EGGSHELL

Words by Anthony Delaney (he/him)

In my seven years of being a man, the shell has just begun to crack. Trans people are classed in two states, hatched and unhatched, yet this does not take into account the agonising period where our membraned, laboured breath is pecking, desperate, against our containment. Nor does this account for the entire period of hatching, which for some takes merely seconds… for others, urgent years. 

In seven seconds I’d been fertilised, in seven minutes I’d divided, in seven hours I’d travelled to the womb, in seven days I’d twirled within my blood, in seven weeks I’d kicked and stretched, in seven months I’d wept, and over seven years, I’d trained myself to lie still. 

To weep was to be cracked. How dare this person, who claims to be a man, be tender? How dare it be sensitive? How could its gentle supple flesh and natal, lilted tone, convey any such authority over us? This deeply vulnerable thing, dare we walk near it at all for we may crush its shell? Who told it to sit out in the open like that? To peep at any one of us for help?

I’ve matured within my egg. The deepening of my timbre, a rebalanced stress in words, a chirp, then a screech, then a caw, injected within the pinprick from which my beak sits, until their ears, at my hatchéd resonance, pricked. Yet gentle still, I spoke. I sidestepped accusation, dodged implication, as delicate sodden wings brushed against my coop I staggered my cause forth with caution: for if my true demands were detected, they’d despise my feathered sight, reconstruct my fractured cell… who is the sensitive one, again?

Who walks on whose shell?