Beauty Is Authenticity

A closer look at the third side of the coin.

In the hours before I met my friend Sarah for lunch one summer day in 2009, I took a quick, hot shower and shaved my legs, like I do every morning. I slathered lotion on my skin, then pulled on a pair of low-rise, thigh-hugging jeans over a black cotton thong. I changed my shirt twice, unsure of how best to present my post-baby body to someone I hadn’t seen in 15 years.

I rushed and fretted and split my time—ducking into the bathroom to apply makeup and jewelry after making breakfast for my toddler, Kostyn; blow-drying and curling my hair after getting baby Evan’s diaper changed and diaper bag packed. Right before we left, I scooped up Evan, then just a few months old, and cradled him in my arms on the bed, breastfeeding him before relatching the clasp on my padded bra, sliding my feet into a pair of low-heeled sandals, strapping both kids into their car seats and heading out.

I did all of this on something akin to autopilot, never once stopping to consider why I present myself to the world the way I do, when that came to be, or how I know my inside matches all that stuff I do so routinely to my outside. Like that joke about a fish that has no idea what water is, I was so thoroughly absorbed in my feminine identity that the gender box I was in was all but invisible to me.

My lunch date Sarah, however, was keenly aware of it—she knew she belonged in that same box. The problem was she’d been placed at birth in the other one.

As I drove us to a café where I’d picked to meet Sarah—whom I’d known by a different name and gender identity in college—my mind wandered back to those days, when we’d worked together on campus helping students check out foreign language cassette tapes at the meager work-study job rate of $4.25 an hour. Back in school, as now, she had a wicked wit and a passion for Philly sports teams. She was an English major to my journalism, and we chatted often about the craft of writing. She was easygoing but angsty, not especially confident but loyal to a fault. Her friends were her world, and she’d do anything for them.

I don’t remember her dating in college, but Sarah and her roommates threw fantastic parties. Booze helped to ease some of her anxiety—as it did for me—and at 6’4”, she could consume quite a lot without getting sloppy. I soon learned that for her those parties were sources of pain as well as pleasure, that despite the camaraderie, and the beer fuzzying her senses and anxiety for a while, there was always an end to the night and with it, a particular gutting loneliness. Not just of being alone, but of being unknown—even to herself, in a way she could sense then but not yet name.

Sarah graduated a year before me, and we lost touch. She spent the next several years increasingly filled with self-loathing for the male body that her female brain was trapped inside. As a first step toward righting that wrong, she’d begun hormone therapy to reduce her body’s testosterone and increase its estrogen levels.

The totality of my knowledge about being trans in 2009 had been gleaned from the 1999 Hilary Swank movie Boys Don’t Cry, in which the protagonist, a trans man, gets ridiculed, harassed, and ultimately killed for being different than people around him were willing to accept. I likely would have defined “transgender” back then as someone who wishes they were the opposite gender than they were assigned at birth. A wish, like something you might close your eyes and ask for silently before blowing out your birthday candles. I wish I was female!

I parked and unloaded us from the car, carrying Evan in his car seat and holding Kostyn’s hand, the diaper bag bouncing against my hip. Nerves creeped in as we entered the restaurant. I texted: “We’re here!” What would she look like? Would I recognize her? Her Facebook profile was devoid of recent pics, and we didn’t have any mutual friends who’d seen her lately. She had told me that except for a significant weight loss she was still basically the same as when I knew her, that not much had changed. But, also, everything is different, she’d written. There is SO much to catch you up on.

When I was a kid in the ’80s, Hollywood had served up a number of “body swap” movies—Big. Freaky Friday. Like Father, Like Son—in which the main character was forced to exist in a different body for a time. The unlucky person would try to act the part of the foreign body in which they were stuck, messing up time and again and becoming increasingly miserable. By the end, every single one was relieved to be back inside their rightful form.

When I saw Sarah, hugged her, and sat down across from her, I felt like a supporting character in one of those movies. Aside from the weight loss and a face devoid of any stubble, my friend resembled the person I’d known in college. She was still solidly presenting as her old self. But I now knew she was someone else on the inside.

What if I was trapped inside a man’s body? I thought as I listened to her share glimpses of her inner turmoil, of how every cell in her male body screams “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong!” What would that feel like?

My boys sat on either side of me at the table, Kostyn in a high chair and Evan in his car seat. I kept Kostyn occupied with board books, Goldfish, and little pieces of fruit I’d brought in Tupperware containers, while Sarah told me about the hell of looking like a guy but thinking like a woman. She lamented how nothing really had changed even though she’d been doing so much work on herself (therapy, electrolysis, hormones, dieting). I quickly told her she was wrong. “It’s weird, because our friendship feels the same as it did 15 years ago, like there’s been no time or distance between us—” I said.

