I Exist Where I Don’t Belong

When I keep my mouth shut I am perceived as a guy more often than I am perceived as a girl. A lady takes a glance at me washing my hands in the sink at the women’s bathroom and walks back out, looks at the sign that has a little stick figure with a triangle for a skirt that says Woman, looks back at me, tells me matter-of-factly that “This is the women’s room”. I have never been in the men’s room, I think part of me fears that once I step foot inside and realize that my existence is not questioned this will become too real, the dichotomy between who I’m supposed to be and who I am, who I’m already perceived as. I am a student at the biggest women’s university in the city. On campus is pretty much the only occasion where I am not questioned at bathrooms. Automatically, I am assumed to be a girl - no matter my hair, my presentation, my clothes. That is a freedom to most. That should be a freedom and a comfort tome,but it isn’t. I know I do not belong and somehow I feel that the stereotypes outside my school are validating even though that is the wrong thing to feel as a feminist.

I have never worn a bra. I don’t have much of a chest naturally and I thank whatever god that made me that way. When I was 12 my mother thought it was time for me to start wearing training bras. I squeezed into one and hated the feeling of fabric pressing into the skin on my shoulders and under my chest, most of all I hated the way I looked in the mirror, awkward and gangly and like a teenage girl. I pulled it off me as if it were suffocating me and I never wore abraagain.Iam20now.Aweek ago I ordered a 5-pack of white tank tops, the kind my dad used to wear at home, the kind men wear under their collared shirts and ties. They are too big on me. Even though I got the smallest size available, a bit of fabric sags around my neckline and hangs looser than it is supposed to. I don’t mind - I look good in them. I look like a boy. It is a joy that everyone feels but not everyone appreciates. To be comfortable in your own skin, to feel pretty in a photo, to look at yourself in the mirror and not want to tear at yourself from the inside out.

Every conversation I have, every session with my therapist, every undergarment I buy feels like an inner chant saying I exist. I exist. I exist. I exist. I don’t think anyone knows I exist but I do. I know that my existence here is not always welcome. I know that on the surface it seems contradictory to what so many people fight for and I am not qualified nor willing to explain why it isn’t, why I am not a betrayal to my community, why I deserve to exist. At any given moment there are two versions of me at each other’s mercy. One is ready to fight and defend and shout that I am not wrong for being the way that I am, and the other says “I know” in the girliest voice I can manage at the sweet lady who tells me that this is the women’s room. In those moments, it feels as if it will take me a lifetime for me to achieve an unapologetic existence. For now, quietly and politely, I say to you: I exist.