You want them to notice
The ragged ends of your summer dress
You want them to see you like they see every other girl
…
They just see a faggot
- Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Against Me!

Yesterday while I was on the bus, a tall man in an orange shirt got on, and as soon as he paid his fare, he started staring at me. I was sitting in the middle of the bus, and when I looked back up as he was passing, he was still staring. He walked past me and as I checked over my shoulder, he was still staring. I was wearing a pink dress, and in that moment, I became keenly aware of my broad shoulders, small boobs, and my raggedy, purple dyed hair. I didn’t know if he wanted to hate crime me or rape me. Maybe both. The man got off at the same stop as me. I held my pepper spray in my hand as I took a deliberate wrong turn to get home from the bus stop. 

I’m not ashamed of being trans. I wear trans colored kandi on my wrist everywhere I go. I notice the stares and scowls. It gives me power, but it also fills me with fear. Maybe I’m too open about it. I’ve been lucky that nobody has been violent towards me, but that could change in a heartbeat. I know friends who haven’t been so lucky. I know friends of friends, members of the communities that I am a part of, who have had their lives permanently affected, or ended, by transphobic violence. 

What am I supposed to do? I will never pass as a woman, not in today’s trans-vestigating climate. One simple search of my name online would reveal my identity. Once you start wearing it on your sleeve, or in my case, on your wrist, you can’t simply go back in the closet. I’m far enough in my transition where I can’t go back to passing as a man. My frame is permanently altered, not quite man, not quite woman, but something else. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be human.

A friend gave me a beautiful Kandi bracelet, it’s about 3 inches wide made of pony beads arranged to look like a trans flag. I love it, even though it’s a little small for my wrists. I don’t wear it often anymore, at least, not out in public. Something about the size of it just reminds me of the arm bands that prisoners in concentration camps were made to wear. I love my identity, but sometimes it feels like being branded. It helps me find my community, but it also helps people who want me dead find me.

Your body’s a temple, my body’s a casket
- Catherine Never Broke Again, Saoirse Dream

When I think of my body I can only think of death. Both the death of my old self and death as the release from this vessel. Every part of my soul fights against this vessel I am forced to pilot. Like a submarine, surrounded on all sides by darkness and immense pressure. I dread looking in the mirror, for the thing looking back at me is foreign, unfamiliar. Despite all this, I still get a sense of euphoria when I look back at old pictures of myself, seeing how far I’ve come. Every once in a while, from the right angle, I see myself as a woman, but most of the time, it feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. “Woman” is a broad category, and not one I easily fit in. Judith Butler said gender is performative, and unfortunately, I’m a terrible actress. Wouldn’t things be easier if I didn’t have to act a certain way to blend in? There’s something so… human.. about that, and I’m terrible at acting like a human.

I bully my old self, maybe as a way to cope with the bullying I experienced in high school. in my defense, I was bully-able in high school. “Look at this loser with the lame buzz cut. Some military wanna-be. He’s so clumsy he can’t even walk properly” -Me, to me. There was no confidence in that husk walking around the halls of my old high school. I started going to a Spanish class recently and the behaviors that made me feel dysphoric sitting in high school and university classrooms still follow me around. I think a big part of this can be attributed to ADHD, the way I fidget, bite my fingernails, constantly feeling the urge to do anything but sit still. But part of me sees that as dysphoria too. Trying to blend in with a class of people makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl, surrounded by people who can function normally in a classroom environment. It feels like I’m looking out the window of my submarine and everyone can see that there’s something not quite human piloting the vessel…

I’ve killed that part of me. That person who existed through high school no longer exists in the present self. If I could fake my own death, let the world be rid of [DEADNAME REDACTED], I would in a heartbeat. Let my family and my high school classmates think I was dead, that I accomplished nothing and died a miserable person. Maybe then I could get rid of the baggage that I carry. That sinking feeling when my dad still refers to me as his son, or when my mom uses my deadname, but only when we argue. I wish they thought I was dead. I wish I could restart my life, fake my documents to live as Pico Pastelle. (If anyone knows how to fake documents…) 

Spread out face down on those stained cheap hotel sheets
She spent the last years of her life running from the boy she used to be
Cut her face wide open, shave the bone down then pumped her lips up exaggerated
A fucked up kind of feminine

Standing naked in front of that hotel bathroom mirror
In her dysphoria’s reflection, she still saw her mother’s son
- Paralytic States, Against Me!

