HeyJessie!

Yes this is what we're doing today, no I don't know why either. Inspiration is a fickle mistress.

What is there to say of history's greatest gay couple (I guess this is the hill I die on today) that hasn't been already? Not a whole lot but for the uninitiated let's do a recap. Paul McCartney and John Lennon – you know them, from the bug band – were totally head over heels in love, and conviction in this truth has inspired generations of fangirls (whose ranks I am honored to have joined in the midst of my transition into girlhood). The Lord hath said "Let There be McLennon", and it was good (For an actual case in favor of this ship I direct you to this video by the lovely uncarley). And that's about as much as you need to know for the purposes of this rant of mine.

As you may have guessed from the title, Dear Reader, this essay is not necessarily about McLennon. Rather it's about what McLennon and the road to it (which was a long and winding one) have meant to me in my journey of self-acceptance as a trans girl. And that road starts with a lovely little film called The Last Unicorn.

Said film might’ve been my favorite movie ever as a little girl who didn’t know what she was. It was a classic old timey animated princess movie about the titular Last Unicorn who gets trapped into the body of a human woman. Rather than going on to be your average princess protagonist however, she is emotionally destroyed by what is realistically depicted as an imprisonment and borderline body horror. There’s a line from right after she’s first transformed that stuck in my head ever since I first heard it, of her wailing “No no no, I’m a unicorn! I can feel this body dying!” (3 guesses what emotional experience this has aligned with in hindsight).

But the dysphoria reading isn't exactly the key bit to this story, although it's likely what got me hooked in the first place. Speaking of, what I actually wanna focus on is how utterly obsessed I was with the movie, to put things mildly. That's where the trouble arose. I knew on some deeper level that my fixation was abnormal. I was a "boy” and so felt the need to temper my love for such a stereotypically "girly" movie, so as not to draw attention to myself. Seeing as my childhood friend's mother had been the one to first put the movie on for us without thinking, my solution to my self-imposed limitation was to make every effort at subtle nudges (which were definitely not that subtle in hindsight) in favor of rewatching it whenever I was at their house. Eventually in this manner I made my way through the entire rest of their classic princess movie collection, but I remained fiercely tight-lipped about the whole ordeal beyond those moments. That is, except when avoidance curdled into animosity and rejection. When, outside that living room with its ancient CRT TV, I turned on the media I loved more than anything. When, out of a twisted sense of jealousy, I could go from belting Let it Go in private to ruthlessly berating the song, the movie it came from, all others like it, and the girls who were able enjoy them, all in the same breath. God I pity that girl.

This pattern of avoidance towards "girly" media that secretly meant the world to me continued and developed when I stumbled across the old 90s anime Sailor Moon. It was, again, utterly entrancing to me and I went to what felt like the ends of the internet and back to find places to watch it since it wasn’t streaming anywhere big at the time. It spoke to something in me that had been utterly neglected up until then. The cast of girls (my age at the time), were cute and bubbly and did every stereotypically feminine thing together like mall shopping, sleepovers, etc, and it all called to me on deep subconscious level. Their transformations into their superhero alter egos likely fed even more into this fantasy, allowing me to imagine and fantasize a similar transformation into a superhero for myself (that just so happened to also be a girl for no particular gender reason at all). It was a part of me that had never been activated by media or real life before. In hindsight I think it’s pretty safe to say I desperately wanted to be them but couldn’t process that yet. And therein lies another issue. My fixations were starting to evolve. It had begun with liking "girly" media. Now that media had imbued a desperate desire to embody the "girly" community and lived experiences surrounding it. Which is significantly harder to look the other way from.

