My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt

Does difference in taste mean difference in love?

This week at FFJ, we’re trying something new: our first-ever serialized story, told in three parts, released week by week. In this powerful and intimate memoir, writer Lira Green¹ traces her experiences of transition, first love, and heartbreak as a young trans woman in an American college town, and the role played by food along the way. In her story, salt — in the form of crispy dill pickles — emerges as a symbol of gender, desire, and the aching tension between difference and belonging in a hostile world.

At a moment when trans rights, in the US and beyond, are under violent attack, Lira’s writing offers a moving portrait of what it’s like to long for love — a quintessential human experience of anxiety, uncertainty, desire, and elation — in a body that is highly politicized, often misunderstood, and increasingly maligned. Through this portrait, Lira sheds light on day-to-day aspects of the trans experience that many of us might not be familiar with, pushing us to think of how we can find belonging in our bodies and with each other.

If you enjoy this story, we and Lira invite you to support trans life beyond the page by donating to Trans Lifeline or another organization in your area that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities.

Until next week,

ZJ&IJbV

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As Lira Green traces her shifting relationship to food as a trans lesbian — through transition, first courtship, and heartbreak — she is faced with questions about how gender shapes taste. Do our bodies crave the same things? And when we do, do we taste them the same?

By Lira Green for our BODY issue

Part I: Pickle Cravings

Unlike most butterflies, my metamorphosis began on the cold, mouldering tiles of a women’s bathroom. I was there for a quick shower before dawn, as always, hiding from the cis students I’d been hired to tutor so I could tend to my idiosyncratic body in peace. I climbed eight flights of stairs to reach the quietest bathroom in my dorm, every single morning.

One morning, something felt different. Stepping out of the frigid water and reaching for my towel, I gave myself a good once-over, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The sink mirror didn’t reveal any more than the darkness beyond the room’s sole window, so I resigned myself to my routine, still confused.

I reached up to fix my bangs. The next moment, I completely shattered. My hair was so soft, the softest thing I’d ever touched, and it was so sudden and different it felt like raking my fingers through someone else’s scalp. I trembled so much I accidentally grazed my cheeks, and realized I felt like satin. Even my hands had changed shape; so much smaller and slimmer.

A long time passed as I stood at that mirror, treasuring little strands of straight brown hair and gently stroking my face. I wondered what was going to happen to me. I had no idea that taking estrogen would make such a change in four days; what else was in store? My doctor had merely said that after months or years, it would “feminize the shape” of my body, I’d “likely grow breasts,” and I might notice “emotional and psychological changes.”

What would psychological changes look like? How much of our personalities come down to hormones? It was obvious that I was finally restoring my long-neglected body to something that would have always felt natural, but I’d spent my formative years attempting to live with a body that didn’t. Was I about to discover that everything in my life had merely been a coping mechanism? And how different are men and women, after all?

All I knew was that my body had never overpowered me before. It felt like absolutely anything could happen to me, and I wasn’t sure how prepared I'd be, even though I welcomed the changes. I’d never heard a man talk about feeling that way, having this fear of one's own body. I didn’t feel entirely in control anymore, and my mind wandered to the way cis women would talk about the whims of their bodies, like they were complaining about the weather.

Did I understand them, now? And if I did, was anyone ever going to believe me?

***

Online forums had many colourful ideas about what might happen to me next. People argued about whether it was possible that taking estrogen could make you shorter. Some, to my growing distress, delighted in jokes about the gentler “mouthfeel” trans women could expect certain soft parts of our bodies to take on, and others were convinced hormone replacement therapy (HRT) changed trans women’s sexual orientation. That stung. I was a woman and could only like women, no matter how hard I tried. The implication that my sexuality was something wrong with me that’d be ironed out with time seemed to lurk behind every post on the subject.

However, I did have one thing to look forward to, one thing that everyone seemed to be in total agreement on: trans women on HRT become obsessed with eating pickles. After starting hormones, I was assured I would be helpless for the snap of a crisp dill spear.

Illustration by Zoë Johnson.

What a bizarre detail. Pickles? I thought. Like with pregnancy cravings? Butterflies eat milkweed as they prepare for metamorphosis, and apparently, I was fated to eat pickles.

