SGGO 5: Against 'a girl in a boy's body'

Episode five of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Against “a girl in a boy’s body”. You can play it or download it here:

SGGO 5: Against “a girl in a boy’s body”

My fifth episode! Made on the road, so not the greatest audio quality, ah well.

Notes

As always, I’ll post my notes that I base the podcast off of, if you prefer reading to listening:

Against “a girl in a boy’s body”

Izzy Grosof

Some Gender Going on Podcast

Episode 5: Against “a girl in a boy’s body”.

I’m out traveling, so the recording quality won’t be as good.

There’s a shorthand for describing trans people that I hear a lot. A trans girl will be described as “She’s a girl in a boy’s body”. Or even “a girl trapped in a boy’s body”. It’s something that is used with and among people fairly unfamiliar with the concept of transness.

But I don’t like it. I specifically don’t like it for the mindset it imparts to trans people who are unfamiliar with the concept of transness. Or who are exploring or who aren’t yet secure in their transness. Which is a lot of trans people. Basically all of us, at some point.

The point is, it’s not just a shorthand that introduces cis people to the concept of transness. Because if someone’s never hear of transness, then neither you nor them know whether they’re cis or trans or something else.

And I think it’s a bad starting point, at least it was for me. If you know it works for you, that’s totally valid. This is about my experiences and thoughts.

On “a girl in a boy’s body”, for me

This is my body. It’s always been mine, it’s always going to be mine.

One can change one’s name, one’s friends, one’s career, one’s family, one’s entire relationship to society.

One can change some aspects of one’s body, gain weight or lose muscles, fat, hair, voice, tattoo, hormones, surgeries

How I feel about my body changes. As I change some aspects, as I change my relationship to my body, as I escape society’s narratives about my body and build my own, these all change.

But even as aspects change, even as feelings change, my body remains. My body’s been with me the whole way, and it’s here to stay.

I’ve made modifications, even upgrades, as I’ve gained a better understanding of what I’m looking for. As I’ve grown able to take my body in the directions I want. As I’ve escaped narratives of what my body should be.

Through it all, I’ve kept my body. Learned its quirks. Loved them, accommodated them, endured them, change them. My body, through and through.

So I’m not a girl born in a boy’s body. I’m not an enby born in a boy’s body. I’m an enby born in an enby’s body. My body. I own this body, it’s mine. No one else gets to own it. No one else gets to define it. Society just wasn’t ready for it yet. They didn’t know, or couldn’t see, or couldn’t ask. So society tried to own my body, define it, define it as a boy’s body. But I don’t care what society thought then, and I didn’t care what society thinks now. I know who I am and what body I have.

I’m me, and I was born in my body. The body I was born in was and is and will always be mine. Whoever I am, this body is mine.

So I was not in a boy’s body. I was in a boy’s social role, a boy’s narrative, a boy-shaped box crafted by every person around me and all of society’s stories and expectations.

And when I crashed my way out of that box, with help, I took my body with me, and left behind the rubble of those roles and narratives and expectations and boxes. My body does not confine me. It is a canvas on which I work, on which I find joy. The box is external to me. It can be defeated. It does not define me.

Song

There’s a song which makes this point well. Deadname by Flasch, specifically the AMAB remix featuring Cara Mackenzie.

And just in case somebody wants to see the boy I used to be

I killed him with my own two hands Tore him out of me Dropped the pretense and kept the body he left behind I’ll take this form and make it mine

I’ll have a link in the notes. Warning: gory visuals.

deadname! (amab remix), by FLASCH, featuring Cara Mackenzie

The point is: The body, my body, is not “the boy I used to be”. I can kill that boy, rip him out of me. He does not define me, he will not be with me forever. And when I’ve ripped him out, I can craft my body, I can make it mine. Because “that boy” is a story, a fantasy, an image pasted on top of me, pasted on top of my body.

Why it matters

We need to start with some context.

