Pink has always been my favorite color, though I tried my best to deny it as a child. I told my mother that I wasn’t like the girls with the sparkles and giggling about boys and their pink winter coats. My love of pink and all things effeminate felt like a betrayal of myself, like something I needed to hide in order for people to see the person I was inside.

This odd feeling made more sense as I grew up and realized that I was a transgender person, rather, I am bigender and I use he/him/his and they/them/theirs pronouns. After a couple of years of introspection and growth, it became clear to me that my previous aversion to anything “girly” had been an improvised way to affirm my gender ambiguity. As I went through the process of discovering how to describe myself, I revisited my feelings about femininity and finally allowed myself to simply like things without worrying about what gender I associated them with.

These days it is pretty obvious what my favorite color is, as my personal philosophy in life is “Why own something in any other color if it comes in pink?” I have become much more confident expressing myself with the femininity I once hid from. I feel more authentic this way. I feel happier.

However, I have found that not everyone is as comfortable with my skirts, jewelry, purses, makeup and collection of fashion dolls. As I am navigating the process of coming out and socially transitioning to live as male, I have faced pushback on the basis of my presentation. I am too feminine, too far from our society’s vision of men and transgender transition.

When it comes down to it, I know that I don’t look transgender. 

I’ve seen the shocked faces, answered the questions, tucked away the misgendering and dubious looks like they’re another strand of my hair, worn long down my back. I know that as a transgender person who identifies the way I do, I am expected to pursue masculine or at least ambiguous looks. But I wear pink and women’s clothes and openly enjoy things that are considered feminine.

In all honesty, when I first came out to myself, I did my best to look as masculine as possible. I cut my hair short, stole my dad’s flannel shirts and hid my skirts and dresses. Despite my best efforts to “look male”, I still felt unfulfilled, like I was dressing for someone else, still performing my gender in the way I had throughout my childhood. 

Coming to terms with being gender nonconforming was uncomfortable, as I knew that coming out as transgender would already put a strain on some people’s acceptance of me. The idea of furthering that discomfort with unconventional expression of my masculine identity scared me, as I feared rejection from both people outside and within the transgender community.

For some people, I am too confusing to talk about.

For some people, I am seeking attention.

And for some people, I am a contradiction that makes them wonder if I am even transgender at all. I hear it all the time.

“If you want to dress like that, why can’t you just live as a woman?”

While the question is often just the product of curiosity, I am getting tired of answering it. The truth is, living as a woman has never really been in the cards for me, at least not if I want to live a happy life. I have never been able to imagine a future for myself as a woman and the incongruence between my identity and the gender I was assigned at birth has been a source of distress since I was quite young. But for many people, especially cisgender people with a limited perspective on gender and queer identity, the role that aesthetics and presentation play in being transgender is greatly misunderstood.

The goal of coming out as transgender is not necessarily to appear as society’s image of the opposite sex. This is a very binary, simplified way of viewing something that, in reality, varies from person to person. We idealize this singular, linear transformation from one convention to another, when, for many of us, transition simply doesn’t look like this.

Transgender people have a wide variety of transition goals. Yes, some people seek to look like that stereotypical version of their gender. Others like me find that their identities are best expressed with a different style, one that may be associated with a gender that they themselves don’t identify with. 

We don’t often talk about how transgender people can be gender nonconforming when the reality is that gender identity isn’t about the way we dress, what we enjoy or what surgeries and treatments we pursue. At the end of the day, there is no checklist of steps for transitioning. There’s no set of rules about how to be “transgender enough.” It’s time that we stop viewing transition through a cisgender lens. 

Hiding from femininity was never the thing that made me transgender when I was young. Doing my best to be seen as separate from the girls never actually erased my desire to dress up, play with “girl toys” and paint my nails. It was only when I embraced this expression that I felt fulfilled.

I know that I don’t look transgender, but I know who I am all the same. I hold out hope that our standard for “looking trans” can become more reflective of the wonderful variety of genders and expressions that exist within the queer community.