From a girl who looks like a boy

It doesn’t take much more than a glance in the mirror to know that my sharp jaw, shadowy beard, broad shoulders and Adam's apple provide to the average passerby a distinctly male physique, but despite these obvious physical traits I possess and what was printed on my birth certificate, I am a girl.

I may not be a girl in the sense your mind instantly jumps to, but for those who didn't know, I am, in fact, a girl.

To most people, to be transgender is a concept that feels distant from their lives, something they’ll hear on the news, but won’t experience in their daily lives. Especially in a rural swing state, the odds are relatively slim your average Miamian has had the experience of knowing or being a trans person.

To be fair, I was someone without either of those experiences short of a year ago. Though, once my egg cracked – as they say – it was twice-fried and baked into the blue-haired crossdresser that writes before you today.

It all happened after a summer afternoon when my eyes finally opened to realize the full extent of who I was, and who I had prevented myself to be for so many years prior.

Since I can remember, I suppressed it and shoved it away, chalking up the “It would’ve been cooler if I’d been a girl” thoughts to simply being random, normal occurrences.

Once it dawned on me who I really was, I owed it to myself to act swiftly and effectively to assert my outer self to match the inner.

So after several months of slowly changing myself from a bland, sweatpants four-days-a-week boy, to wearing jewelry, painting my nails, wearing clothes from the women’s sections of stores and shaving as closely as I could, I hoped for what I felt to be a truer, more physical change.

I wanted to transition.

It wasn’t simply that I wanted to, it was that I had to, needed to, in order to feel ok with my own appearance. I needed to see myself in a mirror rather than some amorphous blob of queer carbon who resembled a stranger when perceived by my own eyes.

There were many a conversation with my parents, an endocrinologist appointment, dozens of questions and some of the most difficult weeks of trying to understand my thoughts and needs that I’ve ever experienced. But I got the prescription I needed and picked it up right down at the CVS on Post Road.

I’m not sure I had ever been more excited for a moment in my entire life. Not one moment before that did I feel more at peace with myself – like I was in full control of my being, my identity and my body. Never before did I truly feel that I had any control over how those around me actually saw me.

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On January 15, 2022, I took my first little pill to mark the ceremonious beginning of my transition. However, it took not long to realize that only days later I would be back in the thralls of Oxford and Miami University.

I had to remember what it’s like to come back.

I’ve spent probably a hundred hours wishing myself to be a party-loving frat guy, or a surrounded-by-lifelong-friends sorority girl because I constantly feel like I’m missing out on the “Miami experience.”

The camaraderie that so many feel here is lost on me. Sure I have my friends, some of whom share the existential confusion that is “trans-ness,” but there’s still something missing.

There’s still something missing from the world outside my apartment, an apartment in which I am called and referred to as who and what I am. The world outside, the classes I take, the professors I learn from all see my pronouns on Canvas and in my email signature, yet still can’t seem to grasp that my identity is worth more than what I may look like.

I ask those around me and the oh-so-many people who, too, experience being seen as someone they are not to take a moment to think before deciding a person’s identity with your eyes, and ask who they might be in their hearts.

I’ve been transitioning for only a touch over a month now, racing to the mirror every morning and evening, hoping desperately that my pill has changed my face just enough so that I’ll get a “ma’am,” or a “she” that day. I may be a bit naive to think it’s possible just yet, though I too could be victim to my own internalized transphobia when I tell myself that I won’t be a girl until I hit some nonexistent and miscellaneous parameter of feminization.

Gender holds no physical bounds beyond that which we choose to give it, so I ask quite often why I feel this desperate, dysphoria-sparked han (a Korean term without a direct English translation).

I truly have no way of knowing the full extent of what pulled me to need to be physically seen as who I feel to be underneath my skin.

What I do know is who I am, how I want to be – no, scratch that – how I deserve to be seen.

I know my transition is far from over – Hell, it’s hardly even begun. But I hope that someday I can walk down High Street both devoid of the fear of not feeling welcome and devoid of the “sir” and “he” that I’m so painfully habituated to receiving.

I hope one day I won’t race to the mirror right after I wake up, and come feel the grandest, most sincere disappointment that proceeds to seep into my bones for the rest of my day. I hope this feeling that prevents even a faint smile for hours on end, and causes my mind to dissociate from my classes and any interactions I have that day, will have no place in my life.

Until next time, further and deeper down this tumultuous path to recognition, this has been Devin: the girl who looks like a boy.

@devin_ankeney

ankenedw@miamioh.edu