All that to say, I couldn’t let it go. That is, until I did. At the time, all those years ago, I had no clear answer as to why I stopped watching. The only hint I can point to with the benefit of hindsight is the gnawing awareness that grew in my gut as I had watched that, once again, there was something not right about my obsession with the show. I knew I couldn’t talk about it and the desired experiences it inspired with any of my friends, as it and they were blatantly meant for girls. So what was I doing letting them consume me so completely? That's what was likely going through my head when one day I took the next step from concealed consumption and just stopped watching, burying the show and my memories of it away (The only trace left was the show’s main theme buried deep in my music library that I would stumble on every couple years through an "Old Favorites" shuffle and that would force me to remember it all before I buried it down again).

And now, in continuation of the developing "Hey--Jessie!" tradition, welcome to the desperate-attempt-to-tie-it-all-together-section Third Act.

Enter: Beatlemania (60 years belated). For the purposes of keeping my train of thought coherent, I wanna emphasize that I fully believe that if you cannot see how female community – the fangirls – is/are intrinsically tied to the phenomenon of the Beatles (and frankly responsible for their rise to fame) you're either being willfully disingenuous or blatantly misogynistic. Got it? Good.

By pure happenstance I stumbled into Beatlemania a few months ago after accidentally clicking on Nowhere Man in Apple Music, and coincidentally only a week after finally admitting to myself that I was trans. That'll be important (if it weren't for that bit I would've had no reason to believe that the pattern of obsession and repression wouldn't continue). That said, it wasn't unprecedented, being predated by prolonged interests in Queen, Bowie, and The Smiths. From there, due in part to my tendency to learn about those real life faces behind the art I adore, and a well timed YouTube recommendation showing me the aforementioned uncarley video which turned that tendency voracious, what could've just been a musical interest led me down the road towards the title components of this essay: McLennon, and more importantly, Trans Fangirldom.

For the purposes of this conclusion I define my ideal experience with fangirldom as fundamentally joyful fixation on a given piece of media AND (arguably more importantly) the community/lived experiences surrounding it. Of course, one can fangirl for non "girly" media (the Beatles to that point aren't particularly musically feminine, just the community that formed around them), I'm just calibrating my language to the most impactful contexts in my experience. With that established, it is hopefully clear from my myriad obsessions with traditionally "girly" media and experiences above that (pre-transition) the fangirl experience was one I frequently found myself just on the edge of, or better yet, actively sabotaged myself from entering out of a bitter sense of self-hatred for deriving such joy in things I "should've" been indifferent to. I would consume said media covertly, actively deride those who enjoyed it openly, and ultimately cut myself off from it entirely out of fear of what my love for it would reveal about me.

It was after 20 years of this relationship to fangirldom, after finally accepting this desperately avoided truth about myself (the I'm A Girl bit), that McLennon finally arrived and drew me into Beatlemania. And a lifetime of lost girlhood began to be made up for. Having crossed the hurdle of incongruence between who I presented as and who I felt I was, and the expectations imposed therein, for the first time in my life I wore my fangirliness on my chest (yes I'm cringing as I write this but isn't that the point of learning to be unabashedly myself? I think I've earned it). Ask my poor summer roommates, among the first I came out to, and who for their acceptance have won my unceasing rants on each new bit of evidence (Paul – purportedly – hung a photo of John naked and asleep in his home for heaven's sake!). It's a culmination that, silly as the subject matter may be, was years in the making, and encapsulates a fundamentally landmark shift in my internal mental framework. I'm finally learning not to hate myself for who I am. And I have 2 super-dysfunctional British men (read: lovers) and the generations of fangirls devoted to that truth to thank for that.

My first post on this blog wrapped up with the words "[there's] barely any contrary (I'm not trans and this is some grand delusion) evidence in contrast to the points in favor (You're trans you idiot)". I concluded with acceptance of that fact. But acceptance came with the caveat that understanding my pattern of capitulation to the smallest doubt actually meant very little to whether I would exhibit any hope of resisting it. And so here we are.

In my trans experience, truly, intrinsically feeling like a girl is a profoundly euphoric and exhilarating state of being. It is also an exceedingly delicate state to maintain under scrutiny, so naturally the first thing I do when it occurs is rip it to shreds to see where it comes from; how it works. Blame it on being a girl in STEM I suppose. Oh, and the OCD diagnosis.

