I was nine years old when I first heard that word. My dad, as if he had to carry all of masculinity on his shoulders, came into my room, my burgeoning transness focused on nothing but the bra I swiped. I didn’t know what I was doing; I just knew that for some reason wearing a bra felt right.

In his eyes, I was a perv. Something any other young girl would have done was sexualized. Wracked with guilt, I suppressed.

Then it was reinforced by the media I consumed. Shrek 2 featured a scene where Pinocchio is wearing women’s underwear, played for laughs, implying that something was wrong with him, and by extension, me. I was a boy after all, right? Right.

Suppress, suppress, suppress.

According to my father, I was a beautiful “specimen” of a man.

I felt a pull, though. I wanted, no, needed to feel like a woman. Like an addict, I would overconsume then purge. Stealing thongs, dresses, dainty shirts. When I had my own money, hundreds of dollars would flow into Amazon to stem my desire. Then came the shame. That long-strained Christian guilt, knowing in the deepest valleys of my selfhood that something was wrong with me. Then a few days would pass, and I’d dive straight into my closet again. Breast forms, bras, panties, and dresses would adorn my body, and for a few sharp moments, I wouldn’t hate myself.

Then a glance in the mirror. My mannish figure exaggerated by the tight-fitting clothes, and in a blink, the clothes torn from my body, stuffed in a duffel bag, and hidden in the back of my closet. Just as quickly, I find myself under the covers, crying myself to sleep.

Suppress.

There’s a time I think about often. It was like any other night, up way too late, playing video games with friends, but unlike other times, I was wearing women’s clothing, a loose corset, stockings, and a long skirt to be exact. I wasn’t the best at the game, a tactical first-person shooter, but that specific night, something was different. I felt lighter, more focused, more at home. While I normally found my name populating the bottom of the leaderboard, that night, in my $17 Amazon corset, I was unstoppable, topping nearly every match.

My mind, while still not my own, was at least on loan.

Frequently, I wrack my brain, trying to drum up my childhood thoughts, rifling through my mom’s closet, searching for anything comfortably feminine. Her boots two sizes too big for my pre-pubescent feet, her dresses eating my lanky frame like fog, her panties offering me a sanctuary, a sanctuary I could keep to myself.

I don’t know why I did it, I just did. I felt like I needed to.

I also don’t know why I took those same clothes in a bag to a hidden cove in my neighborhood, quickly shed my boy clothing, and put them on. Like a religious act, or like a form of self-flagellation, what power did it have if I kept my secret hidden in my room? I wanted to feel the sky’s eyes on my skin.

I don’t know why. I just felt like I needed to.

I had an active imagination. Spurned by interest in magic, the mystical, and a wavering belief in God, I would practice spells, attempting to polymorph my masculinizing body into my female counterpart. I would pray to God every single night, begging, pleading to wake up the next morning in a body that loved me instead of poisoning me.

I’m an atheist now.

Instead of being seen, instead of being magically given a body that reflected me, I got to watch the life slowly drain from my eyes and molasses envelop my feet. I lost any connection to myself, to my identity. I thrifted pieces of personality from places that could maintain a semblance of masculinity without making me want to kill myself.

I still got close a couple of times.

Suppress.

Through my therapist, I’ve been urged to explore the work of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychologist, who is one of the most influential people in the history of psychology.

Jung’s formative theory was that of the four archetypes. Those are the self, the persona, the shadow, and the anima/animus. I’m particularly focused on the shadow.

Complementary to Jung’s idea of the persona, which is “what oneself as well as others thinks one is,” the “shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors…”

When I’m in my room, sitting in the dark, worrying about my flaws, my insecurities. When I masturbate to something I’m ashamed of. When I steal women’s clothing.

That is the shadow.

I think about my high school sweetheart. A beautiful, thoughtful, intelligent woman. But I couldn’t let her in. I couldn’t admit to her how badly I dreamed of navigating the world like she does.

She left me.

Suppress.

Navigating the shadow is navigating your own biases and projections. What you impose on others is likely something you feel internally. I think about a group of trans women who booked out a hotel I worked at. I couldn’t look at them. Before the event, there was a sensitivity training. The spokeswoman delivering it was taller than me, with a voice as deep as mine. In my mind, in that moment, she was a joke.

I couldn’t be like that. I couldn’t be a freak.

Disgust.

There’s an online document called the Dysphoria Bible. It’s a collection of anecdotes, scientific literature, and wide descriptions of trans existence. The point of the document is to help people who are questioning their gender and help them feel seen and connected. I remember going end-to-end through every page dozens of times, relating to every described feeling.

