Bodymagic

An Anatomy of my Integumentary System

Mieke de Vries

The integumentary system consists of the hair, nails, and skin, and is the largest organ in the body. As the first line of self-defence, the skin needs to be able to repair itself quickly if damaged. The rapidly dividing epidermal cells reproduce until they touch each other; thus, a very shallow cut heals within a few days with no scar.

I see Kai on my small, dusty laptop screen. His shirt is unbuttoned, revealing his bare chest and horizontal scars. I am on the couch beside my partner Emily. I feel heat in the triangle of flesh between my thighs and assume I am attracted to Kai. As I watch, I realize I do not want Kai; I want to be like him. My body recalls this warmth: all the “crushes” I had on awkward boys in middle and high school who looked like me—fair-haired and freckled. Kai fills a syringe with testosterone and slips it neatly into his thigh. Could I do that for myself? I could, even though I look away when I get blood drawn. Suddenly, I feel a settling in my gut, and I know I want to magic my own body. This scares a young, childlike part of me who desperately wants to fit in and be accepted. But they can’t deny the surge of embodiment—this visceral feeling of heat in our organs—as we watch a transmasculine non-binary person on screen and see ourselves in him. We sink into the cradle of our pelvis. Our core is incandescent. Our body sees itself for the first time in someone else’s body. Our body is possible.
When I was a kid and teenager, I believed my body was inevitably female. My long, blond hair, skinny limbs, and (when they arrived at sixteen) enormous stretch-marked tits: fleshy evidence of my femaleness. Even though girlhood was a scratchy polyester dress that reddened my sensitive skin, I looked like a girl. My skin hid me from myself. I finally saw myself a year and a half ago, when I went to a barber for a haircut for the first time. She gathered my thin hair into a long ponytail and trimmed it above the elastic. The buzzer vibrated my skull. Chunks of hair fell to the floor until my head was bare. The barber switched off the buzzer and removed the cape from my neck. I looked up into the mirror and saw a man with a shaved head looking back at me. As I left the shop, I raked my hand over my prickly scalp. Cool air cupped my neck. Startling gender euphoria: that corporeal incandescence.
I scratch my skin. It is conscious and it is unconscious. I want to and I do not want to. It is painful and it is pleasurable. I carve a nickel-size crater into my temple. The prickle of pain comforts me. I wipe the blood away and bandage the wound. As it heals, my fingers yearn to pick the scab and I try to stop myself, but I can’t. I got chicken pox when I was seven. Despite oatmeal baths and dots of pink calamine lotion applied by my parents, I scratched my chicken pox until they bled. I produced a scar, a small depression beside my right eye. I stored the scab from this wound in a clear plastic container from my parents’ photography studio meant to store 35mm slides. Also housed within were my baby teeth and a white-blond bundle of hair from my first haircut. I have always been an archivist of my body.
I have an archive of scars. From a hurdle over my tricycle, under my chin. From my chicken pox, beside my right eye. From a fall on a gravel path in the rain, on my right kneecap. From dental incisions, in the wet flesh of my cheeks. From breast reduction surgery, around my areolae and trailing down to meet a curve under my tits. I’m afraid a potential surgeon, some gender gatekeeper, will withhold top surgery from me because I had breast reduction surgery. Because I didn’t know then that I was trans.

A deeper cut takes more work to heal. The first phase of repair is the inflammatory stage, in which blood loss causes clot formation right up to the surfaceof the skin. New capillaries form in the dermis and epithelial cells migrate to just below the clot. Fibroblasts make scar tissue, and then new epithelial cells are made and laid down with extra collagen fibres. Often a scar remains.

