Once, I wanted a body long and lean, all bird-boned lightness. When I looked in the mirror, I expected on some level to see sharp features and steep angles and was startled every time by softness and curves. I envied the angular androgyny of some of my friends. I’ve come to accept that this is simply not my physiology. I am wide-hipped and broad-shouldered, heavy-boned and solid; even trimmed of excess fat, I won’t have the lean slender lines that aesthetically appeal to me.
I realized, as I began to mold my body through movement and nutrition into something more to my liking, that I didn’t want to be insubstantial or waifish. I realized that I liked having substance and solidity. When I began systematic bodyweight strength training, building heavy layers of muscle, I found that I felt increasingly at home in my skin. I developed an awareness and command of my body, my movements and limbs, that I didn’t have prior to strength training.
Rough-legged hawk is in the Buteo genus, heavy-bodied raptors with broad wings and a penchant for scavenging so that they’re called buzzards in much of Europe rather than hawks. This is in contrast with the Accipiter genus, quick lighter-framed raptors, goshawks and sparrowhawks, sometimes referred to as “true hawks”. Rough-legged hawk soars and sometimes hovers. Rough-legged hawk is not quick and agile enough to hunt most birds on the wing, but rather hunts rodents in an open field from the vantage of a high perch, launching from perch to prey.
There is substance to rough-legged hawk, weight and solidity and strength. To be buteo is to be a heavy bird. I want power in my limbs, I want heavy muscle, I want to be all controlled movement and potential forcefulness. The more physical strength I develop, the less dysphoria I seem to feel: gender dysphoria, body dysphoria, species dysphoria… they intersect in this instance. I appreciate GreyGhost’s point about flight as an expression of strength, weight as a stabilizer in flight, gravity as both ally and opponent. It resonates for me regarding buteo as well.
I express and manifest hawk in other physical ways as well: things that ease my discomfort with my body, that help my reflection in the mirror be a little less startlingly strange. I keep my hair cropped short in an undercut, a pinfeathered buzz of hair beneath a longer crest. The prickling shortness quickly grows to the softness of down until I shorten it again. I find myself preening my own hair (feathers), particularly just after cutting it; the feel of it is as much an expression of hawkness, for me, as the look of it is an expression of gender.
Certain activities express hawkness for me, or provide an outlet for it: dancing, sometimes, when I can reach an ecstatic trance state through movement and exertion, so that it’s more like shapeshifting, flying, soaring; being in high places, rooftops and upper decks and clifftops, perching on the edge (fearless) until worried observers call me back; running, on the rare occasions I decide it’s worth the aftermath of stabbing pain in my knees. That doesn’t do much for the reflection in the mirror, but it helps ease some of the pent-up bird-needs, which means hawk is a quieter influence in me, and thus helps calm the feeling that my skin doesn’t fit right.
I’m very tempted to get a tattoo, eventually: rough-legged hawk wings stretching across my back and shoulders and extending down the upper part of my arms. I don’t know that it’d do anything for the feeling of discomfort in my own hide, but it would be an external, visible representation of an integral part of me, and that has its own value.