I tried to take the picture when I thought my roommate wasn't looking. I raised the grainy camera on my flip phone to the full length mirror, tried to frame the shot to catch my shoes, but not my face. Never my face. My boyfriend might have been in the bathroom down the hall at the time. My roommate, her back turned as she did her makeup in her tabletop mirror, was an east coast white girl who rode horses, found excuses to tell me she weighed less than she looked, and had demanded that I take down the poster of two girls kissing that I'd hung on my wall when we'd first moved in. I'd caved, but our relationship didn't improve. Later that year, when I had the flu, she would ask me to sleep in the common room to avoid infecting her; I would throw up and collapse in the hall before being taken to the hospital.

That afternoon, none of that had yet happened. The Pennsylvania fall was in its first crisp frost. I don't remember what I had on—maybe the chunky camel boots I'd worn to the LGBTQ+ gathering I'd checked out a few weeks before, or my thrifted plaid skirt, or the satin men's button up I'd borrowed from my mom. My idea with the mirror had been to take photos of my outfits. I wanted to figure out what I liked, what made me feel good in my body. It was becoming so rare, then, that I felt like anything other than a ghost. I'd been called a dyke since high school because of my awkwardness and my tendency to wear boys' clothes, but now, in college, I'd gone on fucking people of all genders, which only seemed to confuse the lesbians I befriended. Something lay dormant in me that everyone saw but no one could accurately name. At parties, I would walk into a bathroom and startle when, in the mirror, I didn't recognize my own face. When I was drunk, at least—a tactic I wouldn't figure out until my sophomore year—I could make a game out of it, wear the unknown face like a carnival mask.

Maybe I just need to find the right way to wear this body, I told myself. I had been called manly and ugly most of my life. I'd been pushed toward femininity by well-meaning friends and family and by the boyfriends who bought me sweater sets and lingerie and charm necklaces, and I was beginning to believe they were right—femininity, for someone like me, was the currency of choice if you wanted to buy affection, friendship, love, approval. Yet while I studied fashion like a science, it was also the best cover I had to explore the extent of my gender monstrousness. When I stepped in front of the mirror, I could ask myself how a certain silhouette might camouflage or highlight my broad shoulders; I could figure out how to roll up the sleeves of women's shirts so my muscular arms didn't rip them; I could begin to figure out whether baggy tees were the only way to survive the crushing sadness I felt about my chest. It took a great deal of bravery, day after day, to confront the mirror. I wasn't always kind with the person I found. That fall afternoon, when my boyfriend laughed nervously at my outfit as he opened the door, when my roommate glanced over at me and curled her lip in disgust, they were only draping over me the same hurt I regularly inflicted on myself.

***

I'd read fashion blogs in secret for a couple of years by then. Sometimes, I'd run my fingers over the sequins and lace in my sister's closet without having any idea how they could make sense on a body like mine. Every time I was attracted to a delicate, form-fitting, or embellished item, I would put it on and be gripped with a sudden wrongness so strong that I'd rip it off, ashamed. I didn't know it was possible for someone like me to be trans. The immediate reality was that my hairy, muscular, biracial body already placed me outside the bounds of cis womanhood. I was already too masculine. In fact, I was ashamed of being femme in a too-masculine body. The confusion was maddening. If I was supposedly a girl—a word that had always felt alien, squirmy—how could being femme make me feel so ashamed? Why was I drawn to the look of a flat chest in lace, or of a leather choker below the first dark curls of facial hair? How could my most intense adolescent relationship have been with a white guy who had since come out as gay? The fact of his whiteness wasn't neutral. The first time I set foot in a queer gathering in college, in which I was one of the only non-white people, I finally saw a modicum of gender nonconformity in the queer women I met. But cutting your hair short and wearing button down shirts seemed to be a thing for white people. Scrolling through fashion blogs and walking around campus, I struggled to find a sartorial lexicon for some fundamental idea I had about myself that I was trying to express, something I wouldn't see embodied for more than a decade, when I met other queer and trans Arabs and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) people.

