"I never really had a body before I transitioned. The body I was in was so wildly out of alignment with who I am as a person that it was impossible for me to feel any connection with it. The sense of disconnection was so pervasive that I constantly felt like an observer in my own life. I found it utterly impossible to care about what happened to my body - I have a number of scars from the reckless attitude that came from that.
It was, I guess, a good body. People would tell me that at times. I never felt good when that happened. All it ever did was give me a sense of guilt that I couldn’t appreciate in myself this thing that others were appreciating in me. It definitely could’ve been a good body for someone, that person just wasn’t me.
More than anything else, transitioning was(is) an act of embodiment. There are aspects of my body that I changed, and aspects of it I intend to change further, but the most important thing was to claim my body as my own, as a thing that could be an accurate representation of the person I am. Once I did that, the rest was details.
As an adult, I got to experience for the first time in my life what it’s like to be in a body. The simple pleasures of moving in a body through the world are brand new to me. Whole new ways of experiencing the world have suddenly opened up. The way that the smallest movements feel can honestly still seem wondrous to me. I don’t have any chairs in my apartment - I’m still too in
love with the freedom and self-expression that comes from moving in a body that I actually have a connection to. Restricting the ways I can move just seems wasteful to me now, and I already wasted more than enough time with this body.
It’s often hard for me to explain to cis people how truly important it was for me to assert my gender. Gender is literally the first thing we notice in others, it’s a framework through which every interaction is mediated. When people perceive me as male, as still sometimes happens, their entire perception of me begins from a mistake. They might have a relationship with someone, but that person just isn’t me. There’s a very deep hurt that comes from
realizing that a person you thought you were interacting with was never actually responding to you at all. How can I possibly communicate with someone if they can’t even see me?
The first few times I was naked in front of others after my transition were terrifying. I could assert my gender through clothes, but I was scared that as soon as that power was gone I would go back to being perceived as someone I’m not. That through the perception of others my body would be taken away from me all over again.
But that didn’t happen, ever. Some of it was certainly due to the changes in my body, but a lot of it wasn’t. In many ways my body wasn’t actually that different. If you saw old and new bodies side-by-side, it would be easy to recognize them as the same.
What I’ve come to realize is how deeply the perception of our bodies is constructed by our mannerisms, interactions, and social expectations. I guess the best word for it is energy. We have an enormous ability to control the way our bodies are perceived, to an extent that still shocks me sometimes. By beginning my own relationship with my body from a place of fundamental honesty, it dramatically changed the ways in which my body was perceived by others. The parts of it they commented on, the ways in which they described it were all totally different. People started reacting to my body in ways that felt like authentic reactions to me as a person. Honest interaction between bodies is a beautiful thing. I’m incredibly grateful that I get to experience that now.
So. I have a body now. It’s mine to do whatever I want with. And it’s a woman’s body, because it’s Mine.
***
When I saw the photos, I had an urge to edit my statement. I didn't write it while being confronted directly with images of my own naked body and the knowledge that that is the way it would be seen by thousands of people I'd never met. I had an urge to excuse it, to talk ironically about my COVID belly and my shitty tan lines. Implicitly I wanted to assure you, the reader, that this was not what I Actually Look Like. That one day, probably by the time you're reading this, I would be skinnier, fitter, more evenly toned. Maybe that's actually what ended up happening. It doesn't really matter though - changing my statement like that would've missed the point, and it would've damaged the honesty of it. I wouldn't really have been talking to you at all - I would've been trying to convince myself. True body acceptance is really fucking hard, and it's never finished.
This is me, at least as one person saw me at one point in time. And it's beautiful. I'm glad I can share it with you. "