1991 Ski Fun Barbie

I started collecting Barbies my junior year of college. It started after I went on a three day Trixie Mattel YouTube bender. The infamous drag queen has a massive collection and made multiple hours worth of videos showing said collection off. I don’t know why I spend so long watching those videos but in the weeks leading up to my birthday, I watched each one upwards of fifty  times. Something about them enchanted me.

            On my twenty-first birthday, I bought myself a bottle of Crown Royal Peach, poured the whole bottle into a gallon of sweet tea from the 7/11 across the street and drank the entire thing in a single sitting. I woke up two days later to an eBay shipping notification telling me my in box 1991 Ski Fun Barbie had been express delivered to the university housing office where I also worked.

            I was so hungover that I walked the entire way to my mailbox with my eyes squeezed shut and fell asleep back in my dorm room with the Barbie cradled in my arms.

 1997 Movin’ Groovin’ Barbie

I don’t actually remember owning any Barbies as a child. I’m sure I did, just knowing the people who raised me, but for the life of me I can’t pull any memories of them. I remember having a giant winter themed Bratz playhouse that I convinced my father to buy for me but I can’t remember any of the dolls themselves.

            A girl I went to high school with had all of her old dolls in a plastic tub from the container store at the mall and I remember distantly wondering what happened to all of my old toys. I wouldn’t have been very old when we got rid of them. My bet is that I was in the first or second grade, right around when I began to think of myself as a singular entity and began my long and treacherous bucking of girlhood. Maybe they got thrown away with my bows and dresses and love of the color pink. Maybe I burned them myself in a fit of childhood terrorism, leaving a scorching mark on the back patio. Maybe I cried and cried for hours, inconsolable unless my dad sang Richie Valens to me like how he did when I was a baby.

            I don’t know what happened to those dolls, but when I opened my second eBay package and looked down at the neon yellow and blue of the Barbie within, I thought I heard her whispering,

            “What changed?”

1996 Winter Renaissance Barbie

The next Barbie was beautiful. She looked like the 90’s approximation for a white Siberian princess, all frozen sky blue fabric and brilliant white cuffs and massive skirts. I spent hours staring at her, eventually putting her high on display in the staff lounge at the summer camp I worked at, just so everyone else would have a chance to look at her.

Her little smile followed me around, asking me the same question I had been asking myself for months.

 What did change? I.. don’t know. One day, I was a little girl and the next, I was sobbing in the bathroom, vomit still dripping down my chin. Somewhere in between, the things I loved turned against me and with them, it felt like everything in the world had. It became a shackle made of ribbon and doll heads.

During middle school, one of the other girls spread a rumor that I was a lesbian. I denied it, over and over and over and over and over. Then the burning eyes of my best friend lured me in and I lost all sense of up and down, wrong and right, boy and girl. All I knew was that I wanted her to kiss me, over and over and over and over and over, until I forgot everything else.

She held my hand in the hallway once and in that moment, I prayed that God would turn me into a boy, if only so people would stop staring at me.

God didn’t listen, so I took matters into my own hands.

Sophomore year of high school, I would beg my theater teacher to let me play a boy, any boy, in any play. I didn’t know why I wanted that so much. I was feminine, wearing black miniskirts to school and compulsively brushing my long blonde  hair. I had fully rejected the tomboy I embodied as a child, in favor of gold bangles.

People would stare at me, a girl in velvet heels in the hallway and for a moment, I mistook my fear for power.

Again and again, I got told no. I didn’t understand why no one would let me. Eventually, I asked one of the seniors.

She grimaced. “You just seem so….excited by the idea. I don’t really get it? Like, you’re such a pretty girl that it’s just weird that you keep wanting to be a boy. You can’t be both, you know?”

“The boy parts are just better.” I said softly.

She patted my shoulder. “The girl parts are good too. Just…calm down a bit, alright? That's all I’m saying.”

Okay.

Okay.

1991 NBA Trail Blazer Barbie

There had to be a balance. I was sure of it. My peers thought I was weird for being so feminine. My peers thought I was strange for wanting to play boys. They didn’t like my femininity. They didn’t like my masculinity.

I was told all of my life that I had to choose one. I thought I had chosen the right one but nothing I did was right.

So I stopped trying.

I tell everyone I “officially began my transition” during my senior year but it wasn’t a beginning of something new as much as it was an end of something old.

I could never find the center of the seesaw so I unscrewed the entire fucking thing.

It took a few years before the dust settled. I finished high school, I got into college and I moved across the state. I didn’t outright tell anyone. I updated my instagram bio, I introduced myself to new people with a different name and that was it. I didn’t change my clothes or my hair or anything else about myself. It was still blonde hair and big jackets and black pants and eyeliner under big glasses. It became more comfortable and fine and everyone stared (again) but when I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail and grinned, the person in my bedroom mirror finally laughed.

1999 Bowling Barbie

I’m unrecognizable as that person now, five years removed from it.

When I gel my hair back in the mornings, I look more like Ken. Bright button ups over white tank tops and no make up in sight. I treat my girlfriend like a princess, buy her tinned fish and soft clothes, and she loves me for it. I love when she talks and she laughs when I sing. I go bowling on Friday nights and when I text her my score, she tells me she’s proud of me, no matter how low it is.

Late at night, I wander out of my room and just stare at the Barbies on my shelves. They are displayed proudly and happily and when I stroke my fingers across the smooth plastic windows, I know that I've never been this happy before.

Beck is an emerging writer from the PNW who grew up in the suburbs around Portland and has spent the entirety of their adult life in Oregon. They are
a lesbian who loves to play with gender expressions and tries to insert that expression into their writing. They like knitting, Batman, and writing and that is honestly mostly it. Their favorite flavor of Kombucha is the Brew Dr. Blood Orange Ginger.