In February to celebrate LGBTQIA history month we ran a creative writing competition across college for anyone to enter who is a part of or affiliates with the community. The work which was entered was a selection of poetry and prose and the level of work was exceptional. After a lot of deliberation, the winner is Felix Lenton Smith with their short story "Outside In"
"When I open my eyes from the long night’s dream. Will I be you? Will you be me? I waited for so long."
- 소년, 소녀 (tr. Boy, girl) - HaSeul (LOONA)
Outside in- a piece about conformity by Felix Lenton-Smith
To be transgender is to be born backwards. To be created inside out. You observe your peers grow inwards, developing an internal identity while pre-equipped with a clean slate of a body. A careful sculpture of themselves, smoothed over by the hands of time. All the while, you attempt to imitate this. Attempt to mature without roots until inevitably you fall. Without a sense of self to moor you to the ground, the bittersweet nature of repeatedly meeting your beginning occurs only after failure. For your cisgender counterparts, a body is a template from which to mature. To be transgender is to fight for this baseline, to fabricate your origin to feel comfortable.
Being born without a body, however, is somewhat beneficial. By rendering your physicality useless, it is easy to become a shapeshifter. Once your body becomes nothing but an object, you can fill its cavity with whoever you please. With the absence of a single identity to hold you down, you learn how to create one, and once you have mastered this, you can create many. By educating yourself on how to become someone, you discover how to become someone else. An absence of a true identity allows you to have multiple, and this is where the shapeshifting begins.
From my experience, nobody desires to be transgender. The discomfort of feeling detached from your appearance forces you to transition. However, it seems as though this internal distress is contagious. Cisgender people also catch onto your discomfort and soon refract this back at you with a flurry of hate. This is where your ability to shapeshift becomes useful: you become someone desirable. An entity worthless of their hatred. And each time this happens, you further stray from finding yourself by unearthing the ideal. This ideal is who you become. This ideal becomes you.
From here, being ideal is lustful. Addictive. Intoxicating. Despite delving no further into yourself, you deep-sea dive into an ocean of people, seeking what they really want. Salt finds its way into the gaping wound that is your integrity. Water fills your lungs until you are gasping for a breath of reality, gasping to discover yourself. But by then, you are already engulfed in who you should be. By becoming captivated by expectation, the loose ends of identity reside on the other side of the mirror. Though internally, you have moulded yourself into what others desire. Your reflection is now who you are: cisgender. You discover that the illusion of being appealing is a mirage, suspended in a vast desert of transphobia. You were never drowning. You were thirsty for validation.
Upon this realisation, the deprivation is already fatal. All this time, your identity, shadowed by a transphobic standard, has been eroded to nothing. Knowing the body that confines you is the opposite is the only scrap of your identity left. A singular option remains: transition. Reincarnate your identity as who you are. What you are - the gender you align with.
Transitioning restores your health. You are no longer thirsty for approval, instead quenched with love and support despite having to seek it. You will find peace if you search for it. Though it is not ideal, it is healthy. It is necessary. You deserve to live inside the body you were assigned.
To be born transgender is to be created inside out. To transition is to grow outside in.
“This girl is a boy’s girl, This girl is a boy’s wish” - 소년, 소녀 (tr. Boy, girl) - HaSeul (LOONA)