It sounds like a strange thought experiment, maybe even a joke people toss around casually. But sit with it for a moment. Imagine the shock of your own reflection turning against you. Imagine your voice sounding foreign, your movements suddenly wrong, strangers treating you differently without you understanding why. That is the frame I chose for this story.
I am a cis woman. My body has always confirmed back to me who I know myself to be. Yet for a moment I tried to step outside that certainty and picture what it would mean if one day I had to live my life in a male body.
*****
At first it was almost funny. I touched the coarse stubble growing on my face. I laughed at the strength in my arms during a casual arm wrestle. I looked down from a height I had never had before. For a brief while, I even enjoyed parts of it. The ease of walking through the world without being second-guessed felt strangely liberating. People gave me space on the street, and no one questioned if I was strong enough to do something.
But soon, subtle cracks began to show. In a crowded bus, girls pulled away with wary glances when I stood too close without meaning to. The unspoken expectation that I should know how to handle things that had never been part of my world weighed heavily on my shoulders. I was clumsy, out of place, and more visible than I had ever wanted to be.
A month into it, I was exhausted; being around boys drained me. Their careless roughness exhausted me, I detested the smell of them pressing in around me, and the way they joked by crossing into my space was incorrigible. I never wanted a titty-twister. I never wanted this body at all. I wanted to scream that I did not belong here.
Three months passed and the weight pressed harder. I ached for the simple safety of a girl who would just see me as another friend. I found myself blushing at a guy who treated me as one of his own, and guilt gnawed at me – how could I explain to him that I wasn’t supposed to be here, that this body was never mine to begin with? I felt like I was deceiving him. I wanted to tell him the truth that I was still me. That this skin was just a prison. But there was no way he could ever understand.
Two years later I was empty. The fight had drained out of me. My days blurred into a flat nothing. I tried reaching out, but how do you tell someone that your very skin feels foreign? That every breath in this body feels like theft from the girl who should have been here? So I stayed silent; and that silence turned into loneliness.
Most nights I asked the same questions. Could I ever go back? Would it even matter if I did? And more often than I admitted, I wondered if it was worth continuing at all.
*****
That was only an imagined story. I am cis. My body and my self have always aligned. Even in this thought experiment, I never doubted who I was. I knew I was a woman. I only hated the body that betrayed me.
Trans women live this reality without the relief of waking up again. They do not have the certainty I had in my imagination. They spend years choking on questions before they can even begin to answer them. By the time they reach the truth, they are already scarred by silence and rejection; by their own minds turning against them.
This is not a game of discomfort. It is a fight to keep breathing when your body feels like a coffin. It is a fight to stay alive when the world insists you are lying about who you are.
So if you are cis like me, you have a choice. You can add to that weight by mocking, by doubting, by turning away. Or you can make their path less brutal. You cannot take away the prison of their body, but you can stop yourself from becoming another lock on their door.
Because no one should have to fight their own body and the world at the same time just to survive.
Author’s Bio:
I am a 24 year old trans man, a writer by passion and an IT developer by profession. Writing has always been my refuge and my way of making sense of the world. In my blog (Down to A’s – https://chancullen.wixsite.com/personalblog), I explore themes of love and queer identities. It has always been a safe outlet that helps me reflect on the subtle moments that shape who we are. Truth be told, you never know when a heartfelt piece can be the ray of hope in someone’s life.
Behind The Scenes:
I want to share this story because it bridges two worlds that often feel impossibly far apart. More often than not, it’s easy for cis people to ask a trans person to hide their identity and deny them their authenticity; and for this very reason, I wanted to highlight how jarring gender dysphoria could be for someone going through its lived reality. By framing the story through the eyes of a cis woman suddenly trapped in a male body, I wanted to create a point of empathy that cis people could relate to.
My hope is that readers walk away with not pity, but understanding. If they can feel even a fraction of that dissonance, perhaps they can meet trans people with compassion instead of judgment. Sharing this story is my way of saying: listen closely, because the silence around trans lives is already too loud.
