A woman is born to be a martyr. While a girl, she is a measure of human–however little humanity children are afforded–but soon adolescence will stab her through the abdomen until she bleeds. Pain will induct her into further pain: childbirth. She’s a vessel for new personhood; her own is not relevant. She’s beautiful for it. Like a flower clipped from her stem. Just as surely, she will wilt.

Some might think wild, ugly flowers are safe from the shears, but that’s folly. All that grows is marked for harvest. Indeed a wild woman is a point of fascination. If one is tended into womanhood and all the same grows thorns, in spite of genetics and breeding and the careful trimming of attributes–will they really be left to blossom on their own?

No, we are told that they will be happier domesticated. Happier–so much more beautiful. Tomboys will grow into gentle women by a man’s side; they’ll be happier this way. A lesbian must secretly want a man; he’ll coax from her some secret happiness she’s never known. A butch will be happier if he is a man, if he must exist at all; if he must be he at all–but we should surely give she a hard try first. A transsexual may grow through the cracks in the concrete–if it really must–and it should be so happy to be trodden, by men most of all. If it’s being stomped into the ground, that means it still lives. Luxury enough for perversion.

The fates of all such deserters lead to man. Only a few roads branch away, unpaved and unnoticed. Dirty footpaths winding through ditches and dikes; at times they’re hardly paths at all. The civilised eye averts from them. Happiness is the domain of men–that way lies sorrow.

My happiness was written in the form of a psychiatric assessment: I am mostly sane. I react appropriately to stimuli; my brain has been scanned for it. I have a job, I produce work, I need no subsidy except the meds for the chronic pain that it induces (I don’t say that part.) I hallucinate nothing, least of all that I should not be here, answering any of this. I came here of my own free will and I paid money for it. I am a girl that wants to be made a man. Wants her body cut and carved into man’s. I’m examined thoroughly to make sure my body is a woman, from blood to breasts to cunt. It’s found wanting. Flat-chested, muscular, amenorrheic first from self-harm and then from exogenous hormones. I know that helps. Beautiful flowers are a shame to ruin; I am a weed. Of course I would develop this mania. No man would fuck me, and so I’ve grown insane. Diagnosis: transsexualism. Signed and stamped.

I found my happiness first at the start of puberty, via a documentary. It spoke of transsexual men that metamorphosed their bodies to correct–to paraphrase the presenter–a very nearly divine mistake. I didn’t feel like a mistake, divine or otherwise, but what I did feel was the induction to pain. The softening, clipping, blossoming of my once powerful body; what used to beat boys that dared wrong me, was becoming other. Actually it’d been other for some time already. Fat. Ungainly. Hairy. Adults would touch my body when I was fitted for clothes, like I was meat, not yet ripened, and they found it a poor purchase. But elsewhere, at school among peers, I would also have girls rest their heads on my shoulders at school plays, drape themselves on me as if I were an oak. For some quiet moments, I’d be almost wanted. I didn’t understand why, but I liked it–until the girls would turn around and call me names, of course.

And now what used to be wild oak was being rapidly pruned. Stripped of bark and branch and root until all it could produce was flower and fruit.

It was not that I wished for refuge from sexual violence or hyperscrutiny–I could hardly imagine that, nor would I ever escape either. I wished for what I was in those moments of silence. Strong, gallant, wanted. Byronic, almost. I wished it to be written not just in my soul, but also my body. Quiet moments were not enough. Unspoken recognition in the haze of dimming lights, was not enough–in the end light always returned and dispelled all illusion. To be illusory was to be a ghost on the breeze. I wanted permanence.

With permanence came manhood. I did not object to it, but it was never the point. All I heard of masculine women was sorrow, hounding, from the outside world and even their partners and friends. From their own bodies. Forever-exiles–ghosts. I did not hear of any other options at all, only of ghosts and metamorphoses, both opposed. Both promised great violence unto me. But I’d already realised I would never know peace, even if I chose nothing. At the end of one path there was something I wanted; at the end of all others, death.

Manhood it was. A shelter from rain. A raft to guide me from bank to bank along a violent river, and so I bound myself to it tightly and started my way across.

Lift your shirt, the psychiatrist said to me. He meant, Prove that a man could be made of you.

The raft had to be defended–the world hates when women escape, and I shuddered at the thought of being a woman. “Man” was the only way I could be understood. Even if I did not quite feel it, when I saw young trans men look at me–deep-voiced, Adam-appled, androgynous–I saw admiration. Aspiration. I’d hardly done anything, and I was already the man. In their eyes, I was made.

For gay cis men I was an enigma. A woman-man, a cunt that threatened attraction. Behind my back they would dissect my appearance–the lips, the lashes, the ass–as though I could not hear them. Sometimes they told me I was something magical; sometimes they’d confide in me how much they abhorred the touch of a woman, and then apologise. In their eyes, I was made.

The straight cis men would smell something else on me. I saw the calculus in their eyes: what are you? woman? faggot? hostile? I scared them, somehow. A man twice my size told me as much, in complete seriousness: You’re scary. Perhaps he really meant to say, uncomfortable. I know a lot of them found me uncomfortable. In their eyes, I was made.

Manhood has judged me, and it told me in no uncertain terms: you belong here, peripherally, if. I had the potential to fulfil its conditions. I had it in me to be what the trans men saw–lucky genetics. I had it in me to be the gay man’s enigma. One of them would eventually find me man enough, or just not care. I could always stop scaring straight men, not that I wanted to. Peripheral manhood, unlike its big brother, was not an exercise in mind-numbing violence. It was no anathema. As rafts go, not so bad. I grew into it. A place was made for me, and even if most of the world hated me, the people around me did not. I was wanted.

In my eyes, I was made.

