You can be a man, but may you?
Being trans today is starting to feel like that infuriating grammar lesson my grandma used to repeat.
Me: "Grandma, can I have a cookie?"
Her: "You can, but may you?"
Me: 🙄
As a kid, I didn't know medical transition existed. Having a future as a man lived, for me, in the realm of the preposterous - magic spells, sci-fi machines, mythic body swaps. But I could imagine it. I'd seen stories where people turned into all sorts of things, including swapping sex. So the can existed, at least in my imagination.
What I couldn't imagine was that it was possible for me.
Puberty narrowed the cone of possibility even further. The androgynous-boy route (aka Haruka, Sailor Moon) disappeared as my body made clear it wasn't becoming that shape, no matter how hard I tried. Clothes and vibes weren't quite enough either, so whatever futures I could imagine stopped feeling inhabitable.
As I got older, I still couldn't imagine reaching a world where the definition of man shifted enough to include me as I was. So when I learned that trans people existed beyond drag queens or moral-panic caricatures - when I learned that transition was real, medical and social and otherwise, and not just imaginary - it completely changed the story I thought I was living within; the future cracked open just a little.
But in some ways, that was harder.
Because once having a future as a man moved from preposterous to possible, it stopped being fantasy. It became a choice. My choice. Albeit one tempered by the consequences and trade-offs I knew I would have to make in order to choose myself. And suddenly I felt the real weight of the second half of that sentence that had been quietly hiding there all along.
