Issue date: 11/6/09 Section: The Verge

I glare intensely at the mirror, scanning over my body like a contractor looking for a crack in a foundation.

Slowly my eyes move over my skin, my protruding limbs and appendages looking for the crack.

If and when I find it, everything I need to know will come pouring out like a fissure erupting from the earth.

I look at this body, this bag of bones, cartilage, neurons and a mess of muscle and fat, and I wonder, why is this important?

I have been confused ever since my cousin told me she wanted to be a boy. I don't fully understand the tie between self and outward self. I feel na've and childish as I look at my own body. She knows that her body does not represent her. She knows and she tries to explain.

"I never felt like a girl and my sexuality has a lot to do with that," she said as her eyes began to sparkle with the tears welling inside them. "I never wanted to date boys, I wanted to be the boys and chase the girls and kiss the girls and love girls."

And that is why my cousin Melissa will now be called Matthew and her breasts will be removed in swift knife slices and her voice starts to deepen as testosterone is shot into her body and she gradually becomes a boy - rather, a man.

I get it, I guess. She feels like a boy, so she thinks she should look like a boy. She should be Matthew. But, what I cannot grasp is when her identity became so wrapped up in her body. Why can't she just act and be a man without the testosterone and the mastectomy?

I feel my face burning. The frustration climbs as I think about the pain she is going to put herself through for this transformation. I turn away from the idea of her. I look to the the past.

Sorting through old photographs and home videos I watch Melissa play with my sisters and me. She is always standing on the outside as we play house outside and was always Ken when we played Barbies. She is only nine years old and already she feels that something isn't right.

As she grew older everyone could tell she liked women. She clung to the women she loved protectively, like her older brother used to do for her and her mother. She would twist the girls' hair between her fingers as they sat on the couch watching cartoons. We all knew and just ignored it.

But I could not keep my thoughts away from her recent years. Soon Melissa went to college, and when she did she had the freedom to explore her sexuality and comfortably pursue women who liked women. And then, under the rugby name Hansel, she discovered what it was like to be a man, to feel like a man. She chopped her blonde, curly locks and began her transformation.

I fit the pieces together like a puzzle and found that the answer was in fact in the mirror the whole time. It was me, us, her family never allowed her to be seen the way she needed to be seen. We never acknowledged what we knew in a person we loved and therefore, her outward appearance resulted in the way we treated her.

Matthew felt the need to change his body to a man because society doesn't allow us to escape our appearances. We are forced to identify ourselves with our sexualized bodies because of the superficiality of our culture.

It is through my cousin Matthew's transformation that I have slowly begun to distance myself from my body. For I feel, to become a butterfly, you must not dwell on the stages of the body. From caterpillar to cocoon, you are nothing more than a worm. Those bodies die and what you have left is well, beauty.

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