Gender Presentation: A Choose Your Own Adventure Game
By: Nuance Media
Tags: Queer, Gender, Body, Friendship, LGBTQ

by Trisha

Author’s Note: The story is structured after “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, whose aim with the story was to satirize romance tropes. The author of this story chose this format in order to do the same for stereotypes behind gender presentation — for example, the things people assume and the characteristics through which they gender others. In doing so, they hope to explore the different ways of thinking that go into gender expression. While outside appearance does not equate to how someone identifies, it is important to remember that non-gender-conforming folks experience a very specific kind of pressure over how performative (and reliant on cis expectations) gender expression can be.

You go with your friends to look for a prom dress. You dread the process, but your friends are infectious in their enthusiasm. They know what kind of dress they want. They know the colour, the length, the texture. They know what they plan to do with their hair, with their makeup and their jewelry. They just know, and the simplicity of that is what stumps you the most.

You know you don’t feel the same, but shopping for clothes didn’t always feel like this. Or maybe it had, and you just didn’t know what it meant back then. You hadn’t known what other option you had, what else you could do about it.

You still don’t. You have options; the more likely one is to happen, however, the less ideal it is.

It doesn’t stop you from entertaining all the scenarios.

You take a hanger off a rack and hope for A.

A.

It takes multiple outfits to find the right one. You don’t mind. None of them make you uneasy, and this is, you think, the most you can ask for.

Sure, it takes a while, but eventually, you try on a jumpsuit the shade of a New York taxicab and it fits. Your body doesn’t feel disproportionate. There isn’t a knot in your stomach that would usually take hours to uncoil and even longer to give your appetite back. The jumpsuit falls perfectly around your chest and your waist and your hips, and you don’t feel like you’ve stolen your body from someone else. Someone who could use it more, someone who would like it more.

You go to prom with your friends. You are the only one not wearing a dress in your group photo, but it doesn’t matter. The photographer catches on and uses they when she tells your friends to tug you to the middle of your formation.

In the final photo, you have one arm thrown around your best friend. Your smiles leave both of you bright-eyed in the flash of the camera. Both of you visibly euphoric, surrounded by friends in blush pink and sleek raven-black, all of you yet to come down from the high of leaving high school.

Much, much later, you will come across a faded version of this picture and be surprised to realize you remember the night fondly.

B.

You go with your friends to look for a prom dress and come out of the seventh store with a jumpsuit the colour of the milk tea your best friend bought for you after she accidentally used she instead of they. The over-apologizing isn’t necessary, but you take the free drink with a stiffness you are still learning to shed when navigating pronoun correction.

Before separating for the night, she hugs you. You hug her back. She apologizes one last time. You tell her, it’s alright, it’s not a big deal.

It isn’t a big deal. You don’t want it to be a big deal.

At night, you lie awake and wonder what prompted her to use she when she hasn’t done so since you came out to her. Did she slip because you are keeping your hair long again? Is it because she saw you try on a dress, even if you returned it before it even touched the hair around your ankles? Is it because you brought up the possibility of going to prom with a guy in your AP Psychology class? Or is it none of this at all?

You know your best friend. You know it is likely a harmless, mindless mistake. But holding onto rationality does not stop questions from swimming around behind your eyes when you close them. It doesn’t stop the unease sloshing around in your gut.

You fall asleep with one hand holding your stomach and the other against your chest.

When you wake up, your gut feels empty, but at least the need to vomit is gone and your heart has stopped squeezing itself until breathing becomes more difficult.

You go to school. You eat lunch with your friends. You go to prom with them. Heartache doesn’t plague you that night.

Everything goes on as in A.

C.

Your mother brings you to the mall with her and buys a Robin egg blue dress for you even as you try your hardest to refuse. There is a Facebook group, you remember distantly later, where you can upload your dress. You take a shaky photo of yours and wait for confirmation that no one else is wearing the same dress. You hope there is. You pray for an excuse.

But there isn’t, so you wear the prom dress and stop thinking altogether when your mother insists to take a photo of you and your AP Psychology classmate.