The problem came later. Little things, little feelings. My virility brought joy–manhood did not. I’d seek ways to alleviate that discomfort, bejewel or costume it away–only to arrive awkwardly at the walls of dysphoria on either side, always chased by the shadow of queerbashing. Jewels and costumes weren’t enough, regardless. At my worst I wanted my manhood exorcised. Scooped from within with hard nails, pulled from my mouth with ravenous teeth. I had no words for that. None except “I don’t mind.” None except “Please.” The alternative was a violent return to woman, to be constantly pruned until I was hollowed–the alternative was to cease.

Years later, I would find myself stranded in a faraway place for altogether unrelated reasons. Well-hidden from scrutiny, looking quite straight and quite cis. In the private I wasn’t, with my friends I wasn’t, but regardless I was a man. I looked in the mirror and saw not exactly my father, but something quite like him. I’d been made.

Isn’t this what you asked for? I thought. Isn’t this what you want?

The raft arrived, but I knew I’d been lost. Pathology had dissected me. The world had demanded I display my innards artfully, convincingly, or else I’d be excised altogether. I’d known that would happen, always, even as a child. I thought I could emerge unscathed, tried so hard to ensure exactly that–and failed. It proved impossible. Despite my best efforts, I’d still learned what the world beat into me: that I’m nothing that matters. That I am shorn pieces, no less destined to wilt now than I’d been from birth.

Then, as I networked among the various queers and outcasts of fiction publishing, I met transsexual dykes. They were not men–some were women, some not–and yet they pursued the same permanence. Transition, not as I learned of it as a linear path, but a la carte: anything goes. Crucially, men had no hand in defining them. They were not made; they were their own.

The anger I felt at the discovery was at no particular person. It was directed at the general aether and almost theatrical. Why has no one told me? Why has no one ever told me?

I knew the answer: I had no access to any such information, nor any such person, at the time that it mattered. Knowledge did not make the question go away; it was rhetorical. At any rate, it was too late, and I’d made my bed; I would not think of it.

I did think of it. Was I delusional? That’s what they say of trans men, don’t they? That they’re misled, mutilated masculine women–and man, I did not feel like a woman. If I’m not a woman, am I not a man? What does some change of pronoun or personal identifier serve–I will log out, leave the house, and still be a man. And if I’m not a delusional woman, does that mean I’m a predator? A man that cannot leave everyone else well enough alone, cannot abide that there exists a space in which he’s not allowed. And if all that is nonsense, in the end: who cares? Look in the mirror. You are a made man.

I did not extend such unkindness to others. Anyone else could do as they will, and I found no fault with them. It’s the terror of myself I could not permit. Not after everything I’d been through to get here.

My anxiety ebbed and waned. Sometimes it felt almost completely allayed; sometimes it took days of work from me. My man, my partner would whisper fondly, and something in me would flinch, but it’d just as soon be over. I denied any “gender feelings” when prompted. I was lying–I’ve learned to lie very well, or else the doctor would not let me have me. I remembered only the many years I spent insisting on being called a man, and now–

A part of me thought, You changed your mind? The fuck does that mean?

But I’m not so myopic. I remember. I haven’t changed my mind, not really. Manhood was incidental to me when I didn’t have it; it was not what I wanted. It was what I needed. I had to swim across a vicious river, bruised and lacerated, and manhood’s raft saved me from certain death. While in the throes of the current, its violence, I did not matter; only that which protected me did. But now that I was on land, I found myself dragging the raft, chafing at ropes. Manhood became a burden to which I felt a sense of obligation, while wanting nothing more than to be unbound from its name.

It felt funny, to entertain that desire. It would accomplish nothing so monumental. That I would leave the house and still, for all intents and purposes, be a man, would remain true. In the eyes of others, I’d be a man.

Or would I? Why did the imagined opinions of strangers matter so much? Why did I let them spill into myself? Into what I was like with my friends, partners?

I’ve been preoccupied with what others see for so long–needed to be to survive–that I have deemed my own vision completely irrelevant. From there my wants became irrelevant. It stopped mattering what I wanted my friends to call me. It stopped mattering what I wanted to do with my body; it only mattered what happened to it. It all became Ouroboros: my vision of myself did not matter, therefore I did not seek to change myself, therefore no one would see in me what I saw in myself. No one would see that which I neither spoke of nor acted on, and that became proof I should neither speak of it nor act on it.

Even when I finally had words for the way I felt, however uncertain or tenuous, I said nothing. Thought nothing. I’d bound myself to manhood, and no matter what happened to me because of that, I deserved it. Asked for it. All I could do was be happy I got it.

I did let go, eventually. For no particular reason except the accumulation of little things. Like all forms of coming out and transition, it is inevitable–and tragic when it’s not. The moment I did–the moment I said to another person, I’m not a man nor a woman; I want neither of it–my relief was exultant. The moment she said she understood, I could believe I wasn’t insane. I needed so badly for someone to see me and make nothing else of me. To have Ouroboros unravel. Once I could speak, I could believe myself; once I could believe myself, I could make of myself what I willed. I could see on the other side no man’s field nor garden but a wild forest. Not safe to traverse, hardly charted, but still boundless and unashamed in its growth as it wreathed its soil with strong roots.

And the raft was gone. Unbound and on land, my body became my own, not hewn in the image of man nor mutilated from woman–mine. Irreducible. Whole.

M Zakharuk (they/he) is a trans author of speculative fiction. Their works explore life in dystopian settings and the trans lesbian identity. Released in January 2024, their debut novel Imago: A Dystopian Gothic is a genre blend of horror and gaslamp fantasy set in a remote Arctic institute. Their next book, a cyberpunk heist thriller, is set to be published in early 2025.