Born in the Wrong Body
Out shopping one day, shortly after I turned sixteen, I walked down a well-lit hallway that led to the public restrooms. Rounding a turn in the hall, the two doors came into view on opposite walls. Before turning away from the women’s room, as I stared at the door, quick flashes of a more Utopian life passed through my mind. A middle-age woman glanced my way before disappearing inside. It would have felt natural to follow her in, though that would have made her gasp in horror.
That’s because I still looked like a man, barely a year out of a late puberty. Not a masculine man, a wimpy one. Still, during puberty, my body had changed in a way that broke my heart. When the other girls at school were looking at their new breasts in the mirror, I was looking at a penis that had gotten larger.
Call it a temporary lapse, me wanting to forget my body’s configured differently than the other women that use that room. Given certain circumstances, I would have these fleeting fantasies of feeling normal; usually followed by memories of the day my mother, after catching me looking at myself in the mirror in a pair of nylon panties, went through every drawer in my room and threw out all the female intimates I had hidden; or those days in junior high PE class, changing into those awful gym shorts, invariably humiliated when Johnny Perkins taunted me, mocked my slender hairless body, my girlie white skin, my small boyish penis.
It was my sense of self, my feminine sensibilities that urged me to use the restroom I felt most comfortable in, instead of facing the lifelong dread of making myself go in and pee with the men. It didn’t matter the rest of my world saw me as a man, for me it was impossible to accept. It didn’t matter my shoulders were small and my protruding nipples sometimes felt swollen and sensitive, as if they were about to blossom into full blown breasts (but never did); I was stuck with the basic shape of a male. It didn’t matter if I secretly shaved my underarms and legs; I still looked like a man. But I’m not. Not then, that day at Macy’s; not now. I’m a woman. Born a woman and destined to stay a woman for the rest of my life.
