Being born female has always felt like a curse to me. Although I do love presenting femininely, girlhood, and feminism, femininity always felt like an objective that I could never, ever reach. Growing up, I was surrounded by ideals of what a “real woman” should look like and act like, but none of them ever felt like me.
Too often, women & afab people of color, specifically black and brown people, are hyper masculinized by society. Many of us experience gender dysphoria at a young age without even realizing it. In a porn-sick, pedophilic world, we are often told to shave our legs or that we won’t be desirable if we are not petite. We are groomed into believing that compliance with these unrealistic and patriarchal beauty standards is the only way we can be loved or accepted.
This alienation often made me feel like I was a monster, much like how Stryker compares the trans body to Frankenstein’s monster, where both are labeled as “unnatural” creations rejected by society. Even the most natural and feminine part of myself, body hair, was turned into something to be erased. Body hair, a normal sign of maturity, was made to seem masculine, ugly, and unnatural. That made me feel both “not feminine enough” and “not masculine enough,” even as I came to understand myself as genderfluid. I found myself trapped between two conflicting thoughts: one that punished me for lacking male traits, and another that shamed me for not performing femininity “correctly.”
These beauty standards also erase intersectionality, especially when it comes to South Asian bodies. Generations of colonial trauma, famine, and labor have shaped our bodies in ways that defy Eurocentric ideals. Yet we are still told that our features, our curves, our body hair, and our skin are flaws to be fixed. Our oppressors wound us and then teach us to hate the scars it leaves behind.
For me, reclaiming my gender and my body means rejecting those expectations. Like Stryker’s “transgender rage”, I’ve learned that my frustration can become powerful, where I refuse to be molded by standards that were never made for me. My gender exists in the space between what I was told to be and what I choose to become.
The controversy of Miss International Queen 2025 in Thailand has shook the internet all over the globe. This year’s Miss international Queen was won by Midori Monet, a Black American trans woman, marking history and a victory for Black and trans visibility worldwide. However, her win was overshadowed when all the other contests celebrated with Olivia Lauren, first runner-up, and ignored Monet during her crowning moment. Lauren publicly accused Monet and another contestant, the second runner-up, of bullying her during the competition, and there were claims that contestants made fun of her and ostracized her backstage.
Learning the experiences of fellow gender-nonconforming people through reading Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity allowed me to reflect on my own journey of self-discovery. During a time in which transgender voices are facing such prevalent suppression, essays like these encourage their audience to resonate with the writer. I feel grateful to participate in a class that enables me to share my authentic voice.
When I first heard my birth name, I looked over my shoulder expecting to see somebody else entirely, as there was simply no possibility that alien name belonged to me. My first spoken desire post-speech therapy graduation was to please refer to me with a combination of my first and middle name, granting myself some authority in what I’d be called.
Born with panhypopituitarism, a condition in which the pituitary gland is malfunctional, proved disadvantageous in many regards. I never hit standard female puberty: my menstrual cycle never triggered, my breast tissue is scarce, my voice remains neutral. Upon learning this, people aware of my transgender identity revel in how lucky I must feel that I never underwent these changes to cause an onslaught of dysphoria. And, while it could be considered a gift, their ignorance to the daily burdens that it imposes upon me feels like a punch in the gut. Referred to as the master gland due to its major role in regulating the endocrine system, my underactive thyroid gland has affected me in more ways than simply substituting as an English teacher for those unaware of the condition. Chronic fatigue clouds my daily performance, my immune system is weaker than average, perseverant body fat and a stubborn double chin combined with reduced muscle mass has been a source of contention amongst my body image, abnormalities in the lipids and heart rate affect my long-term health, and even unstable moods have always cast a shadow over the outsider’s perceived “but no boobies!” light for me. (Plus, I do still kind of have boobies: see “weight regulation”, or lack thereof.)
