What the Skin Remembers: Transition, Nourishment, and the Refusal to Perform
A trans femme reclaiming of softness, ancestral care, and the sacred logic of adornment.
A luminous reflection on transition, refusal, and ancestral care—this essay reclaims femme embodiment from consumerism and re-roots it in nourishment, ritual, and remembrance. Softness, here, is sacred. Wholeness, already ours.
Introduction: the Erasure Hidden in the Glow-Up
I didn’t always have words for the feeling, but I know it now as erasure. Not the dramatic kind—no one’s shouting me down—but the quieter, glossier sort that wears a ring light and a referral code. The kind that scrolls past on my screen in the shape of “must-haves” for girls like me. The £55 serum promising skin like glass. The blush palette named after emotions I don’t actually feel. The night cream that claims to turn back time, as though time were a mistake. It’s not that I dislike beauty—it’s that the version offered feels more like a correction than an invitation. Like the message is: here’s what you lack, and here’s what you must buy to be worthy of the mirror.
And maybe that’s what stings. Because my transition has never looked like that. It wasn’t a shopping list or a before-and-after. It didn’t arrive with a curated kit and a “she’s glowing” caption. It arrived slowly, quietly, through broth and salt and the kind of rest that doesn’t sell well. I didn’t become softer through products—I became softer because I stopped fighting myself. Because I let my skin be skin, not a surface to be managed. And so when I’m told, again and again, that trans femininity requires contouring, correcting, camouflaging—I don’t feel included. I feel rewritten.
There’s a particular violence in being told your womanhood is only as real as your product shelf. That your face must be fixed to be read correctly. That your softness needs proof. But what if it doesn’t? What if transition doesn’t have to be a performance at all? What if it’s something more ancient—something you remember, rather than assemble? That’s the dissonance I carry: not shame, but the quiet wonder of watching my body become itself without their tools. Not a miracle. Just a refusal. A return. A different kind of glow.
The Body That Did Not Break
I didn’t start eating this way to glow. I started because I was tired of feeling ill. Tired of the prescriptions layered over side effects, the polite nods from professionals who couldn’t quite explain why nothing was working. There was always a new medication, a new label, a new attempt to patch over the exhaustion. But none of it made me feel whole. None of it fed me. So I stopped chasing fixes and started listening—not to doctors, but to my own body. Not through symptom charts, but through sensation.
I stripped it back. Fat. Broth. Salt. Meat. I ate like someone trying to remember hunger—not the gnawing of restriction, but the deep, cellular call to be nourished. I gave myself butter without guilt. Cooked in tallow. Let the bones boil until the broth went cloudy with minerals. There was no plan beyond survival, but something remarkable began to happen: I stopped breaking. My body, once brittle and inflamed, softened into steadiness. My skin, which I’d never thought much of, began to shine without effort. I didn’t need exfoliants or brightening masks. I needed rest. I needed warmth. I needed food that remembered the land.
When I began HRT, I expected changes, of course—but I didn’t expect them to arrive with such ease. Within weeks, my skin changed again: softer, yes, but also calmer, as if it had been waiting for this chemistry all along. The curves came more quickly than they were meant to. My energy evened out. My sleep deepened. I was told to prepare for a slow, halting transformation. Instead, my body bloomed—quietly, unassumingly—into a version of itself that felt not miraculous, but right. Not engineered. Just revealed.
And now? I feel better than I ever did on the pills. My skin is luminous. My mind, quieter. My digestion no longer punishes me. I still don’t call this a miracle, because miracles are anomalies, one-offs, unearned. This isn’t that. This is what happens when a body is fed the way it was always meant to be. It’s ancestral. It’s metabolic. It’s not about being lucky—it’s about being fed.
Ancestral Nourishment vs. the Beauty Economy
There are two stories being told about how to care for a body—especially a femme one. One whispers of lineage, ritual, and enoughness. The other shouts from shop shelves and endless scrolls, promising transformation if only you’ll surrender a little more of your time, your money, your trust. One story begins with broth and ends in rest. The other never ends at all.
