How Perfume Gives Me Peace in My Genderfluidity

It’s summer, and the days stretch out like freshly washed sheets in front of us. It started in spring—something about the tiny yellow flowers pushing up through the dunes on the beach near our apartment. I’d take long walks alone, listening to the same few songs, each of them beating with my heart. My face had started to seem strange to me. After three years of taking testosterone, my jaw had grown stronger, the planes of my face squaring up. At first, I’d loved it, taking endless selfies—the embarrassing little curling starts of a beard included. Then something shifted. I started to feel a stranger to myself again, a strange ache in my chest when I looked back on my childhood, my teens, and the early years of my marriage. I wanted something I felt like I’d lost—something softer, but strong still. Something blooming and vibrant. It felt like a season changing, and I welcomed it.

I started to dust off the floral scents in my perfume collection. The gourmands too: their notes of burnt vanilla, the comforting, milky warmth of tonka. Usually, I would say that perfume shouldn’t be gendered at all, and it shouldn’t, but there was something in them I wanted to express. There was something blooming inside me, a feeling of expansion and turning a bend.

Then one day, I wore my old favorite, the one I’d worn when I first decided to transition to male: L’Ombre dans l’Eau. That scent of green things pushing through wet soil, the soft tang of rain on the air, or the stems of roses just lifted from the vase in the florist’s shop.

I’d put it on in preparation for praying salah, as Muslims are advised to do with perfume, and as I touched my forehead to the ground, something washed over me as startling as diving into a river. The scent, and the trembling openness of my heart, crystalised into something that shook me to the core. Pristine as a blade of grass, upright as a river reed, that scent of open eyes. I remembered things I’d left behind long ago. The days in Paris when I first felt that troubling restlessness, that feeling of reaching toward myself and finding manhood. Only this time, it was womanhood that called me. And both were right, somehow. In their places, clicked together like perfectly arranged tiles in a fountain. I felt myself bearing witness to myself. All the longing I’d felt refined and focused on what was right in front of me—an invitation to dive in and enter it as I would enter water, to be transformed. I remembered, suddenly, the bright flurry of a swan’s wings on the Seine when I was in Paris, longing for transformation.

When I rose, I felt a peace and glowing excitement come over me. I wanted to turn the corner, to try being a woman again. Not as some return to my “rightful” place, but a changing landscape, a meadow I wanted to run in. Manhood had given me so much—a deep, steady deliberateness like the sea. But it was time for something new, and womanhood was there for me, surprising me beyond words.

In the 2002 article “The Eros—and Thanatos—of Scents,” published in Sites: The Journal of Contemporary French Studies, Richard H. Stamelman talks about a woman wearing perfume as a troubling thing, a liminal being “at once a body and a soul, a presence and an absence.” It feels oddly right, I think, but isn’t that what she is always? Women are continually silenced, viewed so often only through the criterion of beauty, and that beauty is defined by men. Perfume ads attest to this, as does the very traditional, historically male world of French fashion.

But a woman wearing perfume is both silent and speaking, her words invisible and yet unignorable. Women of the eighties assailed passersby with Giorgio and Poison, the scent of tuberose—that unignorably fleshy, intimate, and declarative smell—unavoidably inhaled and known. And way back, in 1944: Bandit, a perfume that, as Alyssa Harad put it in her memoir Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride, “goes straight to the whip, taking no prisoners.” Composed by the irascible Germaine Cellier, the beautiful and foul-mouthed mother of modern perfume, Bandit is a command in the form of smoky leather, flowers, and musk, and—according to the Robert Piguet website—“the perfect fragrance for creating an aura of mischief.”

I wanted to turn the corner, to try being a woman again. Not as some return to my “rightful” place, but a changing landscape, a meadow I wanted to run in.

As summer set in—long, stretching days the texture of caramel, cigarettes next to jasmine trellises, secrets told late into the night—I dreamed, and I began to come home to the parts of my body that had caused me pain for so long. My breasts and hips, that I’d bound and hidden through the sleight of hand of cloth and line, became things that hinted at some other way of being, whether for a little while or for the rest of my life. I wanted to perfume them, run oil scented with orange blossom over their curves, show them off in dresses that all fell a little off my shoulders or in crisp linen suits nipped in at the waist. I kept my male self in sight, though—his messy hair, his impetuousness—nodding to him as he slowly receded, and I turned to meet the other side of my heart.

What I found was memory, something I’d always shied away from, afraid of what it told me—this time of the women I’ve been, whether the bride with her clinging cotton dresses or the dapper butch in sharp blazers and crisp shirts. And all of them, for once, for the first time, were welcome.