I still didn’t transition for another two years.

I’m thinking about Carl Jung again.

I spent the better part of my adulthood believing everything my family and media have told me. I was a deviant, I was a perv. I was a freak with a fetish, so that’s why I locked away my manhood and took pleasure in wearing women’s clothing.

I would drift into another realm while fucking a woman. Maybe this intimacy would finally fix me, and in the meantime, autopilot isn’t so bad. But they could always tell I wasn’t with them, that I was somewhere else.

Then at home, I could hear the duffel bag calling my name. I felt sick to my stomach. No one could ever love something like me. But then, in came her. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

She was broken, just like me, in fact, maybe worse. I felt like I could be myself around her. Or maybe that was just the alcohol and the pandemic talking. The details are blurry.

The only person I ever alluded to my transness to was the aforementioned sweetheart. Accepting and open, but ignorant of my needs. Until I told her.

I was blunt with her. Open. I opened the duffel bag, like a boiling wound, giving her all she needed to control me. I told her I wanted to be a woman. She told me that I wasn’t one. I told her I wanted to be friends. She told me she wanted more. I told her that I couldn’t be what she wanted. She took things into her own hands. She threatened me. She said she would tell the sweetheart about our intimacy, about my deviancy. She had me; however, she wanted. She threatened me with the world, using my shame to control me.

“At worst, the shadow becomes inextricably entwined with abandonment anxiety so that its emergence can really feel like a matter of life or death,” writes the Society of Analytical Psychology.

You can’t run from your shadow.

I think about a very young me. No older than five, but likely younger. Wandering my babysitter’s room, her watching me, softness in her eyes. Seeing just how much I liked her boots, she helped me put them on. I spent the day hauling those tiny boots around the house, beaming. Or about the times I got to spend with my two younger cousins, just as excited with their Polly Pockets as they were.

I did an exercise with a late therapist of mine that has stuck with me and my self-perception. He had me bring in a handful of photos from throughout my life. A range of ages and circumstances. We looked them over together, examining what emotions they elicited in me, and looking for trends. Beyond anything else, I saw my eyes sinking, hollowing out by the year. At the time, I thought it was just growing depression, trauma, or dread. Now I know it was more. Now I know that my body was poisoning me, testosterone flowing like arsenic, just slower acting.

I didn’t know what I was, and no one around me cared enough to look. I didn’t cause a fuss.

Going back to the four archetypes, the self is opposite the anima/animus, and the persona is opposite the shadow. The self is true identity, the anima/animus is more instinctual. The persona is who others and ourselves imagine we are, and the shadow is the things we don’t admit we are. For the persona to more closely resemble the true self, the shadow has to be integrated. We have to accept our demons.

I think about when I started transitioning.

My journal entries during that time were sparse, with gaps of weeks or months in between. Frankly, I was in such a bad state that I don’t really remember what I felt; I just remember that I was at a precipice. I was running out of options, and I didn’t know how to be better.

The Dysphoria Bible was bookmarked on my phone, and I scrolled Reddit transition pages end to end. I was alone, confused. I, still so deeply ashamed of what I might be, couldn’t fully commit. I didn’t want to be trans.

But the world around me was shrinking, and I felt like I was about to suffocate. I was about to die.

My shadow, eroding my soul, leaving a husk. I had to try something.

So, I took a leap of faith.

In reality, it sounds more dramatic than it actually was. I reached out to a telehealth HRT provider seeking care. After a few video sessions talking about the struggles I faced, I was prescribed hormones.

Sitting on my childhood twin bed in my mother’s home, I plopped a light blue oval-shaped pill under my tongue and…

Peace.

It’s hard to define just how quickly my body began feeling like my own. The hands I looked down at became less alien by the day. Lines became sharper, light brighter. But pain also hurt so much deeper.

My chest was open, the wind slicing through my organs. I felt the world crashing around me. In reality, it was.

My friendships were dying where they stood, my vulnerability and new emotions too much, too raw. I was needy, listless, and drifting. I was too much.

I distinctly remember writing, “I don’t think I’d be anyone’s maid of honor.” That sentiment, significantly less true now, still cutting deep.

But now I look at it…

I was a teenage girl. At least hormonally. And so much was new, constant firsts flowing in like Instagram likes. I was a writhing mass of girlhood, a teenager at 24 years old.

The aforementioned leap of faith paid dividends.

