The worst days are when I receive a glimpse of my body by accident. I dress in the bathroom with my back to the mirror, eyes screwed shut so I can’t be visually reminded of my body’s irrefutably female characteristics. But sometimes, I turn around, or my eyes snap open, and I feel a little jolt through the heart. I don’t hate my body. But that doesn’t mean I like it.
Once in a while, I get a sliver of perfect satisfaction, a moment when my body feels completely right. I savor those seconds so much. Right when I wake up in the morning, sprawled in bed with the sheets tangled all around me, I’m not aware of my body. Nothing feels wrong. My mind is free to wander, slowly climbing its way out of the depths of drowsiness. I delay as long as possible, lying there until I absolutely have to get up, start my day, and return to the reality of my body.
Sometimes if I’m sitting at my desk or in class surrounded by the boys, I’ll glance at my arms, and they’ll look like a scrawny, skinny, non-athletic, 16-year-old boy’s arms. And that’s perfect because for a few milliseconds, I’ll forget that I’m trans*. Forget that I feel betrayed by my body. That my DNA made my hormones do the wrong thing.
I think David Levithan sums up the struggle perfectly in his book “Every Day”: “It is an awful thing to be betrayed by your body. And it’s lonely, because you feel you can’t talk about it. You feel it’s something between you and the body. You feel it’s a battle you will never win . . . and yet you fight it day after day, and it wears you down. Even if you try to ignore it, the energy it takes to ignore it will exhaust you” (254).
I’m so used to disconnecting from my body, and ignoring it. It’s been a survival technique since puberty so that I can simply make it through the day.
Through the ups and downs, I try to focus on the positive. My eyes, I think. I love my eyes. And then I remember: “Eyes are a window to the soul”. Eyes are a means for me to escape the physical realities of my body. A way to see what’s on the inside, not what’s on the outside. My body does not define me. My dysphoria does not define me. My actions and choices define me. My eyes are a gateway to my personality, the real person who simply exists inside a body they would not have picked if they’d gotten a choice.