My second semester of college, I let my crush make me over. I wouldn't realize the depth of my feelings for her until after I'd transferred out of that school. One weekend she put me in a pair of purple jeans, a pink baby tee, and a pink headband. Warm with the intimacy of wearing her clothes, I surveyed the mirror and swallowed the lump of despair in my throat. I didn't have the word dysphoria; I only knew I had to escape. She was frustrated and disappointed. Probably I spent the rest of the weekend skipping meals and holed up in my dorm room—I don't remember. It took so much effort, sometimes, just to get dressed.

***

I've never had a lot of money to spend on fashion, so I thrifted, repurposed, hemmed and sewed. In grad school I thrifted an emerald boatneck sweater with a plush ribbed neckline from Goodwill, removed the shoulder pads from an oversized tweed blazer, and cut and knotted fabric into soft beads that I strung into a cascading necklace. Eventually, as a postdoc—a wildly underpaid gig, but the most stable money I ever made—I started saving up for statement pieces. I tracked some of them for years, bought them on final sale, and wore them until they fell apart: an airy skirt layered with peach organza, a drapey white tee with sequined stripes, a fluttery red crepe dress with a pleated skirt, black pumps with a four inch heel.

Increasingly, though, as I entered my mid twenties, I found I was buying things less because I loved them and more because they allowed me to embody the person I was pressured to become. Back then, I was in a relationship with someone who kept a close eye on my appearance, both on and offline. He critiqued my tweets and insisted on reading all my emails and writings before I sent them out. Sometimes, he would make me change my outfit three or four times before we left the house. By the time I saved up my money to buy a magenta wrap dress for our rehearsal dinner, I looked at myself in the mirror as I zipped it up and wondered where that other person was, the version of myself who wore men's cargo pants with a slinky gold top, or an organza skirt with combat boots. (I could never afford Doc Martens; in college my friends and I used to joke that we wore knock-offs, which we lovingly referred to as “knock Docs.”) In spite of my suffering, I'd once been creative and daring. Now I was buried so deep in my fear of being unloved that I couldn't see a way out. The longer I stayed closeted for the sake of my marriage, the longer I stayed on estrogen-based birth control and watched my body shift and settle, the less I recognized myself, and it didn't seem worth it to fight back anymore. I'd been read as trans even as a child, when the people around me lacked language for what I was, but picked up on my difference nonetheless. Now I felt like a stranger, waking up in someone else's clothes, someone else's life, wondering how I was supposed to decorate this vessel when, every second, I itched to tear my way out of my skin.

Fitting, then, that shortly before my marriage unraveled, we got into fights about my brown lipstick. About my shoes. The day I bought a pair of men's cargo pants, he screamed at me in the parking lot of the Old Navy. Before the month was out, I was gone.

***

When I first got divorced and came out as trans, I didn't understand the difference between my gender presentation and how I wanted my body to look and feel. At first I tried to express myself in a masc way. Turned away from transphobic (queer-owned, even!) barber shops and unable to afford pricey salons, I learned to give myself a crisp fade with clippers. Being transient with ridiculously expensive health insurance, I started thrifting again. I found a men's mock neck sweater in navy and gray stripes; a perfectly worn-in pair of dark jeans from the Housing Works thrift shop; even, yes, a series of printed button downs. The cut of everything I wore had to be straight and boxy to accommodate my hips and the fact that I was binding. I stopped wearing makeup and experimenting with accessories, and for a while it was a relief; those things had been compulsory for so long that I needed a break in order to know what I wanted to use of my own free will. There was nothing wrong with what I wore. In truth, I felt better—I became invisible to cis men overnight, and that alone was a relief—but I also felt strange and incomplete. Partly it was other people: I feared that if people knew I wanted to grow my hair out or wear eyeliner, they would take it as a sign that I wasn't really trans, which would add fuel to the fire for the cis people in my life who didn't want me to transition and might cause the trans people in my life to turn their backs on me. Partly—as I figured out when I tried to grow my hair out, and my dysphoria gave me panic attacks—it was myself.

