At my friend's fifth birthday, they gather the girls to give them make-overs in full blown ballgowns, lipsticks, and the works. As we walk the “runway,” I carry the train of an oversized skirt as parents gaze in awe—I'm expected to be happy, to feel beautiful, to walk with pride—and instead, I find myself fighting tears, telling myself to keep walking, keep walking, then hiding in the bathroom. There’s a photograph: a woman with curly brown hair pulled half-back in a grey vest and business trousers, her hand outstretched with lipstick to apply red to my baby lips. She is smiling yet focused; I am told to hold still. Moments before the frame.

As a child, I was placed in some kind of behavioral care that I rarely remember. Around this time I spent my summers learning how to properly hold a pencil, how to walk appropriately, how to talk without a stutter or lisp, how to become someone my parents believed in. When I asked my mother about it recently, she casually explained that the clinic was for children with sensory processing disorder. You were always different, you know, your teachers had trouble with you too. I never could sit still—I’d tear up paper at my seat and, despite hiding my fidgeting in the desk, since Mrs. Harrison called it a “distraction,” I still was berated by her time and time again. Once, hiccupping in class without control, she claimed I was doing it for attention. She chastised me angrily in front of my classmates before sending me to complete my test in a separate, empty room.

Looking back, I’m not sure if I hated the dress because of my hatred for being watched by strangers, my budding understanding of “girl-code” rooted in misogyny, or because the sleeves itched. I don't know. Either way, I think back on this moment often when reflecting on my transition—the first moment in which gender norms were imposed on me so explicitly and my body became spectaclized as the ideal “woman,” the first time that my social world betrayed me and I had no option to talk back. I feel for the girl in the dress; I feel for the boy in the photo. I feel for the child who couldn’t have beauty, who thought this was what it meant to be beautiful. If beauty was meant for this moment, who was I to cry in discomfort at being made so beautiful?

Over the years, my choice in clothes oscillated. One year I was band tees over button downs and men jeans; the next leggings and short denim skirts. One year I was leg hair and tie-dye t-shirt dresses; another I was full blown goth. I'll never forget the moment in high school where an older man commented on my legs for their shape—how they’re wide, like men’s legs, like boys’ legs, like nothing that should be in dresses. I was sitting in a café stoned; I could’ve killed him then & there. Those were the days of close shaves, before I found the revelry of my own smirk at the stubble, the beauty in the moment that a stranger gawked at my leg hair and walked away. My appearance was like a social experiment: I had just begun a deep journey into feminism and rejection of social norms. Much like the moment years later when I shaved my head after reading Beauvoir, it was “for science,” it was for god, it was for glory. It was for me.

I’ve always been rebellious in my own deep curiosity. I like to turn heads; be it for fun or for beauty or for the sake of a good-ass velvet dress. In 2015, when I began to openly explore transgender possibility, I got locked in on the fact that I was a man. I knew, I just knew, that I would dress in button ups and bowties and skater punk boy clothes for the rest of my life. That was it: the dresses were all behind me; they didn’t feel right, they didn’t fit right, and at that time in my life, they weren’t right. But after top surgery, something magic happened: I came to love myself again. Not so much again, but so much more deeply for the very first time. I had quit drugs, I had found myself, and I had let myself be free. I didn’t look in the mirror and wonder what others thought of what I was wearing or looked like. For the first time, I looked in the mirror with self-love and newfound wonder: in this moment, what feels beautiful to me?

That beauty looked a lot like dresses. And bowties. And buying the checkered Vans I never had as a teenager. And trying out black lipstick with a denim vest. And cowboy boots. And belt buckles bigger than god. And rhinestoned patterns glued by hand. And sharpie on a t-shirt. And flannel. And miniskirts. And leather pants. And, really, everything.

Fashion became an extension of my own creative expression. It was my playground, my protest, my joy, and my art. It was, and is, my own creative way of making meaning and making mad queer magic. At times, I dress up in faux-fur hoods and babydoll dresses. At other times, I revel in the basic white Hanes tee and jeans. But the best is when I can combine these things & flip gender on its head. To wear a trucker hat with stilettos is my own concept of sacred. To watch the balance and the beauty overflow.

