One of my first memories of being Isabel was in Islamabad, Pakistan, with my father at some nondescript water fountain, teal blue. My identical twin Helen and I, aged around five, are staring up into the camera, blank expressions, no hidden agenda — the grounds around us an abyss to be conquered with yelling matches and dancing and faces overstuffed with chocolate cake.
More memories start to flow like etches on some weird, global impressionist sketch—playground laughs in New Delhi as tiny zig-zagged marks, and loud sobbing tantrums in the corner of our house in the old quarter as frenetic dashes on a canvas, all painting what it was like being female—being Isabel—before manhood.
Helen and I get henna on our hands—burgundy traces of ink on the front and back of palms, at Dilli Haat in Delhi, and rummage through old books at Khan market.
Childhood is effortless and easy—maniacal screaming and kicking and racing with friends in circles and circles, plotting marriages and throwing paper planes off fortress walls with Daniel, jumping on the back of Raja, our white lab, or boarding miniature waves in the outer banks of North Carolina.
We return to the States at eight years of age.
Helen and I join a club soccer team in Virginia. Our mother is now reading us Harry Potter almost religiously, being a woman of books and letters, perhaps loving fiction as much as she loves cradling us after soccer practice. Her voice is soothing, and JK Rowling—then good—was giving us Hogwarts and Hermione, with her tangled brown hair and wicked intellect, on a platter.
Returning from a club game, our friend Annie whispers in my ear. “Isabel,” she says, “Usher cheated on his girlfriend in his song Confessions.” We gush over his infidelity. The scandal. This becomes a fact between us—a rogue piece of information—that we start to guard with excellent statecraft. No one else can know our secret—that Usher is a cheater.
When we’re 12, we move to Russia.
Helen and I join the Moscow soccer team. Tournaments are in Budapest and Bucharest and Warsaw. On trips we shovel ice cream in student teacher lounges and prowl shopping malls in Bucharest, scrutinizing dresses at H&M and Zara. Gossip is exchanged in school corridors and store bathrooms.
In the city, Russian women are “fitful,” people say. High, black leather boots and white tunics during the summer; mink fur in January and loud red lipstick all the time. Vodka in precious shot glasses and black caviar on blinis.
The Novy Arbat is packed with nightclubs—drunkards come out at 8 a.m. on weekdays, some with bottles of Stolichnaya. Helen and I, now 13, race to a kiosk in one of the six-lane avenue’s underpasses, buying Redd’s beer. We are not of age for alcohol, but that doesn’t matter—only that we are tall enough to reach the counter.
We move back to Arlington. In eleventh grade, I feel myself slipping away from my body, drifting away from my legs, arms, torso, and curves. Activities like running or drinking with friends lack pleasure and feel painful. But no matter how many miles I clock on the track, I can’t run away from this disassociation.
Some transgender people hate their former lives. A lot of us want these lives gone, torn apart, forgotten forever. But it’s more complicated than that. Some trans folk miss elements of their past life, sometimes dearly. These two feelings are not mutually exclusive, either.
At present, I wear a pair of washed up, straight jeans, a black Hanes T-shirt, and brown boots that peg me as some sort of country denizen. My jacket is from Old Navy, and sweaters from a motley of stores I don’t care about. Now and then I throw a watch, or a tropical button down.
But the lack of gossip is what kills me the most. Some women bond over Vera Wang shoes, manicures, and tales of boys. I don’t know what the same social currency is for men—beer? Poker chips? Body count? Whatever they are, they seem irrelevant and wasteful.
So I said goodbye to wardrobes, dresses, and mascara. But they’ll never leave my mind, just as being a sister or a female friend will never leave, either. There to stay, tucked back in some recess of my brain, petulant, an ever-nagging reminder of having been Isabel.
Isaac Amend (he/him) is a transgender man, activist, and D.C. native. He is on Instagram and Twitter at @isaacamend.
