A Great Mind Must Be Androgynous

A Great Mind Must Be Androgynous

By Mars Sell

No one ever thinks of me as human

because I am more ghost than flesh,

because people fear that my gender expression is a trick,

that it exists to be perverse,

that it ensnares them without their consent,

that my body is a feast for their eyes and hands

and once they have fed off my queer,

they’ll regurgitate all the parts they did not like.

 

From an early age I knew I was different. I wasn’t interested in the things others my age did, and I didn’t really feel comfortable in the clothes my parents bought me. 

I was 17, and the girls around me were all girls and I wondered if something inside me was broken, or missing, or if my body was simply ignorant. 

 

Naturally, I did not come out of the closet.

The kids at my school opened it without my permission.

Called me by a name I did not recognize,

said “lesbian,”

but I was more.

It had nothing to do with hating my body.

 

The struggle for acceptance was not just internal, it also felt as if my classmates didn’t know what to make of me.

I was told that I was too much. Too loud, too dramatic, too pushy, too big. And somehow that made me feel like I wasn’t enough. I was convinced that I was broken.

 

I hid my identity, hoping to gain the approval of people whose opinion was nonsense.

 

They put me back into the closet, 

hung me with all the other skeletons.

 

I wore some drab shades that made me fade into the background. Everyone’s eyes just slid right over me.

It had nothing to do with hating my identity, I just loved it enough to let it go.

But it was soul destroying, thinking I was being denied a fair shot at existing happily.

Then I learned what it was to be trans.

 

I could say I am simple—my heart

again a newborn with a shelf life.

But there is nothing simple about

my body and its fruity orbit around

the sun. When I had my breasts

removed from my chest, the surgeon

did not ask if I was ready to sleep

so violently. 

It was shocking, to have the words. I had only been able to point out what felt wrong. But that, that one detail felt right.

 I learned I didn’t have to dress to fade into the background. I was allowed to stand out.

 I found a way to celebrate my trans.

 

 

For sources and key:

A Great Mind Must Be Androgynous (1)

 

Reflection:

This essay is compiled entirely from the works of others. My text remains original because though it’s cobbled together from many different sources, the argument is true to my voice and experiences. Going into this project, I wanted to focus on reflecting on my experience with my gender identity rather than the trans experience as a whole. I did end up using sources about the experience of other trans people, but any experience that I included in my paper is true to me as well. A lot of the originality in this paper is also due to my use of poetry to interject passages of reflection. Though I drew this idea from the VE Schwab article (which I also used passages from), I only used basic inspiration from that— my paper is a bit more poetic throughout where Schwab’s essay truly does make the full switch between poetry and creative nonfiction. I also chose a unique layout for my text. Since a lot of my paper is more poetic, I was able to have some fun with where I wanted what lines to be placed. Basically, with the type of paper I chose to write I was able to reflect a lot of myself both through the content and through the structure it took. 

Though my text is original, it is still a plagiarism. Throughout my paper, only nineteen out of more than four hundred words were my own. Every other edit I made was to shift the writing from third or second to first person or to change the tense. Basically, the seven different sources that I used are the entirety of my essay. The author’s original arguments may be slightly skewed now that their work is being used to argue my own point, but it’s still entirely their original work. I took their well developed arguments and poetry and used it to serve my own purpose. I even went so far as to use half a sentence from one source and half a sentence from another to prove my own point. Not only that, but a lot of the experiences in the essay, while true to me, can be and have been experienced from others. However, based on the readings we did in class, this sort of collage of texts followed by a list of sources seems to be a genuine method for writing. So maybe legally, since I cite where each line is from, it wouldn’t be considered a true plagiarism. However, after writing this paper, I don’t feel like I can claim it entirely as mine. Therefore, my paper is a plagiarism.