Displaced.
Nominated by travestyintechnicolour.
Reblogged from iwilltakethesuninmymouth February 22nd, 2012 22 notes #prose #fiction #genderqueer #transgender #ftm #bindingI write about the kids who are overlooked. Tell me what you think.
If you’ve never stood in front of a mirror and hated who you are, then you won’t understand. If you’ve never turned sideways and cupped your breasts in an attempt to push them flat, have seen the gap between your legs as incomplete, then you will never begin to know what this feels like. What it feels like to know exactly who you are on the inside and have it not match your outsides; what it feels like to know so deeply you are a boy that you ache to your very core.
What is tucked beneath my thighs does not define me; I know who I am. But time and time again people have made my sex seem to be the most vital piece of me to society. I’ve never understood why it matters to anyone else, why it offends people if I want to bind my chest or wear my hair short like my temper. What do my body and my decisions have to do with other people? I am who I am and no one else has the right to disapprove of this.
School is difficult.
Sure, I’ve got friends and, yes, it’s not their fault that they can’t really understand. They’ve never felt so displaced. But every teacher who calls me “she” despite my request otherwise, every student that labels me dyke, every sidelong glance and double-take and roving eye that dissects my body in an attempt to discern my gender is like a stab between my vertebrae, severing them from the stem.
Pronouns are not what matter, and it’s not the ignorance either. It’s the decision to disregard the fact that I am a human being too.
It’s amazing, people’s unwillingness to accept such a basic truth.
Sometimes it seems like all of this is too hard: this living, this surviving, you know? Day by day I am poked and prodded by the cruel fingers of expectations, violated by the microscope every person puts me under to scrutinize. Why should I, a stranger, matter so much just because I know who I am and they don’t?
You get tired of it all. Tired of the taunts and the stares and even the way you begin to feel invisible. Teachers do nothing when the class-ass stands up and demands, “Are you gay or a guy or what?” because they agree: gender is important.
But it’s a trick question.
If I answer with what I truly feel I am then I will be mocked, and if I answer with what is biologically correct then I will be told off for not matching the stereotypically ideal image of female. Why does my body matter so much? Aren’t they labeled “private parts” because they’re meant to be private? Why do I need to have a dick to be a man, and why is it everyone else’s business?
Bandages confine my breasts, they lay my chest smooth beneath my undershirt so that with one more shirt I look indefinable. People call it weird. But it’s not weird, it’s painful. I spend each day fighting to be a gender I will never be able to match up to, my ribs aching and my lungs swollen, while those who mock me come by who they are naturally; why can’t they realize not everyone has it so lucky?
I bind my breasts, not in shame, but in response to this primal need to match my insides. In defiance to the parts of me that are not really mine; to be given the chance nearly everyone else takes for granted: to be born who they are.
