How I learned to love my naked trans body

Swimming naked, getting hard, and blocking out the cis bullshit

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artwork by Mason Healy

I was naked all the time as a child. You couldn’t stop me ripping my clothes off, yanking my shorts down (undies too), pulling my faded t-shirt over my head in one go—“the boy way”—right down to the buff. I’d run around the backyard screaming, pounding my chest like a little baby gorilla. My body wasn’t a temple, but it was my kingdom. 

As I grew older and my mother told me I had to start wearing clothes, I learned to love taking them off. I found any excuse too. Swimming was the best one. The closest thing to a body of water we could get in Denver was the Virginia Vale Swim Club, so you bet your ass my New England mother was there every day of summer sneaking in cans of Coors Light in koozies and squeezing lemons in our hair until it was time to go back to school, and we showed up blonde. 

Summer was all pool noises: wet feet squeaking on the linoleum floor, watermelon slurped too fast, the sound a body makes when it slaps the water after a biffed jump off the diving board. My brother and I would spend whole days jumping off the diving board and making shapes with our bodies—jackknife, can opener, pencil, cannonball, flying squirrel. 

I don’t remember when I started to feel ashamed of my body. Unlike my other trans friends, I don’t really have an exact moment of when I realized I was different. I didn’t know I was a boy until the other boys around me had already become men. 

Growing up, no one knew what I was. Sometimes the differences were obvious: the snap off Kappa track pants I refused to take off, my dirt-smudged freckled cheeks, the way I spoke to adults. But sometimes, subtle of things would give me away even when I was trying my hardest to be otherwise. The way I moved my hands when I talked, the shape of my face, how I carried my body in a crowd. It was clear that something was off about me, but no one knew what.