But, as I said, aware as I may be of myself and my patterns, I remain seemingly helpless to stop myself from diving head first down these thought spirals. So in an effort to shame myself into finding said spirals too silly to obey, I shall utilize you all as a live studio audience as I rattle off my neurotic tendencies in all their paranoid detail.

For those trans folks lucky enough to experience and recognize it, gender euphoria is one of the greatest feelings in the world, and as such one of the strongest indicators that one's gender does truly align with their presented identity. That last bit is the dangerous part, in my case. By nature of the perceived validating effect associated with it, any trace of gender euphoria in my mind becomes a target of scrutiny. "Am I actually feeling this?" "What if I only feel this way because I know doing so would make me feel valid in my gender?" "What if it's all my subconscious going along with what I want it to feel?" Never mind the hilariously glaring conclusion from that last line – as far as I know, only girls wanna feel like girls – I hope the exhaustingly rote and repetitive nature of these questions is apparent because that's sort of the point of me sharing them. They accomplish nothing and get me nowhere, but some stubborn little part of me refuses to recognize that.

And at the same time I can't help myself from inciting them because the gender euphoria itself feels so good. So I'll burn my time precious presenting as Jessie sitting in front of a mirror, gawking and preening because, at last for a little while, each burst of joy manages to stave off the doubt for a little longer. That is until I over-saturate myself to the point that the euphoria becomes cheapened and doubt is able to come roaring back. At that point, with each probing question and scrutinizing evaluation for validity, the initial joy I felt gets buried further and further until it ceases to be. It's pretty hard to maintain joy at seeing oneself in a pretty dress when all one's mind is occupied with is whether that joy is "real".

On the flip side, things get even more weird. Under this system of excessive scrutiny, dysphoria, that lovely nagging reminder that something (read: everything) is not quite right also becomes something to assess for the sake of identity confirmation. Take for instance how I'll get wildly distressed the once in a blue moon that I manage to look in the mirror while boy-moding and not get the familiar gut-wrenching wrongness. I'm quick to demand that since I wasn't miserable 24/7 I must be blowing the whole thing out of proportion. Because that's a totally healthy foundation to build a personal identity around, right?: "Gut-wrenching wrongness". So as a result of that mindset, I end up relishing in that miserable feeling whenever it strikes, at times even hoping for or inciting it to trigger so that I can, for those few moments, buy myself certainty that I'm right about all this. It sounds ridiculous and self-destructive, and that's because it is.

The irony here is that I've managed to build a system that is exclusively lose-lose. Any joy is immediately suspect of being fabricated, and any misery is rewarded, and as such neither can merely exist as is. If I'm going to make any progress at all here, I think it's pretty certainly gonna require learning to stop myself once I notice I'm entering one of these spirals. How I learn to do that is anyone's guess, but I suppose it would start with reminding myself of my own words: "[there's] barely any contrary (I'm not trans and this is some grand delusion) evidence in contrast to the points in favor (You're trans you idiot)"

First, I love you forever

Second, be advised that proper essay posts will likely become more spaced out as I burn through my list of initial bottled up ideas and begin coming up with them from scratch again.

No that’s not a backwards emoticon (and I’m honestly hurt that you think I would make such a mistake). Her name is P, at least that's what she goes by, and conveniently for the sake of anonymity that's what you shall know her by.

She works at the coffee shop across the street from my summer apartment. It's adorable, cozy, very gay – all things a good coffee shop should be – plus there's a framed 5 star yelp review citing the barista who was staring daggers. I like to believe that was P.

Who is P, you ask. Why did I dedicate a post to her. Well, 1: because she doesn't laugh at me when I ring up the little apple shaped apple juices, and 2: because she taught me what it was to Be Known, From Scratch (that's right she's citing the title, she can write coherently, you're impressed).

