The scene starts. We see a trans woman put on lipstick, slip into a dress and strap on a pair of heels. Femininity has been personified in this sequence as an art form most people would title "Deception." What a scene right? Uh I can already feel myself gag thinking about it. The focus here is not the person, but the idea that femininity is only about those things, and to be a woman you have to be able to do them.

I literally feel myself tossing and turning over this. First off, in my early years I might have only seen womanhood as such. I may have minimized the struggle of womanhood to make up. I must call myself out as an idiot. Femininity, trans femininity, is about finding a place for yourself in this wild world. A place where you exist and you are real and not the other.

Isn't it a bitch though? When you look into the mirror not knowing who it is you are looking at? You wonder how can this being exist when this other thing is in the way. Oh the struggle. In the early years of my transition I poked and prodded myself. Sure other people would whisper about my ambiguity, but I would literally rip it to shreds and of course those people helped.

The scared girl I saw, I tortured her. I pointed out her sharp jaw line, the hint of an Adams apple under chin, and oh goodness God forbid she wore a ponytail. When she had her hair up, the man showed. Body issues are not exclusive to any one group. Anyone can experience body image issues. The thing is trans folks may experience them on a much different level.

What was femininity to this girl? But all those things we focus on when we think of the female body. There it is. The word body. This girl marked her body as other. She didn't need the help of anyone, she knew exactly how to do it herself. Funny how she was so aware of the invisible walls around her, but not why they existed or how they worked. She wanted to be a woman. Womanhood was all that mattered.

For me womanhood didn't mean I got my period, broke my hymen or got my first sports bra. All those things sound terrible. I was curious about them at one point I really wanted them to happen, but my thinking was problematic and cis-normative. When I put the girl I was through the "art," as I called it, of femininity it didn't feel like enough. There was make up, the comfortable tops and covering bottoms and over all the single pair of heels. She thought this was it. She thought she'd be happy. She had skipped the cis-normative "womanhood" she yearned to get, but she stepped into femininity with both feet. Honestly she was the most naïve person I had ever seen. I feel for her truly. The make up did not stop the self bashing. The heels did not make her a woman nor did they validate her as one. She would have to validate herself, but like in many cases she sought validation through the male gaze. Oh how fu**ed up.

What I call "transwomanhood" started from the very moment I could conceptualize myself as a woman. It requires a lot of self love and self validation. No one gave her those things. She had to learn it. (It's not always the case for everyone though). She still does. The girl became a woman when she saw herself as one.

Her struggles had matured her. It made her someone she could rely on. Her reflection no longer strange. She took hormones, the trans version of a period and the real version of second puberty and wild mood swings. She wore makeup, she wore heels, loser clothing, bras even and showed some skin.

She recognized those things made up part of her personality, but they didn't make her a woman. She learned to value the girl she was as the girl still required love and affection. She learned what those walls around her were and why they existed and how. Whether she wanted to or not she would fight them everyday. She defied. The term bitch became her ally and she knew she had to put herself above the shit, the shame, the darting eyes of masculinity and every monstrous creature society created for her. To be a woman she had to find power in her feminine identity in her transness. This is what transwomanhood was all about to her.