![Willow Wilson sits on a chair in her living room on Friday, April 5, 2024, at her apartment in Columbia. When Wilson was selecting her name, she said she originally had nearly 100 names to choose from on a Word document. For a while, Wilson said she almost committed to the name “Rumor” because it had a “cool, sultry” and “femme fatale” feel. “But I eventually settled on the Willow just because I think Willow Wilson is such a distinctive name,” Wilson said. “It's kind of like [a] Peter Parker, Clark Kent kind of vibe. … Not to sound too egotistical, but that is a very main character name, and I kind of liked that. And I liked that it was very earthy and crunchy and kind of, you know, hippie, a little bit. So, I think Willow was kind of like, where I was like, ‘Yeah, I like that: Willow Wilson.’ That definitely sounds like a lady who's about town and making the most of her life.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/b420262/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1750x1234+0+0/resize/840x592!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F41%2F05%2F730cbb9e4211a4e6e37f185c7caf%2F20240405-bas-queer-joy-willow-wilson-0019.jpg)
Willow Wilson is a transgender woman in her mid-20s and spoke about the process of learning and unlearning how to be a woman during her transition.
Alphabet Soup shares LGBTQ+ Missourians’ stories through portraiture and personal narratives.
Willow Wilson: It was definitely a lot of trial and error, I would say.
A very good example of this was that I hated – well, I still do hate having facial hair. There are definitely some ladies who can pull it off. I do not feel like one of those ladies – and I tried using Nair on my face because I was like, “Well, it removes hair and that's what it’s supposed to do,” and it ended extremely poorly and that was very much a teaching moment.
But I would say that's kind of how it usually goes. It's a lot of trial and error usually.
And this is why I would definitely recommend to any person who's kind of like, in like the same situation, definitely meet other queer people – because they will be able to tell you things like, “No girl, don't use Nair on your face, you probably shouldn't be using Nair at all. Body hair is natural, I promise,” and things like that.
It was a lot of failures, but I would say, you know, more successes than failures.
I think a lot of it was sort of like unlearning that sense of shame I had about, like, every aspect of myself.
I sort of used to tell myself that if I just, like, kept quiet, you know, put myself in a ball and just never talked about myself or interacted with any of the things that make me happy – then I would be safe. For whatever that meant.
So, a part of that was sort of like, learning that I was definitely going to have to come out of that ball if I wanted to, sort of, be the person I wanted to be.
Because it takes like, honestly, an unfair amount of courage to be able to be like, “Okay, this is me. A lot of people are certainly going to have opinions about it, but this is the best route for me.”
I have had to have difficult conversations with people – mostly my parents – I've had to like cut ties with family members.
I've had to change sort of how I do my daily life, just to kind of be healthier, so I can do hormones, things like that.
And so, I think a lot of it was, sort of like, me gaining the confidence to, sort of like, do those things and kind of have the resolve to be like, I'm not going to just be lazy about this. I'm not just going to be sad and miserable forever. I need to, like, actually do something about this.”
Which just made me more decisive and made me like more confidence and more sure of myself – that I have a right to exist and, like, be myself without it being like an inherently awful thing like I used to think.
So, I definitely think that, like, my transition was definitely like fueled by my sense of, like, self-determination and just resolve to actually, like, make my life better and more fulfilling than it was before.