What do I mean by that? Well, by the nature of this whole trans setup, up to this point everybody (in the very small club) who knows me as Jessie has known me as [DEADNAME] first. Some for sizable amounts of time. And while I've been lucky enough to be warmly embraced by all those I've bared my soul to, the little voice at the back of my head won't shut up with it's insistence that the traditional path to coming out fully (in which most people who know me eventually find out I'm trans one way or the other in the name of No Longer Hiding) means there will be a great deal of people who are – consciously or not – less malleable in their perceptions and will forever see as [DEADNAME] first and Jessie second. My paranoia likes to bump up the predicted scale of that portion. Or worse there will be those whose mental image of [DEADNAME] will be so entrenched that they'll think I must have made a terrible mistake, and doubt my resolve. The thought of external doubt being sent my way is horrifying, considering how much grief it's already given me when produced internally. Now is this unfair to the people I have told and the acceptance they've already demonstrated? Yes. Does it disregard their ability to acclimatize with time and gradually overwrite their old mental image of me? Also yes. Has that made in difference in the persistence of the voice? Not a chance.

In contrast to this imagined status quo, picture my first time meeting P. Or rather my second time. The first was pleasant but uneventful. She complimented my matching blue dress and top. I thanked her. Then came round two, a few days later. Pink dress and outfit this time. Another very kind compliment, followed by graciously jogging my memory of her via referencing out previous interaction.

"I'm P," she explained. It hit me that I had an unprecedented opportunity.

"I'm Jessie," I replied.

The conversation went further this time as she commented on my outfits being consistently color coordinated. She asked if I planned to keep it up. I told her I'd try my best. But for the remainder of its length, all I could think about was that first reply of mine.

"I'm Jessie."

It was a first. An entirely new frontier. A person in my life for whom Jessie was nothing but the default, the norm, not a sudden shift away from a man that was previously "known". It had been so easy. It had felt so wonderful. I was, for a moment, utterly free of who I had been and able to just be who I am. It was intoxicating.

After the conversation had ended, as I sipped my drink on a seat in the shop and mulled over events, a now recurring fantasy of mine bubbled to the surface of my mind, inspired by the recent events.

My life is rapidly approaching a point of great potential change. I'm halfway through my undergraduate degree after which I'm planning to pursue a doctorate. There is no written rule that dictates I must pursue it at a school remotely in the vicinity of anyone that knew [DEADNAME]. In two years I could run away from it all – from the old me – to Boston or the Bay or any of the places where I'm looking at schools and build a career and a life there; find a whole new set of people like P to call my own, that would know me as me, as Jessie, and nothing else. If necessity demanded it or I felt appropriate I could come out to select people who had known me previously but I would be under no obligation to do so universally. I wouldn't feel the need to justify or defend my identity to anyone who was attached to the old one; there would be nothing for these new people to be attached to.

I'm not gonna lie to you, It's a tempting fantasy. And it'd be remiss if I said I haven't given it a lot of thought in the weeks since it occurred. Being perfectly honest, I still haven't entirely ruled it out. So if you were hoping for a moralistic closing message about how I resolved not to take the easy way out and went for the high road, I'm sorry I suppose. I'm not sure quite what lesson I stand to learn here exactly. Realistically I can't imagine there's much to be gained by stubbornly deciding that it's somehow "right" to be wholly forthcoming to everyone currently in my life. Power to those who decide it's what they want but I don't think it ever necessarily needs to happen. That said, a fresh start from scratch is inherently lonely. And, if only for the sakes of the handful of people I've already bared my soul to here, my incessant little conscience would give me hell if I just packed up and left without a word.

When I was 16 it occurred to me that I was probably trans. My response?: Oh well. What can you do?

