The Girl With the Penis Is Free

A brief story of coming out

An old 2010 Webcam (Turkish quality) picture of me – My first cigarette in a free full face. I tried so hard to be old before my time.

My father always looked disappointed. He always looked worn down. His leathery face, shaped by the hard waters of life, seldom managed a smile. What fascinated me most was that I had never seen him sit on a cushioned chair––not once. It was always that old, likely Syrian, 19th-century chair that bore all his weight. Both physical and emotional. I always believed it was a punishment he had imposed on himself. He should never know comfort. A penance for the shame.

Beside him sat a crystal ashtray, grey and yellowed by the years, catching the embers of a musky rolled cigarette. I watched him with great curiosity. A quiet but deeply intelligent man. A man whose mind had been dulled by a lifetime of menial and meaningless work. In those jobs, it didn't pay to think. A wasted man.

He would sit there, staring at my mother and me, with wonder and despair. Sometimes, when you look at a person, you can see panic racing through their mind. You could see him wonder what had happened to him. How had life become so unfair? And worse––why could he not lament it? Why was he bound to silence?

As I got older, the looks of shame intensified. Father was worn out. He had enough. I believed that I was the biggest source of his woes. I can recall when he passed me at the tea house and smiled, but as soon as I caught him smiling, he turned away. I wanted him to smile at me again. He never did.

My father lived as if his head was already resting in the stock of a guillotine. The howling blade never fell. But father was sure. Surer than anyone, that one day it would. And he could not wait. I swear his sadness was born from impatience.

Sometimes, I thought he knew before I did. I mean, the signs were already there. I was effeminate. I never played with the boys. I felt more at home in the company of women than men, and not as a Cassanova. Not in a way that would earn me praise as the beau of Istanbul. No. Not in that way.

My uncle Murat was a loathsome, gluttonous slug of a man who delighted in calling me a “Nancy boy”. A name I loathed. Not just because it is profoundly offensive but because it was born out of absurdity.

As a child, I had panicked inside his kitschy bird aviary—a cursed lovechild of ornithophobia and claustrophobia. But, of course, that did not matter. I had made a song and dance. I panicked. Birds flew by my head, and they sounded like bees. They were going to peck my eyes out. I swear. The irony was that later, I would lose my eye, but not because of a bird. I was always protective of my eyes. I knew. Somewhere in the twisted mess of flesh and nerves that my body was, I knew.

Murat laughed. He laughed for almost ten years. I can only recoil in horror at how many times he dined out on that story. I imagine his face contorting with laughter as he spits rogue flecks of mutton on other diners. A most disgusting man. Murat was the first person who ridiculed me for my feminity. The first of many.

Alas, the nickname stuck. And to Murat, ever since that day, I was nothing but a pansy. That son of a bitch.

I was fifteen. I had hair on my balls. Hair on my legs. A lusty desire for everything that moved. But, more than anything, an insatiable need to be true to myself. The latter being the most important of all my motivations.

The hair is of relevance, I promise. Those thick, rough hairs formed on my femur and spread town to my tibia and then to my feet, triggering something of such great consequence, and that is indeed why I am sitting here in Amsterdam, writing to you.

Body hair, or lack thereof, does not define womanhood. I know that now. Back then, it was different. I had subscribed to a magazine image of femininity. It was all I had to go on. In my mind, women were hairless. Again, this is, of course, untrue. Hair was growing rapidly, as one can expect from a person from my part of the world, and it disturbed me greatly, most of all because I couldn't shave my legs without anybody asking questions.

To shave my legs would prove Murat right, and thus all the unspoken suspicions of my family, who, until that point, had believed I was simply gay. Although being gay was bad, it was not as bad as being trans. No. To be trans was to take on God. How dare I be so arrogant? God doesn't make mistakes.

This is to say that I could not shave my legs, and, therefore, I could not be who I was.

I had a friend. Dilara. We lived but two streets apart. We had grown up together. We played together. We worked together. We hid in the shadows together. Dilara was, and is, one of the most beautiful women I have seen. Beautiful blonde curls. Luscious lips. A face chiselled by the hands of Athena. I adored her.

Most of my firsts featured Dilara. She was the goddess of virginal loss but was not the person I lost my virginity to, although it fills me with deep regret now that she was not because it had been written in the stars. Preordained, as it were. That being said, I tend to defy fate. I've lost a lot that way.

One such memory of Dilara will live forever. We were two very closeted, and I mean bank-safe closeted, trans women and our disclosure of this fact came one frigid day in Istanbul. We were sitting at the bottom of the monument in Taksim. Smoking cigarettes. Watching people. I was thirteen. My lungs should have known better. They didn't.

Dilara said that she had a knowing feeling that I felt the same way as her. I knew what she was implying, but fearing a trap, I denied denied denied. I denied it until I didn't, and then we embraced one another with the longest, most comforting hug one could imagine. It was an embrace for the books. Warm. Knowing. It was all I needed. We cried for an hour, much to the unease of passing tourists who we would later be relived of their material possessions in one way or another.

Her knowledge panicked me, sending shockwaves through my mind. If she knew, everybody else might. I could not hide it forever. Fear turned me to stone, but our shared secrets joined us in a holy union when I finally told her the truth. It was a relief like no other—a gasp of air that had evaded me for years. But a door had been opened that could never be closed again.

