CONTENT NOTE: gender dysphoria, profanity

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Diane Callahan | Issue 11, Summer 2026

Your man-self was handsome, of course, with black surfer-boy hair, soccer shorts, tanned arms. He smiled easily, with such organized teeth, making girls glance shyly at their converse.

The girl he loved was no one in particular—quiet, unassuming, the heroine of a teen movie with a pretty face and glasses and a little acne he never cared about.

Boy and girl would walk at dusk around the cul-de-sac beneath the sprinkle of rain and whiff of petrichor, a word he knew from his nightly readings. He’d ask her:

But how do you really feel?

Why does she pick on you if she’s your friend?

What’re you daydreaming about?

In your most persistent teenage daydreams, you were a hopelessly romantic boy who wooed lonely girls. You wished you knew a spell to make it so. Not to have a different body but to live different lives outside your body, which was a mind without a body, really. You were an essence, genderless. Nameless, even. Yet you fit snugly into the role of savior and saved, of the lover and the loved.

You could never give the spell a form, all incantations absent in diary pages and whispered sleepovers. How to slip between worlds…

Sometimes gender is a cloak—a performance that can be worn or not worn. Sometimes it is skin—impossible to remove without being drained of life.

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A protection spell begins with an intention: To be in a body I love.

You don’t believe in magic or magick or God, but you wanted to possess the deep-seated conviction of a Tarot card reader on a New Orleans street corner. You borrowed The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wicca and Witchcraft from the school library. Hunched in a corner beanbag chair, you learned you shouldn’t curse people because the negative energy would come back to you threefold. You forgot the rest but made your own rituals. Pixy Stix were your herbs, power-bead bracelets your crystals, Enya your spirit guide.

As a boy, you’d move about the world with easy charisma. To be kind, you only had to ask a girl about her tamagotchi or bring her a subway cookie every once in a while. You did not have to sacrifice yourself upon an altar of smiling during every conversation or trying not to hustle anyone at the pool table.

You want to embody positive masculinity. No, that’s not right—to wield the soft power of a man’s body. The power that comes with presence.

When you were thirteen, you were bullied. Short, scrawny, glasses. Never wore a bra. Flat as a board. Balding with frizzy curls too heavy for your head. A gap between your front teeth but not sexy like the Egyptians.

You looked weird and were weird, drawing transmutation circles from Fullmetal Alchemist on the back of math homework. Staring at people you found magnetic. Collecting data for your “addictions,” your crushes whose names you wrote on little pieces of paper, rolled up, colored the ends orange. Packaged them all neatly into a candy cigarette box.

The boys would snicker, especially the ones you liked: “Need some rogaine?” The girls would throw mints in your hair in the gym locker room. You wrote poetry that was too sincere, went for all the extra credit. “Nerd” was an accurate label, but it signified some essential Otherness you couldn’t quite define, especially not to yourself.

Freshman year of high school, you became a New Woman. Skinny jeans. Hair burnt from the straightening iron. Too much eyeliner. victoria’s secret black bombshell bra. You were painfully camouflaging yourself: See, I’m like the others. See, I embody desire. You started putting quarters in the piggy bank for a boob job.

In your computer class, you complained to an older boy that you didn’t have boobs—he ogled your tight hollister shirt and declared, “That’s not true!”

For the first time, you realized how easy it was to pretend to be someone else.

You became a better version of all the boys you knew or would know, and as years passed, you acted like it. You fucked the gender norms, asked the guy out first, offered up your wallet, cursed like a sailor, gave girls the best conversations they’d ever had, remembered their birthdays and favorite colors, and when a receptionist forgot to glance up and called you “Sir,” you gained a little swagger in your step. You were a true gentleman.

A fantasy isn’t inherently sexual; it is simply desire. You fantasize about changing the world within because you cannot change the world without.

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A sweetening spell begins with an intention: To be loved by women.

You met your first known lesbian at fourteen in the dorms of learn-Japanese-all-day summer camp, like a wild bear spotting that first hive of honey. She wore baggy shirts and played softball and wanted to dance all night in the common room that hot summer, and you did dance, wildly, in a grinding conga line, in love with every person, including the two gay boys both named Travis, and you vowed to never dance again because the night was too perfect and you wanted to trap those memories in amber.

You wondered if she would kiss you. She had a girlfriend. She would not kiss you. But you kept wondering about it because this was the first time a theoretical possibility had presented itself—that you could be a woman who a woman who loved women could love.

The roles women gave you were cotton-candy sweet on your tongue. Your childhood best friend insisted you be Jack while she was Rose in your pantomime of Titanic, or you the Zorro to her Elena. That was the type of man you wanted to be—swashbuckling, a lover, a fighter. Or not a man at all but a woman who was still the hero.

You remember your best friend, who maybe you’d been in love with, letting you draw on her arm. Multicolored gel pens, henna-like flowers. Her new boyfriend was in the room, and you said nonchalantly that you’d showered with her before. He didn’t need to know it was fully clothed after walking at night in the cold rain and you’d both jumped into the tub in your sopping wet clothes to warm up beneath hot water. He didn’t need to know it was one of the most romantic moments of your life.

You call friends your lesbian lovers in notes passed in class. You write wishes on pieces of paper and keep them in a jam jar. Many years later, your boyfriend asks what anime turned you gay, and you say, Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus, and it doesn’t matter which one you’d be, only that you can be a woman who loves women.

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A healing spell begins with an intention: To give other women what men did not give you.

For a decade, you pretended to be a man on the internet. You were jerrycurls, a mean nickname reclaimed. People didn’t ask you A/S/L?—they just started calling you Jerry, and you never corrected them. You’d flirt with the girls in the live chat, your true self expressed in short bursts of text.

You wrote travelogues as Malcolm. A woman disliked you mansplaining female representation. A man thought you were an odd duck, fell in love when you revealed the truth, joked that you “reverse catfished” him. You want to write gender-bent retellings of The Importance of Being Earnest and Cyrano de Bergerac.

Online, women admit they have a fetish where they reach for their husband’s morning wood and stroke his dick and imagine his dick is their dick. You don’t share this particular fantasy, but you think of Freud’s penis envy and why some women exclusively read m/m smut and the foundations of desire.

You fell in love with a boy who didn’t feel like a boy, in the same way you didn’t feel like a girl, to whom a body was just a body, not an instrument of gender. You built a softer persona around yourself, shaved down your ambition. You wonder how many identities you will shed across your life, how long you will keep trying to hide behind usernames and fantasies and distant points of view.

You are still someone else with the people who crave your presence, who want to dress and undress you in full color, who adore the mole on your innermost thigh. Other people will always see you as a body; that can’t be helped. You will feel your body, too, like you are now, hollowed with fatigue and headache. A cold coming on while, a hundred miles away, your friend offers to practice reiki on your body from afar. They feel an energetic exchange while working with your heart, your solar plexus, your right ankle.

I am in this body, no matter how much I want to remain formless. Other bodies meet mine: desiring, naming, touching, misreading. I let them. I’m still learning what it means to be loved like this—the kind of love I once tried to summon with Pixy Stix and wishing jars—only now it arrives without a spell, simply because I am here.