The whole thing was strange. Food is rarely mentioned in trans spaces, where discussions more often revolve around the grim facts of survival. But in these forums, I kept seeing excited trans women discovering together that they had started longing for pickles. I found it strangely endearing, in the same way as posts I’d seen in lesbian communities about women baking bread for each other as courtship gifts.

But something about it also didn’t sit well. Pickle cravings felt like one more thing I couldn’t have in common with cis people. Worse, salty food seemed somehow masculine — it suggested steaks, sausages, bags of chips illustrated with flying sparks and explosions. Salt reminded me of Lot's wife, the biblical figure who was turned into a pillar of salt as Sodom and Gomorrah burned, and of The Price of Salt, and so many more books where the lesbians meet horrible fates at the end.

I didn’t want every meal I’d have with other women to become a performance of difference. Food was supposed to bond people, not separate them.

***

One week after my revelations in the dorm showers, I burrowed into a scarf and emerged into the wide atrium of the campus cafeteria, full of greetings and quick glances at the familiar faces around me. My classmates liked me, but I still preferred to eat alone, away from prying eyes. I picked up some eggs and hash, and one of the green apples that I made sure to eat every day. It was an old trick I learned while doing voice training for my transition: the tartness of the apple would make me salivate, which kept my voice from drying out and going flat.

I breathed in the smell of my food as I approached the caféteria exit and put my palm to the heavy metal door, as always. But this time, it didn’t budge. My arm ached, my plate teetered in my other hand, and even though my arm was twinging with strain, I realized I couldn't push any harder.

I’d been warned that HRT would cause me to lose muscle mass. I hadn’t been told it would happen all at once, and I was so stunned I just stood there, taking measured breaths. A man came up from behind me, and an instinct rippled through me that I was trapped, that I needed to get away from him. I braced my feet, put my elbow to the door, and threw my whole weight into it, shoving my way outside.

Wandering towards my usual spot on the patio, I frowned, taking in the clear autumn skies and the tang of fallen leaves. Losing so much strength so quickly was frightening, especially as I was now getting catcalled and hit on by random men for the first time in my life. A few days earlier, when I was eating lunch, a man sat down by me and tried to charm me, leaning over the table and agreeing with whatever I said. That evening, someone I knew pulled me aside to warn me that I had been talking to a known lech.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that door. I’d need to take self-defence classes, exercise more, and be more careful where I went until I got used to my shifting body. Thinking of an article I’d read about a recent panic over trans athletes, I almost choked on the irony.

Breakfast was usually the only break I allowed myself, so I took the time to watch sailboats drift past the cliffs as I nibbled on cubes of cantaloupe. I’d always been a slow eater, treating food as an opportunity to rest and savour each flavour. Dysphoria had once dissociated me from my body so badly that I felt like I was sleepwalking every moment of my life, yet when I sat down to enjoy a meal, for a few precious minutes, my senses would be in complete harmony.

Out of a haze of memories that didn’t feel quite real, I could still recall cherished meals from my past with a rare clarity, like I'd read about them in a book rather than lived them. I remembered foraged blackberries from the trail by my childhood home, my grandmother's rice pudding, and the fancy cheesecake I'd had at a tea house when I first moved to a real city, even when I could barely grasp onto much else from that time.

So when I found myself painfully full before halfway finishing my plate and realized I was starting to lose my taste for breakfast meats, I felt a pang of fear. When my tastes finished changing, who would I be?

***

“Lira!”

A woman with warm grey eyes and a gentle cloud of light-brown curls reached towards me, offering the hilt of a rapier. I accepted with a laugh, curling my fingers around the handle and sitting cross-legged on the waxy gym floor. My two companions, Alex and Elena, were classmates from my major whom I’d brought along to the fencing practice my university held every Tuesday night. I told anyone who asked that I was doing research for my fantasy novel, but in truth, I was just terrified of how weak I'd become and wanted some company as I relearned how to move in my body.

Elena was enormously pleased to have found a sword for me. She’d remembered my disappointment at having to wait to borrow one the week before, and she’d somehow managed to convince our instructors to set one aside for me. I was delighted. As I weighed the blade in my hand, Elena smoothed down the frills of her skirt and leaned over to talk to Alex, who was short and athletic, her hair cut down to the scalp. Her eyes were quick to alight on any source of irony, and she was so fierce at practices that it was like we were fighting for our lives.

