Avery Nguyen

disaster/diaster

Yes, to modify the body is an act of defiance. But I thought I would never fit in here. I have the normal anxieties: a pear shape, a chest to match, a voice an octave too high. How to explain, though, that I am also at odds with the rest?

Compared to cisgender heterosexual women, transgender students had greater odds of past-year self-reported eating disorder diagnosis (odds ratio, 4.62, confidence interval, 3.41–6.26). Which is to say that trans youths suffer from eating disorders at a rate more than four times higher than that of cisgender heterosexual women. Which is to say that to hate your body in one way is a comorbidity for hating your body in another. I want top surgery because I’ve calculated that my breasts weigh roughly three-quarters of a kilogram. I want top surgery because I cannot imagine living through all of adulthood without being able to hug my loved ones, the flatness of my chest against theirs.

I lost hope long ago for any feeling of home. My desire is not to be read male, or to be seen as whisper-thin and desirable, or to be perceived as musk-scented and masculine, or to be understood as waifish and fading away. I want to be read as nothing at all. I want to eradicate the sensation of someone else’s eyes on me. I want to be comfortable. I want to go unseen.

Unseen, unjudged. There is nothing about having a body that has not made me miserable. Which is not why I dyed my hair blue, seven weeks ago. I turned my hair this shade of sapphire because I was sick, because I was tired, because I was injured and I felt that my body had betrayed me enough. This is not a temple, and it never has been. I moved towards the unnatural. Somewhere between my fourth and fifth ribs, the scales started to tip.

My first tattoo, inked onto my inner forearm just a handful of days and nights ago, commemorates my injury. The purported healing of that injury, though I am still slow, still fogged-over, still limping in ways both metaphorical and literal.

In the bathroom, the night after I sat beneath the needle, I looked up in the mirror as I washed my hands, and I think for the first time I saw something that I could identify as mine. Blue moon, ink black. I had made so many other attempts to mold my skin into something that I could be settled in. I had tried too hard to fit into a human form. I wanted to be something else.

There is more than one way out of the body you were born with.