Body scan

Face: Stubble feels dismayingly unfeminine. I shave most days, wondering why I’m wasting my time and irritating my skin when I could just get laser (rather than electrolysis, in case one day I wake up yearning for that five o’clock shadow). I count among my closest friends butches and transfags whose first set of stitches came from trying to shave their faces—just like dad!—at five or six years old1, but I wasn’t that kind of kid. From a young age, I was as insistent about being a boy as I was about my party shoes, which is what my family called the fake patent leather Mary

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