(Apologies for the late post today, folks! Thanks to a combination of lots of little weird things not going quite right, my whole week has felt rather off, and I didn’t realize until I was about to pass out last night that I didn’t have a blog written yet. Oops! Anyway, I hope this one makes you chuckle. Enjoy!)

I am not a small human.

I will grant you that I only stand 5’5″ tall, but I am a stocky fellow. I take up space. And I have always (at least since puberty number one) had hips.

Now don’t get me wrong: hips can be useful. They’re great for balancing things like laundry baskets carried in one arm so your other hand is free to unlock and open doors. If I was planning on ever bearing children, I’m sure I would find other instances in which I was thankful for my hips.

But when you’re trying to achieve a more masculine presentation, hips are annoying at best, and dysphoria-inducing at worst. For someone like me, whose chest can be fairly well concealed by a binder, hips turn into one of the bigger reasons I wind up being read as a woman.

Last week, in preparation for our trip to Minnesota, I found myself tackling a mountain of laundry. We live on the second floor of our building; the laundry room is down the stairs, out the door, around the corner, through another door, and down a few more stairs. For someone like yours truly, whose back and knees tend not to love stairs in the first place, laundry is kind of an extra obnoxious experience. But I was determined to get it done. So I packed up a mesh bag full of clothes, flung it over my shoulder, hauled it down the stairs, and started a couple of loads.

Once the laundry was dry, I actually did that thing that I’m told real adults do and folded everything. I then put the laundry in one of our small laundry baskets, picked it up, swing it around under my right arm, and braced it against my right hip.

That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.

Only…I couldn’t find any way to balance the basket without tilting the whole load of freshly washed shirts and socks and a wonky sort of angle in relation to my body, shoving the corner of the basket into my side under my ribcage.

It made getting the laundry back upstairs (through four closed doors, two of which were locked) quite the journey.

I had known for a while that my butt was smaller, but I never, ever, ever expected that my hips would slim down in the least. And my hips are definitely still there. But…they’re not as there as they used to be.

I’m not complaining. But it’s weird to suddenly find yourself unsure of what your body, the body you’ve spent 25 years getting to know, can and cannot do.