I worked my way backward and forward through time and the perfumes I’d worn over the years. The first perfume I returned to was Dior’s Dolce Vita. Worn in the early days of my engagement to my husband, it was a swoon of peaches and lily, cinnamon and rosewood. The first time I wore it, I said, “I smell like a bowlful of peaches on a summer afternoon under the leaves. I’ve arrived.” And it was like that summer—days of dreaming, swaying softly to “Torna a Surriento” in my room, my heart wide open, a table spread with fruit and wine. Where was that self, I thought as I wrestled with what my husband and I jokingly call “the Gender Feels.” Where had she gone?

Not that men can’t be just that, all sweet surrender, but there was a connection to something older there for me, wanting to be a bride—an ancient word, full of traditions both beautiful and suffocating. But it was joy I wanted, that line of Mary Oliver’s: “All my life I was a bride married to amazement.” The first time I married, I’d been the “bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” Maybe I was always going to be both, I thought, just as we all can be, only felt in the very flesh. But surely womanhood for me was not all surrender and sweetness. There needed to be something steely to it too. So I turned to the perfume I’d worn during the most difficult year of my life.

Mitsouko is one of those perfumes there’s no getting away from, when it comes to the history and lore of the perfume industry. It’s worn by men and women with equal grace and rightness. There’s a magnetic pull to it, a sense of the inevitable that awes and humbles. It’s the oak-moss note in it that does it for me—that prowl and murmur of the old gods in the heart of the forest, light clear as a bell ringing through the trees in autumn. I’d bought it blind, my decision made by pure faith in the story of it: Diaghilev used it to scent his curtains, and I imagined Nijinsky standing at the window as they rustled round him. After I bought it, a week later, a disaster struck my family that threatened to undo us.

Around that time, we went on a trip to the mountains—to clear our heads, to get away—and I wore Mitsouko walking up an escarpment to stand facing the wind, the valley around me white with mist. I took the measure of the horror we faced, and I steeled myself, breathing in a scent dignified as the ringing of a temple bell. When I made my way down again, I was changed into something stronger, straight-backed and ready.

But my first forays into perfume were clumsy and furtive: saving up money for single bottles of essential oils, though that was often out of reach, or macerating flowers in water or oil, before I knew a thing about distillation. But the most accessible kind of perfume for me—a child growing up in the urban sprawl of Johannesburg, far from gardens and too broke for health shops—was the deodorant aisle of the supermarket.

There’d be shelves of jewel-colored body sprays, marked “aloe fresh” or “decadent orchid,” many of them the watered-down versions of budget-friendly perfumes by Lentheric or Yardley. One of them, in a deep purple bottle with a harlequin print and labeled with an elegant careless scrawl, was Venice. I remember thinking it felt like a gift from God. Hadn’t I pored over photographs of the Piazza San Marco, daydreamed about going there in time for Carnevale? And here was the promise of it, the dark glamour of it, the handwriting on the label seeming to belong to some future self, a woman who breezily wrote postcards in cafés, turning to watch the pigeons fly up, casting beating shadows on the ancient stone.

The smell itself stunned me too. Metallic and spare, like cold water, before a bouquet of tumbled, bruised flowers breathes through it. That’s all I can remember of how it smelled. But I remember how it made me feel. Sophisticated and aloof, just breezing through before moving on to places more exotic and glamorous than Johannesburg, South Africa.

Maybe I was always going to be both, I thought, just as we all can be, only felt in the very flesh.

Now, almost two decades later, I can’t find Venice anywhere online, except for a couple of short, amateur reviews on blogs. It’s nowhere on Fragrantica, that encyclopedia of modern perfume. The only image of the bottle I can find is on the designer’s portfolio website, which hasn’t been updated in over twenty years. But I can close my eyes and smell it still.

One of the blogs mentions that this scent isn’t for anyone under the age of sixteen. Of course thirteen-year-old me loved it then. And there is something about that longing—for more, for wisdom, for adventure, for escape—that feels so much a part of my womanhood. I was a girl covering her arms with swirling henna patterns, hiding words I learned and loved in the red lace. I was a girl missing her stop on the bus because I was engrossed in Jane Eyre—“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me”—wearing a scent that was cold water lapping at old stone, piled flowers bruised by the sun on the balconies of Venice. She’s there, still, though I haven’t heard her voice in years. It’s still clear as air. Still urgent as breath.

Coming through that journey back, something settled into its place inside me. All of this is me too. There is no opposite to reconcile. I have been soft, tender, brutal, forbearing, wild. I’ve been both bride and groom, have loved and lived as both, since both lived in me. And that feeling when I knelt with my head on the ground, that expansive invitation, was a way of saying, “Yes, why not? Why not have all of it?” I’ve declared myself on so many sides of so many lines. Maybe now I can rest easy in the journey. Again, I follow my own shadow, I introduce myself to the mirror, and the air I walk through tells me my name.

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