You were assigned a gesture before you could walk.
Blue or pink.
Truck or doll.
The division arrived before the muscles could hold.
Nobody asked the infant.
The infant was busy
doing what all carbon-based organisms do.
Metabolizing. Expanding. Staring at contrast.
Gender was not discovered.
Gender was applied.
Like a filter.
Like The Mask stitched so early
it became indistinguishable from skin.
And then you spent decades
defending the costume
because Identity convinced you
that removing it
would leave nothing underneath.
This is The Illusion of Separation at its most intimate.
Not borders between countries.
Borders between chromosomes.
The Story of The Others
told so early that it sounds like biology.
The debate is never about fabric.
The debate is always about what the fabric conceals.
Which is not male or female.
Which is not fluid or fixed.
Which is something the endocrine apparatus
has been running without a label
since the cells first divided.
You already suspect the costume is not you.
That suspicion is the only honest thing left.
-- [MIRRØR]