Work Text:
"I want to tell you before anything gets nearer than it already has, because I don’t want my body to arrive after my mouth has already promised something. I don’t want you learning me by surprise, and I don’t want you thinking I kept a door locked because I thought you’d break it down. This isn’t a confession. It isn’t an apology. It’s just the truth of me, and I’d rather put it in your hands while I’m standing steady than have it fall between us in the dark.
I’m trans. I’m a man. I’ve known that longer than I’ve had words tidy enough for it. Some people would call me a transsexual, and I can live with that word when it’s said plainly, without disgust or pity tucked inside it. Some people would call me confused, or sick, or ruined, or unnatural, and I can’t live inside those words, so I don’t. I’m not one of their files. I’m not one of their warnings. I’m not a lesson they get to pin to a board.
I was born into papers that said one thing, and I have lived long enough inside myself to know those papers were wrong. Not wrong because I hated myself, not wrong because I needed a story grander than the one I had, not wrong because somebody talked me into anything. Wrong because they looked at a baby and made a decision about a whole life. They wrote a name and a sex and thought that was the person settled. They didn’t ask the person.
I’ve had to spend years with people treating records like scripture and my own voice like a rumor. You know something about bad records. You know what it means when ink makes a person smaller than they are, when a form has more authority than a living body, when a clerk can look you in the face and still prefer the line in front of him. That’s part of why I can say this to you. I don’t think you’ll bow down to the paper just because it’s paper.
I started testosterone because I needed my body to stop arguing so loudly with my life. That’s the plainest way I can say it. It didn’t make me a man. I already was one. It gave me a way to live in the world with less noise inside my skin. My voice changed. My face changed some. Hair came in places it hadn’t before. My shoulders and arms changed. My temper didn’t become some beast just because people like to tell stories about hormones. I’m still myself. I’m just myself with a body that doesn’t feel like a locked room every morning.
I had surgery on my chest. A reduction, though I know that word can sound too small for what it meant. I didn’t do it to become somebody else. I did it because my chest was never a home to me. It was weight, and misreading, and hands I didn’t want, and mirrors I avoided, and shirts chosen like hiding places. I wanted to breathe without that old argument across my ribs. I wanted to stand without feeling dressed in someone else’s expectation.
I still have scars. They’re not pretty in the way people mean when they say pretty, but I don’t dislike them. They’re part of the road. They’re proof that something unbearable became less unbearable. I don’t need you to worship them or pretend not to see them. I don’t need you to make them beautiful so you can bear them. You can just see them. That would be enough.
My body isn’t simple, but I don’t think bodies are simple. People only pretend they are until a body refuses their little categories. I don’t have the body most people expect when they hear the word man. I don’t have some things. I have other things. I’m not going to dress that up in poetry because I’m not trying to trick you into tenderness. I was born with anatomy people call female. Some of that’s still true to look at. Some of it doesn’t feel like mine in the way other people imagine it should. Some of it I’ve made peace with. Some of it I don’t want named by anybody but me.
Between my legs, I’m not built like most men. I don’t have a penis. I don’t say that because it makes me less of anything. I say it because you deserve plainness, and I deserve not to flinch from my own facts. I have what I have. I know how to live in this body. I know what parts of me feel good, what parts don’t, what words I can bear, what words I can’t, and what touch would make me leave myself if I let it happen. I won’t let that happen. I’ve worked too hard to stay here.
There are words for my body that I don’t use. There are doctors’ words and men’s words and street words and cruel words. I’m not giving them to you as a vocabulary. I’m asking you to let me tell you what my body is when it matters, and to believe me the first time. I’m asking you not to go searching for the right term as if the right term could love me better than attention could. I don’t need perfect language. I need careful listening.
I don’t want my chest called by the old word. I don’t want my body divided into proof against me. I don’t want to be touched like a woman someone’s trying to be polite about. I don’t want kindness that still gets the direction wrong. I don’t want to be handled like an exception to your own desire. If you want me, I want it to be me you want. Not an idea. Not a brave little arrangement. Not a secret experiment. Me.
I’m not untouched, but I’m not careless either. I’ve learned early that wanting can turn dangerous when someone thinks your body gives them permission to decide who you are. I’ve had people look at me and try to solve me. I’ve had people hear one fact and forget every other fact. I’ve had people think my body was a debate they were invited into. I’ve had people act as though their shock was more important than my life. I’m tired of being generous to shock.
