Nov 07, 2019
How Transition Changed My Rigid Expectations of Masculinity
Obtaining a perfect grasp of masculinity was not my goal when I decided to transition, but I certainly did feel the pressure to try.
Obtaining a perfect grasp of masculinity was not my goal when I decided to transition, but I certainly did feel the pressure to try.
I do not believe in a soul but these past six months of illness, I am guilty of dislocating, of clinging to magic. Of wanting relief. Of being sick of being sick.
What I forgot, for years and years, were the details of what my body experienced at the time. But my body did not forget.
I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.
I don’t recognize the future version of me the doctor describes. To remain myself, I must prove him wrong.
My relationship with food was a combination of deep love, reverence, and guilt—making it impossible for me to give it up.
The secret of the beauty of our bodies is slowly starting to get out, becoming less and less niche each day. And I hope it moves faster.
After you have a preemie, but before you get to take your baby home, the world keeps going without you. It’s shocking, honestly, how much the world keeps going.
It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and it had been trashed in my absence. My resentment was as precise as any recipe.
I felt a down spell in my persistent belief in possibility—a sense that something within me once felt unremitting, but had since been stretched to its limit.
Contrary to its reputation as an extreme sport, freediving has meditative aspects.
Dr. Couney settled in the United States in 1903, when he began exhibiting incubator babies on Coney Island every summer. “Infant Incubators With Living Babies,” the sign above the building read.
I just wanted to believe my eyes were magic, that only I could see things that existed below the surface.
I don’t want my self-worth to hinge on a relationship. But vulnerability is a practice, and for me, it has been a valuable one.
Weight loss is not a life change that just happens with a snap of one’s fingers. There’s more to it than that, even when people say it’s just about “putting in the work.”
This is the problem with the vocabulary of miracles when it comes to childbearing: It ends up equating failure of conception or birth with a divine curse.
These worlds I dearly love, with science-fiction that supersedes the science in our reality, deserve Smart Drives and automatic doors and disabled heroes, too.
Whether it’s postponing motherhood or dreams of the perfect dog, the most painful steps to living the life you want are often the most necessary.
I felt abandoned and alone. I was told that it was at odds with what mothers should feel, do feel, after childbirth.
These women showed me how to love and care for myself—the only way a Black woman could.
