First of all, this is amazing and beautiful and thought-provoking and...I could go on. <3

Secondly, I am endlessly sorry for the injustices faced by trans people today. It would take a novel to express all of that, so I will just be brief and keep it to that one statement.

As for the gender issues...I am struggling with this so much in my life these days. Though I want to emphasize this is NOTHING like what you are going through. For me, I'm not shaving my legs to try to detox from the patriarchy that tells me that to be a cisgender, "feminine" woman, I have to have smooth, hairless legs.

And the truth is: I HATE it. I hate my hairy legs. I feel like a "man" from the knees down. And then I get more angry because the patriarchy MADE me believe in this binary. It MADE me believe that hairy legs are unfeminine and unattractive on women.

And worse, my friends and family tell me to just "relax and shave." That I'm not going to change the world by taking on a useless fight against the patriarchy. But it's NOT useless to me. It's about this binary nonsense. It's about refusing to buy into a culture that tells us how we have to look and behave according to our birth gender. To me, that is a HUGE issue that needs to be confronted.

Anyways...so here I am, working on loving my so-called "masculine" hairy legs. You are right on when you say we are taught to hate the parts of us that dont' fit into the binary.

Much love. xoxo