Am I'm being a little facetious? Maybe, but probably not as much as you're imagining. I couldn't tell you where the thought first manifested whole but I can recite verbatim the first time I vocalized its component pieces, some weeks before their inevitable conclusion would become obvious. It was a passing period, huddled in the breezeway with my high school friends taking refuge against a particularly cold Spring morning. Gym rats that they were, we must've been discussing something along the lines of gym photography, which is likely how we ended up on the topic of mirror selfies. From there (god only knows what possessed me in that moment) I found the words already halfway out of my mouth: "Do you guys ever look in the mirror and feel like the person in there just isn't you?"

It was not as unilateral an experience as I had hoped (Shocker). Sensing a shifting vibe, I laughed it off, played it as half joking, not out of awkwardness but fear at what looked like gears beginning to turn in the heads of my friends. I couldn't even tell you what I thought they were about to deduce, all I knew was that I wanted more than anything to stop them before they found their way there. Before they led me there and made me look.

That pattern of avoidance more or less defined my approach to dealing with my transness up until very recently. Once it became too obvious to simply look away from as I'd done at first, I switched gears to acknowledging and filing it away. Yes I would be happy to be a girl (elated even), but no way in hell did I want the real life road to that outcome. Therefore, things were best left as they were. In the moment, this framework actually felt like freedom. Since I knew I would never transition (point and laugh at her, dear reader) I was free to explore femininity from behind the guise of being a feminine man and ignore the source of the deeper pull. I pierced my ears, started painting my nails, wore eyeliner and never had to confront the crippling awareness of why they made be so happy that was growing with every passing year. All things considered, seeing as it worked pretty well for 4 years I can't say it was a total failure of a strategy, but still I wouldn't recommend. 2/5 stars. I'd say its deepest issue was that for it to do anything long term it would have to, well, hold up a lot longer – meanwhile the cracks had already started showing in 4 years.

Unluckily for me, avoidance is also possibly the most well-documented trans-egg-in-denial coping mechanism out there. That certainly didn't help either.

It's as cliche a story as possible but I was finally confronted with it after watching... I Saw the TV Glow (Yes you're all shocked, I know, I know). For those who are unfamiliar (but how exactly though, you're browsing a trans tag on Tumblr) the movie tells the story of an objectively terribly written protagonist named Owen (who's a trans girl in denial but also not and also a superpowered girl named Isabel trapped by her arch nemesis in a magical Matrix situation that's constructed a suffocating suburban life to keep her stuck) who receives the call to adventure to confront her identity halfway through the movie – and then spends Acts 2 and 3 running headlong away from it as fast as possible. Shit, she's me. It's no surprise then that I love it more than anything and it's my favorite movie ever.

Don't ask me how, but I had never properly processed that in order to keep living my picture perfect life of denial I would have to continue putting in conscious effort until I died. Somehow I was under the assumption that it would get easier with time, or otherwise become an unconscious effort. But watching Owen-Isabel physically deteriorate into old age as time jump after time jump dragged her further through a life that wasn't hers, all the while never getting any less aware of The Question haunting the back recesses of her mind that her life became wholly devoted to running from, something broke in me. I finally saw my inaction for what it was: fear (I already acknowledged how cliche I'm being, get off my back). Being confronted with the end point of the path it had set me on terrified me. And in my experience the best remedy to fear of an approaching rock is greater fear of the opposing hard place.

I'd love to say I was motivated to finally move from my state of stagnation by some idealistic mantra of choosing oneself and being true to my identity. But I suppose fear is the Great Motivator.

I'd also love to say that after having this epiphany I remained consistently unshaken in my resolve but that wouldn't be perfectly accurate either – as made painfully obvious by my recent regressive episode of wondering whether I couldn't just keep presenting fem by night for the rest of my life instead of properly coming out. My progress in life is anything but a linear path but then again that's how all the good stories come about. And since, dear Reader, by now you are probably wondering when the other story I mentioned in the title comes into play, I suppose I'll end with an excerpt from another good (very trans) story, Nevada by Imogen Binnie, which the fear of personally embodying helped shock me out of the aforementioned episode.