I told myself that if HRT didn’t do its trick for me within a few weeks, then it wasn’t the cure that I needed, and hopefully I’d have it in me to try something else. I never stopped, and never plan on stopping.

Today I feel free. The little girl in my babysitter’s home, safe. I embraced my shadow and came out more whole.

Three years later, I have curves now. Tits too. I wear dresses, my closet overflowing with them, actually. I have Barbies hanging on my wall, and makeup covering my desk. I use the women’s restroom and navigate the world as one. When I look in the mirror, I see a beautiful woman looking back.

Most days, I feel beautiful.

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Sitting blank-faced in front of my monitor, combing through fellowship opportunities, looking at previous candidates, their skills, their experience at five years younger than I am now, they’ve done things that I didn’t even know were options.

“I was just a poor kid, raised by deeply complicated people, and I’m transgender, of course, I didn’t get those opportunities,” I try to tell myself to soothe some of the growing anxiety in my chest. “I didn’t have the privilege to take risks, to fail.”

Of course that self self-soothing doesn’t work. I’m still intensely aware that I’m living a life that I don’t want, and explicitly jealous of people who are. I am who I am, where I am, and I don’t feel like I had much choice in that.

“For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice,” renowned ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ Audre Lorde writes in her poem, A Litany for Survival.

I wasn’t familiar with Lorde or her writing. I knew the name, but only in passing. But the more I read, the more seen I felt.

In her account of her struggle to overcome breast cancer and mastectomy, The Cancer Journals, she writes, “Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of ‘Nobody will know the difference.’ But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.”

In reading it, I felt regarded. The situation is something that I never experienced, but having experienced alienation within my own body, having a gnawing insecurity about ‘passing’, reading the words “Nobody will know the difference,” hit straight through my chest.

Now, as I dig through Audre Lorde’s breadth of work, A Litany for Survival makes home in the back of my mind. How could a poem so thoroughly describe my feelings?

I’m hyper aware of my place in the world, as a trans person, as a poor kid, as a woman, and yet I still see myself as a survivor before anything else.

“We were never meant to survive,” Lorde writes.

Before I write more, I want to share my biases. I am a white woman who in no way wants to co-opt the feelings and experiences of a black woman. I cannot begin to understand the lives of women of color; it’s just that Lorde’s words have spoken to me. I feel compelled to share how they connect to me, and I just hope the sheer love and appreciation I have for Lorde’s work is clear.

Cool? Cool.

I began reading bell hooks about a month ago, specifically All About Love: New Visions. I was so excited to read it that I stopped halfway through another book to start it early, and I left feeling dissatisfied. There were deeply compelling points throughout the book, and I deeply respect hooks’ place in the zeitgeist, but I had the feeling that if I didn’t already agree with many of the things she was writing that I would have deemed the book unsupported and uninspired.

I’m having the opposite feeling with Lorde.

My first exposure to her was the aforementioned poem, A Litany for Survival, that I came across through my therapist. It was January or February, and Trump had just been sworn into office. Within the first few weeks, it felt that hundreds of pieces of anti-trans legislation were flying past my head. I’m lower class, with few resources and little familial support. If they came for me, there wouldn’t be anything I could do.

I felt hopeless, like a walking corpse waiting to be buried, and then he shared the poem with me.

I remember the therapy session clearly, sitting at my desk, speaking to him over video call, lo-fi music in my headphones lulling my mind. He references the poem, and I quickly pull it up on my second monitor. After a quick read, I sat, dazed. We chatted for a few more minutes, scheduled our next session, and then I shut down my browser, put my head in my hands, and sobbed.

There’s something so deeply earnest in everything I’ve read from Lorde. She comes across as someone deeply fiery and passionate, but also incredibly empathetic to anyone under the umbrella of her cause.

“The pattern that emerges is that, in some way, what Audrey Lorde wrote gave them permission to be themselves, and to speak their truth and to love themselves in a way that they didn’t before they read it,” Lorde biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs said.

I’m 27, and started transitioning at 24. I didn’t permit myself to be myself for most of my life, too wracked by trauma, identity, fear, and doubt. When that period of my life crosses my mind, I think about my dad. He’s a troubled man, an abusive alcoholic, a misogynist, homophobe, hateful bigot. But there were these moments of clarity, times in between his vodka-laced screams that painted a deeply hurting man. He was a man in so much pain that he wanted to force that hurt onto me, his daughter. He wanted to force me into his mold even if it killed me, and eventually it would have.

