You’re turning into a woman, my dad said to me as he held a pair of pink pumps in his hands, staring at me, expressionless. When I say expressionless, you should know that later that same summer, he stared at me, also expressionless, as I stood before him dressed as a literal gay fairy, wand and all, rainbow makeup And all, flowing flower rainbow print chiffon. At which point he said, your jaw is masculine, words that would very nearly haunt me the rest of my transgender life.

No, dad, I’m not turning into a woman. Major eye roll. Does he even understand the gender spectrum, or identity politics, or non-binaryness? Eye roll. Did he even take gender studies in college??? Eye roll.

I’m a androgynous non-binary trans feminine gay mixed race AMAB, GOD! isn’t it obvious? Clearly over it, I grabbed another box out of my car and let him take in the bag holding my 23 pairs of shoes. Would a WOMAN even have a wardrobe like this??

If he’d seen me in the basement of my childhood home where my grandma lived, he would’ve seen me wearing more than just heels at the ripe age of four. I added in wigs and dresses, too. But maybe that’s just what young kids do. Go through grandmas closet.

If he’d seen into my mind, me in the basement of this same house I was moving into thirteen years prior, he would know that in the gay muscle porn I watched, I always imagined myself as the bottom, the penetrated, as we would say in my gender studies classes. And I was watching muscle daddies fuck twinks because I saw myself in those scenarios.

If he saw me my first year in college, he would’ve seen the booty shorts. It’s just a better cut, me and my girls would tell each other.

By my second year, I was wearing makeup at dance parties, naturally. My community dying for a chance to beat my face.

In my third year, I was wearing heels regularly. DIDN’T YOU KNOW THEY WERE ORIGINALLY FOR MEN?

in the year that was supposed to be my last, my hair began to grow out. I later cut it for work. And even later, upon planning to move back to Portland from New Orleans , I began growing it out again.

Gone for 8 years, my sad now saw the effects of a liberal California college, a loving queer community, and countless New Orleans costume parties later (requiring all sorts of debaucherous outfits, complete with corsets and fishnets).

Being transgender is not a series of external, superficial choices, I told myself repeatedly. Sure, I could be non-binary, feminine, and embrace androgyny as a man-ish person. But being transgender was more loaded, to say the least.

And certainly, I wasn’t becoming a woman, right?

A few years later, taking my first estrogen dose sublingually, I figured my dad may have been onto something. The tablets would help round out my hard body, smooth my muscles, soften the hair And skin.

Somehow, step by step, I’d stumbled my way into a sort of transhood, as if those pink pumps I’d donned all those years were taking me somewhere more than just my neighborhood dive. More than just into the fantasy realm I’d once occupied for the straight men Who paid me to dress up.

So I guess we were both right. I was embracing my full femininity . And as a non-binary person, I was becoming something else entirely, making it easy to refute what my dad was sure he was witnessing after almost a decade apart.

Straight faced, he helped unload my heels and a closet full of debauchery that sunny day, and an assortment of identities years later, and a lifetime of war inspired toxicity in himself.

I moved home so he could see all of me, for the first time since I was a kid in my grandmas closet. I moved home so he could finally see His child before dying. I moved home to give him the chance to love me, and not a finely tuned performance of me. I moved home so I could love him better, with my entire self.