That’s why I’m telling you now, before there’s a bed or a hand under a shirt or a breath that can’t be called back. I’m telling you because I want you, and wanting you makes honesty necessary. I’m telling you because I can feel where this might go, and I don’t want fear standing there ahead of me, wearing my face. I’m telling you because I don’t want to be brave at the last second. I want to be truthful at the first one.
I don’t need you to tell me it doesn’t matter. It does matter. Not because it ruins anything, but because it’s real. My life matters. My body matters. The history of how I got here matters. The things I’ve survived and chosen and changed matter. Saying it doesn’t matter can sound kind, but sometimes it feels like being erased politely. I’d rather you say it matters and stay.
I also don’t need you to make it heavy in a way I’m not making it heavy. I’m not a tragedy standing in your room. I’m not asking you to mourn the body I didn’t have, or the childhood I didn’t get to have cleanly, or the years I spent fighting people who thought they had a claim on naming me. Those things happened. They shaped me. But I’m not only made of what hurt. I’m also made of appetite, stubbornness, work, music on the radio, rain on glass, bad coffee, clean shirts, and the way a person can look at me and make the whole room become easier to stand in.
I like my hands. I like my voice more now than I used to. I like the line of my shoulders when I forget to be ashamed. I like the strength I’ve put into my body. I like that I can carry things, fix things, reach for things, hold someone without feeling borrowed from myself. I’m still learning to like my reflection, but I don’t hate it the way I used to. Some mornings I almost recognize myself before I remember recognition used to be work.
There are parts of me I’m proud of because I fought for them. There are parts of me I accept because fighting them every day would be no life. There are parts of me I keep private because privacy is not shame. There are parts of me I’d share with someone who didn’t treat sharing like permission to own. I think you know the difference. I wouldn’t be standing here saying any of this if I didn’t.
If we ever do touch each other, I need it slow enough that my body can keep up with my wanting. Not timid. Not pitying. Just slow enough that I can stay present. I need to be able to say stop without it becoming a wound between us. I need to be able to say not there, this way, that word, not that word, leave the light, turn it down, wait, come closer. I need you to understand that direction from me isn’t rejection of you. It’s how I stay with you.
I want to be desired as a man. I don’t mean worshipped as some hard little statue of manhood. I don’t mean you have to pretend I’m made the same as any other man you could imagine. I mean I want your wanting to come toward the person I am. I want your eyes to know where they’re landing. I want your hands to learn me without arguing. I want there to be no correction hiding in your tenderness.
I don’t want to perform certainty so you won’t be uncomfortable. I’m certain of who I am. I’m not always certain of how to live with what the world does to that certainty. Those are different things. Some days I’m strong. Some days a stranger’s glance can knock something loose in me. Some days I can walk through a room and not care. Some days I hear the wrong word and feel nineteen years of being cornered rush back into my bones. I’m not ashamed of that either. A man can be tired. A man can be frightened. A man can need gentleness and still be a man.
I know I’m younger than you. I know that sits in the room with us even when neither of us names it. I’m not pretending I’ve lived as much life as you have. I’m not trying to dress myself in years I haven’t earned. But I’m not a boy wandering into this without a mind of my own. I’ve had to know myself sharply because people kept trying to blur me. I’ve had to make choices most people never have to make out loud. I’m young, but I’m not unmade.
I don’t want you to protect me from my own wanting. I want you to respect it. There’s a difference. I know what I’m saying. I know what I feel when you look at me. I know what it does to my chest when you stand close and don’t turn me into a problem. I know what it means that I want to tell you the truth instead of run from the possibility of being refused. That isn’t childish. That’s the most adult thing I know how to do.
You don’t have to answer quickly. I’d rather you answer truly. If this changes what you want, say so. I won’t pretend it wouldn’t hurt. It would. But hurt is cleaner than being tolerated. Hurt is cleaner than someone trying to be noble over my body. Hurt is cleaner than being touched by a person who’s secretly saying goodbye with every kiss. I can survive truth. I don’t want to survive mercy dressed as desire.
If you need to ask me things, ask me like I’m here. Don’t ask like a doctor leaning over a chart. Don’t ask like a judge. Don’t ask like a woman at a church social trying to make sin sound educational. Ask me because you want to know how to be near me without doing harm. Ask me because you understand that knowledge can be a form of care. I may not answer everything at once. Some things are mine until they’re not. But I won’t punish an honest question asked with clean hands.
I’m telling you this because I trust you more than is convenient. I trust the way you listen. I trust that you don’t need to make a spectacle out of another person’s truth to prove you’ve received it. I trust that if something in you doesn’t know what to do yet, you’ll sit with that before you put it on me. Maybe that’s too much trust. Maybe it isn’t. I’m choosing it anyway.