“For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive,” Lorde writes.

Tomorrow, I’m going to work a job that I don’t hate, but every passing moment, I feel this rolling disdain. “This is what life is supposed to be?” I think about freedom, about exploration, about living a life that I want to live. Even today, I am still living out of need and for survival. I have more resources, and I’ve healed, regained strength, but how far am I from the little girl with my father’s hand around my throat?

These are the feelings Lorde’s work pulls out. In the span of 244 words, four stanzas, a minute of reading, I feel seen, I feel grief, I feel pride, I feel hopeless, and I feel inspired.

Then I have to get ready for work.

I’m brought back to reality.

Driving, riding down the congested I-95, I daydream of something more than this life I have, then I clock in and wait for the day to end.

I was promised the moon and the stars, told that the world would be putty in my hands, that my mind would lead me to the mountaintops. Then we were homeless.

I was promised that I would overcome it, that my station in life was completely within my control. Then there wasn’t enough food.

I was promised… then the drugs. The drinking.

A character in Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke says it plainly.

“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living.”

The character, a leper, is at the outskirts of society, his body rotting away before his eyes. Even in his state, and the states of other lepers around him, they still choose life. I guess that’s why I’m still here.

Nothing promised is destined, no matter the purpose. A Litany for Survival sits in the back of my mind again.

“ And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again,” Lorde writes.

We were never meant to survive, but I try to anyway. I think about my early days in therapy, where I was an emotional mess. I was numb and dissociated, prone to emotional outbursts, completely enraptured by the feeling that something inside me was broken or missing.

I was living in survival, my entire nervous system rewiring to prolong my life. So now, even after years of work to build myself up, I still fear that things may just as quickly crumble. Fighting to live takes its toll. But we find a reason to live anyway.

Living through trauma and strife brings up complicated feelings for me. Given the choice between a much easier, less strenuous life and the one I currently have, I don’t think I could answer.

The struggles have brought meaning, and even if I don’t have many opportunities, the few successes I do see feel hard fought, earned, and meaningful. I often think of that in the frame of my transition. My womanhood is one that I chose to chase; my fight for my identity brings it meaning and complexity. I am not a woman because I just ended up being one; no, I made myself one.

The things I’ve seen also offer a level of perspective, knowing just how bad things can be.

In my best moments, that’s a freeing force. If we’re only a few steps away from failure or desolation, then why not take risks? Risk and safety can have the same ending.

I’m proud of my resilience. Even if I’m not where I want to be, I’m still working toward it. I am in a better place than I should be, given my life. I am still alive, and that in itself is beautiful.

Even in the darkest moments, appreciate life, because even that is miraculous.

As Lorde wrote, “ So it is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”

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I’ve been transitioning for just under three years now. Only out to the public for under two. The whole of my womanhood, my new life, fits into that little sliver of time, a mere fraction of my time on this planet.

To build a new life, we must burn the old one down and all that.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I see nothing but a woman except on my lowest days. When in public, when at work, and elsewhere, I’m treated as the gender I project, and as far as I can tell, generally seen as such. People may gawk, but that could also be chalked up to me being a six-foot-tall woman covered in tattoos.

Just three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined this being my reality. I couldn’t have imagined being a woman.

I remember taking my first estrogen pill, a tiny blue oval in my hand. Something that, without exaggeration, saved my life. Sitting in my twin-sized bed, sliding it under my tongue, dissolving and changing my direction forever.

Leading up to it was the worst depressive episode I ever experienced. My high school sweetheart left me, I was raped by my closest friend for eight months, and I had this knawing void clawing at the back of my skull.

“I couldn’t be trans, I don’t mind being a man,” “I’m too old, I’ll never look like a real woman,” “what if I’m not accepted? What will my family think?”

I did the therapy, for years, in fact. From therapist to ineffective therapist, I jumped, none able to fix me.

I tried the antidepressants. A pharmacy full of pills attempts to dam up the feelings I had, to make life manageable. “I could be happy, if only this Prozac worked.”

I talked to friends, what few I had. Something I’ve since learned is that friendships are built on authenticity and vulnerability. I wasn’t close to anyone because no one was close to me. How could they be when I wasn’t even close to me?

I tried to push it all down, but nothing worked. I didn’t want to transition without assurance that I would look like a real woman. I wasn’t even fully convinced that I was trans. I was worried that it was too late for me. But something was deeply wrong, something had to change, and so I took a leap of faith.

My first estrogen pill was my Hail Mary before I killed myself.