"Maybe being trans just means... the self-protectiveness.... extends to literally every other area of her life: she won't check the balance of her checking account unless the ATM refuses to give her money; she fixates on the possibility of having bed-bugs for months before she'll even lift the mattress and look for eggs, She's been working at the same job she hates for more than half a decade because she's afraid to look for another one... Like she's got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her and with that shell there she can't move" (Nevada by Imogen Binnie, 2008)

I can't think of another witty way to kick things off so let's just get into it (Yes I know I'm only 2 posts into this blog, gimme a break).

That was aggressive, sorry let's start again. Hi, I'm Jessie. At least part-time. And as luck would have it, that's exactly what I wanna talk about in tonight's episode of my ramblings.

For the sake of context, I think it'll be helpful to expand a bit on info I touched on in my last post (I promise I don't just like to hear myself talk).

By nature of being in the middle of a busy college life while my gender musings evolved into the full blown realization that I Wanna Be A Girl, I found myself temporally constrained in terms of when I could actually be that girl. Said constraints resulted in the absolute devastation of my sleep schedule as from 10PM to 3/4AM every night I would retreat to my room and don my makeup, hair extensions, fem clothes, you get the idea. It was as if I was taking a stand somehow (for an audience of nil) by refusing to sleep and let those precious hours slip away. But stubbornly as I held that routine, I did realize that something would have change in the long term for the sake of my health.

As luck would have it, things changed for the better far more dramatically than I could've hoped. Soon enough the school year ended, and I now find myself in a summer apartment doing boring work stuff you don't care about as [DEADNAME] by day, but returning to an apartment where I can freely be Jessie by night. Achieving this new status quo necessitated actually crossing the hurdle of admitting to myself what I wanted – freedom to be a girl – so that I could admit it to my roommates. And as luck would have it, two gay men are sufficiently queer enough to be totally unfazed that their roommate wants to change her name and pronouns.

So here we are, Jessie has half of the day (plus weekends!) to herself. What a win, right? Well, that's the issue (which took me a whole 358 words to reach).

I want more. And I don't mean that just because I prefer Jessie as a mode of presentation. I mean it because [DEADNAME] and Jessie have begun to feel like two wholly separate identities that I embody and am constantly ripping apart and stitching back together. But even more than that, while (maddeningly) whichever identity I end up embodying in a given moment has a dramatic effect on which feels metaphysically "true", my emotional reactions to each "truth" are where the conviction that something has to change arises.

Embodying Jessie is, in a word, freeing. That remains true all the way through how I physically inhabit the world. It's like weights are dropped from my ankles leaving me actually present for once in my body. I'm more fluid and hell, I practically prance about my apartment (we love trans joy). Mentally it's much the same. The world around me feels like it comes alive, and there's wonder in every mildly reflective surface. And from the social angle, when I can get out of my own head and let myself enjoy it, experiencing she/her pronouns has been a revelation. The act alone makes me feel beautiful and ethereal.

Conversely, embodying like [DEADNAME] is familiar (that familiarity has given me its fair share of grief; “why aren’t I more actively miserable instead” and so on and so forth. So much for trans joy), but in a manner that is anything but comforting. I suppose I mean the word to be read in the sense of a prisoner and her familiar cage, that which becomes so routine and ordinary that she can't recall or imagine a life beyond it, not even the warmth of sunshine, and settles into a sickly complacency. From behind it’s bars life begins to feel viewed as if through the wooden eyes of a marionette, puppetted from a distance by miles-long strings, as I settle back into tracts of vicious self-loathing I wouldn't imagine otherwise.

Melodrama over.

Perhaps the worst part of all that is, as I said, the fact that when I’m [DEADNAME] my mind seems dead set on shredding and forgetting any memory of the joy that being Jessie brings me. I become convinced that this masculine life is all I can and will ever have and mercilessly berate myself for ever even considering the hope of anything else. Doubt seizes that opening and comes flooding back in. I spent 2 hours last night preening in front of a mirror because I was so in awe of seeing a girl there? Yeah that’s just novelty that’ll fade the moment you come out to more people. He/him pronouns are starting to feel grating in comparison to she/her? Well of course dummy, you’ve allowed this delusion of transness to go on so long that it’s no wonder you’re tricking yourself into believing it. You get the gist. It’s exhausting. That’s it, there’s a better word to describe the [DEADNAME] experience: exhausting.

