can you take those words back, despite the fear of what might happen from here on in, when they are true?
You try it again, and this time the words come without awkwardness or hesitation.
“I’m a man.”
Now it seems easy to say, as if all those hours of angst, grief, doubt and fear were for nothing, pointless. You’ve said them aloud, and now what? What has changed? Your expression still stares back at you with a girl’s face. You’ll still walk into the kitchen and be Susan. What does the truth inside matter if nobody can see it?
You wonder: what does the world see in you? Why are you perceived, without question, as feminine? Your body in the mirror isn’t curvy, but long, lean muscle and bone, boy-like. Your aunt used to joke that you look like a pencil, not a girl. Your face lacks hair, but so does your father’s after a shave, and nobody questions his masculinity, so where is the difference? Is it just the clothes, the long hair? Your voice? Your breasts? It won’t be hard to change those things, or at least some of them, even now. You reach up underneath the tank top, your eyes fixed on the mirror, and undo the back clip of your bra, letting the bunched-up cloth and wire sag to the floor. Your breasts sag also, flatter underneath the pink tank, but not flat enough.
You just look like a girl who strolled down to the kitchen first-thing for breakfast, too sleepy to bother with getting dressed.
It’s not that the curves are wrong. It’s that the curves are right for someone else. The dissonance has crept up on you over time, from feeling uncomfortable in low-necked tops that give you cleavage (for no logical, rational reason you can specify beyond a sense of disconcerting wrongness) to staring at yourself in the shower and wondering why your chest looks so much more appealing when you push your breasts higher up and across. It is supposed to be flat. You are supposed to be able to take off your top and just walk around shirtless in summer like the other boys, but you have those swollen curves of flesh—drawing the eye, screaming your gender. You sigh and pull off the tank, discard it by the fallen bra, cup your breasts in each hand and push them up as high as you can.
In the mirror, with your hands hiding the lower swell, they look closer to right. Not quite like those sculpted and bronzed models in magazines, but close enough to look and feel like some other ordinary man. Pressed flat and out so that there is no hint of cleavage, your breasts no longer define your chest: you’re just left with the beautiful flatness of your sternum and the nervous rise and fall of your rib cage.
For a moment you wonder what you’d look like if you bundle up your hair so that it appears shorter, but you can’t bring yourself to move your hands away from your chest and destroy the illusion in the mirror—or perhaps not an illusion, but a possibility, or even a promise. There has to be, you think, something that can hold them there like that. You know that there are others on the internet, that you’re far from the only one who ever looked in the mirror and knew that you’d been given the wrong gender or sex at birth; if you look, you might find an answer, something so that you can walk out of here as yourself. It’s not hiding, just being more yourself—like cutting your hair, and buying new clothes, and anything else you can learn so that strangers on the street don’t call you ‘girl’ or ‘dear’.
You don’t move your hands. You don’t want to see your chest become rounded once more; you don’t want to become a woman again, not now you’ve said that right-sounding word and caught a glimpse of the person you’re supposed to be. You just stand there and stare at the self your mind’s eye imposes over the traitorous reflection.
“Susan?”
Mum’s voice and the soft knock that follows might as well have been the crack of a glass falling from the desk and smashing onto the floor, given how you react. You jerk in shock, your hands falling away as you scramble across the floor for the bra and top, panting in terror. The bra clip is too hard to manage with your shaking fingers, so you kick it under the bed, pray that no-one will notice—even though your chest seems to loom large before you, soft and fleshy, obvious, wrong. The pink singlet hides nothing.
You don’t know what to say and, in your panic, can’t make your dry tongue form any useful words even if you did.
Can you try and say the words to someone else, and trust that no matter what you say, no matter what you look like, no matter who you are, you will still be loved?
Or will those horror stories, the ones that turn into the kinds of nightmares that haunt you past waking, come to life—and leave you learning the cruel, hard lesson that gender, appearance and words matter to some people, so much so that there is no chance of love and acceptance?
