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- What they don't tell you is that
- It isn't just your gender
- Sure that seems hard enough
- Change your name, change your pronouns
- Grow some tits, shave your face,
- razor nicks on your neck giving you away
- Actually, it's ma'am, a dozen times a day
- Coming home at night and wondering if you'll ever be enough
- They tell you all those parts
- They prepare you for the worst
- What they don't tell you about
- is the freedom
- Like stepping outside the first time since being given glasses
- Looking at the vague shapes of trees and seeing for the first time
- that they're made of hundreds of leaves
- Like running through the house as a child with all my birthday balloons and they surrounded me
- and there was a magical moment where I felt something, a joy and painful longing,
- And I spent the afternoon trying to recreate the sensation but never could
- They don't tell you about becoming a person
- Not a woman but a person
- About what it feels like to suddenly care
- About having opinions instead of apathy
- About joy bursts out of you like fireworks
- They don't tell you that you'll look around the world and see so many rules binding us all
- And maybe once they seemed like chains
- But now they seem more like tripwire
- Tense and brittle
- A fragile spider web of control
- And you say to yourself
- I've already broken so many
- Why should I stop there
- They don't tell you about family
- About the familiar nod from a six foot tall girl in a choker at the board game store
- About the burst of pride at seeing the scars on a friend's bare chest as he goes shirtless for the first time
- About fighting tooth and nail for partner's pronouns when they can't themself, your love a fierce mantra. They them. They them. They them.
- They dont tell you about coming home from that world full of brittle strings
- to a home full of gentle words.
- About hand me down dresses that fit you better than anything in the store.
- About a lover stitching your new name on your Christmas stocking
- About your spouse by your hospital bedside, sneaking you frappuccinos and fries as you lie in a percocet haze,
- your crotch now matching your life, flipped inside out
- What they don't tell you
- Is the realization that your life is yours
- And the fear and the power
- Of making decisions for yourself
- No longer a passenger but behind the wheel
- Driving off for who knows where
- But enjoying the ride on the way there
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