m4ry k4te & a5h13y

this one is about b00bs

This month I have started the long-awaited process of going to consultations for gender-affirming chest surgery, a boob job if you will. I still can’t quite believe that it’s happening, or that i’ll go through with it, but I’m learning that ambivalence is natural and shared and allowed and that leaving your body and watching it continue to do stuff, from the ceiling, is not always bad.

For a long time my gender things felt outside the scope of the languages I speak and half-speak. Gender things felt more like a hum or not quite silence, but absence of sound. After a decade of hard to place discomfort (here and there and everywhere) I decided to force myself to try and write about it because unfortunately for me that’s the only real way I can make sense of anything.

Earlier this year a friend commissioned me to write on the theme of metamorphosis and below I share with you some of what I came up with in its imperfect and unfinished form because although there’s so so much more to excavate, writing these few paragraphs was enough, as am I, as are you.

a still from a film made about Harpies, the trans strip club I danced at 2019-20