Panhypopituitarism paired with Chiari malformation has earned me the ever-affectionate title of medical anomaly by my primary care providers. Years of doctor’s visits and symptoms being reduced to minor inconveniences blamed on my weight or diet meant that it took a frustratingly long time to discover what was “wrong” with me. Underactive thyroid requires hormone treatment, and at the time, my only option was a daily growth hormone shot. Needles were nothing new to me: all the sweet ladies at LabCorp and I were on a first-name basis, and I was all too familiar with intravenous therapy. I was not afraid of needles, so a daily shot was simply a subtraction to my time. The first time I self-administered my injection, I experienced a pain like nothing I’d felt before. The medication stung; I wailed, describing to my parents the searing pain akin to a red-hot poker piercing through my skin into the tissue below. Burning pain continued to ring through the injection site for hours and left me sore. Repeating this nightly, I grew fearful and tense in the face of the pesky green injector. My parents sought advice from a nurse in my neighborhood who advised to hold me down. Of course, when a child is crying out in anguish, physical restraint only worsens the trauma of a nonconsensual invasion of the body. Progressing to the point that I couldn’t be conscious for my injection, my parents would enter my room as a team in the dead of night to administer it – yet I’d awaken alone, a burning feeling in my helpless body, left with no comfort when I wiped the blood away.
While my parents recognized my despair, it wasn’t until my mom decided that Hmm, maybe my kid who faces a lot of medical procedures with little reaction but begins to quake in fear when faced with an injection actually IS worth looking into, that I was listened to. Out of curiosity, she injected herself with the medication and was met with the same sensation I had described. She relayed to my father that if it was that painful for her, a woman who had been through childbirth twice, she couldn’t imagine the kind of fear and pain it arose in me, finally coming to understand my avoidance of the injection. I was given two choices by my doctor: buck up and continue growth hormone, supplemented with a long list of reasons and countless efforts to sway me or my parents into it, or to begin estrogen therapy in the form of a patch. The speed at which “patch” passed through my lips nearly gave me whiplash enough to re-open the sutures at the base of my neck.
Being put on estrogen therapy almost felt worse than the burning sensation in my subcutaneous tissue post-injection. I had never been a feminine girl, resisting dresses whenever possible, but my role in uniformed private schools made me grow complacent. If I were assigned to be a female figure in a game of house on the playground, I’d opt instead to be the family dog. By this point in time, I was in my young pre-teens and exploring my identity however I could, often limited to the safety blanket that a screen granted me. Donning the e-wardrobe of a masculine figure and inviting girls back to my igloo on Club Penguin was my elementary version of gender exploration. My experimentations with my identity triggered a realization: under the guise of a boy, I felt at peace with myself.
Each visit to the doctor yielded an update. Spikes in my growth chart ran parallel to my anxiety, and as I grew, I realized no future of mine had capacity for estrogen therapy in it. My hormone treatment was a catalyst to expressing my true identity, and I came out as transgender at the age of thirteen to my mother. I was so mortified of this conversation that I spent the majority of it with my back turned to her out of fear that I’d read an expression of disgust on her face, or that making eye contact with her would cause me to burst into tears. I felt newborn; my steps were hesitant, nervous, and ultimately unsteady. Upon my coming out, I’d chosen a new name devoid of gender association: Crow. Relatively unassuming, the placeholder name allowed me to distance myself from my birth name without the immediate pressure of coming out as transgender to my extended family.
My mom helped me to come out to my dad and brother. Although they were as supportive as presumably possible, it took a painstakingly long time for my family to get my identity right – my name was easier to accommodate than my pronouns. My identity has been theorized about, too; though indirectly, I’ve overheard discussions wondering if my misalignment with my assigned gender at birth had anything to do with my lack of estrogen production. To this, I argue that the source of my dysphoria does not matter in the slightest, and I really don’t care to entertain the question anyways. My brother once asked why I didn’t use they/them pronouns, to which I responded those set of pronouns just does not fit me. Reading CK Combs’ What Am I? in Nonbinary, I came across the passage;
“She asked me how I knew I wasn’t female and why I couldn’t be female in a way that matched how I felt. I responded with “Well, how do you know you’re female? You just know, right?” I was defensive and frustrated that I didn’t have any other way to explain myself. How do you convince someone of something they can’t see with their own eyes or understand through their own experience?”
This question is one that bores through me often: how do you make someone understand what they don’t experience?
My dad helped me come out to my extended family rather informally during Thanksgiving dinner later that year. While it wasn’t particularly something I wanted to kick off the night with, it ultimately felt nice having such an immense weight heaved off of my little shoulders and carried instead atop my father’s, who made it explicitly known that any sort of oppression would not be tolerated and the opposer would have to finish their Thanksgiving meal at Golden Corral.
