First transformation

The beginning

It would take long to tell the story of how I decided one day to transform into a man. Until now, I only did so for a few hours at a time.

The point of no return was the moment I understood that gender, being a man or a woman, is little more than wearing a costume and acting on it.

I knew it instinctively, before reading Simone de Beauvoir or knowing about Judith Butler, although of course both of them helped me understand it in depth. I knew it through the living testimony of other people, to whom their identities was a daily fight against a world trying to drown them all the time.

Image from Conversations with a Gender Therapist

I felt it in that inner trembling I could never silence, in that choking sensation followed by rage every time someone told me what to do, or how to be, for being a woman. None of them asked me if I wanted to be a woman, or if I had chosen to be one, and they probably never asked themselves what a woman is in the first place. They didn’t wonder how, they just knew it.

And that’s something I can’t stand.