It’s fun to try to be beautiful when people are giving you positive attention for it. It hurts if you’re not meeting that standard and people treat you like you aren’t even there. You watch the people who are getting a lot of positive attention for being that certain kind of beautiful and you are made to feel invisible.

Or worse, people go out of their way to make you feel bad.

It’s hard to be a woman, yes. It’s a lot harder to be a woman who’s hairier, wider, bigger, taller, square instead of round, straight up and down instead of curvy, big hands, big feet, no vagina and maybe no breasts either. A woman who isn’t quite looking like what some people think a woman should look like. But who is finding her way.

To these women, the world can be downright cruel. More than cruel, violent. Harassment often escalates into assault, and more often than you would like to hear, escalates into full on homicide.

For these women, being womanly in the way we are told we have to is sometimes about more than beauty. It’s about survival. This episode is about the story of one woman’s quest for beauty.

It was a collaboration with badass poet and radio maker, Julia Alsop. After we finished production we invited Zil Goldstein into my walk-in closet magic sound booth to talk through some of the blind spots in the story. Zil is a nurse practitioner, working specifically to help medical providers be more LGBT aware.

If you are interested in learning more about the disproportionate amount of violence that trans women face theNational Coalition Against Violence Project puts out a yearly report.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Beauty Is Pain

The Heart