To build a new life, we must burn the old one down.

In the early days of my transition, the only thing I cared about was eventually being indiscernible from a real woman. I’ve since come to understand how deeply parasitic that mindset was. For one, I was a woman the second that I decided I was one, and second, it was a restricted and deeply heteronormative colonial mindset.

But as I progressed, my biggest concern wasn’t my appearance or even how other people treated me, but more importantly, if I was making other women uncomfortable. I didn’t feel entitled to women’s space, and oftentimes I still don’t.

I rarely speak up in conversations about ‘girl problems’ unless it’s with my closest confidants, and until the last ten months, I always searched for alternative bathroom options whenever available.

I didn’t see myself as a woman, at least not fully, and as a result, didn’t feel deserving of the space. Passing was essential, I needed to be a real woman.

But again, I was, am, and always will be that real woman that I so desperately wanted to be. As my confidence grew, as I became more and more comfortable in my womanhood, as I became the person proud of being “passing” was less of an external concept and how other people saw me and more internal, and how I saw myself.

Transitioning is a deeply vulnerable and personal experience. You have to tear down your internal walls and reflect on everything you are.

I frequently think about a passage from Julian K. Jarboe’s book, Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel.

“God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason he made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine: so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”

Everyone has different goals when they transition, and sometimes those goals change. Sometimes what’s important to us changes. And most importantly, who we are changes. Passing just isn’t important to me anymore as long as I like what I see in the mirror.

To build a new life, we must burn the old one down.

It’s quite a weird feeling because for all I’m concerned my life is going pretty okay.

I have the medical care I missed out on much of my life, I’m infatuated with the woman I’ve become, and I’m making good progress in my career goals but I have this existential dread just sitting on my shoulders.

My best friend told me I hold onto things like that.

She’s definitely right.

I’ve been mostly happy for around a year now, and that’s practically an eternity in my life.

A new therapist told me that I probably struggled with dysthymia, or long-term depressive symptoms, something that I experienced for just under 15 years. Those symptoms have all but ceased sans a few bad days here and there, but it feels like that might be making my brain confused like it’s expecting sadness, pain, and then numbness.

Then I look outward.

The world is literally on fire, trans people are on the political and corporate chopping block, and we’ve watched a genocide live for over a year, and that confusion in my brain just amplifies.

Who am I to be happy when so much is going wrong? Who am I to find peace when lives are lost over such meaningless hate?

I want to clarify that I’m not criticizing my growth. It’s nearly impossible to help others when your own needs aren’t being met. I just feel cognitive dissonance, holding so much concern without any tangible way to change things.

Writing things like this does bring me comfort though.

Thanks for reading.

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Then the election happened and I was shaken a bit.

Were people that prepared to throw away the rights of queer people and bodily autonomy for people with vaginas just for some “better economy” that may not even come to fruition?

I think like many trans people I entered a moment of panic fearing for the future of me and people like me. But I sat with it, did some reading, and found resolve in shared queer history, a history built on community, self-sustainability, and mutual aid.

A community mindset took great strides in the mid-1900s following a growing number of trans people demanding rights and wider societal acceptance. In 1959, trans people, drag queens, and others fought back against Los Angeles police who had been targeting trans women in random arrests at Cooper Do-nuts, later being labeled a riot. In 1966, there was an uprising at Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin, a predominantly queer neighborhood at the time. Community magazines were formed, like Transvestia. And most well-known of all, is the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, which many people credit as a watershed moment for queer rights as a whole.

If other people won’t take care of us then we will. And if people won’t accept us, we will demand it.

So as I kept thinking and sitting on the potential challenges we might face in the near future I think of the elders in the community and the Giant’s Shoulders we already stand on. Trans existence in whatever form, is a story about survival and self-confidence, knowing that an authentic self is worth almost anything.

I wish I could write about queer joy, finding myself overwhelmed with the beauty of people like me, but I’m reminded constantly of a poem by the Palestinian poet, Marwan Makhoul.

“In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent.”

Trans people are more visible than they’ve ever been. People like Nava Mau are winning Emmys, Misia Butler had a role exploring transness in Netflix’s Kaos and we’re even finding political representation in people like Zoey Zephyr.

But with that visibility comes backlash.

An entire presidential campaign’s main antagonist was trans people and the “dangers” we pose to society and that candidate won. The Trevor Project’s youth crisis hotline saw a spike of over 700% post-election.

