#summerdance

I started dance class when I was two years old, but I have been dancing since I could walk and kicking my feet to music long before that. I grew up in local ballet schools where we didn’t have performances and classes were mixed gender (which meant that sometimes we would have one boy). I loved to dance more than anything. And then I hit puberty. If you are trans you know the experience of watching your body go through the wrong changes. Now imagine (or maybe know) what it’s like to watch those changes in skin tight clothing, in front of mirror, almost every day. My technique suffered. All I wanted was to crawl out of my skin, to dance in the body I was supposed to have. By the time I was fourteen I had begun to hate dance enough that I was ready to give it up, though only with the promise that I was taking a break, not quitting. I went to one last ballet intensive and every night I would come home and break into tears. I’m not a cryer, never have been, it was one of those “I won’t be a girl” things I picked up when I was really little, and there I was sobbing my eyes out night after night. To make matters worse, my teachers saw my vulnerability and actively made fun of me for it. I quit.

Two years later I’m back. I started boarding school this year and tentatively signed up for a ballet class. And that was it, I couldn’t stay away any longer. My dance teacher is loving and supportive, and she has done everything possible to help me regain my technique and learn the male steps I never learned. But it is so hard. Not only did I miss out on two important years of training, I have to learn a whole repertoire of movement, one that involves a lot of strength, without testosterone. I got accepted into a selective dance program for the summer and have been dancing seven hours a day for the last three days with incredible dancers. It makes me wonder whether I belong. Every day I am faced with the same truth: I am weaker and less well trained then some of the girls I’m dancing with, let alone the boy, who can do six turns to my imperfect double. There are still things I could do three summers ago that I cannot do now. But I feel a duty to push through. I want trans boys to be able to dance without wondering whether there is a place for them in the dance world, especially in the ballet world with it’s strict gender norms. My dream is to open a company and eventually a school, not for trans dancers, but for everyone to be trained equally and to dance all roles. I don’t just want a space for us, I want a dance world in which gender has nothing to do with what you can and cannot do. But to do that I need to be able to dance, not just well, but well enough to get into college and, more importantly, well enough to get people’s attention.