It took me a good two to three years to come to terms with going on testosterone. For one thing, I'd long received the message that I was too femme to need it, or deserve it. I was also doing my best to retain the love of the few people who had remained close to me after I'd come out, and I had internalized the transphobic message that the only acceptable way to be trans was to try as hard as possible not to be. Transition as last resort. Many of the people I loved, as much as they tried to educate themselves, held on to transmisogynistic beliefs about what testosterone would do to me, imagining it would change my personality, make me violent and dangerous. That made me both infuriated and sad.

Would it be so bad if I wanted to be trans, wanted to look trans? What could that mean for me, I wondered, beyond the endless scroll of perfect white chests on Instagram, a kind of chest I would never possess? I looked for inspiration from gender nonconforming men and masc people, both cis and trans. I thought about what I had liked about the clothes I'd worn in my twenties, what I'd learned about color coordination, pairing leather and silk, and the power in a smoky eye. I thought about the way I'd felt with that first boyfriend, the one who told me he'd never loved me after five years together, the way he'd once written me into a story as a muscular, effeminate man, long hair whipping my neck aboard a water taxi. Back then, in high school, I'd made bitmap collages of the faces of dark-haired cis women, trying to figure out what other people saw when they looked at me. Now I made secret Pinterest boards of olive-skinned people with angular faces and black hair, adorned with smooth leather harnesses, bright silky fabrics, crop tops and embroidered jackets. I added to it while I waited to start T, each pin a secret wish.

***

Something cracked inside me.

Being on testosterone made it clear to me that I had been trying, for years, to achieve something with my gender presentation that had actually been a longing of the body. The minute I grew hair on my thighs, I bought a pair of white cutoffs and wore them all summer, pairing them with tiny cropped tanks in sapphire and citrine to celebrate the whorls of hair I grew on my belly. When the round of fat melted off my cheeks, I let my hair grow out; the testosterone made it form spiraling curls as thick as sidewalk chalk, curls I hadn't seen since before I'd gone on the pill, which had made my hair fall out at the temples. I dipped a brush into a pot of kohl for the first time in years. I bought a pair of black boots with a chunky heel and a charcoal jumpsuit decorated with gold lilies.

According to the white supremacist cisgender binary, only two kinds of people ever get to be fully human: white cis men and white cis women. Everyone else has already failed to correctly “do” gender, which means we've failed to be fully human under white supremacy. Understanding the way gender is racialized helped me understand why the embodied language of androgyny ever only seemed fully available to white people: no matter what I signified with my gender expression, my physical body had already placed me outside the legibility of the gender binary, whether I used the term nonbinary or not. From other queer and trans Arabs, I learned to express my gender by borrowing from historical embodied lexicons of queer and trans Arabness and began to accept that my gender would most likely never be legible to whiteness. My use of kohl makes a culturally specific reference; painting my hands with henna or wearing gold jewelry speak to cultural practices weighted with meanings that whiteness will never fully understand, and so when I do those things, I do them knowing that I am first and foremost making myself visible to my own community. There, in that space of illegibility to cisness and to whiteness, is where I feel most free.

I used to picture myself as a boy alone in my room, quiet and sensitive and wanting. I didn't consider until later that maybe I was longing to express a femmeness that only transitioning would make possible. In expressing that femme steel and softness, I do take cues from the masculine people of color in my life—from my father's striped thobe to my floral print bomber and colorful high tops, I take lessons from masculinities in which I recognize something of my friends, my cousins, and my own flamboyant self. Above all, though, I look to femmes of color of all genders who are kin to me, blood and chosen. I'm done trying to imitate the white masculinities I grew up eclipsed and often violated by. They are true and beautiful for some, and there is no shame in them, but they are no longer useful to me in my journey toward myself. I'm still a lover of embellishment, ready to twirl in an organza dress with heavy boots and hairy legs or rock a leather harness over a mesh top that shows my scars. Only now I get to adorn a body that belongs to me, and to no one else.

All photos for this piece were taken by Addie Tsai.

About the Author

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award and was a Goodreads Choice Awards and Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize finalist. His work has appeared in the Kink anthology, Salon, The Paris Review, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Joukhadar guest edited Mizna's 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue and is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and a mentor with the Periplus Collective.