Mirrors

Sometimes I think we’re doomed by the myths we create. Take Narcissus, our warning against the dangers of self-love: a white, cisgender man who drowns in his own image. His world is full of surfaces that keep him believing there’s no end to his worthiness. He never questions their honesty and can drown in his own importance easily. The rest of us aren’t so lucky.

His descendants cast a spell on all of us when we’re born. Some get lost in the promise of these illusions; some learn the art of curse breaking to survive. Trans people, my people, have cultivated the power of prophecy and use their knowledge of the future to reimagine the world. The keepers of our craft, Bornstein and Feinberg, Mock and McBee, Tourmaline and Vaid-Menon, teach us how to rescue ourselves from mirrors that make us into monsters. I believe we are not bound by the mythology we inherit. It is, in fact, our duty to create ourselves through narrative possibility. This is the story of how I learned to remake my image, again and again, until Narcissus was forced onto the margins.

I The Suit

I’m standing in front of the mirror in a dark navy dress. It’s corseted perfectly to my waist, rounding out an hourglass of hips and breasts. I see her, the woman I’ve been asked to be for as long as I’ve been alive. I feel a slight thrill at the achievement and then repulsed by the desire to fulfill other people’s dreams at my own expense. My sister would love this dress. She would love how I looked just like everyone else who was supposed to stand next to her on her wedding day. Almost immediately, I know she can never see it. She’ll smile so big that I’ll swallow my trans-ness to let her joy fill up the room. If for some reason I hesitate to do it, if for some reason I decide to put blossoming first, she will implore and cajole until I retreat back into her, the woman who gives me a stomachache and a burgeoning despair. I know this moment could break me if I let it. I decide to take care of the person I’m becoming. I take off the dress that will make her happy and resolve to tell her that if she wants me in the wedding, I can only go as me, in a suit.

I call her a few days later and say all the hard things. No, I can’t go in a jump suit. Yes, I’d be more comfortable wearing what the groomsmen are. No, I’m not trying to disrupt your vision of the day you’ve always wanted. Yes, I have to go in a suit or I can’t stand next to you as your maid (person) of honor. She isn’t used to me being so decisive. She’s accustomed to me trailing off into question marks, instead of punctuating every thought with certainty. It takes months and months for her to see that I can’t be the woman she’s always pictured in the photo album. She decides to tweak her dream just enough for me to fit inside it.

By some miracle, we find a rose colored suit that matches the bridesmaid dresses perfectly. I try it on and feel like the soft boi I’ve been striving for. No one says anything transphobic when they see me walk down the aisle. One of my biggest loves finds me after the ceremony and we dance. With her around, I can be anyone. I decide to be someone who’s proud of their progress, who gives a boisterous toast full of jokes of in a white dress shirt and glittering purple suspenders. The queer photographer finds me after and thanks me — his eyes say he’s seen what the mostly straight attendees have missed. I tell myself I’ll try harder to live this like, to live inside the word non-binary, instead of invoking it reflexively, a shield against humiliating eyes. I promise myself that I’ll try to stop calling this night a miracle. I will bring bits of its magic into the bathroom every morning when I decide who I need to let out into the sun.

II The Haircut

After the wedding, I spend months trying to recreate that curse-defying suspension of dysphoria. Everyday I try to work out the mechanics: what creates the alchemy of being in my body and feeling above the world’s judgments? Day by day, as I’m “she’d” and “ma’amed” by family that is trying and strangers that harm thoughtlessly, I lose track of my progress.

Some part of me — both angry and terrified — strikes back with changes I can control. I wear pants that obscure the history underneath; I cut off more and more of my hair, until all remembrances of Rapunzel are banished. At first I look for curse breakers in all the wrong places: I go to a barbershop where the stylist recommends I leave some length so I can stay beautiful. I go to a straight hair dresser who tells me about all her queer friends and then suggests an asymmetrical bob I hate. I re-experience the ache of invisibility enough times I realize I can’t remake myself in spaces walled with cis mirrors. I find a queer hair salon and drag my still-too-long hair (and the promise of an actual undercut) to the first appointment.

It’s a bright, sunny afternoon but my insides are storming. I’m nervous because of the rejection I might find; I’m nervous because of the rejection that may never arrive. What if this place feels like home? Would that mean I was wrong about all the places that came before? Places that never quite fit inside the word?

