How Ballet Helped Me Find My Identity as a Trans Man

The discovery of my gender expression through dance

Ballet was first introduced to me during my childhood. I took weekly classes the way many young girls, and some boys, do. For the first couple of years, I looked forward to ballet class as a physical outlet and exciting art form. I tolerated the strange emotions I felt regarding the girls in my classes, the way I felt so incongruous and out of place when surrounded by them.

As the years passed and I became a pre-teen, these feelings became indomitable and impossible to ignore. At eleven, I described the disconnected and abstruse emotions that dancing had ignited in me to my mom and adamantly insisted I stop taking classes. To convey my severe discomfort, I told her that I felt like I was dressing in drag when I wore my pink leotard and tights. She allowed me to stop taking classes and I put ballet behind me.

This was the same year I would realize, on a late-summer day in 2008, that I was a boy. I sat on the floor of the bathroom in a panic, I had just noticed for the first time that my body was beginning to grow feminine curves. I felt a wave of terror and disgust towards my body, along with a deep confusion. I couldn’t ever imagine that female puberty would really happen. To me.

I remained on the bathroom floor in a state of shock until my powerlessness and lack of control over my body led me to cry. I repeated the same thought, “I am supposed to be going through male puberty.” It was as if the pink leotard and tights were a permanent fixture to my body now, following me everywhere I went and bringing that disconnect between my mind and body that I had thought I’d left behind in ballet class.

I pulled myself off the bathroom floor and decided to declare who I was to the people around me, I hadn’t been taught to feel ashamed of being transgender. I didn’t even know there was a word for it. Predictably, in 2008, few people were receptive to my coming out and none understood what it meant. I spent the next thirteen years gaslighting myself into denial and indulging in my masculinity in private until finally coming out in January of 2021. During my many years of suppression, my “ghost years” as I like to call them, I allowed myself one piece of masculinity. Fitness. I forced myself into a tight box of feminity, presenting with a full face of makeup and long hair, I lived and breathed that feeling of dressing in drag. But even in these dissociated and emotionally numb years, I developed a love for fitness and allowed myself to explore the rush of adrenaline it gave me to see, but more importantly feel, my body becoming stronger and bigger. This feeling created a crack in the mask I had crafted to conform to the standard of femininity I desperately wished to live up to.

The crack grew, and eventually the mask broke. I returned to the bathroom floor and reevaluated who I was and what life meant to me. Once I finally had the courage to ask myself those questions, the answers came instantly. I am a man and this life is worth living, authentically. So once more, I came out. The response was vastly different than it had been when I was eleven years old, I had the support of my family and the medical care I needed to become myself. As I began the process of sifting through the layers of my old disguise, organizing each aspect into piles of “keep” and “throw away”, I continued my fitness routine. I pushed myself to the limit with home HIIT workouts and weight lifting, and then I saw it: A video suggestion of a ballet workout. I clicked on it after a moment of hesitation, the old discomfort resurfacing in my mind and the new rigidity I had started to adopt in an attempt to embrace my masculinity and only my masculinity.

I clicked on it and my life has never been the same.

I started incorporating ballet into my workout once a week, as I had done as a child. This quickly became twice a week, every other day, then nearly every day. The familiarity of the movements brought back the excitement I had initially felt in my childhood and the physical demand of ballet made me much stronger physically and mentally. There were days that I would see my reflection and want to melt into the floor from dysphoria, hopeless about my transition progress and fearful that I was once again dressing in drag. But those days were tiny in number compared to the days that I successfully shifted my focus from how my body looked to how my body felt and what it could do. I strengthened my muscles and developed mental endurance and discipline that I had never needed before. The challenge of ballet was a perfect match for the daunting challenge of facing my authentic self.

Each day that I devoted to ballet I became less insecure, less obsessed with which movements were masculine or feminine, and more determined to improve my technique and strength. It didn’t matter if it was seen as masculine or feminine, as long as it was strong and graceful. Through this shift, I began to even see glimpses of my true self, as a male dancer. The dedication and volition I had built for ballet translated into other areas of my life, I had a new confidence and assurance that I could handle the emotions that the changes in my life would bring.

Ballet revisited me in my adulthood and has become a vital part of my daily routine and lifestyle. It has taught me to be strong-willed and unwavering, while also showing me the necessity of tenderness and balance. It has allowed me the privilege of returning to that child in the pink leotard and tights and dressing him in a white t-shirt and black tights, lifting his chin high and accepting who he is. And I plan to take a class in person again someday, hopefully soon. Ballet brought me back to that bathroom floor and placed my future in my hands, gifting me the person I was meant to be and the tools to get there.