When I think about the way I care for my skin, it isn’t a regimen—it’s a remembrance. I reach for tallow, not toner. I stir seaweed into soup, not serum. I rub lanolin into my lips because that’s what sheep-farming women did before me, not because someone on TikTok told me it was trending. My approach to care doesn’t come in a bottle. It comes in the form of slow stews, mountain air, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing the food I eat is the same my great-grandmothers once relied on to weather long winters and hard work.
The modern beauty economy would call this neglect. Or worse—unfeminine. It tells us that care means constant correction. That the body, especially the trans body, must be managed, controlled, improved. It sells us dysphoria repackaged as aspiration. It tells us we are never quite there, but we could be—if only we bought the right kit. If only we complied. If only we kept up.
But that’s not my model. My skin doesn’t glow because I corrected it. It glows because I never corrupted it. I didn’t buy my softness. I fed it. I didn’t mask my body’s needs—I listened to them. And what I’ve learned is that true care isn’t about chasing beauty. It’s about remembering wholeness.
Ancestral Nourishment Modern Skincare
Tallow, nettle, seaweed, broth Retinol, parabens, petroleum-based creams
Shared in community Purchased in isolation
Seasonal, cyclical, enough Constant, marketed, never enough
Passed down by elders Sold by influencers
Builds from the inside Patches from the outside
Honours trans embodiment Capitalises on trans dysphoria
They want us to believe we are incomplete without their fixes. But I am already whole. My rituals may be invisible to the marketplace, but they are legible to the land. I don’t glow for them. I glow because I am fed.
The Lineage of Colour: When Adornment Was Ceremony
Sometimes I catch myself wondering what a little colour might look like. A touch of red at the cheek. A swipe of something golden at the lid. A thumbprint of blue, maybe—just there at the wrist, where a pulse speaks quietly. The impulse always surprises me. Not because it feels out of place, but because I’ve been taught to see it as vanity. As performance. As a longing to be seen.
But the longer I sit with it, the more I realise: it’s not visibility I crave—it’s memory. It’s ritual. It’s the echo of something older than Sephora, something passed down not in packaging but in gesture. For my foremothers—those of the western coasts, of the isles and the inlands where stones still hold stories—adornment wasn’t about the everyday. It was ceremony. A marking of moment and meaning. A way to belong not to a trend, but to a lineage.
A splash of saffron woven into a brat might signal status, yes, but also honour—of role, of season, of sacred responsibility. Amber threaded into a braid wasn’t just decoration. It was inheritance, sometimes burial-gift, sometimes birthright. Blue woad, pressed in spirals or thumbed into the skin, could mean protection, initiation, grief. And none of it was applied for approval. These marks weren’t cosmetic. They were connective. They said: I am here. I am part of something.
There were scents, too—not bottled perfumes but lanolin and sage, sweet cicely crushed between palms, meadowsweet smoke rising from coals. Cloth carried memory. A cloak fastened with a brooch passed through generations. A cuff embroidered with tablet weave learned at the knee of a grandmother. Wool dyed with herbs gathered at Imbolc, or Beltane, or under the waning moon. Even colour had a season. Even the body had a calendar.
They did not paint to please—they adorned to belong. To participate in the sacred. To mark what mattered. So when I feel the tug of pigment now, I try not to silence it. I try to listen. Maybe it’s not about adding something I lack. Maybe it’s about touching something I almost forgot. And if I choose a pop of colour, let it not be for correction. Let it be for communion. Let it be a remembering.
The Face, Made Sacred Again
Why is it that so many Western women feel naked without makeup? Not undone, not casual—but exposed, as though the face alone were somehow insufficient. As though the skin were always the wrong kind of canvas until it’s been worked over, layered, concealed. There’s something deeper at play here than preference. Something older. Something stolen.
Because once, adornment was ritual. It marked time, place, passage. A bit of berry on the lip to celebrate the first full harvest. A thumb-smudge of ash after mourning. A weaving of wool thread through plaits to honour a mother’s line. These gestures were meaningful because they were occasional—rooted in story, not schedule. They weren’t tasks on a checklist. They weren’t sold back to us as self-care. They weren’t performed for mirrors or men.