Over the years since my initial coming out, I’ve grown more into myself. Overly anxious and sheltered in my homeschooled state, I yearned to escape the social isolation I felt at home and told my parents that I wanted to go to public school for my high school education. Attending public school was a first for me. I wanted to reduce the possibility of being called my birth name or misgendered as much as possible. The experience of Nino Cipri, author of Kitchen Sink Gender in Nonbinary, resonated with me deeply; “I was misgendered on the phone before I even got there, and then again once class started, despite my customary polite “heads up, I’m trans” email…”. I would email my teachers before the semester began with a blurb about “hi, I’m Crow and I use he/him/his pronouns” with some extra cushy padding in there to bring home the idea that yes, I’m still human, and no, my transgenderness will not affect the quality of my homework. On the first day of classes, I’d shuffle anxiously to my teacher prior to any god-forsaken icebreaker activities or roll call, introducing myself in person and inquiring if they’d gotten my email, hoping that they had already received and read it so that I wouldn’t have to have that conversation face-to-face.
Pleasantly enough, the vast majority of my teachers made an effort to note this change – the outlier being the school’s football coach slash health teacher. I noticed the heaping pile of unread messages in his school inbox on the first day of class as he shared his screen, followed by him taking attendance in which he went through everyone’s profile on our school website to mark them present, boldly displaying my full birth name to the entire class. Afterwards, I waded through my dread and approached him to politely inform him that actually, I use a different name and he/him pronouns, to which he upturned his nose and dismissively told me to remind him again tomorrow. Tomorrow rolled around, I let him know once again, yet he never did call me by anything other than my birthname. To add insult to injury, the vacant lot three doors down from my house miraculously became occupied by none other than him and his family.
To have your identity ignored outright hurts, but it is far more uncomfortable when your classmates know you as two separate-but-same people. My high school had shared locker spaces; mine just so happened to be underneath a MAGA-hat-wearing man-child, forcing me to interact with him in passing periods. He would try daily to debate with me concerning my identity, particularly as a political point, and upon defending myself I was met with every slur in the book. Unsurprisingly, nothing was done about the issue, being resolved only upon the removal of lockers post-lockdown.
It wasn’t until my junior year that I settled in nicely to a close-knit group of other queer kids. One day, I casually expressed a distaste for the name I’d chose for myself, explaining that I felt I’d simply grown out of it; while some people may want to clarify every introduction with “yes, like the bird” after meeting confused looks, I grew tired of being questioned. I was met with the question “well, why don’t you just change it?” and my friends said they would call me whatever felt right to me, no matter how many times it changed. Honestly, the idea of changing my name again never really occurred to me as a serious thought. I started experimenting with a solid masculine name around my close friends. It felt like when you finally find the puzzle piece that’s been missing under the table for years, and once clicked into place, I felt whole again. As a student in communication arts, we would rotate roles for the morning announcements and, when it came time for me to anchor on them, I introduced myself confidently to the school with my new name. To come out widely to my high school with a Guy Name was nerve-wracking, but the empowerment I felt washed away any doubts I’d had. Passing by school administrators and students alike in the halls, I was greeted with my new name, and I felt reborn once again. The wide-spread acceptance of my new name among my peers made me happy.
I came out once again to my dad and brother. My mom had passed away in my sophomore year of high school, leaving me with only men in my immediate family, and I could no longer turn to her for a guiding hand to hold through my transition. While my family questioned the change, I assured them my new name was here to stay, and they did make an effort to call me by it. I’d reached a level of maturity and comfort in which I could relay my name to everyone else by myself, taking action as soon as I could to initiate a legal name change. I needed to eliminate the possibility of my entire high school graduating class and their families to hear my girly-girl birth name mismatched with the visuals of a blue-gowned figure crossing the stage.
Winter of 2023, I received the glorious scripture that was Rx Testosterone: four pumps of gel each night, two on each shoulder. The sensory input of the overpowering hand sanitizer-esque stench was inescapable on my bare shoulders; the residue would stick to my hands, leaving the skin of my palms feeling rubbery and unclean no matter how much I scrubbed them. It was another strategic allotment of my time each night – I’d have to carve out a segment of my schedule so I could be alone without a shirt, waiting for the gel to dry with my neck protruded like a tortoise so no stray wisps of hair from my shoddy bun would touch the gel. I decided that, at my next check-up, I would discuss with my doctor about switching to injections instead.
