CW: transphobic microaggressions

If I knew even a tiny bit less chemistry than I know now, I could be convinced that bread is leavened through divine intervention. God comes in through the kitchen door and without getting flour on her suede jacket, she makes the dough rise with just one look. Of course, God is lacto-fermentation and probably has a nicer jacket than the one I’m giving her in my mind’s eye, but no one really knows what the leaven does when the kitchen lights are off for the eight to twelve hours it needs to do its work.

I started baking bread to reconnect with my body, once I realized that the person I convinced myself I was wasn’t who I was at all. I dove headfirst into baker’s percentages and dough formulas and emerged a year and change later with a heart that doubled in size, tender ribs, a lot less hair, and a significant number of crumbs between the pages of my journal.

I’m knuckle-deep in leaven when my roommate, holding a tub of yogurt and a spoon licked to streaks, tells me she admires me for being comfortable in transitional periods. I’m learning a lot from you, she says, wiping the corners of her mouth. She puts the yogurt back in the fridge and leaves me in the kitchen, rubbing flour between my fingers. I’ve built a dough this morning from all-purpose bread flour, spelt, rye, and whole wheat. The proofing container will sit on the counter for a two-hour autolyze next, during which I’ll read or sweep or stand in the pantry or listen to four-tone trumpet music while staring at the ceiling. Lockdown has been ideal for baking—as evidenced by the flour and yeast shortages in late March and April—and for honing the craft I’ve been working on for nearly a year.

As I’m dozing off in the six p.m. near-darkness with my timer counting down, I pick at the grit of flour lining my cuticles while squinting at the ceiling fan in my bedroom. I’m feeding this being, I think, as I flip onto my stomach. Wrangling the mess and disaster of the breadmaking process has made me comfortable with expecting less than success and has taken the fatality out of screwing up and starting over. Sinking my hands into something wild and living makes me confident that I can form and shape a growing thing – first the bread, then myself. In my backpack sits a prescription for a transdermal testosterone patch, two milligrams per night, a tiny dose, low and slow. It's a diagnosis of an endocrine disorder because there wasn't enough testosterone in my bloodstream to begin with. The paper’s creases deepen every day. Shaping a living being is hard using controlled substances, and is much, much easier when all you need to use is flour, water, salt, time, and your hands.

There are ways I use my hands to shape myself, like when I massage the tenderness out of my ribs after a day of binding or when I lock fingers with the people I'm dating so they won't try to touch the parts of my body that I wish I could take off and store under my bed. Often, they lack the vocabulary to ask me about my gender and sometimes I hope that they don't ask so that I don't tell them too much, so I don't change my mind, so that my dysphoria doesn't lock my jaw shut and I say it's okay, it's okay if you misgender me to your friends and your family, it's okay, it's okay.

Really, your patience has transformed you, my roommate reminds me when we meet in the kitchen a few hours later. I’m pinching salt into the dough that’s puffed up significantly and she has a baby carrot dangling from between her lips. You don’t shut down from discomfort anymore, she says. I run my hand under warm water and fold the bread four times, once every ninety degrees, using the outside of my palm to shape the slick dough into a round envelope. Thanks, I say. I appreciate it. She bites down and nods with a crunch, then turns on her heel and returns to her room.

There are times I do shut down from discomfort, out of sight of my roommate, usually during a period when I leave the bread-baking to professionals. During those darker times I steel myself to leave the controlled environment I’ve engineered for gender-euphoric safety and I brace myself for misgendering and mistakes. Abandoning one vacuum of tenderness for a simulacrum of another, comprised of family and friends who don’t quite get it yet. You’re still a girl to me, they say, and my jaw locks shut, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay until it unlocks and I slide the prescription across the dining table or crumple it up. Maybe I’m not shutting down but proving to myself that growth can withstand the wild fluctuation of environments, temperatures, gentleness.

I return to the kitchen every half hour, checking on the gluten development, folding and prodding and sniffing the dough for signs of progress. I’m heartened to know that this bread-induced patience has made its way to large numbers of people around the world, in varying grades of intensity and earnestness. I’m thinking about all of the new aspiring sourdough mavens poring over endless articles and guides about the right way to stretch and fold a dough or posting detailed analyses of their starter’s smell to online forums dedicated to pandemic bread-baking. I’m thinking about the seasoned bakers rolling their eyes and getting more comfortable with smell- and poke- testing their dough and leaving numbers out of the game altogether. I’m thinking about God and her suede jacket and how, even though she can make dough rise with just one look, she makes us patient, makes us figure out the chemistry, makes us leave our containers on the counter for eight to twelve hours and wait.