When I am eleven, I cut my hair. The yellow river that poured down my back is snipped onto the white tiles of the David Jones salon. It’s a massacre of blonde. In the mirror, a new person emerges. Strong jaw, sceptical gaze, broad cheekbones no longer softened by a gold mane. Nothing feminine to see here. Here I am, fresh from the chrysalis of girlhood.

On the way out of DJs, Mum and I browse the children’s clothing department. In the boy’s section, the racks of navy blazers speak of an entire world, one where urbane flâneurs stroll through some nameless European metropolis. I want one. I fondle the silk lining, inhaling its promises. Here is all I cannot have.

That year, I graduate from family beach cricket to my very own team. Dad had been a star wicketkeeper before a car accident put paid to his dreams of a sporting career, while my brother is a Zeus on any sporting field. Now it’s my turn. In the absence of a local girls’ team, I join a boys’ club. I acquire the regulation cricket whites, and the whole family sinks into the rhythm of mid-week trainings and endless Saturday mornings beside a sun-bleached oval. I am bemused when the coach’s wife, febrile with good intentions, assures me that I am accepted alongside the boys. Why wouldn’t I be? I know where I belong.

It soon emerges that I’m an abysmal fielder (too afraid of the ball), a middling-to-poor batsman, but a dab hand as a bowler. Word gets round at school, and soon the Year Six boys allow me into their lunchtime matches. The day the invitation comes to open the bowling, I abandon my orange Sunnyboy and girl posse like so much trash. I’m one of the boys now.

One day after cricket training, I’m at the supermarket with Dad. We’re playing our favourite game: a competition to greet the most people we know. Not surprisingly, my father – a middle-aged professor – always trounces me, the shy pre-pubescent. The contest is rigged, but I love it anyway. This afternoon, as we wheel the trolley to the car, Dad pauses to chat with a colleague.

‘It’s lovely to meet your son,’ she says.

I see myself: cropped hair, blue shorts, white crewneck. My second skin. Does this equal boy?

Dad laughs awkwardly. ‘This is Annie, she’s going to high school next year.’

In the car going home, neither of us speaks.

That summer, my brother grows muscle, stubble, pimples. He starts sleeping until noon, and his sentences become barnacled with expletives. I am left behind. Frantic to catch up, I understudy his new role like a pro. I learn to make Warhammer sets, then listen to Jack Johnson on repeat. Next I buy a skateboard, spending afternoons cruising the foreshore in my cargo pants. I never manage any tricks, but my first online handle is sk8ergirl88.

At high school, I learn that I am wrong.

‘Why do you have a boy’s haircut?’ the Year Eight boys jeer.

A girls’ cricket team starts, and I join, but soon miss the boys’ easy camaraderie. Within a season, I abandon the sport for good.

The nubs on my chest turn into pillows, and overnight I become fat. My body is both too little and too much. Then I discover the answer: stop eating. My lunchtime sandwiches, oily with salami and swiss cheese, are replaced by a green apple, consumed in birdlike mouthfuls. I jog to and from class. Sometimes, as a special treat, I nibble a single rye crispbread. By summer, my shoulder blades jut out sharp and proud, trophies that proclaim my labours to the world. I sunbake facedown at the ocean baths, revelling in the dull pain of hipbone against concrete. Breasts disappear and periods dry up. I am right again.

Or am I?

‘She’s disgusting,’ mutter the boys clustered round the school gates.

‘We’re worried about you,’ the year adviser scolds me.

Too much girl, not girl enough. I can’t get it right. At a sleepover, when giggles and teases became tickles and wrestling, a cold voice rings through the darkness.

‘Oh my God, you must be a lesbian!’

Hot with shame, I crawl back into my sleeping bag. Does tickling equal lesbian? I have no idea what lesbians do; I only know that they are wrong. Like me, again.

When Year Twelve comes around, I fall into friendship with a fey scamp of a girl. She’s all freckles and puns, topped off with an encyclopedic knowledge of Agatha Christie. During study periods, we walk, brazen, out the school gates and gorge on gelato at an Italian café down the road. On stormy afternoons the beach calls. We throw ourselves about in the rough surf for hours then sit shivering over hot chocolates. I have never felt so right.

