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My first birthday in college, my natal birthday, was rough. I didn’t want to celebrate but you can’t just turn those feelings off after eighteen years. Each time the day came around I felt this stupid surge of hope, this sense that magic could happen. For twenty-four hours everything was possible and nothing was absurd. Secretly, I hoped I’d wake up as a boy. As a kid I thought if I had all boy things they’d have to let me actually be one. So I asked for a bike, and got a robin’s-egg-blue girl’s bike. Asked for a suit, got a girl’s pantsuit. As a concession to my mother, one year I asked for a Ken doll. I can still see her face crinkling, the way she looked at me like I was some ten-year-old stranger standing in her house, in the place where her eldest daughter should be. She got me the doll, and a Barbie to go with, and Barbie sat unopened in her box while I dressed Ken in the suit I couldn’t have.
Without the faintest inkling of what “transgender” meant, I thought:
This is what I’ll look like someday. If I’m good, I’ll grow up to be him.
But I got older, and wiser, and stopped asking for boy stuff. I let Mom buy what made her happy, and gave it to my little sisters.
This is how the world beats you. It wears you down. It wins through attrition.
That first college birthday I hadn’t started T yet, but I was transitioning socially. I was Ren to most people. He/him/his. When strangers said “sir” I could’ve kissed them. They saw me. Not the girl mask I’d been forced to wear.
But part of me felt this weird grief. The struggle was ending—no more girl bikes, no more girl clothes, no more constant battle to prove myself. Even though I hated it, that struggle shaped me. My whole life I’d waged a war against being seen as female. I’d put my back to a brick wall I never thought I’d topple. When it collapsed, I didn’t know who I was without that not-me-ness to push against.
People tried to label me. They said, “Are you a man?” And all I could say for sure was “I’m not a girl.” I was masculine, but what the hell did “being a man” really mean? If it meant renouncing my past, fuck that, because my past, for better or worse, made me who I am. Surviving in the wrong body made me strong. Staying true to myself despite my parents taking away everything I loved—that made me strong. I’d been tested, tempered. My body would always be an alloy, and that was its strength.
But I wasn’t totally sure yet. Before I took T, I took a hard look at myself, and I felt . . . grief.
I was going to lose things I loved. My singing voice, the softness of my skin. My queerness. My visibility, period, if I ended up passing well. I’d look like any other cis straight guy. No one would look at me and see my history, the battles I’d fought. The sexism I’d endured, the homophobia, transphobia. Someday all I’d have left would be the scars on my chest.
And I’d lose her. My best friend. Who loved me, as a girl.
I knew I’d lose you. I knew I would.
Anyway, that first birthday night she found me curled up in the tub, crying. She said, “Be right back,” and a minute later climbed in with pillows and blankets and ice cream. We talked till dawn. I told her how scared I was of transition, of loss. How it felt like starting over in the world. She said, “We start over all the time. Every seven years, our bodies replace every cell except our neurons.” I thought that was beautiful—I’d already lived through three bodies, and now my fourth body, my male one, was taking shape. I hadn’t lost myself the first three times, and I wouldn’t now.
You were there for me that night. I will always love you for that.
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But tonight she told me I’m a stranger. That she doesn’t know me anymore.
It was pathetic. I did exactly what every rejected loser does: demand explanations.
I asked if her friends hated me. No, she said. Was she dating someone, would they be there, would it be awkward? No. Then why couldn’t I go to her party?
Finally she said, “Because I can’t look at you like this. This gross half guy, with fucking tits, and a beard.”
Just shoot me in the motherfucking heart.
She started crying. Said it was like watching me die. Seeing the girl in me wither and fade, and this rough, loud stranger take her place.
I said, “I’m the same person inside. Neurons don’t change, remember?”
The look she gave me was just like Mom’s. As if I was a stranger standing in someone else’s shoes.
She said, “You are different. T changed you. You let it happen.”
I told her what the brochures say: It’s a second puberty. What every teenage boy goes through. It wasn’t as bad, for me—I was a feminist, I was socialized female, I wasn’t born into the world with a silver spoon of male privilege in my mouth. Men had hurt me, I reminded her.