“She doesn’t mean to be limiting. She just doesn’t see that the way she feels about her body is not the way that I feel about mine.”

“Here I am, gaslighting myself, and all I want to do is buy some clothes.”

“One time my coworker asked if I could dress any dykier and you know what? I don’t know. It’s pretty gay.”

“I can’t be a woman without the right clothes. I’ve been on HRT a year by now, but I still haven’t been gendered correctly by a stranger. It’s a lot of things. I try not to think about bone structure, about shoulders and necks and foreheads.”

I had “dressed” myself before driving drunk to my mother’s home. I had taken a shower thinking that water would take away the smell; that putting on leggings instead of leggings-that-I-slept-and-drank-in, would make me look like I was wearing clothes; that if I put on mascara I’d look like I had slept through the night and not spent the whole day drinking.

“Amazingly, neither the training bra nor my actual boobs magically solved my very typical and very sad self-image issues.”

“It took me 14 years to recognize with certainty that I was a dyke. I wish I could say it was about the intellectual complexities of sexuality and gender, or that I was afraid of being different. Those were factors, but not nearly as pressing as this: I thought dykes had bad style.”