I used to get so upset when people complimented my appearance, unless they did it in a super weird way. For one thing I just didn’t want to be seen. For another it was such confusing dissonance from what I was told the rest of the time. And then the terms they used were all wrong.
There was that one guy who went up to me on the upper east side, and told me I looked like the lord of darkness. That was kind of interesting. Random shit like that, yeah. Sure. Baffling, but I’d take it.
Otherwise it’s like, either you’re wrong or everyone else is wrong—and if they’re wrong, then oh no, because I don’t want you to be right like that. The things everyone else said, they sucked but at least they reflected how I actually felt about myself at that time, drowning in dysphoria.
Getting an insult almost felt neutral. Yeah, it was no good but at least it was true. Getting that kind of a compliment—I’ve never been suicidal exactly, but if I’ve ever been close, those moments would have edged me in that direction. At times I remember melting down entirely.
It never made any sense to me, why I reacted like this. Which just added another layer of fuckery to the whole thing.
I mean. Makes sense now. I didn’t want to be that person; I wanted to be me.
In some ways it feels like transness is a thing for Other People, to explain to them why I’m not behaving the way they expect me to. For my part it’s more like I’m finally getting care for a condition that was negligently misdiagnosed and so has gone untreated all my life.
It kinda feels like… making a transition from, say, an assumed free-breather who keeps coughing all the time, goddamn, to an asthmatic. Like, this was probably always the case, right? Or more close-to-home, a transition from a neurotypical to an autistic with ADHD issues. I was obviously never neurotypical; that doesn’t even make sense. Pinpointing my neurological situation is about correcting for a previous set of false assumptions and lack of care and support.
By the same reasoning, at no point did I ever agree to my gender assessment. I just… didn’t want to argue. It’s neither here nor there that as a result of that misdiagnosis it took me 40 years to work out what was wrong with my situation. It happens all the time medically. I’m not changing anything. This is a diagnostic process. All I’m doing is correcting for other people’s mistakes.
The sense where I am obviously gloriously correctly trans is the cultural, ideological aspect. There’s a way of thinking, of relating to one’s self and the world—a sort of shared understanding of how things work—that is very different from those who don’t have to deal with this. And that is very much a part of who I am and who I want to be.
In an ideal society we wouldn’t dump these gendered assumptions on people the moment they’re born, and even before. Before roughly the 20th century, kids in western culture were treated as more or less androgynous until they hit puberty, at which point they adopted gendered roles. The past sucks and shouldn’t be taken as a model for the future, obviously. But point is, this is arbitrary that we project this garbage on our frickin’ caterpillars, way before it’s relevant to their lives or their self-concepts.
If our culture actually made sense, then… well, gender as we know it probably wouldn’t so much be a thing even—but more to the point, it would be pretty meaningless to be trans, as people would make up their own minds who they were and wanted to be at the right time—except in the occasional case someone realized whoops, they got it wrong before, or something in their life really changed the way they felt, which, of course, valid. But then, like, it still wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with assigned gender, right.
Assigned gender has nothing to do with me. It’s never played into my self-concept except for the fucking trauma that it’s caused me and the way it’s forced me to react and sublimate myself to keep safe all these years.
To make a very cautious parallel that one shouldn’t look at too deeply, just as race doesn’t really have a biological basis yet it’s still meaningful due to cultural identity and history, I absolutely am socially trans. 100%. There’s too much wrapped up in that concept. As for me, though, the way that I see myself? I’m just… me.
People got things wrong, and I listened to them. And it hurt me. Then I worked out the truth, and I’m getting better. That’s… really nothing to do with me. Who I really am has no relation to what others expect.
I’m just Azure. I’m some weird kind of a girl. I always have been. People are just dumb.
I genuinely have never known what it’s like to be male. I was never raised as “culturally male,” as the TERfs would have it. I have never had any interest in masculinity. I have my whole life shied away from thinking of myself or being classed as a dude. I just never quite understood why it bothered me.
I had no connection with any gender, really. I tolerated other people’s assumptions about me, though it made me feel gross—but I had none of my own. The start of my transition was me, recognizing and accepting and exploring this lack of a relationship and what it might mean for me.
My gender is a bit weird and wibbly still, but I do have one now. That’s the thing, though—in every way that matters to me, this is my first gender; my only one. The one that’s always been latent, and that I’ve spent the last couple years grasping toward. It’s still a work in progress to define it and understand how it applies to my life. but it’s not a moving target. It’s always been pretty stable, even when I’ve had no active connection with it.
In a sense it feels funny I’m considered trans, as I’m not really transitioning from anything that I think of as real. It’s more a matter of finally paying attention and growing into myself, after putting it off for my whole life.
