’t ask for more because his father helped him with the physical aspects of his transition and puts most of his money toward Felix’s education. When telling Ezra that his father deadnamed him again, Felix thinks, “while I want to say it’s okay, it really isn’t” (23). Felix knows that being misgendered by his father is not okay but doesn’t feel he has the power to say so. The way that his father, Marisol, and many others ignore or question his gender identity makes Felix scared to do his own questioning, knowing that people will use it as evidence to delegitimize him.