Uniform

You turn to your wardrobe and don’t know what to make of it. You just stare for the longest time. You stretch out weak, yet hairy arms and slip on a dress that’s too tight in the shoulders, too loose around your misshapen breasts, but they are breasts all the same, and the dress is tight around a beer belly and birthing hips for a child that you can never carry. It flows over where your seedless male genitals should be, covers legs that begin curvy and then become muscular, and you just stand there for a moment in the ill fitting garment wondering if you can handle walking with a swish and having people treat you like you’re delicate all day.

So then you tear it off, feeling all of the curves and muscle of your oddly shaped form and you don a light polo shirt and chinos that sit tight on your hips, which gives them a shrunken affect. You think for a moment this might be good, but there is no bulge in them, and while the shirt fits you in the shoulders and stomach your chest is all too apparent, and they feel unnatural jutting out against the straight cut clothing. For that, you will still be read as female, but no one will give you sympathy today, and you wonder if you can handle being mocked by your peers or forced to wrestle words apologetically with the boys.

The only other option is a blend of both. You start completely neutral from top to bottom: sports bra and girl boxer briefs. Jeans, t-shirt and converses. Lip balm and side fringe. But what will people call you today? If you hear ‘she’ will you feel incredibly weak and pathetic? Will your friends not include you as they usually do, worse yet come on to you? And what if you are called ‘he’? Will you be able to cope with the responsibility of yourself today, when you are suffering so silently? Can you handle the banter? And will you take the male pronouns as an insult to your femininity?

All you can do is begin to paint your short clipped nails on your oversized hands and empty your handbag into a rucksack, hoping that someone will call you pretty or handsome, because you really aren’t sure which you would prefer to be called and which would crush you. Then you sit, trying not to analyse yourself too much, trying not to ask awful questions like ‘why me?’ or ‘who could ever love this?’ And you struggle to breathe; you shake, your palms are sweaty and your heart races. You try to ignore that you are completely stuck, with no way out and nowhere to go. You try not to panic and flee or claw at your prison so you just cling to the edge of the bed in your too tight and too baggy clothes, hiding from mirrors, hiding from people, trying to ignore your own mind and your own body.

Then time stops, and your’e still frozen with fear when your loved one comes in and asks you why you didn’t go to school today. You can’t say, you can’t put it into words, and then when the school phones and asks why your attendance is so low you struggle to speak to them with a breaking voice which will never be more one or the other, spoken from lips that aren’t one or the other from a face and body and mind and soul that isn’t ever going to be one or the other. You tell them that you are ill again. You do, after all, feel very very ill. You feel mentally drained and still breathless.