This is the only me there has been. Yeah there was this protective husk, stumbling around for decades. but that wasn’t me. It was the parcel post shipping container. It had no awareness, no sense of self. It didn’t feel anything, want anything. It was just layers of swaddling, to get me through the long exchange.
I don’t know anything about my assigned gender beyond what I can read in a book or see on a screen. Experientially I can’t tell you how it feels any more than I can describe what microwaves look like. It’s an alien concept. It has nothing to do with me.
So there’s this online clothes service… thing, where you give them your measurements and vague preferences and on request or stated interval they send you a mystery box of curated stuff with a free return envelope for whatever you don’t want/can’t afford. I got a $35 credit, so I figured what the hell. Worst case scenario, they send a bunch of stuff I don’t like; I send it back, and don’t pay anything. Best case, I get one or two things I do like, that are covered by the $35 credit, and I send back the rest—and still pay nothing. If I get just one piece of free affirming clothing that I like, it’s worth a trip to the fucking mailbox.
Right?
Turns out, I was both overly and inadequately optimistic.
Like most places that carry women’s clothing, this service, their sizing is all weird and byzantine and bespoke, but I did my best with the fairly rigorous measurements I have assembled—which to my surprise mostly worked out. Sometimes astonishingly well.
I woke after a few days to a phone alert that the box had been delivered. And—well! As it happens there’s no fucking way I could afford any of this, but the experience did make my head swim with new ideas and help me to confirm a few things about this new person whom I am.
Like, say, jewelry. I mused earlier about piercings, and have rattled on internally about necklaces and rings and bracelets—and this package has only solidified those thoughts.
As would become a trend, the piece they sent was… not quite right, and I doubt I’d have kept it even if the price had been other than ludicrous, ($74?! Haha! I’m no expert, but I’ve passed mall kiosks before.) But more importantly, it felt good to wear. I liked the weight and the movement. It just feels good to have something like this (if not this in particular) on my wrist.
There is, as it turns out, a real stim value to jewelry, which—the concept feels like a revelation to me. I want to associate jewelry with, like, Christmas trees, right? I’ve always thought of it as pointless baubles and decoration. But there’s this visceral quality that matters, on a nerdy psychological level. It’s so soothing to have this jangly thing on me that I can fuss with as needed. The sensation makes me feel more grounded, more present and real.
Getting more into the meat of the wardrobe, bottoms have long been an issue for me. It’s hard to find men’s trousers that are both long enough to fit the limited range of acceptable cuff lengths and thin enough to fit me without tying a fucking rope around my waist. Also my hips and thighs and waist and butt are changing, if ever so slowly, and it would be nice to get something that I can wear outside when it’s no longer skirt weather. But, well. Here we start to run into some well-documented systemic issues.
These things are still cut a little low for me personally—I want coverage up to my navel, so my hips are taken care of—but otherwise the fit is… absurdly close yet exactly right. It’s funny; my leg length is completely normal in women’s pants, yet causes all these issues in men’s sizes. And with the stretchy material, these sort of mold to my thighs and calves even. I don’t know if I need all my clothes to be as tight as all that, but now I do know my measurements, and that I should be able to find something in my size with little trouble. Finally.
Thing is, I’m used to paying, what, $20 for a new pair of jeans? More often $5-10 from a thrift store. So what do they want for these? $78.
hahahahahahaha get real.
It’s then that we get into the particulars. I start to make concessions and excuses, and think, well, these pants are kind of nice, and maybe the waist isn’t quite what I want, and I didn’t expect them to be this tight but there’s a place for that, and maybe if they cost $55 less I’d keep them. As I strut around, though, I notice all the little things, most prominently that famous bugbear:
There are no pockets.
I don’t mean the pockets are stitched closed (why does this happen?), or are shallow but could maybe be extended with a little seam work. I mean, there are stitches that indicate the appearance of pockets but there is nothing actually there. It’s entirely cosmetic. A false front.
For seventy-eight dollars, fancy dress pants that are entirely useless.
Whee! Yeah, okay. This is the world we’re living in now. Okay. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but as with so many things sometimes you just need to live it for it to click entirely.
So frustration aside, we now stroll into the realm of confusion.
I don’t know what this top is supposed to be, but, uh. No. I guess I like the whole paisley print thing, but I don’t understand the cut and the fabric is strange, and… it doesn’t suit me in general. On the upside it’s the cheapest thing in the box, at $38—almost affordable! On the downside, it’s not my thing at all. I mean, paisley is good in principle. Otherwise? Yeesh.
Two interjections before we move onto more viable territory:
Excuse my bedhead in all of this. As I say, I literally just pulled myself out of bed to find the package delivered.
I swear, my mirror cannot be un-gross. I clean it, and ten seconds later it’s magically just a wall of handprints—even if I haven’t touched it (so far as I know). Must be the ghosts.
