Soft Animal

One of my favorite poems is Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” It begins as follows:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

For many years I longed for this sentiment to be true. It resonated with me, vibed with me, sparked joy in me. But it was impossible for me to really believe it. I kept walking through the desert, trying to repent for some odd sin inside me that I understood only vaguely, or not at all. All I knew was that, despite what all my therapists and family and friends told me to do, love for myself was something I was incapable of feeling.

This changed at the beginning of August, 2021. This was the moment that I set aside two decades of confusion, denial, rationalization, and self-deception, and began to work on incorporating a key part of my identity into myself. Like an engine roaring to life after the insertion and turning of the ignition key, I began to understand that it was only by changing the way I moved through the world that I could find it in myself to care for and nurture myself. I had to find a way to stop being male and start being female. Fortunately, it turns out this is possible.

My experience is part of the broad technicolor tapestry of transgender experiences. No two of these stories are exactly the same, but the harmonies and resonances between many of them are startling. Part of why it took me so long to discover this part of myself is that stories like mine aren’t what you typically hear of when you hear of binary trans life experiences. The purpose of this blog is to make my story and life visible so that you can see what my particular way to be human is like.

Turning into a girl is an awfully big adventure.