Identity Crisis ; A collection of poetry

"Gender Dysphoria."

Gender Dysphoria:
Noun.
Defined as, "the condition of feeling one's emotional and psychological identity as male or female to be opposite to one's biological sex."
⠀
The sound of my birth name wraps
around my throat every time I hear it.
squeezing out the breath from my lungs
that are already damaged from binding
until my ribs ache and it's hard to breathe.
⠀
The look of my body and face in a mirror, in the photographs of me, of someone
I can't recognize anymore. This doesn't feel like me. This doesn't look like me. If
this is not me, then who is it?
⠀
My mind stranded between something
male, or something female. Why do I
have to be one or the other? Why can't I see something better in this mirror. Instead of someone painfully not me.
⠀
I, myself, are not painful, just the
perception of me that I can see.
My mind tells me one thing, my body,
another. I just want to be me.
Fuck, I just want to be me.