this barbie is a ken

by gion davis

Austin Butler in Elvis. Ryan Gosling in The Nice Guys. Ryan Gosling in Drive. Ryan Gosling in the Barbie trailers. Nic Cage in Raising Arizona. Bruce Springsteen in the promo pictures for Born in the U.S.A. Johnny Knoxville in Jackass. Alan Jackson in the “Chattahoochee” music video.

1 month on T. 3 months on T. 6 months on T. 8 months on T. A year. A year and a half.

She/they. They/them. He/they. He/him.

You taught yourself how to be a girl. Your mother didn’t want you to wear makeup or shave your legs or dress provocatively. She’s at the tail-end of the baby boomers, an educated hippie whose pride and joy is her knee-length red hair. She wears high-waisted Levis and t-shirts and earrings. All your femininity you learned from your friends who sat you down in their bedrooms and held your face in their hands to put lipstick on you and tease you about how you struggled to keep your eyes closed as they scraped at them with a cheap eyeliner pencil from Target.

You learn that you love to look good. You love to be beautiful. You love wearing things that make people look at you, compliment you, talk to you. You learn to make friends this way, through your clothes and your curly red hair and your makeup. You attract other people like you. You attract people who want to be like you. You become the one putting makeup on others, painting their nails, lending them clothes. You love crop tops and short shorts and mini-dresses and high heels. You buy everything fast fashion because it’s cheap and easy and it feels like it’s all made for your thin, white, female body because it is and you love that feeling.

And then, you can’t remember why. Suddenly, everything you own feels excruciating. You stop looking in the mirror. You keep trying, hoping, praying you will push through this the way you had in childhood. You look at pictures of yourself as a tween with a pixie cut and cargo pants and t-shirts with bugs and birds on them. You try even harder. You buy more dresses, more makeup, higher heels.

And then, you get wasted again and pass out dangerously drunk in a bathroom in Memphis. You wake up knowing if you don’t do something, you are going to die.

When you get home, you get your hair cut into a long, shaggy mullet. You make a doctor’s appointment. You tell your therapist you are officially transitioning. You begin to lose your friends.

In all this, you have nothing to wear. You put away all your femme clothes but you don’t get rid of them. They feel like part of your body, like your breasts or your big hips, parts you love but don’t want anymore. You turn to your old standbys, ASOS and Fashion Nova, and order some men’s clothes. When you get them, you have a panic attack because nothing fits you. You are not a 6’0, wide shouldered and narrow hipped white man. The pants are too tight and the shirts are too big. Everything makes you look like a lumpy child in his older brother’s clothes.

Your boyfriend gives you some of his vintage cowboy shirts he doesn’t wear anymore. He takes you to thrift stores. You pick out some bland, boring pieces that feel as masculine coded as possible to you. What’s more manly than a brown shirt and jeans? What’s more masculine than clothes that look like nothing at all?

When you were a woman, you had given up on thrift stores for the most part. You wanted to look new, shiny, plastic, like an Instagram influencer. Now, you don’t know what you want to look like, but you know that assimilating into the crushing wall of elastic waistbands and slip on shoes and blank t-shirts is not for you.

You had a lifetime of studying femininity. You have had about a year of figuring out masculine aesthetics. You’d thought about it before but never for yourself. You teach yourself how to use binding tape with the help of your friend Toni. It helps with wearing shirts that aren’t functioning just to cover up a bulky binder. You can wear tank tops again. You can wear button downs with the top few buttons unbuttoned. You can wear tighter t-shirts without worrying about binder lines.

Maybe part of the appeal of masculinity for some is the permission to not care about how you look. When you’re feminine, that isn’t something you’re generally “allowed” to do socially. But men can get away with anything and that is freeing. But not you. You still care so much. You hate the idea of looking boring but you also have no clue how you want to look.

You start making a list. It’s half a joke and half not. Male celebrities with t-boy swag. It starts with Austin Butler in Elvis, which you see three times in theaters. You are 9 months on T at this point. You want his effortless masculinity coupled with striking, powerful beauty. A lace polo shirt. A smooth leather jacket. Bell bottoms. A full lower lip. A long sideburn.

You make friends with the woman who works at the vintage clothing store downtown. You try on every shirt with a wide, 70s collar they have and you start buying them one at a time because that’s all you can afford. You find a few in Reno when you’re on tour. You grow out your sideburns. You wear flared Levis and a black beaded jacket to a Halloween party and everyone tells you you’re Elvis so you agree with them. A man you don’t know taps you on the chest with his hand to say goodbye. No one has ever done that before. It’s the first time you’ve passed so ubiquitously.

More than a man, you still want to be beautiful. You feel more beautiful than maybe you ever have before. It’s a metallic happiness. It’s chemical change. It’s your armpit becoming a stranger’s armpit. It’s making male friends who treat you like a man but in a good way. It’s being othered but less othered than you used to feel. The desire to smell yourself less. New soaps that all smell like car air fresheners. Taking a picture of yourself every day. Losing your hair. Losing your ass. Getting taller. The impish feeling of tricking someone when they call you sir or man or boss or buddy. Being a man in a group of men. Being a gay man in a group of gay men. The looseness that creeps into your life. The calm down in the depths of you that you didn’t know could exist. Chest hair. Stomach hair. Facial hair. Shaving your face in a motel bathroom. It’s so beautiful.

Masculine beauty comes with practice, just like anything else. You can’t be good at it when you’re new to it. You teach yourself to walk differently. You force yourself to stop doing vocal-fry. You teach yourself to phrase things differently too. You are never going to know the effortlessness of cis men but you didn’t know it as a cis woman either. This is a labor of love for your own life you’ve never had before.

There is the much more profound question behind “what do I wear?” which is “who am I?” Clothing, for better or worse, is a representation of ourselves for the world, one of the ways through which we assess each other quickly whether we know we’re doing it or not. We show each other where we’re from, where we’ve lived, what we like, our favorite colors, our moods, our music tastes, our sports teams, our professions, all in our outfits. Trying to figure out what to wear as a newly trans person is more than just finding clothes that fit: it’s trying to find a version of yourself that fits the world in the way you’ve always wanted.

At the end of the day, being a person among others will always be a performance. You will never really know how others see you versus how you see yourself. But, trust me, one day you’ll look in the mirror and realize you’re no longer a Ken in Barbie’s clothes. You’re just Ken. And that’s a good thing.

about the author

Gion Davis is a trans poet from Española, New Mexico where he grew up on a sheep ranch. His writing has been featured in HAD, MAYDAY Magazine, Sprung Formal, and others. His debut collection Too Much (2022) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize. Gion can be found on Instagram @starkstateofmind & on Twitter @gheeontoast.