Here are two stories:

One month after I started estradiol I got my first period. I don’t bleed, obviously, but at fairly regular intervals my tits hurt, I become a paranoid spiralling mess, and I feel like I’ve eaten a rugby ball made of bad cheese. I remember that first time feeling like utter shit, assuming it was residual nerves from the launch of my debut novel, then walking outside and seeing the full moon and just…

stopping. Something about it made me want to pluck it from the sky, taste it, put it in my pocket for safekeeping. I suddenly needed to surround myself with beautiful things. My friend Casey had given me a little sparkly deer toy, and when I got home I sat down with it and cried because it was so pretty. Having spent almost 20 years in a sort of numb trance, I was so overcome with emotion that once it started I just couldn’t stop.

Two months after I started estradiol, I had shaved off my beard, experimented with makeup. The physical changes hadn’t really begun yet, but I was visibly gender nonconforming, even in a mask. I was walking down Cuba Mall when a man lunged at me, shouting. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. He drew back before he hit me and his mates cracked up; I heard the word tranny directed at me for the first time, though it certainly would not be the last. I asked another doll about it later, how nobody ever tried it on with her, and she told me to cultivate unfuckwithability. You can’t be the soft girl in public, no matter what your skin and hair and heart tell you.

Gender is a performance, right? Big word, ‘performance’, there are a thousand ways a girl can get in trouble onstage, which is maybe why I so often feel caught between dance steps and fight choreography.

At home I am all softness, wrapped in blankets. I got the pink cat-ear gamer headphones just because they were pretty. I fill my living space with every shiny thing I can find. I’ve got a soft little belly and perky tits and lovers tell me I’m a cuddler. In rare spaces where I’m afforded vulnerability, I feel like a different woman.

I put on makeup like I’m putting on armour. I straighten my back, shake off my softness, my eyes go cold and hard like the boy in the mirror I spent so long hating. Flannel, leather jackets, beat-up jeans, big chunky combat boots. By the time I leave the house I’m unfuckwithable. I walk fast like I’ve got somewhere to be while inside I am a spring about to break, my hand in my pocket clutching my keys so they jut between my fingers like claws. I meet eye contact with eye contact. The glare has never once failed. Nobody calls me tranny to my face any more. Nobody dares come close enough for me to hear it.

Catgirls are a funny thing, so like-yet-unlike cats. When I was a kid, out in the bush with my dad, I saw a scarred-up feral cat and went to pet it. He held me back. He leapt on it and wrapped it in a blanket. We took it to the SPCA; it hissed and spat and screamed from the boot of the car the whole way there. I’ve never seen a catgirl like that, except when I catch my reflection in a shop window; there is a kitten inside me who wants tall women with big dicks to play with her hair and there’s a mean old wildcat ready to take some kid’s eye out.

Private trans femininity is gentle, soft, honey and fur and dancing; public trans femininity is teeth and claws, spitting and biting. I called myself a bad bitch a while back and my dear friend Dave – a good man who knows me better than most – laughed and gently-but-firmly disagreed. It meant a lot to me, that those who truly know me don’t see me like I see myself, because on bad days I don’t know which woman I am any more.

We are living through a viciously transphobic moment in a world that wasn’t kind to trans folks to begin with. Eliana Rubashkyn poured tomato juice on Posie Parker and in response the fash keep trying to shoot her. I walk Pōneke with plain black headphones on and nothing playing, and sometimes the black cat follows me home. I lock my bedroom door and sleep with a bug-out bag in easy reach of the bed… I find myself closing off in private, having a harder time finding my softness even as I dive deeper into it in the rare moments when I am safe, perhaps to try to save whatever shred that remains of the kitten who wanted to pluck the moon from the sky. My eyes stay cold for longer. I can’t stay on two stages at once, and I can’t stay inside all day wrapped in blankets, not when my sisters are out there facing the world with such courage. We are not living through a time that affords vulnerability, but I worry about the woman I’m becoming, whether one day some father might hold back his daughter in case I hurt her.

But of course, they’re doing that anyway.

Header image from Sailor Moon