Snapshot of a Self: Alex Marzano-Lesnevich on Walking the World in a Shifting Body and Gender

After you stepped over a threshold on the other side of the world, triggering the ding of the barber’s unseen bell. After you watched her rope your long hair into a braid and you didn’t cry; loop her fingers through scissors and you didn’t cry; sever that braid and you didn’t cry, and you weren’t yet taking testosterone so that wasn’t the reason you didn’t cry.

This was a moment to be rushed through, because beyond it lay your whole life. You only had to do it. If you also had to feel, well, twenty years had already passed that way.

After you felt air on the back of your head for the first time. After you stared in the mirror and the person who stared back was both you and not you, vulnerable as a plucked chicken.

You had posed for one last photograph before the scissors, but already you knew you’d never be able to look at it. What was a trophy shot of? Discomfort you’d mistaken for your skin. Despair that had been animal in your chest.

After the bell rang a second time, and you could no longer hear it, the years gone making a kind of white noise in your head. After you walked three blocks in that fugue, spotted a men’s clothing store, and hooked left. After you stood fingering the fabrics, as though the scissors had snipped your voice from your throat, and the two sales guys watched you.

This was a moment to be rushed through, because beyond it lay your whole life.

After you imagined what they were thinking, tried to puzzle out who they thought you were, and then you imagined the shape of your body through their eyes—who that shape perhaps made them think you were—and you kicked that idea right out of your brain like a drunk out a bar.

After you thought, for the first of what would be a thousand times, a million, a lifetime, no. After you understood that you would have to guard not just yourself against others, but yourself against yourself this way.

After you asked, finally, to try on a pair of pants. And a jacket. And a shirt. And you pulled the clothes over your body, holding your breath at your hips your chest keep going keep going don’t feel keep going and raised your gaze to the mirror and saw, for the first time, that body, your body, with short hair and a suit. Still you didn’t cry. But you did say that you would like to try on everything in the store, please, yes you did mean everything.

You had decided you would go to the beach afterwards, so you did. Again clothing, so again don’t think don’t feel. After you yanked a tight top over your chest and quickly a black muscle t over that and only then paused and noticed the way your short hair now made a kind of echo off the flat chest and thought, okay, this maybe.

You rode the tram to the park and walked to the beach and saw the gorgeous verdant green, observed it like fact, beauty, like a thing you stood back from.

After you noticed that you noticed the distance between you and the world. That you didn’t just live the distance, but could see it. That was new.

And you stood in the water and it was cool and the sky was a gorgeous blue and there were children playing at the water’s edge and you thought, laughter. And this must be what grief feels like, though you couldn’t yet say what you were grieving. Time, maybe. Mortality, maybe. That this had taken you your whole life so far. That if you could feel, you were probably going to have to hurt.

Before you used the language for who you were. Before your smile loosened and your shoulders dropped. Before having a body, and watching yourself have a body, turned into, sometimes, being a body. Before your skin coarsened and your wrinkles deepened and zits became your constant companion.

Before age and the hormone needles’ injections worked their separate transformations. Before you thought about surgeries, decided no, decided yes, decided no again. Before you and your face struck up a kind of peace. Before you, so much later in life than you’d have imagined possible, made peace with the idea of peace.

Afterward came the journey home. Three planes, two continents, one ocean, countless rivers and tributaries and lives passed below, bodies and minds and hearts with sleeping wishes and hidden insides and so many worlds held secret within this one, for which you dressed in the clothes you had bought in the shop, still unwilling to take them off, twenty-six hours in a stiff blazer and button-down shirt.

Afterward came the “sir” from one security officer and the “ma’am” from another, the “sir-I’m-sorry-ma’am” from one kiosk clerk and the “ma’am-I’m-sorry-sir” from another. Afterward, the knowledge that gender was like borders, slippery and permeable and only sometimes marked, invented and policed with violence, a collective fever dream. Afterward, theory became a thing you lived with your body.

But at the ocean there was an ice cream cone and a selfie. First, the selfie, the first you had ever taken in which you looked like this. Later the hair would get shorter, later testosterone would broaden your jaw, but first there was this first.

Then waxy unfamiliar bills you pressed into a vendor’s hand, the choice of vanilla because it was the choice of your childhood, the pleasing scratch of the cone’s texture against your palm. You wandered away from the cart in a daze, your gaze on the turquoise horizon, understanding now that distance was what had made this possible. Made you possible. You stood under a tree and your tongue met the cold dairy and you felt it melt and slip and give way, yielding into sweetness like all the years you had just shed.

You kept rubbing the back of your head then. You palmed the soft bristles of your scalp like a new lover. You didn’t know what was coming, you couldn’t, but you stood companion now to all your fears and all your hopes, the weight of what was to come suddenly as vast and deep and frightening and beautiful as the blue expanse before you, and your grief was so huge you trembled with it.

All you had for so long feared. All you had, you realized, just chosen.

You didn’t know what was coming, you couldn’t, but you stood companion now to all your fears and all your hopes, the weight of what was to come suddenly as vast and deep and frightening and beautiful as the blue expanse before you, and your grief was so huge you trembled with it.

But as your tongue met the ice cream again, and your life before slipped into your life after, you looked up and were surprised to meet the eyes of a woman. Who was, you realized, watching you lick the cone. No— watching your tongue. No— staring.

And who, when she noticed you noticing, suddenly blushed a deep pink. The pink of a sunset, the pink of a sunrise, the pink of both ending and beginning.

And, so in the middle of goddamn weighty everything, you also thought: Oh. This is going to be fun.

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Excerpted from Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image edited by Dinah Lenney, courtesy of Bloomsbury Academic. Copyright © Dinah Lenney and Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, 2025.