There’s a brainworm I grew up with, that infected me, that was heavily circulating especially when I was a kid. It speciifcally targets transfeminine people, like me - note that I hadn’t heard of nonbinaryness when this mindset started infecting me.

The narrative goes that by our very act of exploring our feminity, both in expression and self-understanding, by approaching a girl’s body, that we are harming girls or women.

We embody both perpetrator and victim in this narrative. The boy or the man who is doing violence and the girl or woman to whom violence is being done. That we are making a mockery of the abstract concept of womanhood, that the abstract concept of womanhood is the victim which we sully be our presence.

That if we wear feminine clothes, or feminine makeup, or other products marketed to women which are aimed at feminine expression, that we are doing violence to the products, to the clothes, the makeup, to the expression.

I explored my gender in complete privacy and secrecy, avoiding any other person who I could potentially be harming. And yet still, I was consumed by this feeling that I was harming someone or something by doing so. Something good and pure and outside of me that I was no part of and by attempting to be part of it, or being in proximity to it, I was making that something worse by my presence.

And I explored anyways. Feeling that I was hurting an abstract someone by doing so. Feeling that I was wrong or degenerate or violent by doing so. I’d do it on autopilot, unable to justify why I was doing what I was doing. So I didn’t explore much. And I didn’t tell anyone, absolutely anyone, what I was doing.

I don’t think this is an uncommon feeling, for transfeminine people, especially people who were exploring when I was or earlier (late 2000s, in my case). I’ve looked into where this feeling was coming from, for instance media representations of the time period (Lily Simpson!).

Today I want to talk about how this brainworm specifically interacts with the narrative “a girl in a boy’s body”. It promotes the idea that there are two inherently different things: A boy’s body, and a girl’s body. And that I don’t have a girl’s body, or an enby’s body, I have a boy’s body. And with the brainworm I mentioned, it feeds into: by exploring, I’m bringing my unbelonging boy’s body into girl’s spaces or doing girl’s things. That I don’t deserve girlness until I have first obtained a girl’s body. That girlness is predicated on what body one has, on where one’s body is at a given moment.

This ties into a lot of media obsession around the time period I was exploring (late 2000s) with the details of a trans person’s body. Post-op and all that. Because we’re not “really a girl” unless our bodies are just like those a cis person’s. As if we don’t deserve happiness unless and until we’ve reached that holy grail. As if we don’t deserve to express our gender, our sense of self and what gives us joy, unless we’ve obtained a different body.

For me, the only way I could pursue HRT was if it was secondary to my gender. Only once I’d explored, first in secret and then among friends and then in public and then hatched, to the point where I was so confident in my gender that I knew I’d be the enby I know myself to be, regardless of what bodily aspects I have. That this body would be my body, and enby body, no matter how I shaped it, no matter what I painted on this canvas.

Only then, when I finally knew that my body is an extension of me, that I define it and not the other way around, could I finally start to paint.

And this connection, between this narrative and my experiences in secretive exploration, is why I’m focusing on “a girl in a boy’s body” rather than “a woman in a man’s body”. Because when it affected me the most, was when I was a child.

Takeaways

So no, I was never “a girl in a boy’s body” or “an enby in a boy’s body”. I was always an enby in an enby’s body. And after many, many years, I could internalize it. That my body is mine, that I can do whatever I want with my body, make it whatever I want, and it will always exist as an outgrowth of me. That I own and define my body, not the other way around.

So for you, you get define who you are, and your body is an extension of who you are.

So if you’re exploring, maybe that looks like “I’m a ? in a ?’s body”. If you’re exploring femininity or girlness, for instance, you can explore questions like “so if I’m a girl, and if this is a girl’s body, what I would I do with this girl’s body of mine.” Explore what it’s like to have a tall girl’s body, or a bearded girl’s body, or a muscled girl’s body, or any other way your body is, who you could be, and what body you could have.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for thinking. Good luck, and I hope listening to this has helped in some way.