But I did not know, until I started disman-
tling that femaleness, that I thought that if I
wasn’t a pretty girl, I was worthless. I’d been
indoctrinated to believe that if you’re gonna
be a person with a vagina, the most import-
ant thing to be is nice to look at. By an entire
misogynist culture. By movies, where pretty
girls became objects of obsession and e≠orts
to save, frequently without even talking. By a
formative figure, who used to snake his arm
around my waist with his fingers gripping my
pelvic bone and ask people, “Isn’t she beau-
tiful?” No amount of higher education or
professed feminism or professional success,
apparently, had managed to mitigate it.
Indeed, my career as a journalist had
often only reinforced it. At a variety of
fancy functions, my very presence at which
might imply I had other talents, multi-
ple high-ranking editors brazenly talked
about my body or having sex with me; a
senior male colleague regularly reminded
me where my merit lay when he put his
hand on my upper arm, my lower arm, my
waist, my thigh, my thigh, my thigh. On
location, a cameraman leaned his body into
me until a producer intervened and said,
“I’m gonna need you to tighten it up, man.”
Before an interview, a source o≠ered mehis hotel-room key; after the interview, he
kissed me on the mouth. That’s an incredibly
truncated list. You could argue that it was
just the purview of predatory men, but that
would put aside the female superior who
regularly commented on my weight, and
it wasn’t until I started transitioning that I
understood how thoroughly I, too, had inter-
nalized the message that desirability wasn’t
an asset but the asset.
At the tiki bar that night, and for months
afterward, I was nauseated by the certainty
of my impending loneliness. As hormones
started to take e≠ect, a friend came to visit,
and I fretted to her for hours that no one
would love me after I shed my slick female
packaging. When she tried valiantly to reas-
sure me that they would, I fought with her.
“You cannot know that,” I said. And she
couldn’t. Not for sure.
The morning after karaoke, after another
trans friend had pulled the syringe out of my
arm, we’d sat in silence, almost eerily still.
“What’s your favorite thing about testoster-
one?” another friend asked me two months
later. And I told her: The thickening. The
feeling of more surface area of my thighs
touching, a rapid and thorough filling out
of my frame and flesh along with my vocalcords—even my wrists straining against a new
bracelet—though if anyone had ever told me,
when I was trying to be a girl, that this was
my deepest desire, I would have been highly
skeptical. “Finally,” my elder sister said when
she saw me, “those [broad] shoulders fit, eh?”
I had never felt like an adult woman. So I had
never felt adult at all, physical female matu-
rity an excruciating prison of unfulfillment
until I had, at 37, the glorious, unsteady legs
and voice crack of a fresh teenage boy. When I
had top surgery, I gaped, almost as soon as the
hospital sta≠ woke me up: I made it. The next
day, I sobbed a flood of pent grief, repeating
over and over that while my body had been so
beautiful, I’d been so fucking lost in it.
And.
Nearly everyone I told I was transitioning—
friends, colleagues, even ex-boyfriends
caught cold o≠ guard—responded instantly,
“Congratulations!” After surgery, I watched
with wide-eyed awe as my friends tirelessly
attended to my recovery, despite seeing who
and what I was. And despite none of them
wanting to fuck me.
And still. After several months, when
everything in my body said it was time to
redouble the dose of testosterone I’d already
doubled once since I’d started, I lay in bed in
terror for days before taking it. Even though
the morning I’d taken that first shot, when
I’d finally broken the silence, it was to ask my
friend, a nurse, if he couldn’t have injected it
directly into my heart.MASQUERADING AS A GROWN female, I had
been assaulted. I’d been threatened, and
ceaselessly harassed. At college, at work;
around this country and outside it. On the
other hand, personally—unlike uncountable
millions of women—I hadn’t been murdered.
“I know it’s false, and imperfect,” I whim-
pered to a friend about the security of my very
white femininity the night before I took my
new, bigger dose. “But it’s the only security I
ever had.”
Certainly I felt safer underneath it than
outside straight-looking cis white privilege,
which I’d have had to be out of my mind
to give up easily. When I was 18, a series of
increasingly short haircuts prompted the
groping formative figure to yell: BE A GIRL.
I shaved my head, then went to college. Mere
weeks after I arrived on campus, Matthew
Shepard was tortured to death. A year after
that, Boys Don’t Cry came out, and I saw that
what the figure had long told me in private—
that I’d be killed if I didn’t play nice, play
pretty—was true. The arm around my hips or
shoulders while I talked to other adults was a
constant reminder.
And.
And being a nice, pretty girl might mean
that he would enter me more like a lover—in
the front, from theAUGUST 2019 GQ.COM 95
STYLIST: OCEANA LARSEN FOR AUBRI BALK. GROOMING: PRESTON NESBIT FOR AUBRI BALK. (continued on page 104 )