how to misgender yourself for fun
what was that look for?
Back when I thought less of myself than I do now, I would always make this really bad joke.
I’d stick out my hand to strangers and go - “Hello, I’m Sam. I’m a man and I’m a liar.” By that point I was three years on hormones, sick of my own body, reticent to learn more about clothes or smells or the way my neck looked from the side. I was used to making a first impression.
The joke never played right and I liked that. Nobody ever laughed correctly at it because nobody could tell what I was calling myself. I mistook that for power. It didn’t help that I never told it right. I’d rush the words out, swallow them back up before they were done. I still talk that way sometimes, like second puberty has remade me a teenager- a little too loud, a leftover smile from the end of my last sentence that betrays that I have no idea what you’re looking at. I was fucking around.
My friends would tell me “I hate that joke,” in a way that sounded like “I love you,” even though they did hate that joke. I just wanted to get ahead of it, shame people for wanting to know my gender. No massive spiritual shift made me give up the bit. One day I just stopped introducing myself like that, for the same reason as I started; I was tired of people using me to practice staring.
I loved when my ex-boyfriend used to dress me up. They did not like me very much, which I didn’t mind, because they knew what I looked like. I’d told them how I missed my boy shirts, how between some over-eager clothing swaps and a house fire I’d lost anything I liked to put on. Nothing flattered my waist or accentuated my collarbones. I felt far from my own shape. I was embarrassed to mention the possibility of a well-decorated body.
Over a year and a half, they assembled a complete wardrobe under my name. They bought me a large portion of the outfits I now own. One time, they put me in a slip dress that looked like dry leaves and a pair of earrings, the kind of earrings you can’t sleep in. I’ve never looked so much like myself.
Still, it wore away at me, the way they monologued about my gender. I had been sorted, in their view. They knew my measurements. They resented that the answers I had settled for would not sate them. When they started up, without fail, I was unpersoned by the end of the first sentence.
I saw them the other week through a street-facing shop window for the first time in two years. We did not say a word to one another. The interaction was over in ten seconds. Your eyes stopped short of the tip of my nose.
The only work I’ve ever known is in the service industry. I have negotiated the job as best I could. Here is what I have learned:
When the room is louder, my voice sounds higher, and I get tipped better.
It does not make a difference if my hair is up or down.
Whether my shirt is covering my waist or not makes more of a difference than my stubble.
The question I get asked most often is, “Sam, what’s that short for?” I like that the answer is, “Nothing, actually. My mother named me that way.”
The question I ask myself most often is, “How observant do the inconsiderate need to be to make it my problem?”
If a guest asks my pronouns, that means they can’t read a room and someone else should be ordering for the table.
Most people are not paying attention.
I do not care if I pass at my job.
I would rather be seen as a man than as a topic of conversation.
I am perhaps too comfortable in my own clockiness.
Clothing is purchased as needed, in bulk. I sit in ultrawide on the bus. I don’t voice train, so I run with this faggy Philadelphia drawl and try not to breathe out too strong. I’m a classic butch-fail with the tank tops to prove it.
In the fifth grade I got face-painted at the school fair. I wound up scrubbing it off with one those sharp paper towels in bathroom until I got a rash on my left cheek. Makeup is no different. My face will remain bare until it gets paid not to be.
Every once in a while, I’ll stop doing my shot for a couple weeks to see how it feels. I never stop long enough to change much, but it makes the tendons in my forearms feel like skateboards. The moment my stomach starts twitching like a boy, I cave.
My pronouns are she/they, but the ‘they’ is silent. I stole that line.
The most common response after a person realizes they have misgendered someone is to just ignore it and then repeat the sentence with the correct pronoun.
The second-most common response is a profuse apology.
The third-most common response is the unprompted insistence that they are, in fact, a good person.
The fourth-most common response is to switch to using the subject’s name at all times.
The fifth-most common response is to continue as if they have said nothing wrong.
In moments like this, I evaporate, replaced by thought they loathe thinking. I become self-knowledge. I become an opportunity. I become a swollen artery.
The conservative imagination has been long enamored with bearded men wearing lipstick. This is weird because that is not, really, how they encounter us in daily life - as children, as laborers, as harmless and complete individuals. In flesh we are rational, pitiable, admirable. We are attractive - neither because of, or in spite of, our masculine features, but altogether and all over. We make sense.
So we must be overwritten, then. We are replaced by decrepit clowns, hyper-feminized artifice, born-again fetish objects. The iconography remains steadfast in ways we alone cannot. We are forced into docile supplication under the false pretense of dignity. We are lambasted for deviating from our allotted niceties. We are human beings held to the standard of caricature.
The liberal imagination is no different.
There is nothing stealth about body horror. I cut myself shaving and let the heel of my hand slam against my left temple; I will abuse my flesh before I treat it as a metaphor. There used to be pride in treacherous images. I’d learned to chug water from leaded canisters. The metal made me sleepy, left my mouth loose, dried out my throat.
I am not like the others.
I do the dishes. I’m not in a polycule. I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t drink pickle juice. I can hold down a job. I go out. I touch grass. I never make the first move. I don’t own a plush shark. Whatever it is, I can handle it. I don’t need money, but I’ll take it. I’m not addicted to ketamine. I don’t care what you call me when I’m not around. I’m basically a gay guy. I am a slut in private. I don’t wear thigh-high socks but I’ll throw them on for a footjob. I am not a pedophile in hiding. I am not a cross-dresser, a pervert, a whining faggot in a dress. I promise please I promise I’m not
One of the great pleasures in my life is the time I spend doing nothing with other trans women. This doesn’t make good fodder for a Substack essay, because my friends and I are boring. It is a relief to be inconsequential, to sit in lackluster shapes. We become nothing to write home about.
The other day, in the muck, I told my friend about that bit I used to do, about how I’d meet people at parties and then claim I was a man and a liar. She locked eyes with me and smiled. “That’s a pretty good joke.”
love ya lots and stay safe,
helmet girl xx
This was great. The plush shark line made me laugh a lot
Though I have always loathed my existence now that I have started transitioning I loathe it a little less. Your writing always feels like it was just shot out of my own skull. The deep emotion that I felt within this piece has been what I have felt for the past week and it hit me square in the chest.
Your writing always encourages me to pick up the pen. After reading something like this it makes me happier to be a transgender woman, our experience is a special thing. Not shared by many others, it makes feeling understood like I do now all the more valuable.