“When you have your identity questioned in, say, the highest office, or policymakers are questioning your identity or whether or not you have a place to live in the world, that can really impact your wellbeing,” said Kevin Wong, a spokesperson for the Trevor Project.

Even with all that to look towards in the coming administration trans people will survive. We always have and we always will.

A lot of it comes as you’d expect. If you’re trans fem it might be learning makeup and new clothing proportions, as a trans masc you might be learning how to keep up with new body odor or newly sprouting body hair.

But there are plenty of things I didn’t expect, like my feet shrinking, just how wide my emotions could stretch, or just how different my personality and taste may manifest (including my sexuality).

But something quite silly that I came across recently had to do with my voice and voice training.

For those who aren’t familiar with the effects of feminizing HRT here’s some quick context.

Think of any kind of HRT as if you’re going through puberty all over again, with all the same types of effects that cis people can expect in their early teens. Trans boys get swathes of body hair and growing sex drives, trans girls may experience mood swings and breast growth. But the important thing to note for this piece is the voice.

Testosterone and masculinizing puberty permanently alter the voice. It’s why there are so many stories about squeaky teenage boys pretty suddenly waking up with much deeper voices, and why trans men taking testosterone experience very similar things.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about estrogen and feminizing puberty. Once you go through testosterone-fueled puberty, your voice is permanently changed, which leads to trans women wanting a more feminine voice to try voice training to find a voice they feel suits them better.

I’m one of those trans women, and while my voice isn’t exactly where I want it to be, it’s something I continue to work on.

While speaking in my trained voice, I realized something. I couldn’t do an accent that I do all the time, a stereotypical southern accent, in my femme voice. It was only when I switched back to a more masculine tone that I could do it again.

Feminizing voice training primarily focuses on shrinking the space in the mouth and lifting the larynx through methods like moving the tongue forward and breathing through the diaphragm instead of the chest.

All that means in this context is that until I relearn the accent in my new voice, instead of sounding like a sweet southern belle I come across as a beautiful racist farmer.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

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I wasn’t always like this, in fact, I spent most of my life as a regular old American boy. I played video games, I pined after girls, and I tried my best to appreciate the body I was given.

But something kept calling to me.

The best way I can describe transness to a cis person is to think of living as the wrong gender like treading water. Most days it isn’t hard to float on your back, but sometimes you have to kick your feet to stay afloat, and while that’s easy in stints it gets tiring after a while, and if you ever slip up for even a moment you’ll start to sink. Some days are easy, some are hard, but no matter what, every day is work.

There’s something existential about sinking into dysphoria, especially if you haven’t had exposure to transness or lack an accepting support system, something in your brain might just feel off without any concrete reason for why. You know that something’s wrong, your body knows something’s wrong, like a pain burrowing into your skin.

I remember I used to look at women and feel a yearning that I didn’t understand. I was attracted to women so I assumed it was that but deep down I knew it was different, that there was always a twinge of sadness connected to those feelings. Women always seemed so light, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever want to be a man.

It’s so funny looking back now, reflecting on the thoughts I used to have, it all seems so obvious. I might not be living every day as happy as I possibly could but a year and a half into my transition, and it was the best choice I ever made.

The first time I remember wanting to be a woman was when I was 7 years old. Like any other little girl, I wanted to wear my mom’s shoes and stuff my shirt to look like I had boobs, but since the skin I was wearing gave the appearance of ‘boy’ it came across as provocative, wrong, and instead of asking me if I wanted to be a girl, my parents asked me if I liked boys, if I was gay. Well they were half right, I’m definitely gay now.

I like to imagine how… happy younger me would be with the person I’m becoming. I always cry when I think about that, in fact, I’m wiping tears off my keyboard right now. That all the years I spent praying to some god to wake up as a woman, in whatever form, would pay off. I wish I could reach back and hug them, wipe their tears, and protect them from the brainwashing my toxic father tried to instill in me.

More than anything else I wish I could reach out to the little girl I was and tell them that they were right, that boyhood wasn’t right for me. I try to live without regret but it’s not wrong to say that would have saved me a lot of sorrow and heartache and a lot of lost years.

I wrote an article for Business Insider a few months back and the first line of that article explains it best I think.

“From the moment I was born, I had hypertoxic masculinity imposed on my lanky childhood frame like an ill-fitting costume.”

I don’t love my body all the time but I couldn’t imagine ever feeling like that again. I may struggle but my body feels like a place I belong.

To the little girl struggling to feel like herself, I love you with all my heart and I spend every day trying to make you proud.