Only a matter of time

The funniest thing about my hormone replacement therapy pills is how, in its little, mundane, and, quite honestly, practical casing, it’s almost shaped like a timer. Embossed with days, from Monday to Sunday, like a painful reminder, a countdown, that as I take my very last one, resets back to zero where I have to start again.

Transitioning feels exactly like a timer, a stopwatch. It’s like a sprint, when I never even liked sports growing up because I knew I was too weak to run. And yet, for the most part of my days, it feels like I am running endlessly, chasing expectations in a race that has always been designed for me to lose.

Nonetheless, I run. Even in moments when I doubt I can make it, I run. In moments of triumph, I’ve run past many hurdles. I’ve run past my father and his expectations for me growing up. As his child, the world was supposed to be simple. I grow up, follow his footsteps, and turn out exactly like him. He was like a coach, stern and strict, that I was too scared to disappoint even with the slightest mistake. So when I told him that I wanted to transition, I knew I hit the finish line when I still took that first pill despite knowing I would be snatching his trophy away. It felt like I won against a triathlon of expectations from him, my family, and the world that had other plans for me, other races they would’ve wanted me to succeed in.

But even when I’ve ran past and won against hurdles before, in true athletic spirit, the timer only stops for a while. The next race is always just upon us. And where there are moments of triumph, there are also moments of doubt. These days, running doesn’t feel as much like a victory lap as it is a simple game of hide and seek. Hopping from one hiding place to another, I ask myself, “What am I even running away from?”

Perhaps, it’s the shame that I just couldn’t face. In the years I’ve lived as a woman, I’ve convinced many people to embrace their true selves. I tell them, it feels freeing, like running in an open field, to become the person that you have always known yourself to be. But those are words that I also tell myself at night. I feel ashamed, perhaps, that I couldn’t also just “embrace my true self.”

Everyday is a challenge to convince not only the world, but also my own self, that I am, in all my being, a woman that is capable of taking her place in this world.

At times, it’s not even about running anymore. I’m running just so that I can hide, before anyone can even seek and find out the truth. Transitioning becomes something that I work overtime to conceal from the world in order to pass. I plead to the world, with all my blush, my lipstick, and my phony athletic stance, to look at me as if I’m on a pedestal. “I’m a woman!” I declare, while deliberately leaving out the journey that it took to get there. Hiding then becomes a defense, a way of self-preservation, an opportunity to live free of any danger.

It’s a battlefield of contradictions, truly, that I’m bound to lose because the world has shaped me to believe that there’s only one way to win this race. Even liking boys is never really easy. So much of my identity has been tied with my relationships with men. If not that of my father’s, it’s with the men I’ve slept with, be with. Dating is a jungle where I’m a deer running away from a hunt—only to still get shot, beheaded, and passed around like a naked trophy for men. In a world that is fashioned to discriminate against me, I’m also a horse whose value is based on how much they can bet on me in this race.

Nonetheless, I still run. At best, focused, steady, and grounded. I run because, despite being too weak for a race that I never even signed up for, it’s the running, perhaps, that gives me joy, some semblance of freedom against the world that I never could’ve felt otherwise. Running then feels less like a sport, but more of a war, a revolution, that I need to win in order to break the chains that keep people like me from running in a game only a few can play.

I run against my own body, in how it was designed and believed to be destined at birth. I run against my society, in a system that only trained me to walk. I run because there are battles to win and a world to fight for. I run, still, and continue to do so, because to stop now is a betrayal to the women who have died running just so that I can take my first steps. It’s in these moments I take comfort, in knowing that my pills, in their little, mundane, and practical casing, aren’t mere countdowns for an ending but a marker of our journey toward a world where we can finally run free.

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Ida Bondoc Palo, 25, is a youth activist, writer, and human rights worker currently based in Los Baños, Laguna. She graduated with a communication arts degree from the University of the Philippines Los Baños and has since served as a paralegal for political prisoners and victims of human rights violations across the Southern Tagalog region.