"The other day I was running late for a date after work and stopped by the nearest cafe to pick up a sandwich so that my tummy wouldn’t be rumbling when I faked my knowledge of contemporary art. The cashier was looking down when he was punching in my order and paused when he looked up and saw me. He clearly hit backspace on what he had just typed in and told me that my sandwich was on the house. I was thrown off and asked him to clarify what he meant. He told me the sandwich was free and I asked him why. He told me it was because I looked nice.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. It’s not frequent, but it’s happened enough times for me to realize that not everyone gets this kind of treatment. In the moment it feels nice to have cis men offer me free things and carry my suitcase for me when they don’t even know my name or astrological sign. But then I realize that they make all these grand gestures to me because they see me as a Pretty Girl. And the thing is, I’m not a Pretty Girl. I’m a Weird Lil Guy. I feel dysmorphic and strange and unsexy. I feel like my body is a corporeal burden, I feel a little jarred when I look in the mirror and realize that this physical form is what people interact with. Because on the Inside I don’t really feel like how I look like on the Outside. I feel like my Outside is a slimy skeleton that I shed when I come home and I get to sit in my underwear and breathe a sigh of relief.

There are a lot of things I do to maintain a certain level of sanity. I only wear thin bralettes that hide my boobs and I shave my face so that I can run my hands against the grain and feel the thicker hair growing back. I like letting my leg hair grow free like a wild plant. I wear a lot of loose trousers. I slouch when I walk and keep my chin up so that people can see the prominence of my jaw. I see myself more as a Space Alien than a Normal Human.

This doesn’t mean that I definitively dislike having feminine traits. Sometimes being femme is fun and I enjoy being a Girl For A Day. I just feel like I exist in some sort of purgatorial middle ground most of the time."