I really hated being a woman. The incredibly complex, winking social rules of girlishness were impossible for me to keep up with; the cultural obsession with my curves and the assumption that they existed for becoming a mother and feeding an infant made me go to war with my body.
I perseverated over my self-image in destructive ways, spent hours bent over the sink picking at pores and lightening my hair. I raised my voice to make it seem more feminine until doing so gave me laryngitis. I practiced swaying my hips and then fumed at the men who noticed.
In contrast to all that, becoming a man felt pretty wonderful for a while. After a lifetime of other people projecting assumptions onto me based on a body that I had not chosen, finally I was in control enough to choose something else.
Becoming a man, I thought, was the closest thing to being truly seen as gender neutral, since men were the social default. Intellectually I knew that manhood came with its own set of punishing restrictions and damaging hang-ups, but I hadn’t felt them yet. I was too focused on getting free.
But then, I started avoiding mirrors. The man on the other side was a perfectly adequate human being, but he always looked dour, and so boring. I hated smiling as him. Tiredness always clouded his eyes. It made me kind of sad to see him, but I could get away with not thinking about it.
I didn’t obsess over his appearance the way I had as a girl. I could let a flyaway hair or a cyst on his back just be for days. But I never delighted in seeing him either. When I looked away, and had no confirmation of what he looked like, he became featureless in my mind, and unappealing.
In public, my arms and neck felt stiff all the time. I couldn’t walk down the street with ease, or lose myself in my music. I was so conscious of the space that he occupied, hypervigilant against intruding against anyone, and yet insulted when crowds treated me like I was invisible and bumbled into me. My shoulders kissed my ears and my hands and feet felt like solid concrete, too hard to move.
I had escaped the dysphoria of being a woman so totally that now I could recognize there was also a dysphoria to being a man. I was suffering from something my friend Jess White had once named bilateral dysphoria, the confusing push-and-pull of being some kind of nonbinary gender in a world with mostly-binary embodiment and presentation options, and almost exclusively binary social scripts.