I adored my new friends. They were intimidating, though, because they were both cis. I certainly didn’t have any advantage over them at fighting — Alex was a head shorter than me and still regularly thrashed me. But no matter how natural our friendship felt, I instinctively feared that I was only ever one misstep away from losing it all.

It had been half of my life since I’d had any female friends. As a teenager, I was disgusted by the chest-thumping of the boys and humiliated by the attention of the girls, which only reinforced a male identity I never wanted and made my longing for female companionship cruelly ironic. Back then, I rebuffed everyone who approached me. But now I was a woman among women, and in completely new territory. Things could be different.

I held my sword aloft to check the blade, and Alex and Elena raised their weapons as well. “Yours is the longest!” Elena declared, proud to have found me one that matched my height.

“This is how women compare dicks,” Alex laughed as we brought our blades back down and ran our fingers over the ornate twists of metal in the hand guards. I shivered, uncomfortably aware of the lengths I went to pass. My friends sometimes talked about their periods, and these conversations always made me feel confused and pitifully barren.

But when Elena and I pulled on our armour and faced each other, raising our swords to signal the start of the match, I was completely at home. I was agile, but she attacked quickly each time my sword whiffed by her head. I stalked around her in circles, nearly tripping over my skirt, and she cautiously advanced, still wearing her three-inch heels. By the time we ended up in a tie, we were already giggling.

As we collapsed to the floor, our armour strewn around us and our swords resting on our knees, I started to gush. Elena was such an impressive fighter, but she wouldn’t hear it. “It's not fair,” she panted, “how you've suddenly gotten crazy good in the week I've been gone!”

“I heard ‘not fair,’ what's the problem?” My instructor had wandered over in case we needed a referee, but Elena and I were laughing too hard to respond.

“They're just kissing up to each other,” Alex told her, before turning back to us.

“I really like Lira,” Elena said, quite seriously. Alex gave us a long, strange look.

“You two are so close, I’m envious,” Alex said, slowly shaking her head. “Just kidding — but I also kind of am.”

Later that night, as I finished my last fight, Elena called out to me from the bleachers. I leaned on my sword, breathing raggedly and sweating off the foundation I’d carefully layered to hide the slight shadows along my jaw, and as I turned to look, Elena blew me a kiss.

I froze in place. I had heard so much about how much more affectionate women are than men, but... blowing kisses, really? I was a little taken aback, terrified that if I didn’t hit just the right notes of playful banter in response, I’d be ejected from womanhood before I’d even begun.

After all, Elena had said she was straight. Frequently.

“She didn’t accept my kiss!” Elena complained to Alex, still giggling but genuinely sounding a little hurt.

“What’s going on?” I asked, my voice a little higher than usual.

Alex snorted. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

***

Another night, I was driving my friends back to campus for fencing practice when Alex decided we should stop for a burger. As we crawled through the dimly lit drive-through, a fear bubbled up inside of me. What if I ordered wrong? Was I eating like a cis woman? I was so far outside my comfort zone that I was taking even absurd worries seriously. I ordered the same thing as Alex, but forgot about the food in a fit of self-consciousness, leaving it uneaten in the cup holder next to me. Elena, as always, insisted that she wasn’t hungry.

“So, you’re bi, right?” Alex asked from the passenger seat, searching for my eyes in the rearview mirror. I bit my lip, and Elena looked on from the back with interest.

“I’m a lesbian,” I said, slowly turning the Outback onto the road by our campus. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever said that out loud.

“Oh, cool, so we’re all gay people,” Alex said, then quickly glanced back. “Besides Elena.”

Back home, I ate the burger, the bun soggy and the pickles cold; I didn’t want to waste it. Elena was unusually talkative over text that night, and gradually steered the conversation around to queerness, asking me about how I knew I was a lesbian, and if I’d been confused. I didn't really know what to say. I felt like a fraud. How was I supposed to have a lesbian awakening if I didn't even know I was a woman until I was halfway through my teens?

My response was vague and confusing as I tried to figure out what I should consider my awakening, but Elena was happy with my answers anyway. She told me, in an aside, that she was a lesbian too, but closeted, only telling close friends. I was beyond honoured, but as I drifted off to sleep that night, I wondered if I was the right person to trust with something so enormous, and which Elena was clearly so worried about. I decided to try my best to be worthy.

