A couple days ago my daughter told me that I was a girl at heart. I was pretty happy and also sad–I want to be a girl. I feel like I’ve started to kind of slip, refer to myself as her at the tip of my tongue anyway. I don’t think I’ve done it yet. Correctly gendered myself in front of family.
My daughter did my hair kinda cute the other day. She put a braid in and a couple bows. I took a picture, smiled my girl smile. It’s a genuine smile but, the smile I do for when I feel feminine.
The deep chasm and void are always a few steps by me. Either to the left, or right, maybe my next step. The deep pit of being stuck a man. If I had to internalize and perpetuate a male identity from the inside I don’t know. I mean I spent a good 10 years avoiding looking at myself in the mirror. When I did, I’d see a complete stranger. He doesn’t look nice. It wasn’t what I expected that I would look like when I grew up. Not that I gave it much thought. I always thought I’d look softer. I don’t know that I understood the reality that I expected to see something more feminine looking back. It never really connected that I would be happy to appear as a girl.
The deep chasm, that of dysphoria, falling into the pit of despair. I’ll never be a girl. Yet in the sleeping hours and in deep prayer I find myself to be a girl. I ask to wake up a girl and the response I hear is that I am. Some would find it a cruel response, but there’s truth to it. This is the girl He created. I’m the girl He created. My physical manifestation didn’t conform. But my soul must be a girl–a woman. Otherwise there could be no basis for this? Perhaps I am wrong–then the question becomes why would I want it so badly? Why do I want the good and bad. I feel like a woman more aligns with my soul, my heart. I could embrace femininity as a man but I return to being a stranger in the mirror.
After doing my hair, my daughter declared “you’re a girl at heart.” And I feel like this wasn’t the first time I’ve heard it but it’s been so long. I think if I had embraced it like I do now, my feelings of being inadequate for a male–incompetent wouldn’t have applied so much. I was incompetent as a male not for the sake of being incompetent but rather because I wasn’t really a male. Not inside. Not that soul begging to shine. I don’t know that I feel the same way as a woman, like I know there are ridiculous standards society has set. I don’t know what sort of pressure I would feel to try to meet the standards. I think on some level having the identity at the bottom of the stairs is perfectly fine. I know who I am. I think I’d be my own woman and would be fine forging my own path. I mean I think I’ve done that as a man so to speak.
I never cared about how I looked as a man. I didn’t care about me. I didn’t love myself. I wasn’t myself. I was the stranger in the mirror after all. I don’t know how to express the difference of working towards being my true self and self-acceptance. I think most people would look at these words with a certain scrutiny and stop at “you didn’t accept yourself as a man.” Maybe there’s truth to this but when that man is a stranger–is not me at my core–what do I do? When I’m in a chemical bath that doesn’t match the song in my heart… I’m sorry I don’t know how to even convince you the reader any reader of what I know in my soul. I don’t know how to describe the mismatch–how to prove that I am mismatched from my soul and to my body. How do I prove to you that a female gender is essential to my existence? How do I prove that I don’t truly exist without that? That I’m no more than a disembodied soul. That I myself have become a “spirit” “possessing” this body. How can I accept myself without accepting the gender in my soul??
Someone who is cis doesn’t have to prove their gender. They don’t have to prove that the gender in their soul matches the one in their body. This isn’t true for transgender men and transgender women.