I wake in the night with sweat pooled under my tits and behind my knees, torn from a dream of Adam in a labyrinthine house that I try to leave but cannot. I sleep restlessly and wake the next morning nauseous and dizzy. I cry in bed and use voice-to-text to write Adam a letter I know I won’t send him. I need to speak the words aloud. Get out of me. Leave me alone. His presence in my dreams—in my body—disrupts the safety of my recent gender explorations. If (his) masculinity hurt me, how can I want masculinity? But I do want it and I want to uncouple him from masculinity. He is only one man. His version of masculinity is his own. I could be a soft man, like my dad, who was sensitive and introverted and enjoyed scrapbooking, or his father, my Opa, who loved to garden and do calligraphy. I could be any kind of man.
I research gender-affirming surgery and that scared young part who wants to fit in emerges. I try to ignore the vertiginous sensation of falling but I can’t. This part is terrified of us changing our body and they make me feel sick to prevent it. They carry transphobic burdens: they learned that trans people are rare monsters who must hide their monstrosity. They try to suppress my interest in surgery. A different young part—perfectly preserved as his authentic child self—pushes against them, excited for this new idea of changing our body. This part knows no one is a monster. He knows that transness is frequent. He longs to be seen as he is and is sick of the other part suppressing him. He longs to be celebrated, not demonized. He longs for a body that reflects his inner experience. He pushes me to read more about surgery. The idea of phalloplasty intrigues him and I learn that it requires a skin graft to be taken from the forearm or thigh to create a penis. It’s thrilling to learn my skin could be used to make a new part of me. What sort of bodymagic is this? My skin: capable of reconfiguration. Home of my past and my future.
In the winter, I wear as little clothing as possible, shorts and a hoodie and a fuzzy blanket wrapped around me. I hate clothing on my skin—too tight, too itchy. In the summer, I wear even less. I overheat easily and this overwhelms me. I want to be able to take my shirt off when I get too hot. Like cis men do in public places. But not really, because I won’t feel as comfortable as they do, unaware of the space their bared body occupies. Their skin is so unnoteworthy, it is invisible to them. When I saw Kai on screen, usually shirtless, he confessed that he took every chance he got to take his shirt off because he actually felt good in his body now. Confident. As a child and teenager, a male family member greeted me with feminine adjectives, like “Hey beautiful,” “Hi gorgeous,” and “Hey sexy.” Every time she cut my hair, my hairdresser told me how I was beautiful and should be a model and how I must have a boyfriend. These comments displaced me from my body. Recently, I requested that Emily stop calling me beautiful and start calling me handsome. Handsome is something I feel that I could be. When she calls me handsome, I feel that incandescence. I am lit from the inside.
After I write this essay one evening, I dream of Adam again. I see him in a large group of people, and he acknowledges me with a smile. We’re about to talk, then I wake. I feel calm as I emerge from this dream, not enraged and full of grief like before. I released shame while writing last night and feel physically lighter today. My dreams help me understand my shifting feelings toward Adam. They’re a safe space to interact with him, to feel anger or grief or empathy or attraction to him, to feel freely without the judgment of others.
Separating Adam from my concept of masculinity isn’t easy. His masculinity eclipsed my own and obscured more gentle versions of it I saw in other people. It became the definition. Consumptive, selfish, hypersexual, insensitive. Power stolen through violence. When I realized Adam raped me nine years after it had happened, this violence seeped into masculinity. I began to fear all cis men and distanced myself from male family members and friends. Cis men no longer evoke panic in my body. But to be a man myself induces a different discomfort: a hesitation to embody something I have associated with harm.

The integument is an outer protective layer shaping the body. The epidermis consists of various layers, visible under a microscope. The millions of sensory nerve endings in the skin are found in the dermis. Although it is actually through sensory nerve receptors that we feel things, all of this experience of the outside world is mediated via the skin.