As final exams approach, we shop for formal dresses. Her choice is a cheongsam-inspired gown, black with red panelling, a daring creation found at the city’s first designer store. I can’t wait to be seen beside her on the night. Next week in class, a message is conveyed: Sam – charming Sam, secret crush of all the girls – wants her as his date. At the formal, I sit alone and miserable as Sam twirls her on the dance floor, black dress flaring just as I’d imagined. My friend is giddy with joy, but everything is wrong. Wrong casting, wrong lines, wrong me. With my strapless aqua gown, I am no match for besuited Sam. The blazer has won again.

 Yves Rees (photograph by Susan Papazian)

It’s the early 2000s in an oversized town populated by redundant steelworkers and their surfer sons. The streets are dense with empty shops, and a frothy cappuccino is the height of sophistication. ‘Gay’ is an accusation, not an identity. ‘Trans’ means only the drag queens teetering across the outback in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. ‘Diversity’ is the occasional Greek surname, or the solitary pair of Hong Kong-born sisters at school. Beneath the vacant blue skies that keep us ‘relaxed and comfortable’, my unruly body has desires I cannot name. Only at the beach, where the world is water and light, do I slip free from the wrongness that stalks me into each new scene.

‘How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?’ writes Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts (2015). In her telling, the ‘born in the wrong body’ trans narrative obscures the fact that many belong in the messy middle, forever betwixt and between.

When your gender is a dog’s breakfast, how do you know whether this is your own mess or the world’s? Was I always trans, part boy beneath my skin, or did I land in a place where ‘girl’ was a container so small it could break your bones?

The pallid feminism dished up in the Howard era told us that ‘girls can do anything’. They can be athletes, they can be doctors, they can run a business. They can even be prime minister. (That didn’t work out so well.) To be a feminist, I learn, is to challenge and grow what ‘woman’ can contain. You want to skate like your brother? Great, you’re a feminist. You want short hair? Feminist gold star for you.

But my guilty secret is that ‘woman’ never feels like home. I don’t want to be a ball-breaking superwoman, smashing glass ceilings with my shoulder-pads, while my husband tends the stove. I want that David Jones blazer and the body to fill it out.

Why, indeed, would any child embrace ‘woman’ when they are the seeming losers, the victims, the Penelopes who get left behind? The men in my life are the ones who jet off on international business trips, eat meals cooked by others, have their sexual currency increase with age. My father moves to a beachside apartment with his coiffed new wife, while my mother inflates with grief. She dishes up mid-week spag bol and watches reruns of The Bill; he buys a Bose sound-system and quaffs pinot noir against a backdrop of 1980s synth jazz and Japanese cologne. In the battle of the sexes, I know who will win every time.

Yet make no mistake: for all my cricketing exploits, I am no rough-and-tumble tomboy, running riot with the lads. That ‘born in the wrong body’ conviction is never mine. My shit is messier than that. For all that my aesthetic signals ‘boy’, I am the quiet child who gravitates towards books and make-believe – sedate, acceptably feminine pastimes. I have Barbies and I like them. Most days, it’s not so hard to pass as female.

Without a language to express this mess, I leave my body behind. I smother its unruly desires beneath textbooks, prizes, degrees. Photographs are to be avoided at all costs. Shopping is an exercise in drag. I buy the dresses, the skirts. I go through the motions of performing ‘girl’. I even go on dates when men ask me, half-amused they can’t see through the farce. I learn that a ready smile and a sympathetic ear are the only props required to impersonate a woman. The performance becomes so familiar I almost forget that it’s staged.

There are only occasional moments of rupture. Talk of marriage, breast fondling, beauty salons, being called ‘Miss’ – all induce revulsion and panic. At one big white wedding in Greece, I spend the reception shaking in the toilets while the other guests dance in raucous circles.

There’s only one possible explanation: it must be all my mother’s fault. Wasn’t she supposed to have taught me how to be a woman? Her blunt style and aversion to fashion and makeup must be the reason why I lack some essential understanding of femaleness. If only I had a different mother, a mother who wore mascara and kitten heels, I would have learnt the passwords, the secret handshake. Or so I tell myself.

The day before my brother’s wedding, Mum and I drive to a beauty salon for obligatory mani-pedis, a bonding exercise with the bride-to-be and the women of her clan.

‘How does it work? I’ve never done this before,’ Mum proclaims on arrival, announcing her ignorance for all to hear.

She doesn’t even know to be ashamed, to see that she’s failed femininity and failed me in the process. I turn to ice and refuse to look at her. In the car going home, arms crossed, I spit out her shortcomings, one by one. Anger provides a refuge from confusion and fear.