I wish I could cut out that part of me that still exists. That part of me that still unconsciously spreads my legs when I sit. That part of me that still has a deep voice in whispers and hushed tones. That part of me that still has a fucked up face and fucked up expressions and a fucked up gait. That isn’t me anymore and I regret that it ever was.

My face is the front of shop
My face is the real shop front
My shop is the face I front
I’m real when I shop my face
- Faceshopping, SOPHIE

I hate my face. I hate my face. I hate my face. It’s not me. I cover it up whenever I can. Masks, pursuits, pup hoods. I don’t like showing my face online because it’s not me. I would rather be perceived as a dog. I’m not human. This face isn’t supposed to be mine. I’m supposed to have a muzzle and sharp teeth, not an awkward nose and crooked teeth. I’m not human. I wasn’t meant to be a human, but I cope with that by embracing my authentic self by being a puppygirl on the internet. In my webcage, I can be a dog.
					

In the same realm as the gender dysphoria, I experience species dysphoria. Animal software running human hardware. I look in the mirror and mourn for the lack of a muzzle that I was supposed to have. Fucked up human ears instead of sensitive animal ears. Clumsy, lanky human hands instead of paws. No tail. I was born into the wrong body. I was not meant to be part of this human society, the one that drives our bodies and minds to exhaustion. 

On my better days, I am able to relax myself and allow myself to feel the phantom shift, the sensation of having the tail, muzzle, and ears that I was meant to have. I get a certain type of elevated euphoria when someone calls me “dog” or “pup.” Unfortunately, most people associate this with kink or sex, but for me, it’s not that. It’s so much more than that. It’s a feeling of being seen as my authentic self, the one I was meant to be. Animal trapped in a human body. Alien. Machine. Vessel. I can feel this same species euphoria when I dawn my pup hood, another accessory that society only views as a part of kink. I wear it out in public often. If I’m getting weird looks anyway, I might as well allow myself to feel authentic. I don’t wear it as a piece of kink gear, aside from a collar (Which also fits into the canine-therian-species-dysphoria realm,) Instead, I wear it with normal human clothes, feeling like those dogs that get dressed up in halloween costumes. I would love to live life as a dog, to be someone’s pet and to have someone take care of me (one again, something that often gets confused with kink.) I think in the past I’ve played into that part of me by embracing the kink aspect of it, but as I’ve been exploring my asexuality, I realize that this was my way to cope in the only way that most people could understand. 

I struggle to balance this authentic, therian/furry aspect of me with the desire to be a musician and a writer. Most people see the furry profile picture and the aesthetic of the way I present myself online and want nothing to do with it. My goal is to challenge this. I want to show that I can be a musician and a writer, while also living my authentic self as best I can. I want to challenge the people who turn away and refuse to listen to my music or read my writing just because they don’t want to be associated with a furry. One way I’ve started challenging this is by putting “bet you won’t follow a furry, you coward” in my BlueSky bio, and surprisingly enough, it worked. After I put that in my bio, I noticed an uptick in non-furries following me. I believe that is because, with one line, I challenged some people’s view on furries. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed too many people who have done the opposite, hidden their furry self in order to appeal to a broader audience. One person that comes to mind is an old Twitter mutual of mine who wrote a lot about city planning and public transit around Chicago. They took all mentions of being a furry off their profile and then started gaining a bigger audience. I refuse to do that. Identifying with an animal is my authentic self, and even if it means I have to fight harder to get an audience, I will continue to do it. I’ve sacrificed myself in too many other ways. On the internet, I can be a dog. I will always be a dog. I won’t let that part of me go into hiding.