Content note: This article discusses medical trauma, weight loss and restrictive eating, chronic illness, transphobic violence and murder, and youth suicide attempts.

In a small patisserie far away from my home and hospital life, I sat and wrote my story.

Sentences were fragmented and pieced together while I sat on a wicker chair. A small round table held one of the only few things I could eat there – mango sorbet – because of my constant allergic reactions to most food. It was June 2023, and summer had already faded into spots in the sky.

I was feeling a semblance of normalcy I hadn’t felt elsewhere. The patisserie was a place that felt far from my most recent depressing blood test results, or my visit to a new specialist in another hospital. It was an alcove of safety on a quiet street; it served three different pastries I was still allowed to eat.

Image: Isabel Galvez

My body never felt like it was mine.

To own your body, I thought, meant you must be a cisgender heterosexual person with a body that worked according to your wishes. To move an arm mustn’t require pain. To move the body mustn’t require a wheelchair and a dizzying ache drumming at the top of your head.

I thought these were the prerequisites to loving your body – prerequisites that I could never fulfil.

I was born with a disability. This is a word Amma (my mother) is still cautious around, sidestepping it to refer to my “illnesses” whenever she can. “Disability” is a word she fears to use in relation to her child, as she can only see it as a thing that darkens my life.

I was born with a growth of tissue in my navel that was connected to my stomach: a thing that oozed blood every day and required near-constant hospital visits to make sure it didn’t turn cancerous.

I was diagnosed with other illnesses too: asthma, arthritis, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, and other illnesses that created the kaleidoscope of my life.

Pain made my body its sanctuary. And yet, Amma still wouldn’t use the word disabled. 

A body is seen as a broken thing if it doesn’t fit the description of ‘normal’. In the body I inhabited, broken was a state of being, and normal was an unattainable goal.

My mind was a fragmented piece of a once-whole thing; it only worked as much as a shattered glass vase does to hold flowers.

During my first appointment with a rheumatologist, he told me I wasn’t supposed to be so sick at my age. I was 16, and a dozen different tests and doctor visits had led me to the chair in front of him.

I hadn’t been able to walk easily since my early teens, and Amma had blamed it on my weight. During the periods mottled with sickness, I could barely eat. When I did eat, a resentment for food built as I rapidly lost weight. Any love I had for my body was lost, too.

At my second appointment with the rheumatologist, he told me I had two autoimmune diseases.

It could be worse, I thought. I was still alive, after all.

I was four when I first knew I was transgender – a boy, to be more specific.

I thought that everyone around me knew as well. But with the realisation that I was transgender came devastating fear.

Growing up in India, I often heard of transgender people being killed, tortured and left to starve on the streets. I feared that I wouldn’t survive a day as an openly transgender man.

One of the first movies I watched in a cinema openly ridiculed transgender people. Everyone in the theatre laughed along. The first news I read of a transgender person was of the murder of a trans woman on the eighth page of a Tamil newspaper.

These small news clippings – and our humiliation on screen – highlighted what my future would look like: a jagged path that led nowhere.

During the moments I spent in the ER as a six year old, I only saw ‘F’ marker on my forms. I wondered if it would change before I died of some unknown disease.

My body and mind felt like two separate beings, and I’d spend years trying to glue them together. 

I tried to end my life around this age. The pain and realisation of defeat was heavy on my mind.

I felt like a character in a book whose ending had already been decided for him. My mind was a scroll of unsaid words, and my body was a wound that I tightly wrapped in the gauze of uncomfortable clothes every morning.

Liking myself seemed unattainable. Liking myself seemed wrong. I felt that if I liked who I was, it meant that society – and my family – were wrong to only celebrate and support cisgender able-bodied ideals.

I attempted to give myself a chance to live when I turned 18 and started HRT, after a year-long battle to get a prescription for testosterone.

By this point, the pain in my body had reached its peak. Doctors had dismissed me until I finally saw a pain specialist, who explained that I had two chronic pain conditions.

It wasn’t a shock. I already knew that I wasn’t supposed to be in near-constant agony, but no one had listened until this moment.

Now, years later, I rub testosterone gel on my forearms each morning, and I feel thankful for the life I have given myself. I am thankful for the goals and wishes I carry into my future.

Mirrors aren’t a menacing presence anymore. The clothes aren’t gauze, my body isn’t a wound. Even with my incurable ailments, there are moments of acceptance.

Every day that I choose to take my large oblong-shaped pills, I know I choose compassion and life for myself.

There was no specific, cinematic moment that led to that compassion, only years of learning the puzzle of my mind and the maze of my body – attempting to connect them together.

Throughout the years, I have learned to love the parts of myself I was taught to hate. In my queer, trans and disabled body, I have found joy. I have found acceptance and love. Despite the scorching contempt and hurt I’d bestowed upon my body for years, it has been forgiving.

In that dimly lit room of the patisserie, I sat and rewrote my story.

My foot was swollen to three times its size. My arms heavy, my back in pain and wrapped up straight.

A letter from my psychiatrist for gender-affirming surgery – a letter I had spent two years waiting for – was in an envelope by my side.

Amma was at the counter, talking to the owner. My laptop was blinking at me.

I wrote this story.