North Woods — By Jessica Austin
artwork by Dan Finaldi
When I was a man, I took my Tinder dates hiking in North Woods. The girl would say, “You better not kill me,” and I would reply, “How do I know you won’t kill me first?”
Before the fall semester of my senior year, my girlfriend and I were walking through those same woods, and I kissed her for the first time as a woman. Under the pine trees near the power lines, straddling the touched and untouched land. I needed our kiss to happen where no one would see us, and so did she. You could only be so unnatural in nature. Not long after, she texted me, “It’s been hard for me to make the adjustment from who I knew you to be to who you are now,” and I agreed, but for different reasons.
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Pre-transition, I was neurotic about powerlifting, bracing too much for the weight on my shoulders. I didn’t spend much time wandering the woods. Hiking, I thought, would only tire me out. Better to save that energy for the gym. I emulated men who tied their long hair in tight buns and wore women’s leggings to squat deeper. Fitness YouTubers, of all people, gave me permission to wear tights in public, and boy did my best friend’s hand-me-downs flatter my legs. Sometimes, the mirror was kind to me. Sometimes, I even turned myself on a little. But my hip-to-waist ratio was an equation that could not be solved with calories-in-calories-out.
Inside my dorm room, I spent hours taking pictures of my face. Profiles, portraits, 3⁄4 profiles, the angles my FFS surgeons asked me to send pictures of before my pre-op consultation. As I compulsively marked up my selfies with thick black lines, I imagined what my face would look like $26,000 into the future. What it would be like to be happy, or at least prettier. All it would take is a team of cisgender men molding a woman’s face to their standards. What’s more natural than that?
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A month after I realized I was trans, I did shrooms with a group of strangers from the New York State Summer Writers Institute. As the only one familiar with both psychedelics and the area, I guided them through the trails––until I had to pee while trans, which had been made illegal in North Carolina only a year prior. In civilization (read: five minutes away, in the dorms, where I was housed on the first floor of an otherwise all-male apartment), I would pee sitting down, my attempt to bargain with dysphoria. But in the woods, with these strangers, that felt too revealing, not least of all because it would require me to pull my pants down to my ankles. I joked that I ought to use my male privilege while I still could.
Later, I walked deep into the woods, alone, to test whether scream therapy worked. I was afraid to scream, afraid that I’d hurt my voice or sound too masculine. Does a trans woman sound like a man if no one is around to hear? I throttled my vocal cords together, again and again, but I didn’t find relief. Maybe it only works if you’re willing to let go of something.
Jessica Austin is a queer, trans writer living in Washington, D.C. She has attended the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Tin House Winter Workshop as a 2025 Winter Scholar. Her work has been published in Lilac Peril, the citizen trans* {project}, and the 2025 DC Pride Poem-a-Day.