With that understood I hope it becomes clear how, despite the veil of “truth” it comes draped in, the sheer and unique emotional negativity that defines the state of being [DEADNAME] has contributed to my belief that it just cannot be metaphysically “right”, if such a thing exists. Or perhaps more accurately, I can’t bear the thought of it being so. Hence my prior mandate: I want more Jessie instead (“hence my prior mandate” girl you’ve been writing too many papers and it’s irreparably damaging the tone you write in).

What is it to be a woman? To be clear, I don't mean that in the Matt Walsh way, god no. I suppose I meant it in the sense of what it means to be anything at all? I debated internally a while (you'll come to find that that's a pattern of mine) on how I wanted to properly open this blog, and eventually figured it would only be right to start with the through-line question I'm sure will haunt the narrative of my ramblings as long as they go on. If you've read my bio, you'll have found out that I'm trans. Admitting that to myself has been the easy part. I've even managed to pull on my big girl pants and muster the courage to declare my pronouns as she/her in said bio. Ooh, aah, you're all very impressed, I know, I amaze myself too. With all that said I'm sure the answer to the Great Big Question of My Gender (TM) must seem painfully obvious to you, dear reader. How I wish it were. I might not even be here writing if that were the case. Alas, we've both found ourselves here so let's make the most of this chance to address said question. I would love to be a woman. More specifically, I would love love love to feel myself intrinsically to be one so that in that face of any hardship thrown my way for it I'd at least have that truth to cling to. But I've come to realize that I'm not that kind of trans person. Instead I'm the weird other kind whose apathy towards masculinity just gradually climbed as the years post puberty passed, until apathy began to rot and wither into distaste, discomfort, and what I now feel comfortable calling dysphoria. The face in the mirror no longer looked like my own. And somewhere in that transitory state flourished an equal and opposite longing to embody femininity. But of course I wasn't trans, don't be silly. Objectively I knew trans people existed, but they knew they were trans and I knew nothing of the sort. All I did know was that there was something wrong but I was not to share these feelings rattling around my head with anyone. For a decent length of time once I'd gotten older, I convinced myself I'd solved the issue by resolving to be a feminine man. I started wearing eyeliner, pierced my ears, painted my nails, all the things and more that you can imagine. And for that time I was happy. My years long obsession with using Faceapp to save dozens of feminized photos of myself was curbed. But it couldn't last, and out of the blue it came crashing down one snowed in night in my dorm. My strategy of appeasing as opposed to addressing the call towards femininity became painfully transparent. The questions were back, dominating every thought that crossed my mind, and that was that. So much for my resistance. A week from that night I had shaved all my facial hair and tried on a dress in secret, both for the first time. Several months later of obsessively dressing fem every night until ungodly hours using a growing collection of feminine clothes, makeup, hair extensions, etc, and here we are at the present day. To give credit where due, I've come further than I ever thought I would during those years spent dreaming "If only I was trans". For heavens sake, I've even shared these revelations with my roommates and with their consent begun to dress fem in our shared spaces, plus going by Jessie and she/her. And yet, the Question: What is it to be a woman? It dumbfounds me, and as long as it does I feel incapable of calling myself one. It's such a silly thing to get hung up on. I enjoy my new name. I love hearing myself referred to as her. But my mind, it runs and runs and runs in circles around whether I meet some metaphysical benchmark of woman, the goalposts of which seem to keep creeping back. And I think that's because, as I said in my initial clarifying question, I have no fucking clue what feeling like a woman would feel like. It's an unmeasurable metric, and as long as it is I will always be insufficient standing next to it.