“What is your embodied experience of your gender like for you?”

My body and I have barely been on speaking terms for a long time. Since puberty, pretty much, although the onset of middle age with all the attendant encroachment of upper body hair, abdominal spread and all the rest probably made it worse.

It isn’t so much that I actively hated it, more that I found it almost impossible to relate to. It was just there, but in a way that I’d rather it wasn’t. When you’re a deeply closeted trans woman who’s been in denial about her gender for decades, this isn’t an easy thing to unpack.

It took me a very long time to join the dots.

My awareness of whatever level of dysphoria this counts as was limited to a studied refusal to acknowledge the reality of my body, as much as possible. I achieved this by avoiding mirrors (and photos). Scraping the stubble off my face every few days, when I could no longer bear it. Going to the barbers when, likewise, my hair started irritating me. Doing the necessary washing and bathing, but no more. Wearing an anonymous androgynous uniform of jeans and whatever t-shirt was at the top of the pile.

Very definitely Not Giving A Fuck.

The one concession I made was to shave my legs. I discovered this in my early 20s, under cover of being a reasonably fit cyclist and having a couple of male cycling friends who also shaved their legs. I hated the jungle of hair on my legs as much as I disliked any other part of my anatomy, but shaving was a revelation. Suddenly, I loved how my legs felt. They felt like my legs, for the first time. Smooth. Soft. And paying attention to them every few days actually felt good, too.

I didn’t join the dots.

Sporadically I’d cross-dress and feel something akin to euphoria, rather than dysphoria. It was my safety valve; something that I clearly needed to do. It also sparked a deep sense of shame in me, that amplified the feeling of wrongness that I’d had since I was very small.

It wasn’t until I booked a makeover session with a professional makeup artist in 2012 — something that I’d wanted to do for at least 15 years, but had never had the courage to follow through — that something clicked. I saw myself for the first time. I looked happy (which was unusual, considering I was looking in a mirror). And the happiness spread, so that by the time we’d picked out an outfit and I was standing there as myself, the makeup artist commented that I’d been transformed. Not visually, but in the way that I held myself; the way that I moved.

And I could feel that, too. I wasn’t putting on an act. I wasn’t holding myself the way I thought a woman would, or should. I wasn’t moving the way I though a woman would, or should. I was just being myself. And it was glorious, because another human could see my as myself, for the first time. And she saw a woman.

I still didn’t join the dots, though.

With the benefit of a great deal of hindsight, this was the moment that I was able to connect my body with my mind in a way that made sense. I saw her, not him, and it all fell into place for an hour or two. It was a facsimile; I still had the same body under the hair and makeup and clothes. But it wasn’t just me that saw a woman staring back in the mirror, it was the other human in the room with me, too.

Since coming out to myself in February 2023 my relationship with my body has certainly changed. For the first time in my life, I pay attention to it and try to look after it. I shave and moisturise every day. I’m losing weight through diet and exercise. I still sometimes struggle to look in the mirror, but that’s because the real me is in there somewhere and she wants to be set free.

Do I feel comfortable in my body? No. I never have. Am I proud of what it can do? Well… in an athletic sense, because I mountain bike and trail run, yes. Do I feel any joy in my body? Absolutely not. Does it reduce my sense of self worth? A resounding yes.

I told one of my cisgender girl friends about this embodiment question and she responded with bemused bafflement. “I don’t understand the question”, she said. Then she thought some more and said, “is the answer tits?”

But that isn’t the answer, because gender isn’t reducible to a collection of body parts. I don’t have a shopping list of changes, I just want to feel like myself more of the time. Well, all the time. That’s something I haven’t experienced for my entire life, and that doesn’t seem fair. It’s caused a great deal of unhappiness and anxiety. I’m very hesitant to use the cliche of being trapped in the wrong body, but I suppose it’s as useful a shorthand summary as any other. Being seen as myself by other people brings a degree of contentment that’s a completely novel experience, because I’m being used to being seen as not myself, which reinforces my internal monologue of wrongness. When other people see a woman, that monologue disappears.

I’m tired of being tired of not being myself. There’s no one single thing that can change that, but there’s a combination of things that, together, can help me to achieve that sense of peace and congruence, more of the time. Which would be nice.

I think this means that I’ve found a way to join the dots.