With my trans body I performed sleight of hand, illusions, and tricks. My magic was so effective that I even fooled myself. I want to stop performing, but I don’t know how. My transness is not a magic trick, nor is it rare. Being trans is common and ordinary. And I am still drawn to describe my trans body as magical because this word evokes a quality that resonates. Magic is a paradox: holding two “opposing” truths at the same time. Why is my transness seen as a magic trick when the real trick has been hiding my whole life? Why are trans people doubted when we claim certainty over our bodies? Why is our thinking deemed magical, our minds diseased? Transness is whole. My body is expansive now that it has been released from the tight grasp of my younger selves, who kept it hidden for so long. As my body emerges and expands into fullness, I document its everyday magic. My body once protected me and now knows protection is no longer needed.
My trans body is my disabled body is my queer body. Bodymagic doesn’t separate these strands as I have. Bodymagic is wholeness. My illusions of non-disability were similar to my trans magic tricks. I couldn’t see my own disabilities because I didn’t think they were possible—that I was possible. I tricked myself into thinking I was lazy, weak, too sensitive, inherently wrong. I was invisible to myself, my disabilities hidden under layers of masks for all occasions and audiences. The paradox of my survival in an ableist world: I had to hide my disabilities to survive. That survival is disabled bodymagic. When I say bodymagic here in reference to disability, I do not mean that disabilities are superhuman or supernatural. I reject the tropes of the magical madwoman who predicts the future, the inspirational SuperCrip who doesn’t let their disability stop them, and the disabled superhero who overcomes his disability with the help of his superpowers. When I say bodymagic here in reference to disability, I conjure the magic of a body that feels pleasure and pain. A body that I love not in spite of but because the world told me I shouldn’t love such a body. A body that hid itself to survive, that does not have to hide anymore. I conjure gratitude for the days my body feels easy to be in and tenderness for the days it feels impossible to be in.
My skin feels all. Constant corset of clothing chafes torso, socks suffocate toes, a patch of eczema itches, a scab begs to be picked, chapped lips burn. Sun-warmed bare skin in spring, Bart’s fur as he rubs his face on my calves, a hot mug of tea between my palms, Emily’s skin on my skin as we spoon under a duvet. I sink into her body into mine.
My trans body is magical in its everyday materiality, in the same way cis bodies are magical. My body—in spite of everything—persists. I don’t hate my body. I am grateful I have the option of surgery and I fear expressing my gender in all its complexity. I love so-called feminine things and I don’t want to lose them because I am masculine. I feel pressure to morph into hypermasculinity and try to pass as a cis man in order to be seen as a “real” trans man. Simultaneous expression of both masculinity and femininity feels too risky, impossible, paradoxical. The body’s ability to heal is magic: to close an open wound so quickly, to hide itself to survive, to continuously exist. The body’s everyday functions are magic: consumption, digestion, elimination. Transform food into nourishment and expel what is unnecessary. Despite all cultural efforts to dissect my body, I resist. My body will remain whole. Even as I write it into this story, my body defies definition. There is no easy narrative. No “born a girl, became a boy.” My body is one way now but will not always be. I perch on a precipice between past and potential. Skin is a paradox. It conceals us and reveals us.
skinbodymagic
I wish I had grown up as a boy. Because I didn’t get to. It is a loss, even though I never had it. This is the core of my trans grief: mourning who I could have been, and what I could have done, and all I could have had. Before I was born, believing they had created a girl, my parents chose two names: Michael Lee and Mieke. As a kid, I always thought that was strange. “Michael Lee, for a girl?” I asked my parents again and again. I had never met a girl Michael. Lots of boy Michaels, but never a girl. Now, I wonder if they knew without words, saw the me beneath my skin.

Note: Adam is a pseudonym. Headings taken from Holistic Anatomy: An Integrative Guide to the Human Body by Pip Waller, North Atlantic Books, 2010.

mieke de vries

(he/him) is a queer, trans, non-binary, disabled, neurodivergent writer, editor, and musician of Dutch and Danish descent. He lives on the unceded stolen territory of the Quw’utsun First Nation. He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BFA in Creative Writing in 2021. During his time there, he was a student intern on the fiction editorial board of The Malahat Review. Alongside Lara El Mekkawi, he currently works as essays co-editor for The Ex-Puritan. He is currently writing a memoir about his body.