13 Nov 2025

Fit check

Tal Lavin’s wardrobe metamorphosis

Today: Tal Lavin, author of Wild Faith.

Issue No. 442

New Clothes

by Tal Lavin

Once I finally, tremblingly, crossed the threshold of the closet and came out as trans, one of the first things I had to do, it turns out, is turn right back in and buy new clothes.

At least, this is my experience as a hesitant, newly minted trans guy, who’s been relentlessly rehashing all the reasons why I can’t come out for the last eight years or so. Living under an administration that seems poised to foreclose all opportunity for HRT has forced my hand, but all those obstacles I’d been obsessing over didn’t go away—they just seemed, suddenly, less urgent than the overwhelming realization that if I didn’t act now, I might never be able to at all.

One of the big shadows of the closet was the realization that, at a stately 5 feet two-and-three-quarter inches, with a paunchy and generous physique, I would never be an Adonis, as a man. All that hopeless longing to be a man—those thousands of hours thinking about it and carefully not thinking about it, dissociating from my own body as often as possible, going hunch-shouldered in sacklike dresses I didn’t have to think about or look in the mirror to don—were offset by the realization that, as a man, I’d be a rather goofy one. Surgical miracles notwithstanding (and they are often on my mind), I’d never look like an action hero, or anyone’s ideal Grindr pick, or the type of guy you’d salivate over from the corner of a bar. I’d be short and pudgy with a prow of a nose, as I have ever been, only somehow even shorter, as a man, and the thought made me cringe. Considering such radical changes to one’s body makes one all too conscious of its shortcomings. How to make the deliberate choice to shuck off one gender and acquire another, without ever coming within spitting distance of any sort of masculine ideal? I may want to be a man, but I’m not swift as a coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, with all the strength of a raging fire. And I post every thought before I can remotely become as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.