Transgenderism & Catholic Highschool

Jackson Lingard

It’s Friday now and the 5th day I’ll bargain with my mother, hustle the price for her to let me stay home from school. Same method as usual. I’ll cook dinner, Mum, I’ll sweep. I’ll hoover.

I don’t want to do PE today—ball-dancing: girl-boy.

This will never happen again; I’ll wash the dishes.

I waited up all night, nurturing a hunger-induced stomach-ache (for realism) and staring at stark blue light for seven hours to induce red-shift in my sclerae and a convincingly gaunt gaze. In the morning, I mimicked the limbo of lethargy and waited until just 5 minutes before rush-to-the-bus o’clock to trudge down the stairs and confess how horribly ill I feel. There are pros and cons to this.

Pro: she is too busy tending to my brothers for verbal dueling and scalding spitfire profanities, at the moment.

Con: she won’t be so busy later.

I haven’t been eating much recently. For most girls, the goal here is conformation. I describe my own goal as ‘ironing-board’ to my mother, and she calls me ridiculous. She says I have birthing hips, which makes my stomach belch as if a baby just kicked at it.

My hair is black, now. Black-blue. School is angry about it, but having darker hair gives a more rugged appearance. Noticeable eyebrows make you more imposing, as dysphoria asserts.

To my father’s dismay, it has also been chopped short and curled. I’ve never seen him cry, but his first time seeing the state of it is the closest it has and will ever come; brutally overt about it, he says it’s horrible, tells me (as he always has) how people would kill for beautiful long blond hair like mine. But, the sacrifice means that unfamiliar men in public tend to swap out the usual ‘sweetheart’ for the more camaraderie ‘mate’ nowadays.

High-cost, low-profit.

Girls still aren’t allowed to wear pants at school. I am all doom and gloom and squares (personality, joy, and colour are all feminine: be grey or be girl), walking to class in a frumpy pleated skirt and socks pulled up past the knees (I refuse to shave my legs) and the boys find it hilarious.

Begging to the world to look, look, at you—and not at a refraction of themself and their view—preordains you to humiliation. This will become your primary emotion; epitomise femininity or have your personhood to your peers be analogous to a jester in costume, in front of his court.

This changes, when you change your name.

The humiliation is not so external anymore, no, you internalise it until it cauterises your fingerprints. People stop talking to you—they don’t know you anymore, don’t know how to—but their eyes pierce relentlessly, and unwaveringly, and the emanating blood seeps from your pores like sweat. Walking to class leaves you sweltering and panting and wishing the ludicrous coat you wear (even in summer, be sick not seen) would gain autonomy and strangle you where you stand.

It doesn’t.

Hour-by-hour until the day is over and day-by-day until the week is over, I compress my chest (and my breath) neatly within one-of-two cheap binders and quietly skulk alongside the only people who don’t look at me like a three-legged lion. They see my old name but say my new one—and that must be enough, because I might just go insane without the company.

Consequential fabrications of this still reside, internally.

But now, in college, my hair colour changes by the month and is loose, unbridled around the shoulders. I wear green joggers most days, and swap out crystals from my necklace, an externalised emblem of my mood.

This means that I must announce my transness to each new teacher, student, and friend—and that I still suffer abdominal ache on the bus journey home each evening, courtesy of my continued adornment of unforgiving binders.

This also means that I know who I am now, and I refuse to shun it for your convenience. I am Jackson (or Jae, to my family, or Leaf, to my lover), I am transgender; I am everything I ache for, and everyone who got me here.

I am one month on Testosterone, now, and on the path to being me.