The next day, I watch my first YouTube make-up tutorial. Maybe I can acquire the secret handshake elsewhere. But I don’t go back to a beauty salon for years. Without Mum on hand to play the naïf, surely my own ignorance would be obvious. I can’t afford to be unmasked in the citadel of womanhood.

Through it all, I keep myself small and lean. No womanly curves, the merest hint of breasts, muscular quads – androgyny to the max. When I’m not studying I’m exercising; either living in my mind or keeping my body under wraps. Cake, ice cream, chocolate are all verboten. Even alcohol is suspect: too many empty calories. Feminism tells me this is patriarchy in action: women are not allowed to have large bodies that claim space. My body regulation is surely just another artefact of a sexist world. Yet it isn’t size I fear so much as hips, buttocks, and breasts, those expanses of flesh that scream ‘woman’ to the world. No J.Lo booty for me, however toned. Heroin chic is more my style.

Deep into my twenties, the wrongness persists, unnamed and unnameable, my constant friend. Words are my instruments, language my drug of choice, but something festers beneath the surface of what can be seen and known. Unnamed, unnameable.

Until one day, I look at my reflection and see a man staring back at me.

It’s Saturday night and I’m slumped against the window of a swaying train, returning home from the city. The reflective glass shows someone familiar. Strong jaw, sceptical gaze, broad cheekbones. Unquestionably male. A second later, he’s gone. I yearn to run after him, as though after a childhood friend glimpsed in a crowd. In his place I see only a sad simulacrum of a woman, with wonky lipstick and a wig-like mane. She huddles into her coat, face pinched and hungry.

Six months later, at an airport far from home, my Kindle suggests a novel: Nevada by Imogen Binnie. On the plane, I race through the virtual pages. It’s a trans remake of the classic American road story. Our hero is a trans woman on the run from New York, who befriends a young man questioning his gender deep in the Wild West. The youth confesses to fantasies of having sex as a woman, known as autogynephilia. I pause, jolted into unwilling recognition. Squashed into my plane seat, I remember all the times I imagined myself with a penis, penetrating a woman. Later Google will tell me this is autoandrophilia, a condition controversially associated with ‘transsexualism’.

Back home, I disintegrate into a ‘major depressive episode’, a collapse that once would have been more poetically termed a nervous breakdown. One grey day, in the car with Mum, I stutter a confession.

‘I’m concerned about my gender. I read a book about trans people and I recognised some things.’

She’s distracted, preoccupied by traffic, focused on keeping me alive.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that. Let’s just get you home, have some lunch.’

My words have skated off the surface of the moment, as though they’d never been. Later, she’ll have no memory of this conversation.

A year passes. One day I wake up, alone in British Columbia after a night experimenting with local cannabis, with a pronouncement flashing across my mind. ‘Wearing women’s clothes is drag. You’re not really a woman.’ By midday, I sport a new tattoo to mark the occasion. From there, the mess unspools, unravelling in all directions.

It starts slowly. I bundle my dresses into a bag in the back of my wardrobe. I abandon the lipstick, the earrings, the mascara. My high heels sit unworn. Slowly I am less girl. Slowly I am more me.

The next step induces terror. Late one Friday evening, when the masses have gone home to their wine and Netflix, I feign a casual stroll into the men’s section of Kmart. I’m soon deep in a khaki forest of shirts and slacks, breathing quick and shallow, stomach clenched, mind on high alert for the inevitable voice shooing me away.

Grabbing clothes at random, I scurry into the fluorescent changeroom like a criminal, only to discover that nothing fits my woman’s frame. Even after months of push-ups, my shoulders are dwarfed by the wingspan of a men’s XS shirt. I’m reduced to a child in his father’s clothing. Absurd.

Internet research leads me to a store that specialises in slim-fit men’s shirts, a favourite of the Asian students who animate the inner city. While interstate for a conference, I muster my courage and venture into the tiny boutique. I’m immediately assailed by three shop assistants. No other customers in sight. The staff assess me with cold eyes, sizing up their prey. Avoiding their gaze, I sidle up to the racks.

‘So what can we help you with? Are you looking for a gift?’

‘No, for me.’

‘For you? A new look?’ She asks, with thinly veiled scorn.

I nod inconclusively, mute, eyes fixed on the clothes. Several minutes of searching rewards me with three shirts that might just possibly fit. Plain white, navy, checks. I can picture him, the man from the train window, bringing them to life.

