THIS IS US
Become What You Are
In a binary world, everyone who looks at me sorts me into “man” or “woman.” Everyone is wrong.
“You look very much like yourself,” my husband told me. We were in a pool in Virginia, late at night, taking turns dragging each other through water as warm as blood.
I had no idea what he meant. My husband went to grad school to study Wittgenstein, at one point, and he has an academic’s habit of choosing a word located two doors down from the one you’d use in casual conversation. You can sit with his little poems forever without decoding them.
“You’re all sharp and spiny,” he said. “I can always tell exactly what you’re thinking when I look at you. Your body has your personality now. It’s weird.”
That part made sense. That is, in fact, what I look like: Spiny and spiky, like a cactus or a hedgehog, like something that’s had to come up with creative ways of not getting eaten. A stupidly, involuntarily elastic face connected directly to the forbidden regions of my brain, a face that has never once allowed me to tell a convincing lie. That feels like the person I am; the person I’ve imagined since I was little, the body I would describe for myself in role-playing games and bad short stories. When I started testosterone, that person…