“I know, right?!” she interjected. “It’s so great.”

“Totally. But you feel really different. Like, your energy is different.” Her energy was unmistakably feminine; I could sense it in the way we laughed and shared things about our lives so easily, intimately. Was it a byproduct of the hormones? Or was she just revealing more of her true self to me than she ever had before?

Over the course of an hour and a half, we flipped back and forth between her life and mine.

“I can’t believe you’re a MOM!” she said, smiling at my little ones.

“ME NEITHER!” I responded, both of us giggling at how different we were than the two college kids who’d shared hangover pizzas at work on so many occasions. We vowed to hang out more often since I was back in Pennsylvania for good. On the drive home, I was astonished to realize I wasn’t exactly sure what it is that intrinsically makes me … me. How do I know I’m female, on the inside? I pondered.

I was 36 years old, and I’d never thought about it.

Behind me in their car seats, Kostyn talked and Evan napped. Their genders—which had been assigned to them at birth based solely on anatomy—did not cross my mind. During both mid-pregnancy ultrasounds, I’d been relieved to hear “It’s a boy!” I never felt I was all that “good” at being a girl—self-esteem issues had long plagued me—and I feared if I had a daughter I would unwittingly pass down all the traps and travails of being a woman in this world.

Being a mother to boys will be way easier, I’d thought.

Sarah and I both had blogs in 2009. Hers was called The Third Side of the Coin, which she explained on her site: “There are not two sides to a coin, there are three. There are obviously the two faces, but there’s also the narrow edge that surrounds it. It’s not often thought about ... yet it exists. This is a little bit about someone on that third side.”

I imagined her precariously balancing on that overlooked edge, desperate to move herself to the opposite side from where she’d been placed at birth, but not feeling like she really belonged anywhere. I pored over her blog entries after we met up, realizing with a pit in my stomach that her life’s journey was not some frivolous wish or body-swapping rom-com. It was a dilemma of survival, but grimmer: She could choose to feel utterly wrong inside her own body every minute of every day; she could choose to die, to end the suffering; or—BEST CASE SCENARIO—she could opt to undertake an exceptionally difficult life as a trans woman that is costly, painful, isolating, and dangerous.

That is the choice she was tentatively, haltingly making. And the courage of it left me breathless.

Nine years after our lunch date, Sarah took the leap and had transfeminine bottom surgery, a procedure to reconstruct her genitalia that greatly eased her internal turmoil. In the days before that surgery, she wrote on her blog about coming to terms with her identity: “It’s not that I didn’t explore other options. It’s not that I didn’t scream and cry for it to be other things. It’s not that I didn’t go to seven different therapists to try to find out what was really underneath it all and why I was having these feelings.

“After all of that, it became clear I was having these feelings because I’m trans. I was having these feelings because I’m a woman, yet I look the way I do. It’s enough to cause self-hatred and depression to envelop you like a shroud. It’s enough to make you want to die. Literally. It’s nothing that anyone would want for themselves, for it’s just a magnificent amount of pain.”

We met up for drinks the following summer. When I walked onto the bar’s patio and she stood up to hug me hello, I was a little bummed to see her still presenting as her former self. I was divorced by then and living in our old college town, eager to not feel like the only person undergoing transformation. But Sarah was reuniting for the weekend with her old roommates. They knew about her transition-in-progress, but telling and showing are two different things. And Sarah wasn’t ready to show us.

One of her old roommates joined us for a drink, another friend I hadn’t seen since college. It was great to catch up with him—he’d published a book that he later sent me in the mail—but his presence in particular made me hyperaware of gender in general. As we talked about the joys and struggles of writing, I imagined what others were taking in about the three of us sitting at that small table sipping our beers and Long Island Iced Teas. Two guys and a girl, they would likely label without more than a glance.

But we weren’t two guys and a girl, not even by strict anatomical standards. How strange, I thought, that nobody knows the breadth and depth of who someone else is on the inside.

Sitting beside Sarah, my own gender expression that afternoon felt overt, though I’d never considered it to be. My slim body inside a pair of dark jeans and a simple sleeveless blouse suddenly seemed wildly feminine. The visible biceps that normally made me feel a touch masculine were somehow dwarfed and softened, just two more curves that passersby might find sexy or cute.

