What is Identity?

It is colder outside than I hoped it would be. Brandy and I have arranged to meet at my house in New Jersey because it is convenient for the two of us. We sit on the back porch, protected from the drizzling by a roof above our heads. The wind blows, birds chirp. There are no walls to protect us from a slight wind made stronger by the already mild temperature. The sky is overcast, and unkind, but not unforgiving. We are both positioned so that we can speak to each other while admiring the lake behind us, the breeze rippling and wrinkling its reflective surface. Fortunately for me, the pollen in the air has been drenched by the rain, minimizing my seasonal allergies to something much more manageable than the watery eyes and stuffy nose that usually comes with the change in season.

It has been a while since I’ve seen Brandy. Upon meeting again, she said something about how different I look: my short cropped hair is now down to my shoulders, and my smooth baby face has fuzzied into a bristly beard. As soon as she says this, she pauses, then finishes her line of thought with “well, you know what they say about first stones and glass houses and all.” Her hair is probably a little shorter than shoulder-length, but it’s tied up in a ponytail under a hat. Brandy’s eyes are accentuated by strong eyeliner, a new addition to her outward appearance that has provided her with an unfamiliar, but not unwelcome confidence.

I am eager to spend time with Brandy, as it has been a few years since I’ve seen her. I remember her being well-spoken, articulate, and having many ideas that I found worth listening to. In many ways, she is still this person. She spends time thinking about what words she is going to say next, and this inspires me to lean in a little closer and hang onto her every word. While she’s the same person she always has been, there are certainly a few noticeable differences from when I saw her last. The biggest difference being the last time I saw her, she was Brandon.

Brandy is a 20-year-old trans woman who came out as such about a year ago. She’s always had a sense that something was wrong, that she “wasn’t in the driver’s seat.” As a child, she would see pictures of pregnant women and think to herself, “oh, that’s how I’m going to look when I’m pregnant.” Hindsight is 20/20, but little thoughts like these would spring up everywhere throughout Brandy’s life while she still identified as a man. It took a bit more growing up before she realized that thoughts like those didn’t exactly align with who she knew herself to be, before she realized how much she felt like an imposter around other men. Brandy explains that there are unspoken binding forces that bind men to each other, and similar but different forces that bind women together. Those masculine binding forces were not nearly as strong as the feminine energies for Brandy.

For a long time, Brandy would “correct things through a filter before they came out,” which left her in a dark and difficult place. She explains that she doesn’t remember much from this time in her life, but she knows that it was filled with self-doubt. Brandy’s body language during this part of the interview is peculiar; her eyes are shifty and rolling around in her head to random points in her field of view. Eye contact is mostly absent. She fidgets but not out of nervousness, instead her inability to sit still is a manifestation of pent-up natural energy that is mostly expressed through her words. The energy which is not translated into spoken word seeps out through the way she shifts her weight while she sits and the way her eyes can’t seem to find an object in her field of view to comfortably rest on. Brandy’s body language is not a result of anxiety or a lack of confidence, but rather a side effect of prioritizing senses other than the visual or material so that she can look inward and self-reflect as genuinely as she can. Eye contact is far less important than articulating her experience in a way that makes sense and can be understood by me, her interviewer.

A bit before COVID hit in March/April of 2020, she sat down with herself to address feelings of discomfort in her own skin, and reached her climactic point of realization. She asked herself, “who would you be in a vacuum — no one else around, you get to decide whatever circumstance of what you are — and I knew the answer immediately: ‘I’d be a woman.’ My brain said it before I could, like a knee jerk response, and it scared the hell out of me.” Brandy continued to suppress this feeling until quarantine. Suddenly, she and everyone else in the world was forced into that exact vacuum she mentioned. Abruptly, there was no one else around, no one to filter her true Self for. Over the next six months, Brandy would, in her words, “do the Buffalo Bill thing,” where she would wear feminine clothes in front of a mirror and look for something that wasn’t there. “A lot of trans people say to avoid the mirror, but I was obsessed. I’d look at my face from different angles, looking for something, but what I was looking for, I didn’t know.” This too was filtered out as simply embracing a potential feminine side that normal life didn’t allow for, but if that was it, why was the bathroom door locked? Why was she still hiding away? Eventually she took note of the strangely fortunate circumstances the universe had put her in, and she knew that “now’s the time.”

At the end of the interview, I asked Brandy what she would say to everyone in the world if given the chance. For a moment her buzzing eyes slowed down, and I noticed her gaze go inward. “Consider yourself carefully,” she began. “Trust yourself and your own feelings and instincts because they’re not wrong. If you’ve felt it before, you’re gonna feel it forever. You owe it to yourself to be true.”