[Trigger warning: explicit description of body parts, including “sex characteristics”.]
I don’t have a penis. So when I was born, I was assigned “female”, or declared a “girl”.
I have a vagina and uterus and functioning ovaries. Despite my GAHT, I still ovulate and menstruate. Depending on when my blood is drawn, my estrogen and progesterone are often still in the “standard female” range. And despite HRT, my testosterone levels are “only” somewhere between 300-400, the very low end of “standard male” range (which is extremely broad, going from 300 all the way up to 1,000).
And yet, what I saw drawn on the artists’ canvases yesterday was a beautiful and unmistakably male body. And that body was my own.
Down to the smallest detail, it was so masculine: the narrow hips, the broad shoulders and flat chest; the chiseled muscles, the small nipples, the bush under the arm-pits, the strong jaw. There it was, a male body on canvas. There it was: my own body seen through the eyes of figure-drawing artists.
I was blown away.
For over a year now I’ve been toying with the idea of modeling. For several reasons: on the one hand, I want to help make trans/non-binary bodies visible, accepted as one of the many beautiful possibilities; on the other, I want to celebrate my own body and learn to relate to it differently.
On the one hand, I’d like to model for companies like Speedo, ideally wearing their “men’s” swimsuits on my own non-binary/transmasc body to show that even people like me, even bodies like mine, can and need and want to wear those garments. I want to be not only “out there” but also “up there” for people to see because I know how important visibility and representation are, especially for folks from marginalized communities. I probably wouldn’t have got here, become who I am, if I hadn’t seen non-binary and trans people (& their bodies) so clearly and openly in the past three or four years, so I know how important that representation and visibility are, and I’d like to give back.
On the other hand, modeling feels like a way for me to connect with my own body in a different way, possibly more accepting and unconditional and loving or gentle. It’s also a way for me to feel empowered, taking back my power and control or agency: if I model, I choose when and where and how and to whom to show my body, I am the active subject instead of being the passive object of people’s gaze (as I still so often am).
So yesterday, I finally auditioned for nude modeling for figure drawing. And I really enjoyed the experience, even more than expected. The awkwardness of being stark naked in front of half a dozen people fell away with my robe and I never really felt uncomfortable with my nudity. On the contrary, I was actually able to enjoy being in my body in a still way. Figure modeling is a form of performance art so there still was a level of performance in my embodiment but it was a different type of performance from my usual athletic (& often competitive) performance. It felt more gentle, unconditional, and very peaceful. I connected to myself in a new, and different, way that I enjoyed and that I look forward to doing again.
My view of myself somehow changed yesterday, even if only for a few hours. It changed both because of the different way in which I was relating to myself in my body and because of seeing myself through the eyes of other people in a way or in circumstances — figurative arts — that were new to me. And both of these aspects are extremely important for me as I’m still learning to navigate my inner existence as well as the outer world in my “new identity”, in this “new body”. Realizing more and more that much of how I feel about myself depends on what is reflected back to me from the outside, much of what I see of/in myself can actually depend on what/how the world sees of/in me. And I’m still so often surprised by how masculine I look, how “male” I am assumed to be now — and this brings on a mix of emotions for me because it’s partly still turning my inner world upside down…
The Little Prince and the Fox 