You stand there, your hands over your head, and gasp for breath, because you don’t know, and is there anything in the world harder than not knowing whether or not the people you love will hurt you?
“Susan?”
You don’t have to say anything right now, you tell yourself. You can practice a script and do it later. You can put a plan together: drop hints, get a sense of how certain people might react, tell safe people first. It’s not being chicken to reach for a blouse and pull it over your singlet, to decide to attempt this another day, to delay the bravery for a time. It’s sensible. You can do this, you know you can muddle your way into coming out and everything that follows, but only once you’ve figured out the next step of speaking the words to someone else.
The decision calms you, so you swallow and find your voice. “Coming!”
This, you tell yourself as you open the door and manage a wavering smile at your confused-looking mother, is a pretence, but it’s only temporary. You will find a way to step out from the safety of your false skin, to be brave enough to be yourself. You will, one day, be seen as the man you are.
At least today you said the words and saw a glimpse of the self you will one day be, and what journey doesn’t begin with a first step out onto the road?
Everything in a Name
“H-hey.” Chris draws in a deep, steeling breath and plonks themself down on the couch beside Melissa. Their knees tremble and they can’t seem to find a comfortable way to rest their feet—tucked up under their legs? Held loose, free to swing back and forth and draw attention to Chris’s unease? They sigh and cross them before remembering that women typically cross their legs; they shift until they rest with their knees slightly splayed. Not too far: they don’t want to be that guy, the man whose balls somehow need to take up both seats on the train. They just don’t want to look like a woman, and doesn’t that mean not feeling the need to cross their legs like a good schoolgirl?
Melissa only nods, her eyes glued to the dinky TV on the far wall, and while Chris supposes it’s a relief that Melissa isn’t noticing Chris’s inability to sit still, the ease is short-lived: why isn’t Melissa noticing? Shouldn’t their roommate know Chris well enough to turn her head and notice that something is up?
She doesn’t; she just stares at the TV as though there’s nothing more important than reality show drama, curled up on the far end of the fraying green couch in her oldest pyjamas and a pair of fluffy bunny slippers. Chris looks down at their ironed dress shirt, waistcoat and best jeans, and then pretends to stare at the largest hole in the seat cushions while trying not to beat themself up for what, in hindsight, is nothing more than a terrible case of obviousness. Perhaps all that stuff about dressing for success is just bullshit: what kind of confidence can looking good lend to a situation when they are way overdressed for the occasion?
Of course, it’s not like Melissa has noticed either way. Hell, if Melissa were any good at noticing, Chris wouldn’t be sitting there in an ironed shirt and trying to summon up the courage to ask their housemate one simple-sounding question. She’d have noticed Chris’s best attempts to not grimace every time Melissa says their name. She’d have noticed that Chris never uses their full name in any capacity other than receiving mail and paying bills.
No, they have to ask.
“Uh. Melissa. C-can we—”
Melissa makes an annoyed grunting
sound and plucks at her flanno pyjama leg—yellow ducklings on a soft blue background. Ducklings aren’t as much ‘in’ as they are ‘all that’s left when nobody does the laundry’, but Chris thinks them cute. “Commercial break, Christine?”
Chris swallows and nods. “Right. Sure. Sure. Sorry. I didn’t think—”
“Hold it, will you?”
Hold it, when every moment that passes is another moment to think about it, another moment for the anxious mutter of their brain to grow louder, another reason to bow to the avoidance and not act? Chris nods, picks at their fingernails, hisses a slow gust of air out between their teeth. Their psychologist seems to think this might help, that a whole heap of absurd things might help—an audio track of clicking noises, tapping hands and recalling memories, meditation, paying attention to the sound of popping bubbles while they do the dishes. Logic has it that everything else they’ve been trying for years didn’t help, so why not all these strange and bizarre solutions?
They’re not the simple, easy, magic-wand answer they wish for; not even their meds accomplish this. The transition is one of slow degrees, one frightening step after another: a new jacket, a shirt from the boys’ section of the store, a haircut. They’re only made slightly easier by the application