I do not hate my body for the dysphoria, I do not hate it for the wrong that it is for me but instead love it for the right it should have been for someone else.

I treasure my arms and my legs, my face and my chest, and I work to mold them into the kind of perfection I will never desire, because the only alternative is stepping into a pyre and proving to the world that this birth was not for me by trial of fire

I respect the body I was born into, even if at times it mixes the black and it mixes the blue, even if I recognize that all this forced-on love perpetuates the crimes of gender that I have worked so hard to hide

I hold myself with the strength that my dream self carries, and slip away into the mind-ferries that take me back to the days when I would pick black-berries and realize that like my lips they would look fine as hell colored with cherries

I do not hate this body for the dysphoria, I just feel the sting of eyes that immediately think ‘male’ when I wear a dress, like, do I have to write it on my forehead that ‘she’ is how you need to address me?! Do I have to rip off my ***** and sew on a different *** for you to learn how to respect me?

I cry this body to sleep, rocking it in my arms because I know that like my brown father’s black baby it’s not wanted. It’s perfection is a defection that I wish I could love, but when I don’t watch my thoughts I just find myself wanting it to leave.

I do not hate this body for the dysphoria, I just feel like I should have been given a body in which I could get cozy, one that fit me, one not for Tom, Or George, but instead for Josie.