This week, an acquaintance I barely speak to found me on Instagram. They DM’d me a screenshot: me in a blue medical mask, a light brown plaid dress, and brown boots, in my psychiatrist’s waiting room. The caption reads: This is what you see in society now. Waiting in a doctors office a femine “guy” I guess, wearing a dress with hairy legs. I’d seriously rather watch a cow take a dumb in a field. At least that’s natural. The post reads [Name Redacted], 1 hour ago, with a laughing emoji reaction underneath, and has given viewers the option to click like or comment below. After days of deliberation, the acquaintance reaches out to me despite our distance to let me know this showed up in their feed. They’re devastated, they’re upset, they say they wanted to let me know. They report the post upon my request; I share it on my story, asking others to do the same, only to find it’s private. I reach out to a friend to dig up dirt—name, phone numbers, workplace, address…not to do anything, but to know I’ve taken power back. I call a friend. I call another friend. I text someone. I go to Target.

What’s a boy to do once they become a transphobic shit post on the internet? Why, buy a new dress for the occasion, clearly. The irony that my T is literally in the mirror selfie is gorgeous to me. & yes, god bless me on my mirror always, I caption hours later. In the photograph: a sleeveless copper glitter dress, high waisted, flowing short skirt held in my right hand to kick my leg out. My T-gel on the counter, the mirror engraved in green expo with a heart that reads god bless me in the center from weeks back. I take my life back one dress at a time. I keep on moving forward.

To be genderqueer in public is a battle I have lost and won. The years of fear in reactions and harassment at the hands of strangers is enough to hold back many I know from a nonconforming presentation, and I 100% understand why that’s their truth. But it makes me sorry. Sorry that we have to make that kind of choice—at the doctor’s office, at the movie theater, at the courthouse, at the hospital. Every day I choose to dress for beauty is a day of radical acts. Every day I smile in the mirror and mean it is another day closer to god. It is like a ritual: of love, of joy, of resistance. I will never make myself small in a world that held me back from loving myself so long. To fashion myself in the eye of myself is a joy I defend with my life.

At the psychiatrist’s office, minutes before this photo was taken, [Name Redacted]’s partner was rushing in the waiting room. “I've been waiting over an hour and a half! I have cancer! I’m going to miss my appointment! I can’t do this like this! My medicine is out of refills; I don’t have a choice!”

“It sounds like you’re unhappy here,” the woman at the reception desk replies. “If you’re unhappy at this clinic, I’d suggest finding a new one.” I look up at [Name Redacted] in empathy, in shared knowledge of our broken healthcare, as he walks over to his partner to support her if she needs to leave. I look over at [Name Redacted] several times after she returns behind the shut door, in a gesture of quiet solidarity, as he looks directly back at me.

What does it mean that in this moment he looked back, not out of understanding, but of violence? What does in mean in this moment that he took the picture, I was staring him in the eye with a gaze of genuine concern and understanding?

It means that we are troubled. It means that we are threatened. It means that, instead of understanding or sharing a commonality of this clinic’s constant fuckery, we are more concerned about the distance of my dress and his perception. I’ve been stepping back from queer spaces lately after becoming attuned with my disabilities. To hold space for my lived experience as a psychiatric prisoner, a victim of the courts and the medical industrial complex, much less the stigma of madness in our community means that I have felt less at home. In queer spaces, I’m too crazy. In the madhouse, I’m an anomaly. In the psychiatric office, I am tokenized, wrong pronouns, wrong body-mind, wrong everything. To be doubly booked in queerness and in madness is a journey. While nothing here is new, the journey to learn my history and my own story is. What does it mean to be doxxed at a clinic that is harmful but I must attend? What does it mean that in the waiting room [Name Redacted] can’t see we are the same?

Like my dresses, my madness is sacred. A space I am learning to hold and carve. To carry the weight of my history, of the violence, of the world between. I am navigating my mad magic in a copper glitter gown. I am holding every gender in the mirror.

About the Author

Brody Parrish Craig is the author of The Patient Is An Unreliable Historian (forthcoming 2024) and the chapbook Boyish (2021) from Omnidawn Publishing. They are the editor of Twang Anthology, a regional collection of art & writing by transgender, nonbinary & gender non-conforming creatives of the south/midwest. Find them on IG @brodyparrishcraig or read more of their writing at brodyparrishcraig.com.