A birthday declaration…
[No. 81]
DEAR SAM, I AM WONDERING IN WHAT SENSE YOU CAN DECLARE YOURSELF “NOT FEMALE” IF THAT IS WHAT YOU MEAN BY GOING BY THEY/SHE, RATHER THAN JUST “SHE”. WHAT IS IT THAT IS LOOKED FOR THAT IS NOT CONTAINED IN BOTH BEING AND BEING REFERRED TO AS A “SHE”? THANKS.
So inviting, so enticing
To play the part
I could play the wild mutation
As a rock & roll star
Bowie
Dear Alien, your question seems to live in the mind. My answer lives in the flesh.
I could speak of the organs that have been removed from my body.
[Ovaries. Breasts. Uterus. Cervix.]
I could speak of the dresses and skirts that felt a cross between clown and coffin.
[Look nice. Smile. Appropriate. Cocktail attire.]
I could speak of the misalignment [or misassignment] of dreams and desires that were assumed part of my assigned gender and also of the countless ways I was expected to live into [up to] a body like mine.
[Wear this. Do this. Be this. Say this.]
I could speak of the ever-evolving intimacies that exist outside of boundaries, boxes and body parts.
[…………………………..]
The list goes on and on…
My declaration lives in the tightness in my chest when I am called “ma’am” or “she,” and the resonance I feel when referred to as “they/them,” and honestly even “sir.”
My declaration exists in the discomfort that arises when my thighs feel especially curvy, and I want to tear at their seams.
My declaration smiles with the euphoria I feel with a freshly shaven head and the lines of the growing definition of muscles.
My declaration cries in the enormity of explaining an expansion when it feels so clear to me.
My declaration swirls with the deep breath I took for what felt like the first time when I awoke to the great plains across my chest after my explant surgery.
After I went flat, people expected there to be grief, a sense of loss. So much of what I had been told made me a woman was now gone; and in its absence, I felt free. My body started to feel like my own and invited me to question what it meant to inhabit a “female body,” what it meant to be “female.” I started to recognize myself in the in-between. 
Allowing ourselves to ask uncomfortable questions and welcoming the unexpected answers is the essence of this very project.
We can be so quick to cling to a binary, far beyond bodies. The countless ways we delineate everything around us construct a believed sense of external safety and order. [If you are this, then I am this.] When we question the labels imposed upon and around us, we start to bring down the house of cards. There is a potential disruption to the order and ways of being that we are all asked to uphold.
Some may see chaos, I see possibility.
You speak of containment. I speak of expansion.
It is a challenging task to describe something that feels in perpetual motion. And yet, when we are alive and awake, everything is in flux, allowing for nature’s inherent fluidity.
Who are we to cage a shooting star?
Sincerely,
Sam
[They/Them]