I was five years old when I first gained a penchant for blood in my mouth. The blood has always tasted like a word I can’t quite get myself to say—it chokes me coming up and hurts my chest going down. I try, unsuccessfully, to parse it in hopes of digesting it more easily. ​​

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I try to remember the first time I heard the word transgender, but draw a blank every time. Growing up, the words trans and gender were not found between pages of the catechism and New International Bible, some of the only books littering my home. I knew the Latin, of course, trans meaning across. Transubstantiation, transfiguration, New International translation: these were words I knew. I knew the words boy and girl, man and woman, Adam and Eve. I was well versed in brother and sister, of which I respectively had and was. 

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I was, allegedly, the first girl born in my family for over a century. I have three brothers, my father had two, his father before him had three, and so on. When my mother, once dutiful and present, found herself suddenly more concerned with extra-marital affairs and big city living, my father was left with his three sons and one enigma—a daughter. His solution, one I cannot fault him for, was to raise us all alike. I would play baseball, not softball. I would inherit camo print pants and SpongeBob printed shirts from my older brother and share a dresser with my younger ones. If my hair, thin and wispy, became matted from a lack of care, it would be cut into a crude bowl. This “fairness” from my father, of course, led to severe bullying throughout my childhood, but I didn’t seem to mind back then. I had vague ideas of boy vs girl, of anatomies and genitalia, but I never really saw myself as a true girl, and I was not the only one. 

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Girls at school did not want to be my friend, shocked and disgusted by my raggedy appearance and tomboyish ways. Boys, meanwhile, fueled by pre pubescent misogyny inherited from their fathers and older brothers, were not too keen on having a girl as a friend. There was nothing I wanted more than to feel accepted into one camp or the other. My peers, both boys and girls, hated me for not falling neatly into one of their categories. My best (and perhaps only) friends growing up were my teachers, opting to spend my lunchtime in their classrooms rather than have to be gawked at from across the cafeteria. 

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At home, meanwhile, I was wholly myself. While I envied my brothers intensely for their ability to be, much of the joy of my childhood stemmed from their acceptance of who I was. They took me seriously. I was their equal on the basketball court, at the card table, on the gaming console… we had armfuls of differences between us, but the competitive spirit flowed in us all. There was no notion of “losing to a girl,” but only a notion of “losing.” And no one wanted to lose. ​​

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I remember a ritual with my father when I was very young. Every day, before he would go off to his law office, I would sit on the sink and watch him shave his “tiger whiskers,” as we affectionately called them. My father always reminded me of the Wolverine growing up—a cigarette smoking, foul-mouthed, five foot six man covered in dark, coarse hair. He shot whiskey, laughed loudly, and loved hard. A real man, with no room for interpretation. By the time he would come home from work in the evenings, I could see the resurgence of these “whiskers.” I remember rubbing my face against his, laughing at the scraping of his fresh beard against my skin. There was no one I loved more in the world during my childhood, and no one I wanted to be more like. 

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I remember watching his hand grip the razor and slide it down the jut of his jaw. My father—usually so messy and uncouth—became more methodical than an oil painter, more focused than a sharpshooter. We rarely spoke during these morning sessions, resigning to our roles of watcher and watched. There was a sense of holiness to it—reminiscent of watching the priest at Mass transform the water into wine. On occasion, he would grow his beard out for a week just to please me when he shaved it all off. He knew I was obsessed with the performance of it. The theatrics of change both delighted and perplexed my young mind. It felt like watching an actor switch their masks on stage, or like when the magician vanishes behind a screen. I admired how easily he could shed some skin and step into another. I wished to claim this shape shifting quality for myself. 

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted an incarnation: for the person living within me to become flesh. I didn’t know this in words, of course, but there was a certain restlessness within me on these mornings. I would stare at myself in the mirror when he was done, wondering what I would look like with tiger whiskers or a receded hairline. What if my jaw was sharper, my nose more curved? What if I wasn’t so scrawny, what if I was a little bit taller? There was an endless list of things I longed to borrow from my father and brothers. 

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After months of letting this feeling bubble in my chest, I finally gained the courage to take my first step towards transformation. I stood before the dirty bathroom mirror and really looked at myself. I began to imagine myself as if I were a man. How would I style my hair? How would I cut my beard? I thought long and hard about what constituted a man. I thought about my father with his calm control of the razor blade. It didn’t take long for me to reach for one. 

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I covered my face and hair with his shaving cream, recreating the placements he would have done, and then some. I began with my hair, as this was the most obvious difference about me: my hair was too long to be a boy’s. The start was promising. I shaved off bits by my temples, running the blade under the faucet and watching blond wisps go down the drain. It didn’t take long before I grew tired of this, though, considering that my father never cut his own hair. In order to be a true man, I would have to tackle my face. I raised his disposable razor to my bottom lip, imitating the close-mouthed way my father would push out his chin to get a better angle. I dragged the razor down. I don’t remember it hurting much, probably too shocked by the sheer amount of blood pouring out from my lip. This certainly never happened in all of my mornings spent at this sink. I remember the sight of myself in the mirror, the stark white of the shaving cream and the cherry red of the stream rolling down my chin. 

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I didn’t scream. I barely cried. When my grandmother eventually came to check on me, I was sitting on the floor of the shower, water swirling the crimson down the drain. It felt like some enormous failure, like proof that I was not—and could never be—anything but a tomboyish girl. I could not grow up to be a boy, considering that I could not even shave my own non-existent beard. 

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But with the disappointment came a sense of relief. Had it not felt nice to indulge in the ritual? Did I not feel like a man standing there, razor in hand? This cavern in me was not one I could naturally cross. That much was clear. But maybe, maybe there could be ways to chase the feeling. I could never grow up to become a man, but maybe I could grow to feel like one. 

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I don’t remember much of the rest of that day and the ones that followed. I wonder if I would remember this event at all if it weren’t for the thin white line slashing my bottom lip at the ¾ mark. I had no explanation for why I had done it—nothing that I could have articulated, anyway. I can hear my grandmother’s laugh echoing through the emergency room: she just wanted to be like her daddy, it seems. 

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I learned a new word then, wrapped around my brain like twine ever since: transgress, transgress, transgress.