# data[].attributes.body
I take my makeup off, tired from a day of heavy coverage, but envious of my previous femininity. I disassemble my instruments, I let my guard down. As Butler so greatly put it,  “Autonomy is a socially conditioned way of living in the world. Those instruments, such as the diagnosis, can be enabling, but they can also be restrictive and often they can function as both at the same time. (Butler, Undiagnosing  Gender, p.77).  Enabled, I started the day off with full glam, secure in my appearance. But at the end of the day, I need it off, it’s restricting my ability to live naturally, my skin breathes, and I can’t keep suffocating it for the reach towards my gender, my beauty. But I don’t hate my tools, for at times they are used for empowerment, sometimes the art on my face feels so similar to the war paint that the cis-het-man is so fond of. It, like Transing, has metamorphosized from a disciplinary tool to that “pathway towards liberation,” that “escape vector”. (Stryker qtd. In Stalling, p. 10) But this is the end, the final rally, where i don’t have to think about my body and it’s transing, I wipe away the cage, the cage that I know is still there, but that I pretend is not. I am allowed. Just like those female body builders, I now “need no ‘male gaze’ to validate [my] bodily activity.” (Shilling, p. 147) I have the autonomy I so desired throughout the day but can only experience in the comfort of my room at night.

# data[].attributes.body
Next, I move to the bottoms, the foundation, but also the piece that can shake everything up. Skirts are easy—no one questions a skirt. Pants, though, are trickier. The wrong pair can shift how I’m read entirely. Tight jeans? Still safely feminine. Loose, oversized pants? Suddenly, I’m stepping into another category once again. Just like the tops, the bottoms start to define me: Am I genderless? Genderfluid? Am I even a woman to them anymore? The difference between being legible and being suspect is just a few inches of fabric. On top of that, theres my personal comfort in the clothing. Skirts scream “woman” but to my body they scream “legs”. I suddenly am faced with a puzzle of what parts of my body I like, what do I show. The highrise pants, may cover my belly, but they suffocate me, I feel like the meat in a sausage casing. Truly, the sweats are the only thing that feel truly comfortable. But, if I want to be taken seriously and not like the lazy slob that the sweats call me, I must confine myself to the work pants that ride up my crotch. "Acceptability becomes the tradeoff for ‘authentic’ experiences” (Stone, p. 230). Choosing pants is not just about comfort—it’s about risk. It’s about how much I want to be questioned today. Because even when I feel like myself, the world might decide otherwise. “The female bodybuilder as a ‘gender outlaw’ … disregards dominant understandings of what is aesthetically, kinaesthetically, and phenomenologically acceptable” (Shilling, p. 142)​. I, too, become a gender outlaw in the wrong pants. The ones I reach for in comfort might be the same ones that put me on trial. So I hesitate. And then I grab what’s easiest, just to avoid the stares.

# data[].attributes.body
I start my day off with a double shot of gender. The mounds on my chest remind me of who I am supposed to be. I wish they were gone, I hate the reminder that I am supposed to be someone, and play a role, for the people who want autonomy over my body. That’s right, MINE. It’s not necessarily that I do not accept my label, woman, but rather that I do not understand it. What makes me a woman? These things on my chest? I don’t want them there, I didn’t ask for them, they feel alien. But I don’t feel sick, I just don’t understand what everyone wants from me. But to have them gone means to have something wrong with me, something to be cured. As Butler says, “To be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (GID) is to be found, in some way, to be ill, sick, wrong, out of order, abnormal.” (Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 76)​. I don’t feel so sick. I think I know what my mind betraying me feels like, and this isn’t it. So instead of admitting illness, I must please those who view me in other ways. I make the choice every morning what kind of chest I can have today. Do push up, accentuate my femininity so that my body is truly given to their gaze, abandon my sense of self? Do I restrict, tame, bind, so that I may see myself how I like? I can’t go bra-less, that’s a route filled with pain and unwanted stares, so I choose my weapon.

# data[].attributes.body
Next, I move to the tops, even more visible. My mother always says the outfit is made by the top, so a lot is riding on this cloth to say the right thing about me. My top choices are not always personal, they’re shaped by that external gaze. Which one will my gender be accepted in today? Does this one scream gender? Genderless? Genderfluid? Which is most transing? Which will get me hired and not hit on? I could put on my [insert top], and it would label me as [identity]. The shirt becomes alive, it has the ability to change me, to call me out. “Althusser conjectures this ‘hailing’ or ‘interpellation’ as a unilateral act as the power and force of the law to compel fear at the same time that it offers recognition at an expense.” (Butler, Gender is Burning, p. 82)​ Butler and Althusser work together to put in words what it’s like to have your clothes talk for you. By appearance is what identifies me to the outer world, and if I make the wrong choice, step too far outside of what’s expected, I risk becoming something the world sees as lesser, but if I choose the right top, I still risk the same thing. It fills me with questions, when I assemble myself, I ask “For whom are these narratives constructed, under what gaze, and what stories appear and disappear?” (Stone, The Empire Strikes Back, p. 224). These questions fill my mind and soon I run out of time and put on what’s easiest, and I’ll regret that later.

# data[].attributes.body
Next, I move to makeup, the most obvious transformation, the mask that shapes my face and, with it, my identity. No makeup is an option, but not a neutral one. No makeup means unreadable, incomplete, like a sentence cut off before it finishes. Am I lazy? Sick? Unfeminine? Unknowable? “To be implicated in the relations of power that one opposes is not … to be reducible to their existing forms” (Butler, Gender is Burning, p. 83)​. Even in rejecting makeup, I am still trapped in its expectations. No face paint, no face, no identity.

But what about just enough? The in-between. Concealer, some mascara, a little blush (barely there but still working) a compromise. Not quite glam, not quite natural, just enough to pass. Just enough to smooth over the questions before they come. “You have to always have been trans to be ‘truly trans’” (Stone, p. 225). Just like trans narratives are forced into a before-and-after structure, this level of makeup lets me exist within a “believable” femininity, one that doesn’t challenge but doesn’t erase. It’s safe. It’s effective. But it’s not really mine.

Then there’s full glam, the hyperreal. A face so sculpted, so perfected, that it becomes something else entirely. Power, beauty, performance, excess. But excess is its own kind of danger. Too much, and I become suspicious, artificial, a spectacle. "Once captured, the ape says he had no choice … he had to accept the cage of human subjectivity” (Preciado, p. 19). Femininity, at its peak, can become another kind of trap. The more flawless, the less real.

And what about when I break the rules? Art makeup, bold colors, asymmetry, when I feel most like myself, but also when I am least understood. “Trans as an act of artfulness, an act of creation and possibility” (Green, p. 66). I could wear this out, but I’d be noticed. And some days, I don’t want to be noticed. I’ve already thought about it too much, I’ll just hid my acne and settle with that.