The Beauty of Growing Into Womanhood

I have always been a girls’ girl. Nearly all of my friends, from childhood to now, are women, and my experiences with them growing up–from braiding hair at sleepovers to singing to pop punk songs in the car to struggling over calculus homework to crying over breakups–forged my fierce love for the bond that women share. Moreover, growing into my queer identity has meant appreciating women not only with platonic love, but with romantic love, too. Decentering men’s gazes, voices, and opinions has been one of the most freeing experiences of my life and building my experience of womanhood together with all of the incredible women I have had the good fortune to know and love has allowed me to become the person I am today. In a world ruled by patriarchy, finding this bond with other women and figuring out how to proudly and unapologetically be ourselves has been my greatest privilege.

However, there is a part of me that I don’t have in common with most of these women. Unlike them, I’m transgender.

I’m writing this piece for the first ever Gal Pal Museletter in a moment when the trans community is under relentless attack from the federal government, and when I myself am recovering from bottom surgery, long seen by many people as the “final step” in a trans person’s transition. Historically, this surgery has been seen as trans people’s first steps into “going stealth”, or in other words, living as their true selves without telling anyone else about their trans identity because for the first time–since our bodies finally match who we have long known we are–we are not in danger of being outed against our will due to our physical appearance. As I sit here, mind fogged by pain and Vicodin, I have had a lot of time to think.

Ever since I came out in the beginning of 2021 after what is colloquially known in the LGBTQ+ community as “queerantine”, this surgery has been my ultimate goal. As a trans woman, the one thing we fear the most–especially early on in our transition–is to be seen as a “man in a dress.” Far from forcing our way into locker rooms or bathrooms or sports teams, we are often struggling through a second puberty years after our first one caused us irreparable psychological harm by forcing us through a form of body horror that we didn’t have the words to describe. 

For months, I stayed inside, ordered hundreds of dollars of clothes off Amazon, practiced makeup endlessly, and grew my hair out until I could begin to hope that I wouldn’t be making people uncomfortable just by existing as myself in a public place. It wasn’t just not wanting to be perceived as a man invading women’s spaces–it was not wanting to be perceived at all.

As I have moved farther and farther along in my transition, the last time I have been discriminated against or misgendered–accidentally or otherwise–is a distant memory. But I am one of the lucky ones.

I have been able to finance my transition–I took on two jobs for the past four years, and tens of thousands of dollars in debt–while many trans people can’t afford the care that they so desperately need. I have been able to live in a place that is overwhelmingly accepting to the point where trans folks around the country are fleeing here from anti-LGBTQ+ laws in other states. Finally, I am a binary trans woman while many trans folks don’t fit into the gender binary quite so easily and continue to have to struggle against a world who doesn’t see them for who they truly are.

As I sit here after my surgery–which for so long was called a “sex change”–I start to wonder why it was so important to me. I was just as much a woman before as I am now. People can lob whatever accusations they want about chromosomes (have you ever had yours checked?) or birth sex (my birth certificate also says I weighed less than 10 pounds; some things change), but I experience the world as a woman, and the world returns the favor.

Back in Ancient Greece, the Cynic philosopher Diogenes was often at odds with Plato, who, when teaching at his Academy, often referred to his mentor Socrates’s definition of a human as a featherless biped. According to legend, Diogenes came into Plato’s classroom with a plucked chicken and presented it to the class while exclaiming, “Look! A man!”

There is no perfect definition of a woman (or a chair) that includes all things which are something and exclude all things that aren’t. Every dichotomy is a spectrum. That leaves us no closer to when we started.

But I think about a night in high school when a group of friends and I from IB English went to the midnight release of Life of Pi. As expected, we were the only ones in the theater. We smuggled in bags of snacks from Winco, we stretched out over the seats, we nerded out over the film representation of the literary themes of the book, and we drove home at 3 in the morning, hopped up on sugar and caffeine, singing along to my friend’s playlist.

I didn’t need this surgery to be a woman. I didn’t need any part of my transition, either. All of this just told me something I already knew: this is who I was always meant to be. 

Now, for the first time, the world just sees it, too.

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Evelyn Kocher (she/her) immigrated from Indonesia with her family to her hometown of Beaverton at the age of 3. She graduated cum laude from Oregon State University in 2018 with an Honors Bachelor’s of Arts in cultural anthropology and international studies. Formerly the interim executive director of the Oregon Student Association, she now is the communications manager at Latino Network. She is also active in policy spheres, writing and passing bills to change the state song and and expand trans and abortion rights in Oregon. She currently serves on the boards of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, Westside Queer Resource Center, and Equality PAC. She has lived in five different countries and speaks ten different languages.