Upon hearing my wish to switch to injections, my medical providers would react in shock; “Hadn’t you been so scared of your last injection to the point you had to stop taking it?” To quote Susan Stryker in Words to Viktor Frankenstein, “It shows so dramatically how much they simply don’t get what I’m doing with my body” – no, it was never the injection I feared, rather the medication itself that ached. So I sought out a new doctor, particularly a gender-affirming care technician, and for the first time in my extensive medical history, I felt comfortable being a patient. I was switched from gel to weekly subcutaneous injections. Sure, the first few doses did arise a bit of anxiety, but I quickly fell into the habit and the euphoria of being a self-made man was much greater than any fear.
I transferred to University of Maryland, Baltimore County this fall semester from Wor-Wic Community College. Immersing myself in a completely new environment where absolutely nobody knows anything about me aside from what I tell them has been a rejuvenating experience, considering I come from a small town where everybody and their mama knows my family. Prior to my transfer, I was a founding member in the resurgence of Wor-Wic’s Gender Sexuality Alliance club, which had begun to face censorship in the face of the political climate. Forced to change the club’s name to something more discreet and general, it feels as though queer spaces are being diminished. Let this pose as a reminder that efforts may be made to reduce our safe spaces, but no political ideologies can ever erase our identities.
Here I am now, at twenty-one years old, approximately eight years after my initial coming out and two months until the milestone that is three years on testosterone. My legal name change was processed in May of 2023, but my insurance card finally changed mere weeks ago at the end of September 2025. It’s a special kind of irony to pick up my testosterone at the pharmacy with my birthname still plastered on the prescription; even moreso when the pharmacist misgenders me whilst harboring the knowledge of my situation, asking me with each visit if my insurance had gotten fixed yet. Although the gender marker on my license has been changed along with my name, that holds no significance in the eyes of the general public I interact with.
As I write this, I recall standing in wait for my order at the Einstein’s Bagel Bros on campus this morning. The cashier had gotten my drink wrong, resulting in some milky blended concoction sitting on the counter; the barista, referring to me, asked the cashier “do you remember what she ordered?”, receiving a shake of the head, to which the cashier responded “well, did you ask her if she wanted the drink or not?”. I stood there awkwardly, listening to them discuss me in front of my face as if I wasn’t there, looking down at my backpack straps to ensure that – yes, indeed, my he/him/his pronoun pin was glaring them in the face. “Ma’am, are you okay with this drink?” the barista asked. Internally, I questioned what aspect of myself could have been interpreted as feminine. Regardless, I simply nodded and took the drink. I figured it would be easier to deal with whatever havoc the dairy would wreak on my lactose-intolerating ass than continuing to be humiliated, and I didn’t want to be late to class anyways.
My body, at its core and most efficient, is one of abnormality. It is a chimera in the principles of nature. I’ve undergone brain decompression surgery, innumerable medical procedures; I take medications daily to regulate my thyroid, weekly to affirm my gender; my current body is unnatural, a product of medical science. To reference Stryker one final time, I rise from the operating table of my rebirth as something beyond my initial design with the most prominent role in the creation of the body I inhabit: I am both the monster and the scientist.
A quick notecard drawing I did at the UMBC Community Art Project.
“The flesh is inscribed with meaning both from ourselves with our consent and by others against our will.” Kosut & Moore, Introduction: Not Just the Reflexive Reflex.
In times when my community is the center of media, I feel like an ant being scorched alive under the microscopic lens of a snot-nosed child. Why, in my own habitat, must I smell my burning flesh? It’s not as if mine or my neighboring hills have done anything to incite such a cruel fate. Still, man believes himself to invade and reign supreme over bodies he views as ‘other’.
Growing up in a small town is difficult because you know everybody and everybody knows you. Being divergent from those who surround you, the burden of being seen feels suffocating; you’re not really sure what people think until they say something to indicate how they feel about people like you.