The next thing is nearer to a thing I might conceivably wear. Thing.
I’m told this shawl-smock whatever is meant to be a kimono. I don’t really see how that makes sense. But whatever it is, it’s rad and I want to see more like it. But, probably not for $44. Because again: i am poor. Chop off, like $15, and maybe we’ll start to think about it. Even then it’s pricey.
If this is meant to go with that paisley top, I’m… like, that seems like a dangerous intersection of patterns. Confuse your enemies. Dazzle your friends. With a flat color it should be fine.
And finally, the centerpiece:
I’ve never actually worn a full dress before, and this one confuses me to put on. I keep burrowing into the wrong holes. But, haha, the cut is novel and it seems to fit just right.
I mean, the dress isn’t super duper interesting in its own right, but gee does it open my head up to new ideas. It seems to fit just right. And I don’t think I’ve worn anything more flattering in my life. It is… a little scary how accurate it is in terms of what it feels it should emphasize, and not.
As with everything, the problem here is the price. I guess maybe $68 could be reasonable for someone, but not for me. That’s just money I don’t have, and if I did it would be going to keep me off the street and to keep the power on. If I could afford it, though? I guess I would be exploring more dresses like this. Because, jeez Louise.
So although I don’t get to keep any of this, the adventure has been constructive. I know I have my sizing correct. And I know that a V-neck is good, for the way I’m shaped now. I guess I work well with a low cut, even. If I go for a dress, a wrap style might not be a bad plan apparently. And now that I know how good I look, it’s hard to keep my mind off of it.
Just as a garment, this is so comfortable and natural to me. I mean, yes, the fabric is soft and warm and stretchy and nice. But also, I just feel confident in a way I’m not used to. It’s like, wearing a dress like this, everything clicks. I make sense to myself.
So! Guess this is fully my thing now! Every day, becoming a little more human, huh.
I think if I had a dress like this, I’d want some kind of a necklace to break up that space. I guess we’re entering the jewelry zone, huh. (It’s mostly gonna be silver. Or, you know, white metallic.)
All in all this was a reasonable, if not quite right, menagerie. That top is kind of weird. The rest of it, some good beginnings of ideas at least. I like the feel and cut of this dress. Turns out, I like a jangly bracelet. Everything beyond the ideas, it needs to go right back before I do it any damage or wear. (This is making me a little paranoid. Better hope the return mail works properly.)
Altogether that’s $302 they wanted for those five items—which… you know, I’d hope to have paid like maybe $75 for, by whatever impoverished fantasy bubble my mental calculator currently lives in.
Someone out there surely will mock me for this, but I don’t get paying that much for clothes. If we weren’t in a pandemic, thrift shops are of course a thing that exists. Often you can get a decent top for a couple bucks. Maybe five, for a pair of jeans?
So yeah, this service ain’t gonna work out. But hey, fun dress-up session. Again also, it’s also good to know that my measurements seem to be right on—and that it is possible to find clothes that fit me! This is such a novelty! And an important point. I have never in my life found masculine clothes for my frame. And, that’s because, not only am I not a dude; I’ve never been shaped like one. And now I’m really not.
All of which speaks to—hrm.
A thing I’ve been learning just recently is—presentation-wise, my tendency has been to play it slow and safe, right? Dress down in public, even as my tits become harder to hide and my face changes and my hips grow. I’ve been reluctant to go too overtly femme, as I didn’t imagine I could pull it off and I felt kind of vulnerable to think about it.
But, turns out. It suits me. Like, this is actually me.
It’s not only fine; it’s not just that it works okay and I shouldn’t worry about it. It actively works really really well. way better than the half-steps I’ve been settling with and way better than anything I’ve worn in my life. And I feel amazing. Like, I found something here. Maybe if I could dig up something similar, but cheaper—and with a bit of lace? A dress, and maybe some cheap, stimmy white-metal jewelry. I hadn’t at all considered the stim factor, and now I want to keep going with it. (Again, god, I wish thrift stores were a thing one could reasonably visit in the year 2020.)
I just had this flash. Imagine waking up in the morning and actually being excited to get dressed—like, it being a fun thing that served to enrich one’s day, rather than a thing one had to do. I bet that’s what it’s like for some people, assembling themselves each day.
It also is becoming clear to me just how much clothing affects one’s presentation. I mean—duh, right? But normally I don’t much notice clothing. It’s just a thing that rests atop the essence of a person, and my attention brushes right past it like the furniture of an entryway. It’s decorative, not structural.
The thing is, no detail exists in a bubble and clothing isn’t just about the clothing; it affects how everything else is read. Weirdly I think even my face looks different when attached to well-fitted, clearly feminine-coded dress. The brain, it picks up all these different peripheral contextual clues, which add up to change the overall perception, the meaning of any component detail. Change the bulk of the signals, and that changes how one reads what’s left.
