The Scraps

While I was fighting for chemical autonomy with self-medicated hormones, my heart remained trapped in an old, familiar cage: the belief that I was unlovable.

In late 2013, my friend Ronel, a beautician who had helped me with my physical transformation, called me late one night. We had grown close, and in my loneliness, I had mistaken her attention for safety.

“Jua,” she said, “I’m in love with you.”

I was shocked. I asked her if she understood what that meant, that she would be in a relationship with a woman. Then came the caveat. She told me she wanted me to experience sex before I transitioned fully. She wanted to sleep with me as I was.

I felt a coldness wash over me. This was not love; it was fetishization. She didn’t want Juanita; she wanted the exotic experience of the “in-between.” She wanted to access the very parts of my body that caused me the most dysphoria.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I would betray myself.” I tried to explain that my male anatomy was not a sexual organ to me; it was a wound. To use it in that way would be an act of self-harm.

It wasn’t just the dysphoria, though. There was a fundamental mismatch in how I viewed desire.

At the time, I described myself as asexual. I knew I was romantically interested in women; I yearned for their softness, their company, and their emotional intimacy. But I had absolutely no romantic interest in men, and I had no desire to be a man in bed for a woman.

This created a terrible impasse. The women who were interested in me, like Ronel and Anneke, were attracted to the “safe man” they saw. They wanted a boyfriend who would perform the standard male duties in the bedroom. I couldn’t do that.

So, I was stuck. I wasn’t gay, I wasn’t a straight man, and I wasn’t ready to be a trans woman. I was a romantic soul trapped in a celibate body, accepting “shadow arrangements” because I didn’t think I qualified for a full relationship.

But my loneliness was a powerful drug. Despite my refusal of sex, I stayed in the “relationship.” It became a shadow arrangement; we were friends in public, never acknowledging our bond, but we had “steamy” conversations on WhatsApp.

I realized later that I had the mentality of a stray dog. I walked around a world that didn’t want me, kicking me from every doorstep. So when someone offered me scraps, affection hidden in the dark, love without public recognition; I ate them gratefully. I allowed myself to be a secret because I thought being a secret was better than being nothing.

The Invitation

By August 2014, the hormones were working. My body was softening, my mind was clearing, and I was beginning to see the “stray dog” for what it was.

On the evening of Saturday, August 23, my phone beeped. It was a WhatsApp message from Amber, the friend I had made online through her page “Looking Through The Eyes Of A Lesbian.” We had been friends for two years, supporting each other through my cyberbullying nightmare and her chronic illness battles.

“Hi Jua. I have to talk to you about something important. Please let me know when we can Skype.”

My anxiety spiked. My history with friends, the betrayals by Estelle, the “Lekker Kekkel” fallout, had conditioned me to expect rejection. I assumed I had done something wrong, that I had said something “controversial” and was about to lose another friend. I set up my computer for the call, bracing for the worst.

When her face appeared, she looked anxious. She told me she was scared to ruin our friendship, but she couldn’t keep it to herself anymore.

“Jua,” she said, “I have feelings for you. I’ve had feelings for you for a while now.”

The Disclaimer

Her confession froze me. I wasn’t used to being chosen. I was used to being tolerated.

I felt I had to warn her. I had to give her the “transclaimer”, the list of defects I thought disqualified me from love. I had to make sure she knew what she was signing up for.

“Amber, I need to be honest,” I said. “I’ve never had sex. I’ve never been in a proper relationship. I hate the male part of my body so much that I don’t know if I can ever be intimate in that way.”

I waited for her to pull away. I waited for the disappointment I had seen in Anneke and Ronel when the reality of my dysphoria clashed with their desires.

Amber didn’t pull away. She looked at me through the screen, unwavering.

“I love all of you,” she said. “And you are all woman to me.”

In that moment, the stray dog died. I was being offered a feast.

The Graveyard of Arguments

That night, we didn’t just confess feelings; we negotiated the terms of our survival as a couple. We knew the distance between South Africa and the United States would be brutal. We knew people would doubt us.

I told her a story I had heard in church about an old man and his wife. The man had taken a young visitor to his backyard and pointed to a patch of earth filled with ice cream sticks. “This is the graveyard where we bury our arguments,” the old man had said. He explained that he and his wife promised never to go to bed angry. They buried their disagreements so they wouldn’t haunt the marriage.

Amber and I made that same pact. We agreed to build our own Graveyard of Arguments. We promised radical honesty. We promised not to let the sun go down on our anger.

“I want to tell the entire world,” she said near the end of the call.

I started to cry. “Do you know what that means to me?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“Because no one has ever been proud to say this is the person I love.”

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t a secret. I wasn’t a project or a curiosity. I was a partner. I ended things with Ronel shortly after. I couldn’t live on scraps anymore. I had tasted the feast.