4/5/23
Dear Evie,
I needed to talk to you, like you’re owed a little explanation. To be honest, we were never great at being a girl unless we were pretending to be one. I still have clear memories of wanting to, of putting that character on, but even the other kids knew we weren’t a Girl like the ones around us. I think you knew this lived in us before we knew its name.
When you saw Jazz Jennings on The Ellen show and asked mum what “transgender” meant, I hope it made her think. I’m proud of you for asking if you’re trans for liking “boy toys” because you were braver and bolder than I am now. When you get older, you’ll wonder again if you’re trans when you realize you like girls, and years after that you will realize you were right both times. In hindsight, binding your twelve-year-old chest with camisoles in 100° heat was a giveaway.
I need to tell you that I’m going on testosterone. I’m putting our body on new hormones. This isn’t your body anymore, but it was once. I inherited it from you, and it has all your scars. You live inside my head now, and I’m not sure how to connect to you when so much has happened between our separate turns piloting this machine. In a way, I’m just using it until it’s time to pass it on to the next of us. You probably gave it to Evie with the bad ombre we got to impress a girl, who gave it to the one who cut it all off… and so on until someone gave it to me.
Now I’m the first EV. There might be another name after me, or alongside me, I’m not sure yet. Regardless, though, this body is changing. But it’s changed already. Do you know we’re crippled now? And we’re a twin! Some is the same, I’m still freckled and craving a wonderful, world-altering sort of life experience. I can’t promise true magic like you’d hoped for, but I can give us transformation and our own kind of girlhood.
I just worry you wouldn’t understand. You gave me this body to care for, and I’m putting it on bottled hormones. I hope you can understand that we need this. I need it, and I think you do, too.
I am glad it took us so long. There’s going to be some very confused, maybe even angry, Evies somewhere inside here. And scared. I was scared recently, but you wouldn’t be. Not you in the big party dress. Not you punching the other preschoolers for tearing legs off crickets because “they’re God’s creatures” like us. I know you’ll support me, I just hope you approve of it, too. And I wish I could speak to you, like a sister.
–EV
9/30/25
Dear EV,
I didn’t write myself before or after top surgery. I did journal furiously throughout my all-nighter, got everything out before going under, but the thought of writing to you didn’t even occur to me.
I just felt so wholly at peace. After the Spring we had, I was looking forward to anesthesia like the MARTA ride home at the end of a long shift, the promise of rest that could move me from one place to another. I couldn’t even see my chest when I woke up, so the change didn’t sink in until we could shower and by that point summer seminar had started… and I just got busy.
I did write to Liam from study abroad, who’d asked us point blank if we wanted top surgery and put this whole thing in motion. The image of him grinning and holding up his shirt to show his scars, back to everyone in the house but you, sits on a shelf in my mind. I wrote to ND Stevenson, whose transition updates you took to the HRT doc as goalposts. I wrote to trans guys and butches online, sharing updates and answering questions in details that you’re still searching everywhere but FTM porn for. This is what my body looks like, this is how the healing went, these are the strange new sensations…
Top surgery just wasn’t the monumental shift you thought it would be. It’s like finally stripping off an uncomfortable outfit at the end of a long, exhausting function. Every single day is better now, but life is also so incredibly mundane.
I had a very naked summer in which I journaled very little amidst endless change, quite out of character for me. Between the first post-op shower, mikvah, and skinny dipping we were born again several times over, and now I’m just going to work and riding the train and driving to see people like normal. I’m wearing wide open tank tops like I’m paid to do it, tasteful side boob happily replaced with the chance to hear a young trans boy confessing “I like your scars” in the line at Six Flags. The surgeon says my chest looks fantastic. I’ve put on enough weight to need new pants again. Our sharp bones still jut at strange angles, but the flat of my chest smooths down into hairy stomach in a way that softens our ribcage. It looks good in the mirror and in a photo to our butch. These are things that you should know.
This is my journaling to you, three months late. It happened, and now we’re just normal. And hotter. All that to say, it’s good. I’ve got two new names and a new body and a little stockpile of testosterone and our butch boyfriend and a government that hates that, and you’re behind me and behind me and behind me. It’s all going to come together and you’re going to become me.
–Emrys
