Sep 27 | Dusk Child, Part 2 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the second entry in a series of four on gender identity and my journey toward claiming my pronouns.

For Part 1, click here.

 

PART II. EXAMINING THE SURROUNDINGS

Adolescence is so incredibly awkward. I don’t fit in with anyone.

My hair grows long again and I use it to hide my face. I develop earlier than my best friend and am painfully aware of my curves. I alternate between feeling fat and hyper-sexualized. Subtle and unsubtle jabs come from my mother’s family, where women are generally pear-shaped instead of hourglasses like me.

I go to buy my first bra. The saleswoman, who’s in her fifties, presents me with hideous shiny white monstrosities that make me want to fall through the floor.

My mother, ever merciful, directs me to a younger woman who finds more age-appropriate pieces, but I still feel disgusting.

Older men begin to notice me and stare. Again I disappear into baggy Tshirts and jeans, and yet I adore most of all the sailor uniforms we wear for choir. They look like Japanese fuku, which make me feel like an anime warrior, but they are also sexless as well as elegant.

And in choir, you can be invisible. You can blend into a wall of song, one voice among many forming a whole new creature.

Better by far to be invisible when you trust no-one.

 

I pick up the pen and manage to hold onto it this time, but I can’t touch it to paper yet.

I open my browser and explore my options. They/them feels too impersonal. Ze/zir and xe/xir are better but still feel odd, like one of those fancy cocktail dresses you can’t figure out how to put on when it’s on the hanger. You have to turn it back and forth, stretch it to discover the shape, wrangle into it and get tangled up and have to wriggle out again, coat it with sweat and idle muttering, hope that no-one sees or hears your struggle in the fitting room.

I become a teen. I have torrid romantic feelings like most teens. I discover I’m attracted to girls as well as boys. A friend tells me she’s bisexual. I have never heard the word before, never knew there was such a thing.

It’s like I’ve been wandering through a pitch dark honeycomb of caves, and suddenly someone’s handed me a lighter.

 

I write “ze” on the line.

I sit back and think about it.

It’s petrifying to make such a permanent mark on such a beautifully open field of possibilities.