Everything is a blur of apprehension, relief, and discovery: I see my buzzed head for the first time and feel like I’ve crossed over into a world I’m not sure I’m ready for.

I realize, this day and after, that I’ve been afraid to sink into an embodied masculinity because of what that would signal to the world. White masculinity has done women I love immeasurable harm and I am afraid to be associated with it, even in appearance. I am afraid to get kicked out of the circles of queer women that showed where the world’s light had been hiding, who taught me how to find it again after periods of darkness. I’m afraid the women who matter most to me won’t see me as one of them anymore. I teach a feminist, culture studies class for teenage girls and my students see me as someone equipped to hold their pain properly. Whenever they hand me stories they’ve learned to unearth, I feel pangs of alignment with the gender I was assigned. I don’t want them to lose the safety they’ve found with me. I don’t want to be forced out of that same safety and into the cold.

Months and months go by: I find the magic suit, and eventually, the queer salon becomes a fixture in my routine, a place where I can continue to reshape myself.

I credit that safety to C, the stylist who clocked my unfolding. Their station greets you as walk in: a motorcycle jacket and helmet are first to say hello, hang casually on an industrial hook mounted firmly to the wall. Just to the right sits a sizable dresser topped with a black-rimmed mirror. It’s edges are lined with gifts from clients: a colorful needle point of Frida Kahlo, delicate animal figurines, and a monochrome sticker that reads “Homoriot” with two masked men kissing underneath. C rocks a black smock to match, with a menagerie of colorful pins that hang together in kind of manifesto for living. They always greet me the same way, with an expression that says, “why’d you wait so long to do something about that mess under your hat?” I’ve gotten into this habit of waiting too long to get cleaned up and after about eight weeks, an unfortunate shaggy quality settles above my earlobes and down the back of my neck. I look part middle-school boy, part Midwestern grandma. C suggests I come in at six weeks. I always nod, vigorously, and then come after nine or ten.

We fall into conversation easily when I sit down. C pulls the beanie off and if there’s an “I knew it” on their lips, it doesn’t show. They look over the mess I’ve left, but there’s a softness to their expression that peaks out from under jet black hair. We fall into a rhythm of swapping stories about our families and our mutual teenage moodiness. They describe their love affair with heavy metal and how it gave them some place to smash out the anger that lived in their body then. I retort that I had more of a depressed, writing-terrible-poems go of it — that I preferred crying in closets instead of throwing elbows in pits. It strikes me that our styles of confronting the world are creations of our bodies as much as the cultures they were raised inside.

C is unapologetically brown and queer; they stand in their body like the larger world has crashed into their livelihood one too many times. They stand like they know how to create a center of gravity for themselves. I have a sense this steadiness is both hard won and different from the one I sit in.

I’ve been read as a white woman for a long time: I’m relatively short and my voice is closer to soft than butch. Being forced into compulsory femininity has done real damage to my psyche (and a now frayed nervous system), but it’s also shielded me from certain kinds of physical jeopardy. While I’ve heard C talk about working through their own set of intersections, I’m not sure they’ve ever had access to the camouflage white femininity has afforded me. I know that my fears of masculinity are also about facing the scrutiny of living in a recognizably queer body. I’ve both craved the feeling of being known and feared the potential violence of visibility.

Whenever I sit in C’s chair, I’m freed of reasons to hide and relax almost immediately. I start to realize how often I’ve been holding my breath. I wait for the mis-gendering, but it never comes. C never drops “she” like the ghost of the life I can’t quite leave. They’ve created a space that’s so welcoming I realize how haunted I feel everywhere else. Everything about the experience has helped deliver me back to myself: somehow, when I’m in that chair, my tenderness and buzzed hair aren’t in contradiction. Somehow the hand held mirror reveals how perfectly they fit together — like one had been calling out for the other all along.

Toward the end of every appointment, after they spin the chair and say, “hey look, it’s you again,” I think about how I can honor the space C’s opened up. I decide that part of what I can do is to help build a new, white masculinity that isn’t threatened by bodies like ours. Part of what I can do is promise to challenge the white structures that despise the the clarity of C’s joy and threaten their safety. Part of what I can do is show up for C and the salon; to love hard, in whatever way or direction they need.

