Conformation

The body no longer policed by gender

Of all the things I did as a little girl, none of them were right. This is, of course, hyperbole. I’m sure I occasionally or eventually must have managed to do things right, if only by accident. This is also an accurate summary of my girlhood experience. There was nothing a person does with their body that I could do correctly, by which I mean: to my mother’s satisfaction. Considering that I turned out in the fullness of time to become a larger-than-average man it’s not too surprising, but that’s the grace of hindsight. In the long moments of my childhood and adolescence, my body, and all the things I did in it, were cause for a global alarm and consternation.

None of this alarm was mine. I know we’ve all heard story upon story of young trans people cursing their genitals, fearing their secondary sex characteristics, ashamed to the point of staying indoors and swaddling their proto-trans transgressions in layers of sweats. Some of us are revolted by what we see and some exhausted by the impact our personal topographies have on the emotional and political climate, but that wasn’t me. My vagina was not the problem (and gosh oh golly, is that a sentence I never imagined writing) or at least it wasn’t my problem. We got along okay.

My shoulders, however, were a problem — broad, broader than the boys and this was…