‘Could I please try these on?’ I whisper.

I’m shown to a cubicle in the middle of the store. It’s a blank box, no mirror inside. There’s only a communal mirror next to the registers.

‘Don’t you have any other changerooms?’ Of course they don’t.

I cannot stomach the humiliation of three assistants gawking while I try on shirts that will, most likely, sit all askew on my puny woman’s frame. I cannot let them see my awkward, most intimate desires. I thrust the shirts at the closest assistant and flee into the roar of Broadway. Empty-handed, again.

A whisper in my ear tells me that testosterone would be the solution. Within a few months, my shape would change, I’d begin to approximate the man I saw in the train window. The shirts would begin to fit. My psychologist, a specialist in gender identity, can barely conceal his impatience with my reluctance to grasp this lifeline. For him, gender dysphoria = transgender = hormone replacement therapy. Simple. Problem solved, fixed by the miracle of modern medicine.

‘Transitioning to male is easy, really,’ he tells me. ‘The testosterone can work wonders and you just gain male privilege.’

If only it were so straightforward.

On Instagram I find other creatures like me. Following the hashtags – #FTM, #transmasc, #TransformationTuesday – takes me down a rabbit hole into a land of second becomings, of AFABs (assigned female at birth) remaking themselves into the muscled, bearded mammals we call men. Hours disappear in a blur of gym selfies and before-and-after pics. An infinite sequence of washboard abs, of tattooed chests (to hide the top-surgery scars), of arms padded with muscle to distract from the lingering, ineradicable curvature of a female pelvis. The holy grail is a V-taper: the triangular torso, with shoulders wider than hips, that our world equates with ‘man’.

There is so much here to lust after and so much more to critique. Is this chiselled heft the only alternative to the cage of womanhood? This is a monoculture of synthetic maleness, reeking of beer, leather, and sweat. I yearn for that jawline, that flat chest, but balk at the narrowness, the endless reproduction of normative hetero-masculinity. Where are the dandies, the fops, the besuited gentlemen, and the scrawny artists? After months gorging on the images, I am queasy, overfull. Every selfie begins to look the same.

In truth, despite what the psychologist’s questionnaires tell me, I’m no more M than F. I’m not a man trapped in a woman’s body; I’m a trans person flailing around on this strange binary earth. Transmasculine, not male. Neither side of the gender binary feels like home.

My fear is that testosterone would merely transport me from the F camp into the M – which, from the outside, seems riven with random violence, all hard fists and swallowed tears. I couldn’t survive there. After thirty-one years in a female body, fear of men is implanted deep in my cells. I can no longer live as a woman, but nor can I bear to be banished to the parallel universe of men. My shit will stay messy, I can tell.

And yet. When I catch up with a transmasc acquaintance deep in the second puberty of transition, the whiff of their new teenage-boy sweat has me reeling, suckerpunched by envy. In that moment, I’m overcome by want, a raw hunger for testosterone that annihilates all doubt. It lasts maybe twenty seconds, a minute at most.

For the most part, I belong not in the M camp or the F camp but in the murky middle – or more accurately on a different plane altogether, one where we’re all just bodies, living and dying, in infinite, marvellous configurations.

The struggle is to craft that gender in embodied form, to somehow fashion flesh and blood that confounds the gender binary, that refuses to be categorised as F or M. Most days, that task seems impossible.

A trans blog suggests a solution for my fashion woes: boy’s clothes. ‘Male’ clothes in smaller sizes, at half the price. The only trouble is the endless dinosaur and robot prints. Not to mention the dearth of brands that go beyond a boys’ size 8, which is too small even for me.

I finally hit the jackpot at Zara Boys, a calm oasis upstairs from the frenetic women’s section. The choice is limited – half the size of the pink and sparkly girls’ section – but at least the aesthetic is neutral, classic, with blessedly few robots. I scour the selection for white shirts, T-shirts, chinos, a navy blazer – all the while trying to project the image of a mother shopping for her son. Totally normal, nothing to see here.

The change-room mirrors reveal that I’m a perfect boys’ size 12. Shirts, pants, jackets – they all fit. Finally, the man from the train smiles back at me, suave in a blazer that could have been tailored for him. Twenty years after our first encounter, the boys’ blazer is now mine to take home. It has silk lining, interior pockets, and fits like a glove.

And that just might be enough, for now.