III The Binder

I finally muster up the courage to order a binder — a rubicon of trans-ness that’s been calling (and taunting me) for months. It comes in the mail on a Tuesday, but I don’t open it until the weekend. I tell myself it’s because I’m busy, that it’ll have to wait until the right moment. I know that’s a lie. I know I’m really afraid of the joy I might find when I slip it on. I’m afraid I’ll finally meet someone the world’s kept me from.

I stare at it in excitement and apprehension as it slides out of the slick, gray packaging. It’s bright purple: the color I thought would bring together the parts of me I’ve always known and the parts I’m still discovering. I think of how much time I’ve already lost in the betrayal of hourglasses. I remember the miracle suit and the undercut and decide this next leap is worth the risk. It’s a struggle to get the tight fabric over my anxious shoulders, but I manage after a few bungled attempts.

Unlike the first appointment at the salon, this moment is crystal clear: I stare at myself, entranced by the relief of not having to reimagine my body. I take in the euphoria and watch as it dissolves the weighty discontent I carry in my chest. On a whim, I slip on my own version of a technicolor dream coat — really a rainbow flannel I bought at a second hand store. I smile in way that stretches toward the future. It feels like the perpetual sunrise Carol promises Terese, a dream that’s outrun the world conspiring against it. I try to linger here, in the expansiveness, but soon it’s hard to breathe and I know I’ve trusted the joy too soon. The binder I ordered is one size too small. I feel a familiar grief take over and get pulled into a kind of remembering I don’t know how to stop.

I see myself at fifteen one morning before dawn, leaning my weight onto one hip in the mirror. I slip on the wrinkled white Tee lying on the counter, but can’t bring myself to hoist up the pair of bootleg jeans crumpled on the floor. As my left hip juts out into the air, I feel my palm iron up and down the cellulite with a desperation I can’t control. The markings disappear momentarily before re-asserting themselves, a landmark of womanhood I never asked for. I repeat the motion over and over until the sting of tears snaps me out of it. I flee from the rage I can’t name, from the self hoping to be released. I don’t have words like “trans” or “dysphoria” so I take the whispers of cis women as gospel: it’s normal to hate the way you look at this age. Everyone wants to be thinner sometimes. There’s this diet called Weight Watchers you should try.

I turn my brilliant mind into a dieting archive. I collect and collate dozens of articles about the calories in different breads and cereals. I learn to see the BMI scale as the ultimate arbiter of reality, believe its judgment to be final and righteous. I anxiously hop on the scale at the end of every week, eating just enough not to be constantly hungry. I stop thinking the point of eating is to enjoy the taste or to revel in the company of people you love. I grow into a womanhood that feels as empty as the one my arc angels promised.

The constriction of the binder snaps me back into 30. I clutch the edge of the sink to steady the leftover swaying in my knees and rush to yank the purple fabric over my head. Tears spill out of their own accord and fall onto my neck. When the dizziness clears a few minutes later, I open my eyes and stare down the parts of womanhood I can’t seem to release. I’m suddenly flooded with a rage that’s 15 years old: Why did the world deny me the right words and the right care, and leave me broken angels in their place? Why does it always ask me to cobble together self-understanding alone, in a bathroom mirror?

Can we ever take out Narcissus, release ourselves from the specter of his vision? I ask myself everyday if it’s possible for us to be free. I ask myself if we can ever see ourselves clearly in a world full of broken mirrors. Sometimes I think he’ll always be lurking at the edge of our lives, ready to break in. The only thing I know for sure is that every shard of progress is both painful and exuberant. Although the un-breaking often feels cruel, I’m not sure the process is entirely to our detriment. The problem with Narcissus is how he reveled in his own perfection as a foregone conclusion. Our bodies require a radical acceptance of imperfect progress, of always reimagining who we might need to be. There is beauty in trans excavation. When I think of C’s smock full of pins and the hand held mirror that can contain all my tenderness and masculinity, the unfolding continues. Anywhere my love and I are dancing, anywhere she sees who I am and calls me family, the unfolding continues. I see a bright, new binder in my mind and know I haven’t finished yet. There is beauty in writing ourselves into imperfect stories that we aren’t sure how to end.