The summer heat makes my hair stick to the back of my neck with sweat. I need to cut it, but God, I hate the hair salon. 

I cut my hair about once every four months, or when I can’t possibly bend the image of the person in the mirror to be me anymore. I show the hairstylist a reference picture of a guy on Pinterest, and she tries her best. But I’m never happy; not because the hair looks wrong, but because the face isn’t right. My jaw is too soft. Pinterest Guy has broad shoulders. A chest you could splay your fingers flat against. 

Once, at a psychiatry appointment, the doctor asked me if I had any former diagnoses, and for the first time, my pathology exited my own mouth: “Gender dysphoria.” But I have never felt sick. 

For a long time, I thought I was born in the wrong body. The simple grammar made sense to me: a boy born in a girl’s body; my being in disorder. 

But when I look at my brother, my father, the cis men in my life — the đàn ông con trai that are grouped together like a species, their defining trait being that they don’t know to separate their dark and light laundry — I can’t imagine myself in the ‘right’ body either. 

Then I scrubbed the haze from my eyes, I realized that my understanding of trans denied its own queerness. 

I started feeling trans joy when I surrendered to the war between my self and my body. I stopped chasing the fleeting, rainbow-after-rain euphoria of seeing a guy when I glanced at my reflection in the subway window. For me, the condition of ‘passing’ is passing. Too much of my life would have to pass before that feeling stays. 

I started feeling trans joy when trans ceased to be right or wrong, before or after, passing or not. I have always been trans. Trans is my life, and I refuse to believe that I, at any point, lived wrongly. 

When I came out, it was the first time I ever saw my mother cry. It took me some years to understand her pain: from her perspective, her daughter had committed self-annihilation. I wish I could tell her that no subtraction had ever been made; I did not take away her daughter. Rather, I added more of me atop her; me who is him who grew from her. I am more whole, I want to tell my mother. I am ‘more.’ 

I was and am and always will be in a state of becoming. The grammar of trans is evergreen. 

In Vietnamese the word for “transgender” is “chuyển giới,” which can be translated back to “crossing worlds.” I had a tumultuous childhood due to my incapacity to conform to social and cultural norms. All the hostility I encountered, I deflected. But I stepped into a new world when I began transitioning, not because the world around me had changed, but because I had. 

Transitioning, and untethering myself from the norms that attempted to choke me, has allowed me to embrace the wonderful parts of masculinity and femininity both. Trans joy is that sure feeling I have, of knowing with absolute certainty I never again want to return to that colourless perspective I had of the world. 

And I’ll describe to you the beautiful colours I see:

The coolest green hair on my best friend. Every time I show up to one of their dinner parties I learn something new about transformative justice.

The orange hat of a marmot plushie my other greatest friend gave to me. Her art-making process inspired me to set my art free.

The blue after sunset, my partner’s favourite colour. Before I met him I did not believe I could find home in a person.

The Easter family gathering and the poetry books on my shelf and the baby goslings outside my house.

Every breath I take because I chose to keep breathing, even though the world is treacherous, even though my face doesn’t look like Pinterest guy’s, even though I haven’t yet gotten top surgery.

Next week I’ll go into the hair salon. And I will see all those colours, all the life joys that are trans joys because I am trans, the second I step back out into the blistering heat.