Fair warning, this is a ramble about part of my experience trying acid last Saturday. If trip reports sound as exciting to you as hearing about someone else’s dream, feel free to move on.
Before the trip Lilith had told me about a game she and her girlfriend had come up with on one of her previous trips where you look into a mirror and play around with how you perceive your facial features as if you’re looking at a character creation screen. Lilith had said she found this malleability of appearance helpful because it helped her cement her feelings around FFS and acceptance of her own appearance. I was excited to give this a shot, but when the visuals kicked in and Lilith and I made our way to my bathroom mirror, something else happened for me.
When I looked in the mirror I perceived myself differently than usual. I was a lot bigger and taller, and more solidly built. A little bit “apeish,” but not in a bad way, more having a primal human sort of beauty. I felt like I was seeing more of my features that I thought of as masculine as instead being feminine but not meeting stereotypical feminine beauty standards.
I know I carry around some body dysmorphia, and typically I can combat it a bit by comparing my reflection in a couple of different mirrors. Some days it feels like one mirror will have it out for me and another will be more tolerant. With this in mind, I moved to the full length mirror in my bedroom to get a second opinion. Instead of giving me a different read, the mirror’s reflection was consistent for once with the bathroom. I could see my whole body, and I looked quite feminine (whoa hips!), still a bit bulky and primal. I’m not sure how best to explain this part but I could see my body as much more dykey and less femme than I typically think of myself, and again not residual-masculine. I realized that the only gender dysphoria that I was experiencing was from my genitals.
The drugs were really kicking in at this point, and while trying to explain what I was seeing to Lilith I started to hear and observe myself speak from a more removed perspective, like I was offset a foot from my brain. I paid attention to my intonation and gestures and pitch, and even more of the dyke read was coming through. I thought “I look like a cave girl and sound like a big bossy dyke,” and I honestly felt happy with that. It was a way of perceiving myself that I hadn’t experienced before. It was reassuring to interpret what I previously thought of as leftover male features of my body as just a different sort of femininity than I was used to.
One of those bits of transfem lore that gets circulated around is that most of us go through a phase early on where we start out presenting extremely femme, then as our bodies change and we get more comfortable in our femininity the pendulum swings back to something less exaggerated. I dove into femme expression with gusto as soon as I could and denied that I was anything but that, but this reevaluation of my body has me questioning my stance and feeling a little sheepish that I, too, might be living the trope.
Frankly I’m a bit shaken by the experience, not just by how I looked but by how I seemed to present myself in the world with speech and posture. I’m hoping this experience effectively stripped away some of the stories I was telling myself about appearing masculine, but it also means that I have more work to do on body acceptance and what that means for my gender expression.