Ladies, Gentlemen, and Everyone in Between

The street behind my apartment building shares its facing sidewalks with clustered hardware stores, coffee kiosks, and motor-cycles. Mothers hold the hands of their children during the day and men smoke hookah pipes by their shops at night. In need of electronic supplies, I once made my way to one of these stores only familiar to me by sight. Two men by the counter took their time to help me find what I needed, and, later throughout our exchange of dialogue, they asked me “Shou Esmak Lzghir?” (What is your name? -addressed to a man-).
My baggy sweatpants and binded chest did not allow their eyes to pick-up on any missing or present bulge that would indicate my sex. Instead, the vendors focused on my appearance, my posture, the fact that I was unaccompanied at night in a hardware store, and completely disregarded the pitch of my voice. They therefore believed I was a man. Without hesitating I firmly answered,“Mohamad”, the name of my dad.
I continued to be greeted as one of the “boys” from the area, and, as I carefully accessed this man cave and shared new body language with others, it felt like trespassing. I had to keep up with this act without allowing them to realize that something was not right. That the gender they saw me as was not in fact aligned with what they believed was in my pants. But that did not happen. I kept embodying what was closest to my understanding of a heteronormative man, and in that moment, I was, in fact, a man.