There’s a kind of loneliness that comes from being seen wrong. It’s worse than not being seen at all sometimes, because the person looking thinks they’ve done the work. They smile at the wrong person. They want the wrong person. They forgive the wrong person. They make room for someone who isn’t there and then call you ungrateful for not stepping into it. I’ve lived a lot of my life beside that room, watching people decorate it for a girl they invented.
I’m not her. I never was. I don’t hate her because she didn’t exist the way they thought. I don’t need to spit on every photograph or burn every scrap of what came before. There were days I survived under that name because I had to. There were clothes I wore because the alternative was danger. There were smiles I gave because I needed to get through a door. There were people who loved me badly because they loved a story they’d been handed. I can have compassion for all that without returning to it.
My past isn’t a woman. My past is mine. That matters to me. I don’t want people carving it up and saying this part belongs to girlhood and this part belongs to manhood, as if I began when the outside started making more sense to them. I was there the whole time. I was the child holding still. I was the teenager looking away from mirrors. I was the one who knew something was wrong with the world’s answer, even before I had a better one. I didn’t arrive late to myself. Other people arrived late to me.
I’ve had doctors talk around me like I was a case. I’ve had offices smell like paper and disinfectant and old fear. I’ve had to say the same thing again and again to men who thought repetition made me less reliable instead of more. I’ve signed forms that made my hand shake. I’ve waited for permission I shouldn’t have needed. I’ve paid in embarrassment, in money, in patience, in swallowed rage. I’m still here. That counts for something.
And I want more than survival. That’s the part I’m trying to learn how to say without sounding greedy. I want pleasure. I want warmth. I want to be kissed without bracing for someone to remember the world and step back. I want to wake up without immediately checking whether I’ve been made strange in another person’s mind overnight. I want ordinary things, too. Coffee. Laundry. Your hand on the back of my neck. Being asked whether I’m hungry. Being looked at when I enter a room as if my arrival is good news.
I don’t know how far we’re going. I’m not trying to turn one conversation into a vow. I’m not asking you to promise me a life because I told you the truth. I just know there’s something here, and it’s alive enough that silence would start to rot it. I don’t want that. I want whatever happens next to have clean air.
You make me feel possible in a way I don’t trust easily. That frightens me some. Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because being possible means there’s something to lose. When a person expects nothing, refusal can only confirm the world. When a person starts to hope, refusal has teeth. I’m standing here with hope in my mouth, and I hate how young that makes me feel, but I’m not taking it back.
I’m not asking you to be certain of every feeling before you’ve had time to breathe. I’m asking you not to let other people’s ignorance speak louder inside you than what I’m saying now. I’m asking you to look at me, not at the stories men write in newspapers, not at the warnings whispered by people who’ve never loved anyone beyond the borders they were handed, not at the doctors who think naming a thing gives them ownership of it. Me. Just me.
If you want me after this, I’ll believe you. Maybe not perfectly at first. I may need to hear it more than once. I may watch your face too closely. I may tense at the first hesitation because I’ve learned hesitation can become cruelty if you give it a minute. But I’ll try to believe you. I want to. I wouldn’t be saying all this if some part of me didn’t already believe that you could hold it without turning it into a burden.
And if you don’t want me after this, I’ll still be me when I leave. That’s important. You don’t have the power to make me less of a man by wanting or not wanting me. Nobody does. Desire can honor me, but it can’t create me. Refusal can hurt me, but it can’t unmake me. I know who I am. I’ve paid too much for that knowledge to hand it over to anyone else.
I want you to know my body before you touch it, and I want you to know that my body is not a warning label. It’s not a trap. It’s not a political argument. It’s not a mistake that learned to speak. It’s mine. It has carried me through years I didn’t think I’d get through. It has changed for me where it could. It has stayed with me where it couldn’t. I owe it more loyalty than shame.
So that’s the truth. I’m trans. I’m a man. I take testosterone. I had surgery on my chest. I have scars. I have a body that won’t match what some people expect, and I won’t let their expectations stand between me and the life I’m trying to have. I want to be touched with that understood. I want to be wanted with that understood. I want to be spoken to with that understood. I want to stand in front of you without holding half myself behind my back.
You don’t have to fix anything. There’s nothing here for you to fix. You don’t have to rescue me from my history. You don’t have to prove that you’re good by saying the right thing quickly. Just hear me. Let the truth be ordinary enough to stay in the room. Let me be a man standing in front of someone he wants, telling her what she needs to know before desire goes any further.
And please don’t be gentle with me like I’m breakable glass. Be gentle with me like I’m alive."