“Did you get the gift I left with you?” My mother asked. I roll my eyes, “Yes, mom. I got them,” I reply. Of course I found the little gift bag my mother had pushed me out of the door with. Of course I had opened them after I drove the two hours back to where I was living, only to find shaving cream and razors. I had laughed, not because it was particularly funny, but because it would have almost been ironic if my mother hadn’t have given me something like this. “I’m not shaving,” I say into the phone, feeling almost mechanical, like an automated line answering questions of annoyed customers. “Well, you’re living with Phil now! You have to shave,” she exclaims. Have to. Have to. She’s always used that phrase. I’m living under her roof, so I have to. I’m young, so I have to. I’m a woman, so I have to. No matter how many years I tell my mother I’m not shaving, or that I don’t feel like dressing up, or that I like short hair, she still finds ways to slip in reminders that I have to be feminine. Have to. “Mom, I’ll talk to you later,” I say, “I’m not feeling too great.”
From an early age I learned that my role was to be a woman. My sex defined my life, my personality, my disposition, and my actions. If I was gaining weight I was asked if I was pregnant. If I was depressed I was told to smile. If I was upset I was asked if I was on my period. Not only did these assumptions seem preposterous, but they also reinforced the fact that if I was something I had to be something else. If I had feelings it had to be because I had female hormones. If I was gaining weight it had to be because I had “gone and got myself knocked up.” If I was human, I had to be woman. I didn’t know that the way I had been raised was sexist until I reached college. I took a history course above being taught new information I was being taught new ways to think. I was taught to question my education and the opinions around me, instead of accepting things for what they were. For the first time in my life I was taught that I didn’t have to believe the things that people forced onto me. I didn’t have to.
After my first year of college I started researching gender, sex, and race. I started learning, instead of being told. I moved in with my best friend at the time, and eventually her boyfriend moved in. Scotty wasn’t a good person, not by any means, but he was a good person to have been in my life exactly when I needed him. He wore a mullet, a camouflage shirt, and a denim vest, which sounds as though he were a six-foot-something, shotgun-toting macho man, but really he was just a man that seemed to feel he needed to be the idea of masculinity. Man-incarnate. I don’t know if he was over compensating for the vagina he was born with, or if he really was a big fan of looking like he just left a monster truck rally, but I looked up to him all the same. This was a young man that overcame constant struggles, with his traditional Mexican upbringing, his mother still referring to him as his birth name, watching his friends do drugs and steal, and feeling like he wasn’t worthy. Scotty was taught that he was optional, his existence was something that could be ignored, but his gender was open for societal control. That didn’t change who he was, if anything it made him more sure of it, he was a man above the comment of others.
After cross-dressing for months, reading studies, and researching the horror modern science calls “phalloplasty” I decided it was time to be myself. Finally, after twelve years of hiding I decided to come out on Facebook. “So, if you haven’t already seen my blog then you wouldn’t really know. Here’s my “coming out” post. I’ve always felt like I should have been born a male. I would be super feminine still and most likely cross dress all the time. I love glitter, pink, and leopard print, but my genitals don’t make sense to me. I’ve thought about transitioning, but it wouldn’t really have a point. Bottom surgery will never do anything for me. It can never be what I want, need, or should have been born with. So… now you know. You can refer to me as Mahala, Blu, or Oliver, and I use any pronouns. So… yeah,” I posted to my wall. I didn’t message any family, I didn’t come forward in any dramatic or heart-touching way, I just typed what I felt and hit send. The backlash was unimaginable.
I reread the texts my mother had sent me a few days before, “OK but I want the money back that you get from your dad for college… Oliver..” Not only was my mother’s lack of grammar heinous, but her message was repulsive. I felt my stomach drop again. I had no mother. I had no family. Again it flip-flopped. “Are you ready, sweetheart?” The hair stylist asked. “Yeah,” I sat down in the styling chair. I looked at myself in the mirror. I noted my glasses, round, tortoise shell, clearly a statement on my pale face. I counted the piercings in my face, four without counting my ears that were almost stretched to an inch. I let down my hair, feeling it rest against my breast. It was heavy, after having been grown out for five years it was thick and reached the middle of my lower back. I touched my extremely split ends, the likes of which had seen many different colors. I looked my reflection in the eye and breathed one more deep, indecisive breath. “Cut it all off.”
“I hate growing my hair out,” I absentmindedly commented as I gelled down the side. “Well you shouldn’t have cut it off,” Phil touted. He was so proud. He was always right. “You know why I cut it off,” I alleged. I knew that he knew my reasoning, but did he really believe me? “Good night,” he said as he attempted to kiss me. I felt my stomach turn. “Good night,” I replied and went back to my tarot reading. I didn’t love him. He wasn’t someone I wanted in my life. I felt ashamed at using him, but I felt even more ashamed that I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want to hurt him. “Phal-“ I type into Tumblr and before I can even get the word typed out it recognizes my search. I sigh and click the previous search. Images of healed phalloplasty surgeries flood my browser. Huge scars litter the sides of men where skin had been torn off while they show off their newly healed skin tube. I would call it a penis if it even remotely resembled one. I feel the first tears start to sting my eyes, knowing that this is the only option for my future, if I decide to transition. I cry, silently sobbing for hours, only stopping when the sun comes up to feign sleep when Phil gets ready for work. I walk into the bathroom and stare at the reflection I have become so familiar with. Every night I barter with it, begging with it, hoping each day will bring a new image but never seeing the results I want, the results I need. “You’ve been crying again,” it addresses, as if I didn’t know. “Of course I’ve been crying,” I counter, “Why wouldn’t I?” My reflection looks me in the eye, as I mirror its actions. Its eyes seem to plead with me ‘this isn’t you.’ I analyze the face, the tortoise shell glasses, the facial piercings-four to be exact, and the hair cut to the skin. “Then who am I?” I ask myself. I think I know the answer. I’m sure I do. “Who are you?” My reflection asks me. “Who am I?” I ask it back. I feel images of leopard print, pastel hair, light pink cardigans, and the giant five foot teddy bear I used to have flood my vision. I feel love for these images, these inanimate pictures of things I enjoy. My head gets fuzzy and I start to weep again. “Who are you?” My reflection seems to interrogate me. “I’m… I’m Me,” I whisper audibly. Why am I whispering? No one is home. Why am I even speaking? No one is here. I look at the reflection once more, staring it in the eye and I finally cease crying. “I am myself,” I say to my reflection. I wipe my eyes and look back to the mirror, about to brag to my reflection, but all I see is myself.
Twelve years of denial, twelve years of repression, eighteen years of being told that who I was was directly correlated with my genetalia, eighteen years of being told that I was someone that my environment had taught me to be. I struggled with myself. I rebelled against the role force upon me from birth only to build my own cage of hyper-masculinity. I thought that if I am not one extreme that I am another. I have to be. I cut off my hair, I wore baggy jeans and ill-fitted shirts, I discarded the name I loved, and I bound the breasts that never bothered me. I built my own system of oppression. Still, I found myself wanting: wanting for myself. I spent nights weeping, spent days begging my reflection, spent years suppressing who I was, and spent a lifetime being told I had to. Then I found that gender was not a concept of two binaries, but a spectrum of many different expressions. I found that masculine and feminine are nothing but words that define societal norms. I found that people are not made up of definites, but rather display a variety of differences. Eighteen years to freedom.
Closet Kinkster 