Twice now have I received a call from my dad following cases of gun violence in which the shooter – or someone personally involved with the shooter – identified as transgender. First, he’d sent me a text saying to call him when I had a minute. He’d preface the call with “now I’m not saying this to scare you, but” before updating me on the latest crass life-threatening narrative spun about my community and subsequently spread like wildfire among people who haven’t known how it feels to live with intrinsic fear laced in their veins. And although it was coming from a place of love, he told me this time to “be selective of who I tell”; as if that is something I needed to be told, as if telling me to keep my identity a secret isn’t painful no matter the place it comes from.
Michael Foucault’s Docile Bodies describe “a body that is docile may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved”. The modality of control is an uninterrupted coercion, and technicians of discipline become dominating. Where there is power, however, there is always resistance.
What does self-preservation in the face of tyranny look like? Under the scrutiny of everyone’s eyes, I feel like I’m expected to shrink, to slink quietly back into stealth and hide an integral part of myself. The fighting part of me refuses to go unnoticed and I yearn to get irrevocably intertwined in activism, to bloom into a symbol of hope. My pride will never get ripped away from me. I will not be a docile body.
Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen, poses a question that stings like alcohol on a raw wound; “How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?” Are minority groups viewed as so far removed and alienated from ‘typical’ society that we are seen not as human, but as beast? When the very structure designed to serve you strips you of your rights, your protections and defenses, and discusses rescinding your amendments, the answer is an aggressive, spit-in-your-face “YES”.
(image description: an illustration of a person with a teal, cactus-like spiky head between two islands on a black ocean against a pink sky. the border, framed in wavy spiked lines, says “GOD’S FAVORITE TRANSSEXUAL” in black bubbly text on a yellow background. this art belongs to Leo Fox, from his trans comic series Boy Island! you can get this image as a sticker at https://store.silversprocket.net/products/gods-favorite-transexual-by-leo-fox :] )
Since before I started medical transition over a year and a half ago, gaining testosterone-linked physical traits through HRT has been a goal of mine. And recently having the ability to “pass” as cisgender has been such a wild ride in a very gender-affirming way (though I still haven’t gotten used to times when I am perceived and treated as cis male in a social context, such as getting pulled in for a strong dap up after finishing a group project).
One thing that I have always been excited about was my “passability” opening up new avenues for me to explore queering my gender presentation. There was always something appealing to me about presenting physically masculine with more body hair and a deeper voice while having the freedom to wear whatever I wanted, like skirts with boots, and feeling confident wearing tight shirts without getting dysphoric about my chest. The physical traits I display are also helpful with decoding patterns of comportment and taking up space that I grew up socialized into as a “girl,” because now instead of fearing gender dysphoria from expressing emotions and being particular about the way my body moves, I feel like I am actively participating in throwing off binary norms, rather than taking up as much space as possible and acting closed off and invulnerable as embodied “masculine” stereotypes often go.
I recognize of course that presenting my gender the queer way I do is something that I have a privilege to do, as I am able to safely be out as transmasculine; I believe not every single trans person should be required to revolutionize trans embodiment and destroy gender norms whenever they can possibly be perceived. No one should be held to that standard, and critiquing those who can find safety within the gender binary is unproductive to the goal of universally embracing trans embodiments.
I believe my medical transition and performed gender, and the euphoria I experience in my trans body, demonstrate Susan Stone’s theory on the transsexual body’s ability to “generate new and unpredictable dissonances which implicate entire spectra of desire” (“The ‘Empire’ Strikes Back”). Her and Judith Butler’s description of the erotic dissonance of the butch lesbian is something I find strong connection to, especially after coming back around to identifying as a lesbian in how inherently queer and “everyone-but-cis-masculinities” my sexuality has been throughout my 8 years of being out. Butch identity and my transmasculine body just feel like they go hand in hand now, and doing what I call “coming home to lesbianism” has been such a euphoric experience for me recently, one that I feel comfortable describing as transsexual gender euphoria.
Alchemical perfection — An Alchemist’s Magnum Opus
After one has gone through the stages of putrefaction and purification, separating opposing qualities, those qualities are united once more in what is sometimes described as the divine hermaphrodite, a reconciliation of spirit and matter, a being of both male and female qualities as indicated by the male and female head within a single body. The sun and moon correspond to the male and female halves, just as the Red King and White Queen are similarly associated.
Upon reading Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein” I reached enlightenment. She blessed me with an epiphany that had evaded the capability of language.
