I get on my bus just about every weekday. I hear people talking about gender: âpeople canât just change their chromosomesâ. We never wanted to. âTheyâre insane.âÂ
It takes fifteen minutes to get to school. The comments donât stop.
At six fifty we get off the bus and sit in the lunchroom. The comments continue. People are accused of being gay. Those of us who are trans keep our heads down.
The day rolls by. Not one goes by without another comment made by some teacher or faculty member. They give me strange looks when it takes a moment to respond to she, her, miss, maâam.
My reflection is blurry. We have no windows. The mirrors are warped, I think. That must be it, right? I cannot recognize myself. My face is not my own. My hands are small, not quite hairy enough. My legs feel wrong. Iâve been bleeding for three weeks, I call it the red wave.
The blood is green and yellow and reeks of death. I know I am rotting from the inside out. That organ was never supposed to be there. It causes so much trouble because it too knows itâs wrong, it was not supposed to exist. Not in me.
People comment about my hair. They call me Logan â some of them do â after a hard won battle over six years. My hair is green now. Itâs dead, fried from bleach and chemicals. I like when it falls out.Â
âThis is Logan, sheâŠâ
The day ends. I come home to my mother. She is my only parent. Sheâs on the phone with my aunt. Both of them use my deadname. I am called she, girl, even my old nickname flies around between the two. Iâve been out to both for six years.
I shower with the lights off. Surely, that way I can deal with my grotesque form. I am heavier around the middle. That does not bother me, I love how the hair grows on my stomach and makes a little racetrack.
The binder comes back on when I get out. I canât look at my bare chest anymore. It comes back on before the lights.
I go online. Back into my studies, itâs easier than listening to the same words be repeated in my ears over and over. My mother likes to talk about how ashamed she is that IÂ âhateâ my female anatomy. How she must have failed as a mother.
âYou canât encourage delusions!â âShe. Her. Female. Thing. You disgust me.â âYou must be perverted, why else are you trying to go in the menâs bathroom?â âYouâre already autistic, you must just be retarded.âÂ
It buzzes like flies, the same ones crawling out from between my legs, from the rot that drips out. The little maggots turn into flies and say meaningless things in my ears.Â
I tune it out, it happens every day after all. Social media provides nothing better. Everything is the same, with the taste of battery acid soaking my tongue. I can feel those bitter words rising up my throat, tearing out my insides. The maggots slip out from between my lips. âI hate this body. I hate this skin. I am unnatural. I am not human. I am disgusting. I am subhuman. I am filthy. I am wrong.â
My voice makes me nauseous. It is not mine. Trying to find the owner is a useless chore.
Sometimes I wish I was like the stereotypes. I wish I was the way they portray us. I wish I was delusional to my own sex. I wish I was pretending. I wish it was all for attention, and that a hug would make it all go away. I wish endorphines would send the dysphoria flying when I cut my wrists, I wish and I wish and I wish.Â
Online I am called a trans rights activist, whatever that means. I see those who hate us everywhere. Tiktok, twitter, tumblr, instagram, the list goes on.
âYou are blind to sex.â I wish I was. Please, gouge out my eyes. I will give them to you freely. Make me blind, I beg of you.
A long time ago I was called âitâ as an insult. I have since taken those pronouns on, wearing them like any other decoration with my outfit. I am a thing, crawling and slithering in human skin. Billions of maggots, rotting from the inside out and walking around in this filthy, rotting carcass. I am an it. I am subhuman. Look at me and tell me I am human, for you will see you are wrong.
I have been told it is for our safety. That we should not transition. The regret will be too much. We will become statistics, suicides, bodies in holes. Those holes will have the wrong names on the headstones, I assure you, if they have headstones at all.
I am mentally ill. I have hallucinations. I have delusions. I was sexually abused as a child. I was raped by a classmate, sexually assaulted other times, had child porn filmed by a friend and watched by a relative. I have cPTSD. I am autistic.
According to the watching folk, these things make my identity false. I must listen to them, they must determine what I am. Am I a woman to you? If I tore off these hazards, if I gave you my arteries, would I be a man?Â
âA woman has a uterus.â Would you like mine?
âA woman has breasts.â Would you like mine?
âA woman has a period.â Would you like mine?
âA woman has ovaries.â Would you like mine?
âA woman has a dainty, high voice.â Would you like mine?
âA woman comes in many forms.â Would you like mine?
Please. Take it. I have no use for skin, for a body or a form.
My mother told me not to shave my legs as a child, that the hair would grow back darker. I nodded, listened to her speech, and did it anyway. She grew angry with me when that razor didnât stop there. It travelled up my neck, accompanied by strawberry-scented shaving foam, to shave away the peach-fuzz on my face.Â
The hair hasnât grown back darker there yet. I keep trying, though.
Is this your cis gender dysphoria? I carved a scar on the top of my navel as a child. Itâs covered by hair now. I used that to justify my feelings of wrongness, that I must have had something cut off. Now, itâs just a scar. Iâm more aware than ever that it is just a scar. I have never had something there. I have never wanted it more. Packing doesnât satisfy me anymore. I am missing flesh. A phantom organ rests against my thighs.
I have never been a woman. I thought that would change when I started a period. It did not. I have been lied to about transgender people as a child. I was told they were all rapists, murderers, beasts and shadows in man-skin stolen from good, god-fearing people. Families were robbed of parents and siblings because of this gender thing. Societies were torn apart, they told me.
But they would never tell me what âtransgenderâ was when I asked. I have been hit more than once for asking.
If I kill myself will it end? We mostly end in suicides, after all. They say hormone therapy will not change it. I will never feel right in my own body. I will always hate myself. I will hate this skin and throw up maggots and taste that battery acid every day of my life. The surgeries wonât change it. The name will not change it. The pronouns wonât change it. So when does it end, o great viewers? You seem to know the most about us animals. Tell me, the curious filth, when does this stop?
I will never be human to you whether I ask to be seen as I am or not. I ask for a separate place to go and you spit fire at the thought. An alternative makes you sick, you claim. And yet, so does the idea of us existing. So where do we go? Do you want us to all die? You claim to want to fix us, sometimes, but your fixing is torture. Volts of electricity to shock the animal out of us. Sit down girl, behave. Grow your hair out and claim the title of tomboy again. Keep the gag in your mouth. Dry heave, starve yourself so the maggots wonât come up. Do anything but be what you are, you goddamn animal.
8:30 pm rolls around. I take my night meds, roll over, and wait for the dawn to break as the pattern continues tomorrow.
pixelskylines
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
titsay