But that sacred relationship with the face—what we do to it, what we allow it to express—was colonised. Ritual became routine. Adornment was flattened into maintenance. Now we’re told it’s empowering to spend an hour correcting the “flaws” a company invented to sell us the fix. That full-face makeup is a form of self-respect. That the bare face is only acceptable if it glows with youth, health, and genetic good fortune. And if not, then there’s a product to simulate it.
Somewhere along the line, the face stopped being sacred and became a site of labour. Not just for cis women, but especially for trans women—for whom every inch of appearance is scrutinised, gendered, appraised. The stakes are different, but the logic is shared: if you don’t paint it, you must be ashamed of it. If you don’t buy the “corrective” cream, you’ve failed to do your part. The cost of appearing feminine is an ongoing subscription. The toll is perpetual.
But I refuse that ledger. My skin is not a failure. My face is not a debt to be paid off daily. I am not naked without makeup. I am in ceremony. Even when I wear nothing, I wear lineage. I wear the salt of broth, the balm of tallow, the memory of the land. I carry the scent of sage, not foundation. My face belongs to my foremothers, not to algorithms. And if ever I reach for colour again, it will be with intention. Not to perform, but to remember. Not to comply, but to bless.
To the Woman Who Painted Her Cheek with Berry
(a prayer for the remembered face)
To the woman who painted her cheek with berry,
not for beauty but for blessing—
who crushed the fruit between thumb and breath,
and marked herself not as offering but as offered—
I remember you.
To the hand that knew the season by its tint,
that touched ochre like a truth,
that placed blue at the temple
not for fashion, but for the ferrying—
for the crossing over, for the sacred edge—
I honour you.
To the braid laced with thread from a mother’s loom,
to the wool steeped in herb-smoke and salt wind,
to the cloak fastened with love’s own brooch—
I see you not in gloss,
but in the grain of linen, the glint of jet,
the scent of lanolin and time.
To the woman who did not decorate
but declare—
whose face bore witness,
whose pigments told stories,
whose adornment spoke of passage, kin, and becoming—
I walk with you.
And to the woman I am becoming—
who reaches now for balm, not blush;
who touches colour not for correction,
but for connection—
may I never forget
that my skin is already sacred.
That my face is already a rite.
That I do not need their permission
to be seen in my own light.
Closing: Refusal as Femme, Memory as Medicine
And so, let them scroll. Let them list the ten things every trans woman must buy, the creams that promise womanhood in a jar, the palettes that flatter, the serums that soothe the dysphoria they quietly help create. Let them. I am not angry. I am not even tempted. Because I’ve come to understand that my refusal is not lack. It is not bitterness, or jealousy, or shame. It is presence—without permission.
I did not build my femmeness from blush. I built it from broth. From the bone-deep knowing that I am already whole. That nothing about me requires correction, only remembering. My softness was not bought—it was cultivated. Fed by tallow and tide, quiet mornings, and rituals no influencer has ever named. I do not need to pass. I need to persist.
The face I wear is not bare—it is blessed. The body I inhabit is not waiting to be validated—it is already sacred. The herbs I crush, the salt I stir, the stories I wear in my skin—these are not vanities. They are continuities. They carry the women who came before, and the woman I am still becoming.
I’m not invisible because I’ve failed to conform. I’m invisible because I refuse to perform. And in that refusal, I become more visible than ever—at least to the ones who matter. The ones who see not the contour, but the commitment. Not the product, but the presence. Not the polish, but the promise.
You thought I was quiet
because I had nothing to say.
But I was remembering.
Calling the blood back from its long forgetting.
Letting the salt settle into my skin.
My softness is not your silence.
It is not absence.
It is the sound of the hearth when the war ends.
It is the breath drawn after the refusal.
It is the root that breaks the stone.
@edgarallanpoe @Pole Vault
Brainforce