She starts by breaking down the monstrosity of the transsexual in extremely profound ways. “The transsexual body is an unnatural body,” she says, “…It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than which it was born.” I have been hyper-fixated on this concept since discovering my own transsexuality and I could not agree more. But much like transgender is to transsexual, why not push the boundary further? Why be unnatural when you can be supernatural? Preternatural? Extraordinary? To augment oneself to perfection. To reach a level of divinity only capable through self-made creation. This is where my love for the alchemist began.
As transsexuals do we not toe the line between scientists and sorcerers, ever in pursuit of physical perfection? To transform one substance into another? Matter cannot be created nor destroyed but it can be transmuted. We become monsters, or in Stryker’s explanation, heralds of our own extraordinary creation.
While carving, sewing, and transforming your body is perhaps the closest to divinity I can imagine, there is always the scrutinizing eye of the world upon you. In embodying what lies beyond the realm of normalcy comes the onlookers probing for answers. To be transsexual is to be spectacle – for better or for worse. You walk through the world always on display, always looked at but never seen; this is visibility versus legibility. In the space between the two, I find my transgender rage. Always listened to, but never heard. Always known, but never understood. In this violence, I find my transsexual body an abject one constrained by the world’s subjectivity and “…limited by its signification.”
I could spend forever talking about what enrages me about my own transsexual embodiment, but I’d like to end on a positive note. I am a monster in all aspects and retellings of the word. But I am a monster of my own creation. In some strange way, I am both Frankenstein and his monster. Creator and created. Alchemist and Rebis. And I will continue to create.
As a cisgender woman, I’ve grown up aware that my body fits the societal norms laid out for me. From an early age, I was taught that my body should look and act a certain way, especially in sports. While I’ve had access to opportunities and acceptance in athletic spaces, I’ve come to understand that this isn’t the reality for everyone. Transgender athletes—especially transgender women—face barriers that often seem impossible to overcome.
In the article, “Beyond Physiology: Embodied Experience, Embodied Advantage,” Torres et al. delve into the challenges transgender athletes face. They show how discussions about their participation in sports are often reduced to debates about physiology, particularly for transgender women. These athletes are often subjected to scrutiny about their bodies, which overshadows their identities. The article highlights not only the social and political hurdles they encounter but also the privilege cisgender athletes like myself often take for granted.
Reflecting on my own experience as a cisgender woman in athletics, I realize how much privilege I carry. My body is rarely questioned or scrutinized in sports; it is accepted without hesitation. I’ve been able to compete without worrying about being excluded or misgendered. In contrast, transgender women often have to fight for the right to compete—against opponents and, more often, against institutions that marginalize them.
This constant fight can take a toll, and creates mental and emotional barriers. It’s not a question of whether they can succeed in sports but whether they’ll even be allowed to try. Recognizing my privilege as someone whose body aligns with societal expectations reminds me of the need to advocate for more inclusive spaces in sports, where everyone has a chance to thrive without fear or discrimination.
“Woah, I never noticed before, but you have big boobs!”
”Thanks?” I responded.
I was wearing a gray shirt that my mom bought me. I really liked the shirt, but its soft material happened to outline my chest.
I was 15 when I first noticed boys looking at my boobs. They couldn’t see anything behind the fabric that covered them, but their eyes would always be below my eye line.
I was 17 when I first decided I no longer wanted my boobs.
Do I get top surgery? No, that was too extreme for a girl.
Do I get a reduction? No, because what if I eventually want top surgery.
If I ever decided on a surgery, how would I pay for it?
I was 18 when I stopped wearing regular bras and switched exclusively to sports bras.
I was 19 when I switched to ‘compression tops’.
My chest has become a constant source of dysphoria that I’d like to disappear.
As I continue through life and gain a bit of weight, my compression tops become tighter and tighter.
When will it end?
When can I come to terms with my identity?
You won’t see me at the pool because ‘I’m not feeling well’ or ‘I have a bad sunburn.’
But really, it’s because of my insecurities and gender dysphoria.
Autistic people are a lot more likely than the neurotypical population to identify as transgender — something I personally chalk up to us having a keener eye for social norms that make no sense (the gender binary being no exception). As an autistic trans person who has to deal with the social repercussions of both these parts of myself, I have noticed how society is built not only to prioritize cisgender neurotypical people, but to actively shun those who don’t fit in either category in very similar ways.
Unruly Bodies 