Then, after much secrecy and much trepidation, as our bodies changed, we decided we could no longer live a lie. To counter the radical changes, we needed to be radical and face the tide head-on. To lie and continue damaging ourselves this way would be, in our view, a great sin. It could not carry on. There must come a deliverance.

Apres moi, la deluge.

To face things head-on is the most foolish yet effective method of delivering news that will change your life. We would confess. Although it wasn't a crime, it felt like one. Guilt thrives in the spaces between rules—where nothing is clear.

Come hell or high water, we will stand tall, and the crushing pressure will not entirely stamp us out. Just as long as there is one ounce of conviction, one ounce of determination and one ounce of love in our hearts, it will never win.

This bravery, of course, was all front. It was taking a banana to a gunfight, and either way, we would be left wounded and bleeding out. Still, I would rather die in the gutter as the person I know I am rather than the person I am not. Even in deaths famished with dignity, this was preferable. I would not lay dead a liar.

We geared up. A full face and a full heart. Even now, I have never felt so truly myself as I did in that one hour of darkness. I, for one hour only perhaps, was Füsun. That was incontestable despite what blind, foul mouths would speak in the future.

We would split off on Turan Caddesi. I would walk proudly in front of grocers, butchers and barbers who had known the limp body that was once attached to these feet. They would laugh, and they did. They would scorn, and they did. But they didn't know just how heavenly I felt. Just how perfect it all felt. They had no idea. I was the real winner, regardless.

Through the open doorway of my building—ironically, always open—I climbed the stairs in four-inch heels, adding to my 6'4" frame of emancipated joy.

I stood for a split second behind the door and knew they were all there—my clan. They were eating or listening to the radio. I bet my mother was cleaning dishes, and my father was sitting in the chair mentioned before.

My hand gripped a doorknob as old as my parents. In, I walked. Time had taken a siesta. You could hear everything in piercing definition—a surround sound of anxious heartbeats.

I looked at my father first. His face was hungrier than ever for the guillotine, and perhaps I was the blade. I will never know. I do know that his face wondered what he did to deserve this. Another slathering of shame on an already cramped canvas.

My twin brother—once my closest ally—lost his jaw somewhere under the Persian rug. My other siblings looked on in horror, a horror that was as white as any blizzard but soon turned jovial with a crescendo of laughs. Each laugh. Each stifled giggle. Well, they were daggers to my perfection. They said nothing. They didn't have to.

I knew that they would never accept this. I had doubted my certainty on this matter, but with those laughs and my father gathering shame like a shepherd on Dexedrine, I knew it wasn't to be.

My bravado and brutal acceptance of the situation are false. I feel deep sadness. A great despair that eats me every day. Anyway.

Those were not the worst reactions. My mother, the old Sphinx, paced out of the kitchen and stood with a grin that showed nothing but bloodlust—a blood-curdling grin I will never forget.

"I knew it." She said, with the arrogance that only years of silent certainty can bring, and it was like slapping me in the face with a dead fish. It was so grotesque that one of the main reasons I partook, and still to some degree, participate in the use of mind-altering drugs was to forget that face. That heinous, shit-eating grin will haunt me forever. How righteous she stood before me, knowing she had been proved right.

Then came more laughs. More insults. Hideous insults. Pervert. Disgusting. Abomination. You will never be a woman. You are sick in the head. You are a bad person. You are evil. You are not my son.

The last insult was the truest fucking thing she's ever said.

She was shouting. I don't know what else she said. I turned to my twin brother, who looked away from me. He felt betrayed. I looked at my father, who was shaking his head in disbelief. How could life be this bad?

Then, most haunting, I turned to my other twin brothers, who were five then. They sat on the floor, confused, but they both smiled, all toothy, at me simultaneously, and I was drawn to them. I love them dearly. I approached them to give them a cuddle. I knew I was leaving.

My mother, springing into action, jumped almost impossibly in front of me, blocking my way. I'll never figure out how she did that. The angle was impossible, but there she was, in front of me.

"Stay away from them. Get away. You won't corrupt them. Get out! Get out now. You're an abomination."

She didn't even let me pack some clothes. She kicked me out. There I was in the world. I no longer had a family. By being honest, I had been relieved of the burden of family. I sat on the doorstep and smoked a cigarette. I watched blue curls of smoke fade into the air and felt kindred with them. The shock had not shocked me. It had winded me.

I knew they would be cruel but not so callous as to deny me a goodbye with my babies, my brothers, who I had raised, who I had clothed. Who I had loved so dearly and understood them. If I were Christ, which I'm not, that would have been the final nail.

Footsteps sounded out from behind. Slow, nervous steps. I turned, and my twin brother, with a rucksack, was behind me.

"Here are the things you need. Take it, and go. Never come back..." He said, placing it next to me.

"But, I love you..." I said, like a silly little doe begging a lion for love.

He just walked away.

I agreed to meet Dilara at a certain spot. If it went wrong, we would meet there at 8PM sharp. If it went right, we would not show up. We had known two other trans girls, a little older, who had done the same thing. We would take our places in the unrecorded history, right beside them.

The saddest thing I ever saw was Dilara waiting for me, crying, shivering, alone. The world was ours now, but first, we had to love each other harder than anyone had loved anyone before.

Love was the only answer to a thousand what-ifs.

We had lost everything. Everything apart from freedom. Freedom was our new family. Freedom countered every loss. Freedom was the antidote to all grief.

Love.

F x-o-x.