Six months later, Sarah came to my house for an overnight visit. She chose a weekend in early January during winter break, when our normally bustling town would be devoid of college students who might make faces at her or say unkind things. As she was exerting more effort to present herself to the world, she was coming up against more and more pushback. Only part of her family approved. Some friends had disappeared, and her social life was diminishing.

That night we hit the bars for old time’s sake, both of us dressed casually in jeans and dark shoes. She wore a simple black coat and pulled her long hair into a low ponytail, revealing small hoop earrings. Over drinks, she laid out the differences between us.

“You can wear jeans and a plain black shirt and totally pass as female, like no one ever questions whether you’re a woman,” she said. “For me to have any hope of that, I have to go so over the top—flowery dress, dress shoes, full makeup, I have to do my hair, the works. But even that’s not enough. I mean I’ve lost all the weight I can, and the hormones have changed my body a lot. Like, a lot. And I’ve worked so hard on my voice, too. But my face especially still reads as male. My skin is definitely different, it’s softer and smoother … but my bone structure is so masculine, that when I try to be myself I feel like people just think I’m a guy in drag. That’s how they respond to me.”

I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t come off as denying her reality. She took a sip of beer and summed up her biggest fear: “I’m never going to be seen how I really am.”

“I see you,” I assured her, knowing it wasn’t nearly enough.

“My only hope is plastic surgery,” she replied. Fake boobs? I wondered, a tinge jealous. But she wasn’t talking about breast implants, she was talking about facial feminization surgery, the chiseling of bone and reshaping of features that might boost her chances of being able to walk through the world as a woman, the way I do. The idea of it was radical, scary, and a little thrilling. I tried not to encourage her in either direction.

Eventually, we moved on to other topics: the best undereye serums we’d tried; our old college boss; what it’s like to be an aging woman in a college town with a perpetual population of perky 20-year-olds. When we’d had our fill of the bar scene we wandered around campus, taking pictures and reminiscing.

Back home, we sat on my sofa and talked till the wee hours of the morning. I ranted about the ways I was becoming aware of gender norm bullshit, thanks mostly to my older child.

“Kostyn’s favorite color is pink, and it’s impossible to find a pink shirt in the boys’ section of a store. Like, impossible,” I explained. “I ended up going to a thrift store for kids’ clothes here in town, and searching through the racks of girls’ shirts in his size. Because of course all the clothes are separated by gender, even though kids up to a certain age basically have the same bodies. For some reason we still have to separate kids’ clothes so little kids know what they’re allowed to wear, and what’s not for them.” I rolled my eyes; Sarah was smiling at my sarcasm but shaking her head at the absurdity of our binary world.

“Anyway,” I continued, “I finally found a pink shirt that didn’t have flowers or some weird, sassy saying on it. Just plain pink, I was so excited! But the fucked up thing was that as I was searching, I had to keep reminding myself, ‘Colors aren’t gendered. Clothes aren’t gendered.’ Because it’s so ingrained in me, like I felt weird shopping for my boy in the girls’ side of the store. Which made me mad! We’re taught at such a young age that there are ‘girl’ colors and ‘boy’ colors, ‘girl’ clothes and ‘boy’ clothes, it really gets in there, ya know? It’s crazy. They’re just things!”

I was agitated not just as a parent but as a human, realizing how trapped I’d been inside gender norms and binary biases. As a young adult I used to make loud and clear my distaste for the color pink, as if that proved something. I took pride in how my male friends considered me “one of the guys.” Was being one of them better, somehow, than being a girl? Being … me?

Sarah lauded me for being the kind of parent who would go against the grain for her kids’ sake. I knew it stung, how her father still called her by her dead name and repeatedly referred to her using incorrect pronouns. She was up against so much out in the world, and couldn’t even find peace inside her family.

I was determined that inside our home at least, my kids would never feel any sort of angst about who they are. But I began to realize that gender had never been a big part of Kostyn’s identity. It didn’t occur to him to feel any sort of way about how he loved pink. He just loved it. He grew his hair long and was never bothered when people misgendered him. On Halloween, as his brother donned costumes that centered brute force and masculinity—Batman, the Grim Reaper, a ninja warrior—Kostyn tested my crafty skills year after year with requests to be utterly ungendered objects: An evergreen tree. A stoplight. A spider web. A plate of pasta.

“Gender is a big deal to, like, your generation,” Kostyn told me one day. “But it’s just not to us. Gen Z isn’t like that.”