You itch the entire time. You can’t pinpoint the source. You can’t stop squirming, desperate to tug your own skin until it feels looser, less suffocating. When the dancing begins, you gesture towards the untouched plate in front of you and tell your date you are too nauseous to stay for the rest of the night. Not with bass pulsing across the ballroom floor, not with strobe lights roaming like it’s searching for someone.

You aren’t lying about the nausea.

When you reach home, you peel the dress off you on your way to the bedroom and leave it as a puddle on the floor. The itching doesn’t go away even as you curl into yourself, the silk somehow rough around your waist and the jewels marking the shoulder straps too sharp. You fall asleep with a hardened lump in your throat, longing for the comfort in A.

You don’t feel better the next morning.

D.

You go with your friends to look for a prom dress. At first, you try to convince yourself that the queasiness is excitement manifesting differently than it usually does. It works until you reach the third store; fresh out of trying on three dresses, you feel faint as your best friends pick out three options for you.

You enter a dressing room that smells like your older sister’s room the night of her own prom. Artificial and floral, sweet and cloying, the sharp tang of hairspray and the smouldering of a curling iron joining too many spritzes of perfume shared between friends. It makes you dizzy, both the memory and its echoes in the present. You stand still for a moment, stuck on the image of girls older than you dancing around in cheap purples and sequined pinks, stuck on the cold in your gut when you tried to imagine yourself doing the same and found that it didn’t feel quite as right as watching your sister.

The salesperson closes the door behind you. You hear them write on it, the scrape of chalk forming the three curves that make up the number 3.

And then it’s just you. You and the mirror and the three sets of clothes you have in your arms. You hang them and refuse to look at your reflection.

You thought you were going to be alright. You like dresses. You browse through runway photos from Paolo Sebastian shows and bookmark fashion articles on new Elie Saab collections.

It has been a while since you felt this restless.

It eases, if only a little, when your best friend knocks on your door and wordlessly hands you a navy blue suit set. You fall in love with it in one glance; still, you remain hesitant as you try it on, reluctant to hope, bracing for immediate disappointment.

The jacket doesn’t quite fall around your hips the way you would prefer it to and the cuffs feel too masculine even as the tapering feels too feminine — but you try gathering your hair in a ponytail and decide this is the best-case scenario.

The dysphoria stays with you until the end of prom night, but you shove away the need to climb out of your own body and attempt to think yourself into feeling how you would have in A.

It doesn’t quite work.

E.

You go with your friends to look for a prom dress and lose your temper after the third store. You don’t want to explode on them, so you excuse yourself to go to the washroom. The hand dryers leave your ears ringing and the lights above leave your eyes stinging, but you tell yourself to breathe even as the frustration has your jaw locking while you grit your teeth.

On days like this, it grows all the more difficult not to resent how every facet of your day-to-day appearance is a gendered signal. A checklist of sorts, where, to miss one box is to increase the likelihood of misgendering — of the wrong pronoun — of the but you don’t look non-binary. A checklist of sorts, where, to fill all the boxes is to impose dysphoria upon your own self.

It gets exhausting, having to catalogue each movement, each choice in apparel, even each laugh. The timbre of your voice, the way you do your makeup, the shoe size you wear regardless of how long or wide your feet truly are. The way you sit. The way you shake someone’s hand. The haircut you ask for. The ratty shirt you wear underneath a fraying cardigan that you also had to second-guess.

It gets exhausting, how most things you display outward have to adhere to a wider expectation of what you are supposed to be because of what you are. It gets exhausting, to be constantly aware of the ways you present yourself, all to have any semblance of control over how others perceive your gender presentation and everything else attached to it.

You keep looking, chasing the possibility of A, but you don’t feel any better from the other clothes you try.

You decide $90 is too much to pay to be uncomfortable for five long hours. You don’t attend prom.

F.

You decide looking for a prom dress is not worth all the discomfort. You choose not to try looking altogether.

You don’t attend prom.

When your friends send you the photos later and name the classmates that had been looking for you, you wish A had been your reality instead.