“I knew at the time […] that I was attracted to the white female aesthetic,” they said. I felt a strong connection to the bone shape, hair texture, skin tone, social signals, and mathematics of all of it.
This insight was “surprising, perplexing, daunting, and extremely inconvenient, to say the very least,” according to Ronnie.
They told Medium that they fell into “the depths of a depression and a minor oblivion” due to the “psychological weight” of that realization.
“People might say that it would’make sense that you would feel like that’s how you should look’ as a young child surrounded by mostly white children,” Ronnie said. But the emotion has persisted throughout adulthood.
Dr. Gladden was exposed to violence throughout their childhood and adolescence, including the middle school murder of their half-sister. The author has said that their father was abusive in addition to other childhood trauma.