Even a face, it’s relative, not absolute in what it serves to communicate. My face is more masculinized than feels comfortable to me—the jaw, the brow, the chin—but much of the significance to those elements seems to dissolve next to a form-fitting, low-cut dress and other distractions.
Masculinity, femininity; they’re arbitrary and exist on a scale. Different people have different faces, and even with testosterone damage mine is fairly androgynous really. So take a broadly androgynous face and surround it with all these other signifiers, and one’s perception shifts to fit one’s expectation. It’s kind of like color theory. The features look different as dimensions in a broader context than they might seem on their own. Lots of women have an angular face, and if everything else is coded feminine nothing seems all that strange about it.
Figuring out a lot here that I hadn’t really thought about. I’m going to be chewing on all this for a long time.
I’ve always had a poor sense of self. The confusing thing, that I’m only just working out, is that this doesn’t mean disliking myself; it means being hopelessly out-of-touch with a concept of me. With an inner narrative about who I am, and why, and how I feel about that.
This is an engineered situation. I know I’m not alone in this, except in that my experience is my own. But the effect is that this whole zone of selfness, this area that defines me and what I want and need, it’s fogged over with a perception filter. I try to look, and I roll off. To look at myself, try to identify myself as a person, even work out what I might want from moment to moment, it’s like making eye contact with a stranger or staring into the sun. Or checking one’s inbox, when an unpleasant response is likely. More than that. It feels shameful.
I lived in an abusive house. One of those where almost daily my father would congratulate himself at me for not hitting me, and telling himself (one suspects) more than me how grateful I should be, because other people had it much worse. Constant screaming. Near total neglect.
There were no mirrors in the house, except a high and dark one above the bathroom sink and a palm-sized one high up by the front door. I’ve mentioned this, but it seems important. I never got in the habit of seeing myself. I learned to keep my head down, make no demands or noise. If I did nothing, didn’t add to the noise, didn’t draw attention to myself, I could maybe get through the day without any of the surrounding war landing in my lap. Life was a matter of deflection, avoiding confrontation, reading danger signs, and pleasing the unpleasable. In return, at best, I got nothing. I got left alone.
And when I mean alone, I mean alone. No one ever really talked to me. Asked me questions. Showed me how to do anything, take care of myself. I had to figure out how to survive myself, sort of, in a house with two adults. As long as I was blank, I was fine. Because, if I weren’t blank I would be wrong.
In hindsight, anything would have been wrong. But I also… I didn’t have a strong concept, again, but I knew almost nothing that people expected of me applied to me in the slightest. In the ’80s and early ’90s, concepts of gender and sexuality weren’t so developed in the culture that would reach a small town in Maine. Whatever other people were doing, it sure didn’t fit me. Lots of people assumed, or feared, I was gay. I knew that wasn’t quite right either.
This whole scenario, it created a sort of limbo where it was impossible to move forward. The warfare between my parents undermined a desperate attempt to attend college out-of-state, and I just wound up doing what I was expected, trying my best to hack out a tolerable space in it. It wasn’t until I was 25 that I stumbled onto a lifeline, an excuse to get me out of that house. I had no idea what I was doing, but I didn’t care; I had to go. And I shifted into a totally different abusive situation. Someone looking for a void mirror like mine for themself.
So it went. I’m now 40; of those, only three years have been of my own company, outside of relationships where my lack of a sense of self was the main draw for the other, and I was a tool for their vanity. The point of me was not to be a person. I was obedient, so as to survive.
Obedience is the thing. It’s the only way that I’ve known, yet I’m so very bad at it. I’m okay when it means doing nothing, but when it means to do that which comes naturally to others, or to play a role written for me, I don’t have it in me. And this is where the pain comes in. The depression, the anxiety, the shame, it’s actually nothing to do with me. My poor self-concept isn’t a concept of a poor self. That’s not where the hyphen is. It’s all to do with the narrative put on me by others, that I’m expected to reflect without flaw. And I’m not so glossy.
Getting to know myself, it’s scary. I’m so used to checking over my shoulder. Making sure no one sees me glancing in the mirror, or the glass of the shop window. What I see there, it feels forbidden on so many levels. But, it’s all that I have. I need to take a serious tally. When I step away from the shame of looking at all, and the fear that what I find may not match the expectations of those who control my fate, I like the person who I find. It’s a shaky relationship, the one I’m building, and one started far too late. But at least I’ve found them.
I still don’t know what to do about all this, how to support this person who it seems that I am, how to help them be who and what they need to be. But I see them now, and I’m coming to understand. And I’m starting to care. So this can be my little project from now on.
