I can intensely relate both to not feeling allowed to claim womanhood, and compromising on my identity. My story above leaves out my profound religious and cultural trauma from being raised in one of the most conservative parts of my country. This was a place I instinctively understood to be unsafe for people like me, even as a child when I had no concrete notion of how I was different from my peers. Undoing the psychological harm I sustained from such a childhood has been the ongoing project of my adult life.

For example, I spent a really long time leaning into masculine gender performance. I was terrified of the men around me and the sick entitlement they felt over the bodies of feminine people. But when I was visibly muscular, scrubbed of all softness, and polished into an instrument of implied violence? That was the only way I could feel safe for the longest time.

I had to put in the work for a long time. I was fortunate to have a brain that responded well academically despite my social impediments, and I rode that opportunity far away to a series of safer cities and more open minded peer groups. However, I still carried all those scars, all that internalized transmisogyny with me. The ways I had molded my body and mind to survive became my biggest impediments.

Things should not be like this. I should not have had to travel across my country to one of its most progressive corners and attain educational and career success and security, just to feel safe enough to begin the years-long process of healing myself and claiming a sincere identity. It breaks my heart how, despite how tenuous my own journey has been, I am in fact much more privileged than most other queer people. I hate that so many of our journeys are so hard and so lonesome and feel so hopeless.

It makes me so sad that you relate now to how I was then, that anyone does. I can say this, and I hope it helps: I have not regretted a single moment of bravery in my journey, even when things didn’t work out in the moment, or when I felt shame or cringe afterwards. Those small moments of bravery where I moved forward despite my fear and uncertainty are the most important actions of my life. They have made it possible to be visibly queer in my life, to improve things around me for the next generation. And you know? I think I’ve succeeded, just a little, in making it easier for the next queer person in my social, familial, and career spheres of influence. That was my trick: to be brave for them when I felt like I was not strong enough to be brave for me.