i am not a woman. i am not a woman or a man or anything you know because i do not know what i am. my gender is a writhing thing caught between my ribs, screaming into every move i make, and i am afraid to let it out.

my body speaks before i can even begin. you see my breasts that hang heavy, breaking my back with their pink ribbon tied around my spine like a gift. you see my uterus that runs red with the moon, an empty cradle in a flaming nursery. you see my rounded face, and softer voice, and kindness borne from heartache, and you know what i am before i can even say a word.

i give up, sometimes. i slip between the sheets of pink run dark with red, make bedfellows with my body like it's an old lover. there are days, though, when i loathe my body, because how dare it fall against chance, how dare i not look more masculine, more thin, more palatable.

my teeth grit against the steel of your gender, of boxes that you impose because your confusion is more important than my comfort. your curiosity is more important than my safety. your needling about who i like and how i have sex and when will i get a goddamn penis because i said i'm transgender will always be more important than the civility between people.

because i am not people. i am a criminal, given the third degree whenever i speak because 'that's not right, what is this freak doing here?' i am an animal, slotted under a microscope and enhanced to find what exactly is wrong with me. i am a virus, an epidemic, a bad influence that will brainwash your children into looking beyond your false binary.

i am a faggot. i am a slur held in a fist, ready to show its teeth to anyone who will recoil. i am a little girl, shuffling through the women's section and wishing my body would stop growing so i wouldn't have to look at frilly underwear and beautiful adverts and broken women hiding between racks. i am a silence broken, privacy invaded for the sake of your sick curiosity as you ask me when I'm going to get a surgery i never want, when i'm starting testosterone, when i'm going to choose a box to hop in so i can get shipped off to the looney bin with the rest of them.

you hide behind your heterosexuality like a shield. like if you're loud enough about it, we'll fall into line behind you. like if you ask what this little flag is for, then we'll forget the fact that you damned us in every breath. you lie to our face, ask us every fucking question under the goddamn sun because you couldn't be fucking bothered to look it up.

do our work for us, and we might give you rights. run your little parades, but let the cops, the pigs march with you. get shot in the fucking head, and we will return your body to your mother in a casket, in a cradle, pink or blue, pink or blue?

you say we are going to hell for this. that God is going to see someone who was hurting and say 'i'm sorry, but you didn't put your GENITALS on a PEDESTAL, so you are going to be TORTURED FOR ETERNITY.'

i want you to say it to my face. i want you to stop hiding behind pride flag cheat sheets and 'that's my opinion' and false ignorance. i want you to yell with your chest, with your body sculpted in God's image and your mother's womb and society's arms, that i am wrong for living.

and most of all. most of all. i want you to stop. asking. questions.