Today I took my 3rd testosterone shot, and I’ve had 2 foremost thoughts leading up to today…
Catfish. That’s the word that came to mind when I thought about expressing the first thing… In 2017 and 2018, I spent one year each living through either end of my gender polarities. In 2017, I cleared out my wardrobe and replaced it entirely with men’s clothing and shoes. In 2018, I flipped the script and did the reverse, living in my feminine.. Both years had their own challenges but it helped me face up to the way that the world sees gender and subsequently how the world sees me. This brings me to the way I started off thing 1.. To catfish someone means to lure them in with a false image of yourself. I do that often, in my pictures.. I always turn away from the camera slightly, so that you don’t quite see my curvaceousness. Throughout the years I’ve seen the many other ways that masculine womxn mask themselves so that their figure is not a highlight of their appearance..some get super thin..some get super thick..some over-emphasize, with jeans slung low on hip, and a deep crawl.. But I feel sad for the need to force the point..that some of us feel like we have to put it on display…like, look, see see, I am a man too…
I’ve had to talk myself down in many situations where I am confronted with comments that are made specifically for the purpose of embarassing me into ‘reality’ and the version of reality that the person is proposing is that hey, you look too much like a girl for what you’re saying about yourself to be true..you’re not a man or half a man or none of that shit..just accept it.
The second thing is the idea that making any movement along the gender spectrum is, once expressed, understood as a move toward the other end, completely.
Transition is seen by most as an on and off switch instead of a circular knob tuning in and dialing into the perfect frequency…
..I’m moving toward my own sense of balance – in between places..
Catfish. Transition.. the two words that I’m leaving you with today, in this ongoing story from a hybrid human..
Sidenote: you see my sweet puppernoos, Tessa-Joy? Lol, she’s the sweetest..
JanBerry 