I’d started studying random boys in a way that could be described as either subtle or incredibly creepy. Research! They moved in different ways, obviously, because they were not all part of some male hive mind controlled by a remote queen, but there were similarities. They led their stride with shoulders and chests, their spines straight, less of the curve you sometimes saw with girls, especially dancers. Hip movements were minimal. Also, sometimes, they sneakily adjusted their crotch areas.
The crotch area was a simple enough fix. I rolled up a sock and stuck it into my pants. The first day that I did this, the sock dislodged itself during rehearsal, slipping lower and lower down my pant leg until my fake penis had reached my knee. I excused myself to the bathroom. Trav was less than happy, but he didn’t notice the knee penis, so I counted it as a victory. The next day, I folded the sock into my underwear in an elaborate loop the loop. This was more effective.
The more I tried to lead my gait with my shoulders and chest, though, the more my chest felt like a stumbling block. Luckily, I was on the small side of a B-cup, but my boobs weren’t invisible. A sports bra only got me so far.
At the end of the week, I consulted Google. How to flatten chest, I typed into my laptop, sitting on my bed, and clicked on the result that looked the least like porn.
I scrolled down to a section that warned about the health risks of strapping your chest back with ACE bandages. There was a list of shirts called “compression shirts” that you could buy, but I kept reading, hoping for something free. One bullet point suggested using the control top of nylon pantyhose. I had a pair that I didn’t mind disemboweling. I fished them out of a drawer and settled back on my bed to follow the directions.
I’d already snipped off the legs of the nylons when I looked back at the computer screen, suddenly curious. What was this site?
I scrolled up.
Here, said the introductory paragraph, are some tips for passing that worked for me before I started hormones.
I stopped. I reread the sentence. Hormones.
I set my scissors down and peered at the sidebar. It read, Charlie. 24. He/him. My unofficial collection of emotional and physical resources for trans people. FTM resources, which I have the most of, are here. Click for MTF, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, non-binary, and general resources.
For a moment I was taken aback. Then I felt a sudden, distinct twinge of guilt. My hand found its way to my mouth, and I started chewing my nails.
I didn’t know how big Kensington’s trans population was. I’d met two trans kids here who were out: One was Will Teagle, a genderqueer kid in my grade; he was co-president of the Sexuality and Gender Equity club. The other was Jo Cavaliere, a trans girl in the film school who’d asked me to act in her senior capstone film last year. She’d come out halfway through filming, and then started her transition, which was followed by a week or so packed with people’s mortified apologies every time they referred to her with male pronouns. Some days she waved it off. Others, she seemed too tired.
It stunned me how awkward a bunch of well-meaning people could be. There was something exceptionally clumsy about a bunch of cis kids trying to act nonchalant about her transition, rotating between aggressive supportiveness, curiosity, and intense silence around the topic for fear of saying the wrong thing. Trying to normalize—but not to ignore. Trying to be chill—but not distant. Things had grown steadily less weird as we came to the collective realization that this was not, shockingly, even sort of about us.
I reread the website’s sidebar and tried to tease apart the bud of unease in my stomach. I hadn’t given it serious thought, how my act contrasted with the way some trans kids lived their lives. I was just playing a role, and trans people weren’t, so it hadn’t felt relevant, hadn’t felt like it was in the same ballpark. But it had weird echoes, didn’t it? I was on a website that trans people used for their day-to-day. I felt like I was poaching, fishing earnest resources out of this site and turning them into ruses to trick the Sharps.
I lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Cross-dressing and drag had their own history. I wasn’t doing anything unprecedented. Still, I felt that I’d edged into a place that was not mine. Worse, I pictured some nightmare scenario in which the Sharps found out about me cross-dressing, got furious at me for lying, and somehow carried that anger over into a situation with someone trans who was just living their life.
If they would act that way, though, that had to be something deep-seated, some land mine of darker thoughts waiting for a foot to hit it. Kensington, probably because it was an arts school, was such an overwhelmingly liberal place when it came to social issues—I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have that sort of opinion around campus. Or anywhere, really. It was a strange thing to have an opinion on somebody else’s existence.
I thought of Nihal’s contemplative air and Isaac’s carelessness. I thought of Erik’s peacocking, showing off every talent he had, and Marcus’s desperation to please, and I tried to make sense of the possibility that any of these normal, decent-seeming people could secretly hate an entire subset of the Kensington population. It didn’t compute to me. And it struck me, all of a sudden, how incredibly lucky I was not to have to worry about those opinions when I walked out into the world every morning.
From what I’d seen, none of the guys seemed that way, but I hadn’t seen much yet. I didn’t want to believe it, but I couldn’t know. I imagined the sort of stone that’s smooth and gray on the outside, which splits open to reveal a jagged red mineral interior. I wished I could tell who was gentle all the way down, and who turned to sharp edges the deeper you got.
That evening, as usual, Nihal and Marcus were working in the Nest when I arrived. Tonight, gentle guitar music echoed through Marcus’s laptop speakers. He was always playing something that threatened to send me to sleep, classical piano or the occasional Gregorian chant, probably to calm him down. Marcus was so anxious, so excitable, ready to be startled into laughter or nerves by virtually anything. Talking to the kid stressed me out.
A serene counterpart to Marcus’s furiously bouncing leg, Nihal sat by the piano in meditative stillness, tracing line art on a series of cartoon panels.
I hovered over his shoulder, peeking at the cartoon. Bold line art gave the characters exaggerated features, heavy-lidded eyes and dramatic mouths. He’d done the background in dappled watercolors.
“That’s really beautiful,” I said.
“Hmm?” He looked up at me.
Shit—I hadn’t fixed my voice. I straightened up, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Uh,” I grunted, “looking good, bro.”
“. . . thanks,” Nihal said, sounding a little weirded out. I backed off and considered the merits of melting into the floor.
As I set down my things, a clicking noise rang through the window where Marcus sat. He flinched away, lost his balance, and toppled onto the sofa, his laptop folding shut beside him.