I felt a pang of embarrassment, because he was right. Why was gender such a big deal to us? I started to notice more and more trans and nonbinary people out in the world—the barista at a favorite coffee shop, the cashier at the grocery store—and felt such gratefulness toward them for modeling the ideal of being exactly who you are, binary norms be damned. I relished not knowing someone’s gender at a glance, admiring the mashup of features and fashion typical of men and women. Every time my Gen X brain couldn’t instantly label someone “boy” or “girl,” I felt a little freer, less encumbered and more empowered.

At the same time, Sarah’s journey was never far from my mind. And Kostyn’s take on gender as “no big deal” made me wonder how both things could be true: How could gender be merely a construct in so many ways, but also deeply meaningful and true—so true that Sarah had spent decades risking so much to pursue a life authentic to her internal gender identity?

Several months after our campus bar crawl, Sarah had the facial reconstruction surgery. Recovery was grueling, and not what she’d hoped for. A second surgery, with a different doctor, eventually fixed some lingering issues she had with the first results. In the meantime, she started living more fully as herself. She transitioned at work, and though she works mainly from home, her company was fully supportive. She told me what a relief it was, and how much more productive she felt after coming out and being accepted by her colleagues. “You’re not using all that energy to hide anything anymore, you’re just being yourself. It frees up all that mental space,” she said. “I’m starting to feel what cis people feel, because I think about my gender only a tenth of how much I used to.”

I shared with Sarah when Kostyn wanted relief from thinking about gender so much, too, asking us to shift their pronouns to they/them. “They said basically that when me or their dad references them as ‘boy’—like ‘C’mon boys, time for dinner!’ they wince inside because it doesn’t feel right,” I texted her.

Then I welled up as I typed a follow-up message: “I just want to wrap them up in my arms forever and never let them feel pain or cruelty from outside.”

For a minute I watched her three texting dots waving on my phone screen. Then: “Good on them for recognizing this and for speaking up. Hopefully they’re taking their time in figuring everything out and doing what they need to in order to understand themselves. There’s no rush and no set pace for anything. It’s all about their comfort.”

Unlike Sarah, Kostyn didn’t want to move from one side of the coin to the other. But they did want to step out of the gender box we’d placed them in way back when we knew nothing about them but what we could see with our eyes.

I think placement in that box labeled “male” wouldn’t be such a big deal if our society wasn’t set up in a way that made a hundred other decisions for them based on that first one: What kinds of clothes they’re supposed to wear throughout their lives; what their acceptable emotions, toys, and hobby preferences would be; what income status they could achieve; what careers they’d be most suited for; whether they’d someday be more responsible for yardwork or laundry; on and on and on it goes. Kostyn felt that happening and said, “No. This box isn’t right for me in all those ways.”

Right now, they prefer to be on that third side of the coin rather than lumped into a category of either “heads” or “tails.” It’s a narrow space that desperately needs greater acknowledgement, appreciation and acceptance.

The third side of a coin is essential: It connects the other two, giving them movement and meaning. Without it, life is flat, limited, inert. I don’t want that for anyone; aren’t we all created to live in the richness of 3-D, to feel whole and aligned in mind, body and soul?

The last time we scheduled an overnight visit, Sarah showed up at my doorstep fully transitioned. She had a new, shorter hairstyle, and wore a simple purple dress with tiny flowers on it, a black sweater covering her shoulders. Her makeup was perfect; I confessed my envy at how good she is at applying eyeliner. “Lots of YouTube tutorials,” she said. We took a selfie that night that I love revisiting. Her face is radiant, her sweet soul shining through her eyes. She is stunning.

When I told her I wanted to write about her for an essay on beauty, she didn’t understand why. I tried to explain. “When I strip away all the bullshit that the term ‘beauty’ is burdened with, what it is, to me, is authenticity. And you have fought an uphill battle for decades just to be your present, authentic self. You are more self-aware than most people I know, and that inner knowing mixed with the outer presentation you’ve worked so hard to achieve is exquisitely beautiful.”

I kept going: “I lived a completely unconscious life in the cocoon of my assigned gender until the day you told me your gender. It boggles my mind how I could have been sleep-walking through my own life like that for so long.”

She took a moment to let that in. She’s been in a dark place for a long time, struggling through the barrage of anti-trans laws, crimes, and rhetoric that are constantly demeaning and diminishing her and others like her.

All of us, really. Hate, ignorance, and intolerance diminish us all.

“Maybe that is the point of people like me,” she replied to my text. “To jog others to alter perspective and ask different questions of themselves and the world. That gives me some hope.”

She gives me hope.