***

As the snow melted and the semester waned, so did Elena’s interest in fencing, though she kept tagging along to practice. I worried she’d feel neglected, so after my bouts, I sat with her against the bleachers and kept her company as she sketched. Things had changed after Elena came out to me, and we started texting regularly, nearly every day, sometimes on and off for hours. I was surprised at how easy it was to talk to her and how happy she was with my company. She was perceptive, witty, and charmingly opinionated.

The moments on the sidelines became more interesting than the fights. I learned that Elena kept a notepad document on her phone filled with scathing reviews of books she’d read, and that any dog or cat she encountered immediately worshipped her. I watched in bewilderment one day as someone’s dog came up to the bleachers and nuzzled her.

“Aww, he’s so stupid,” she said in dulcet tones that made it sound like the sweetest thing I’d ever heard. For some reason, this was how she always praised animals, her gentle stroking touch along their fur betraying her affection, making me smile. “Stupid idiot.”

My friend started to take shape in my imagination as something complex and wonderful. There was a surprising symmetry in our relationship. Elena’s fears about being a lesbian mirrored my fears about being trans, and we could talk to each other about things we were reluctant to explore with most others. She was, in so many ways, the best friend I’d longed for since I was a child.

***

Classes ended, and I returned home. My tastes had already shifted enormously — I was eating less than half as much as before, had lost most of my taste for meat, and now craved earthy, complex flavours, and oddly, eggs. I mastered every egg recipe I could — boiled eggs that peeled effortlessly, fried eggs with lacy brown edges and jammy yolks, egg fried rice with separated yolks and whites as bright as summer — and it soothed me.

And, of course, I craved pickles, too.

It had been a long time since I’d been in the kitchen. When I was little, I spent most of my time with my mother, cooking, baking, or gardening, and took to it all so passionately that my father worried I was gay. I was good at cooking; it made me feel independent and capable. Indulging the senses, breathing in the smells of the kitchen, was when I felt most real. Now that I was using the food I cooked to literally build myself a new body, the experience felt genuinely profound.

By then, the transformations my body had gone through were almost unbelievable, and each morning, I’d wake up to a miracle. The feeling of my body against the sheets had changed, and my whole sense of myself was altered. I felt lighter, softer, and my weight was distributed differently. I surprised myself every time my breasts pressed into my pillow. Little movements I made were strangely fluid, and sure enough, I actually had become an inch shorter. Things felt right, at last. Just lying in bed as the sun filtered in and feeling the way my blanket brushed against my ankles as I moved was enough to fill me with contentment and peace.

Incredibly, I’d stopped mentally separating myself and my body. If my foot touched something, I was touching it. Until that moment, I’d been feeling like I was piloting my body as a vehicle. But if I was my body, I slowly realized, then when people looked at my body, they were looking at me.

I cowered in my blankets. My desires, which had declined as dramatically as my appetite, were returning, too, and the recognition of my sexuality was overwhelming. I still loved other women — but it felt different, now, more intense, more emotional, more personal.

As I plodded through gentle fantasies, which now included my own body, I gradually came to realize what I wanted most was to eat and be eaten. The tenderness of being tasted by a lover, the gentle lift of someone's tongue against me — the idea of these things made my whole body thrum with vulnerability. I’d never hackled at this before, never felt these washes of warmth which sent my head rolling back into my pillow. Everything — every single thing — had to be learned over again, and I wanted help.

Two ironies stabbed me. I didn't have a vulva. And even if I got one, there was that nasty rumour I'd read once, deep in some forgotten forum — was it really true that the surgery would make me taste horrible? It was surely just a vicious little lie; my own transition had already disproved dozens of those. But the thought of looking up at a lover's face only to watch her features tighten with disgust —

Those were nights when I couldn't sleep.

📺 Stay tuned for Part II of Lira’s story, coming to your inbox next week!

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Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk.

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If this piece struck you, please consider supporting a local organization that advocates for trans and nonbinary communities! Often understaffed and underfunded, these groups are vital, and if you've been feeling helpless, there is always meaningful work to be done if you're willing to learn about your local support network.

You can also help by donating to the Trans Lifeline project, which operates a hotline for trans people to speak safely to other trans people if in crisis. And if you have trans or nonbinary loved ones, a hot meal can work wonders in dark times, when cooked with love.

1. Given the personal nature of the story, Lira writes here under a pen name, but we’ve loved the chance to get to know her and we’re grateful that she has chosen FFJ as a home for her words.