Borrowed Starlight

This is a piece inspired by Rider Brandau, over at riderhbrandau on Substack.

This is about the way my body is allowed to be perceived, and loved, and appreciated, and the ways I struggle with the fact that the gaze which permits it will only ever see a boy.

The archetype I fit most is the beautiful androgyne: Bowie, Swinton, the starved, lovely, ethereal creature. For decades, it has been the single register in which a body like mine is allowed to be considered striking. 6’8”, thin, lanky, sharp-lined. I fit it. I love the look. I do love my eyeliner. I want it. The trouble I have isn’t with the frame. It’s what the frame does with me once I’m standing inside it.

Androgyny, in this case, isn’t scored from zero. It’s scored from male. The whole charge of it. What allows me to read as striking instead of ordinary is a man being delicate. Masculinity that has been caught performing softness. That’s the transgression, and a transgression only works if the thing being crossed stays legible underneath it. The aesthetic needs the male read to survive. Take it away, see the same body as simply, plainly, a woman’s? The frisson goes flat. So this existing frame in society, that of the beautiful androgyne, can’t hold me as a woman. It holds me as a beautiful feminine boy, and the better I wear it, the more surely that’s what I get filed away as. The fit is the tell.

And it’s the only frame on offer. There’s no second aesthetic waiting behind it, no other kind of pretty a body built like mine could step sideways into. I can’t trade the androgyne for something softer and stay lovely, because nothing softer is available to me. Leaving this look doesn’t lead to a different beauty; it leads to plainness. So to keep being pretty at all, I have to stay narrowly, exactly here, in the one register that ever called me striking.

The moon makes no light of its own. It’s praised for a brightness it’s only throwing back. That’s the kind of beauty I get complimented on. Beauty thrown off of a male original. Something reflected, and called mine when it was never mine to emit. Borrowed light. I glow, but the glow is a citation of something I don’t belong to.

And the problem I can’t resolve is… I don’t want to walk out of the trap. I don’t want out of the light. I don’t want to be plain, or ordinary, or unremarkable. I never have, and I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t feel like mine when I see it reflected in the glass. I do want to be pretty. But the exact features that make me remarkable here, and that’s in the public, head-turning sense, not merely in the private, Narcissus sense, are the exact features the eyes read as male. The length, the flatness, and the sharp, unpadded lines. My body does the beauty and the misreading in a single gesture. Narcissus starved at the edge of the water because he couldn’t look away from himself; I am paring myself down to the bone just to hold onto a reflection that belongs to someone else. The aesthetic demands thinness. It wants the body pared down so the light bounces off it cleanly. I can’t pretend my relationship with food, or that of so many others, came through it unharmed.

Rider, the inspiration for this article, was shut out of the room entirely because she couldn’t fit the doorway from any angle. Unlike me, she is broad, stocky, and gets read out of the frame as a man, all the while I get read into it as one. We aren’t opposites, though. We’re one sorting done from two sides. Same hand, same rubric, different verdicts. Neither of us is being seen for ourselves; I’m just the one it flatters.

And it was never only the two of us in front of that hand. The same rubric runs through a whole community of women like me, each of us held up against a doorway none of us were built for, each of us learning that the only way to be seen is to be seen thin and sharp and ethereal and legible. We pass that standard between us like it’s tenderness, calling one another beautiful in the exact register that is quietly starving us. I can’t give you numbers and I won’t invent them, but I have never once been alone in the hunger, and something this common was never a private failing of mine. It’s the shape of the frame, and the frame is teaching a whole roomful of us to vanish just to be called lovely.

None of this is a niche way of seeing; it’s very nearly the default. The androgyne is the template many trans women get read through in the first place, the closest thing to acceptable the culture hands us, and even at its kindest it returns the same verdict it returns to me. A feminine boy, beautiful and filed under male. Because the rubric was never really looking for trans women. To many who live outside of queer spaces, there is very little difference between the label of “trans woman” and “femboy.” It’s looking for masculinity, and it believes it can find masculinity in a jaw, a height, a flatness, a set of sharp, unpadded lines. So it doesn’t stop at us. It reaches past trans women and takes hold of cis women too, the tall, the angular, the strong-featured, calling them into question for the very features it calls beautiful on me. Transvestigation runs on this aesthetic. Transphobes seize the androgyne precisely because it is so nakedly bound to the male that they can hold it up as unquestioned proof. They see the borrowed light, and they go hunting for the man they believe must be casting it. The same rubric that files me as a boy goes hunting cis women for the crime of a face that catches the exact same light, and it never once finds a man. It finds a look, and it calls that look male, and everybody wearing it, mine and theirs alike, gets sorted the same way in the end.

So I keep the look. I love the sharp lines, the lean silhouette, the whole lovely borrowed thing of it all. Because it did call me beautiful when nothing else did, and because it is beautiful, and both are true at once. What I want isn’t a different aesthetic. It’s this one, cut loose from its chain and no longer so indelibly male. Why must this stay so strongly linked to masculinity? I shouldn’t have to reflect a maleness I never wanted. I want a version where the light I emit is my own. A moon that gets to be a star.

Maybe the maleness is load-bearing. Maybe that is the entire reason I must keep the lines so sharp and the frame so thin. Maybe it’s the whole reason the thing reads as beautiful to the people looking, and there’s no reforming it into something that shines on its own. But I’d rather keep wishing for this idealized version of my own aesthetic than pretend that the borrowed version truly belongs to me. It isn’t mine. I am seen as beautiful, but the way I am considered beautiful is owned and operated by masculinity. It’s just close enough to ache, and just far enough that I feel that gap every time someone calls me beautiful and means it kindly, and means it about a boy.

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