When I was 13, I was enamoured by Delta Goodrem on season 1 of Australia’s The Voice. In the shower, I would reach for the soaring notes of Born To Try and imagine being loved by thousands as I strutted across the stage. She was what I understood the ideal woman to be: tall and thin with impeccable bone structure, long, lustrous hair, a winning voice that matched her smile. In my mind she was perfect. And I have always been a perfectionist.
When I started my gender transition five years later, it was Goodrem’s silhouette that stood at the end of my transition goal posts. After scouring the vibrant trans communities that gather on Reddit and Facebook, I compiled a list of ‘easy’ steps for transitioning and a timeline for executing them.
- Refuse to get a haircut six months before coming out.
- Start lasering my entire body, head to toe, three months before.
- Start hormone therapy two months before.
- Buy an assortment of floral dresses so that everyone knows I’m feminine, but I’m not too in your face about it.
- Start learning how to apply makeup.
- Give my voice teacher a heads-up a month out so she can start thinking about how to shift my voice up.
- After coming out, get a nose job the week after so my face is more proportionate.
- Get my ears pierced.
- Change my name and sex on legal documentation.
- At the bare minimum, get gender confirmation surgery within a year.
After a gruelling first year of transitioning, my perfectionist self made sure the plan worked. But even though I ended up ticking off each step on the list, I couldn’t stop myself from fixating on the parts of me that I couldn’t change.
I couldn’t stop myself from fixating on the parts of me that I couldn’t change
I am 6 feet tall – a height that some people might call ‘model height’ but which, in a practical sense, places me outside the female average. I am thin, but a size eight wouldn’t zip up past my waist. There is no easy fix for changing your height or the breadth of your shoulders. (Trust me. I Googled it.) At that point, I was confronted with a choice: to feel as if I will never look the way I want to, or do the work to reinvent the idea of what I want for my body.
That is, to radically accept my body the way it is.
I started by educating myself. I read Janet Mock’s autobiographies so I could begin to see myself living as a trans woman in this world. Then, I listened to and learnt about the wonders of all different types of bodies.
I made sense of everything I was learning by writing. Having grown up in the theatre, I wrote plays about identity, gender and how the body is situated within these constructs. My first play, , which I wrote at the start of my transition, was a drama about how we perform our gender, and my new play,, is a big gay farce about the fluidity of identity and queerness.
Cassie Hamilton. Source: Supplied
But nothing was more valuable than my interactions with other trans people. Over the years, I have had trans people love me for just the way my body was at that moment, without expectations or hopes for it to change. I think, when you transition, you have to come to terms with the fact that gender norms are founded on faulty logic and you begin to see others not as their gender, but more so just as who they are. We have the right and the responsibility to redefine what is beautiful, to find beauty in self-expression rather than conformity.
Today, I love my body for all its contradictions
Representation finally arriving in recent years for trans people also played a massive part in how I understood my body. The pilot episode of Euphoria changed my life when Jules, played by trans actor Hunter Schafer, laid next to Zendaya in her underwear, obviously untucked but also unfetishised, unridiculed and understood not to be a joke, but as simply and uncompromisingly a woman. The silhouette that filled my idea of the ideal woman shifted at that moment from a cisgender Australian pop singer to a girl who was just like me.
Today, I love my body for all its contradictions, the ways it conforms and the ways it doesn’t to what people expect from a woman’s body. As my body changes and evolves, I want not to make my body more ‘passing’, or more like a ‘woman’s body’, but simply, more reflective of who I see myself to be. No more perfect transition plans, but simply the pursuit of an imperfect, beautiful self.
If you’d like see more of Cassie’s work, her new play, Daddy Developed a Pill, will be performed at the Kings Cross Theatre, 8–18 June. Find out more .
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