The Eight Fundamental Horse Steps by Ark Ramsay

Ark Ramsay's Life Writing piece – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize –  immerses itself in a knotty quest to 'outpace gender'.

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

1. Climbing the Mountain 

Before the horse, the mountain. Fists digging into my sides, I lower into an uncompromising squat intending to inhabit confidence and ease, my body undergoing a dual lesson in kung fu and manhood. It is a Sunday morning, and D, our shifu, plays up his prowess for the gathered crowd —little children earn his praise, and old men pause in their walking to parry invisible enemies. A statue of Chairman Mao is just visible from the basketball court, surrounded by a platoon of ornamental cabbages. 

Later, across the street in a Xinjiang restaurant, D and I eat noodle soup speckled with tomato and shredded egg. In our brash, loud-stepping English, we speculate about our future beyond graduate work in China, and D loses himself in tales of compulsive infatuation. He floats ways to declare his love to two itinerant cafeteria workers, or the woman behind the counter at the nearest Family Mart — and in these scenarios he has chewed a hole into their lives, imagining himself as so many have before, just a drifting expert caravanning across China. As if it is some unknown and unknowable country. In one story, he is the beloved schoolteacher who drives off bandits from a small mountain town with only his classroom rule. In another, he adopts all of the children his widowed wife cannot support and passes on his dying kung fu lineage. In still another, he sequesters himself on a mountaintop, a Daoist ascetic forced to break his code of non-involvement. Brave the fighting. Save the girl.  

Beside his noodle bowl, his right hand rests atop a weathered copy of the Legend of Condors, and his fictions romp about the room.  

It is tantalising to imagine that, with his tutelage, I might also learn to bully my way into others’ stories. How cutting that masculinity. How impenetrable that disguise.  

The restaurant owner has a shrine to Osama Bin Laden as his Alipay profile, and D storms out. I pay what is owing.  

D is an American. It takes a long walk through a neighbouring park to remind him that one country’s suffering is always another’s celebration. He accuses me of cynicism, and I charge him with Americanism — a holier-than-thou disregard for the rest of the world. Climbing empty stadium bleachers in the cold, he concedes that he never dwells on the worst events in Afghan history, but the fall of the towers is always front of mind. He wonders what a man who makes mediocre soup could see in Bin Laden, but I have no satisfactory answers for this eye-for-eye-for-spleen-for-spleen. He collapses into himself and the bravado of shifu sloughs away.  

Once, I joked that D would make a good cult leader. 

Without missing a beat, he told me that I would make a good cult follower. 

2. Horse Riding Stance 

The stabilising stance, wide-legged and rooted. If shoved, no bending is allowed — like trees in a storm that choose to snap instead of touching forehead to soil.  

Years before Shanghai, I am curled into myself, shotgun in my father’s parked car, lips smeared with drugstore black lipstick. I tell him that I am a woman. I am sure of it. Maybe. Maybe I am sure of it.  

Could this be because you ate your twin in the womb?  

His voice is equal parts sincere and desperate. I sip from the flat soda he has brought, and take him up on an offer of food, unable to trust myself alone. Over Jamaican beef patties, I can only fixate on why my stillborn twin – garroted by the umbilical cord in utero – would want me sad, suicidal, and out-of-body. Was this what it meant to be a woman, pursued by the absence of a man you swallowed?  

My father drops me back to the apartment I rent in a former colonial military barracks turned prison turned hospital turned apartment block. The walls are thick with past lives, and some nights I hear screams or peels of laughter, as if a body is not entirely necessary to experience the most outer bands of emotion. I have a friend visiting, who in a decade will admit to his manhood by fertilising a bald chin with beard oil until testosterone is procured and hair can sprout. We walk the long stretch of boardwalk that fronts the nearby beach, creating a prudent economy. The rest of the world is shut out, and there’s only the two of us – two bodies – the requisite number to undergo this kind of transmutation. I offer my penis, he relinquishes his vagina without much bargaining. Like this, we barter parts back and forth, until by the end of the boardwalk, we are both, through the unsustainable alchemy of longing, become unrecognisable homunculi.  

3. Kneeling Stance 

Like a cult, our wear is uniform, but only I remain after a few months, once the brutal cold paws in and the idea of an outdoor kung fu practice loses any appeal. We no longer have the numbers to take over a basketball court with our forms and drills, so we practice in the corner of a calisthenics pit. A man smoking a cigarette does relentless pull-ups without a hint of being touched by frost or the tactile winter smog.  

D and I have grown closer, but I get the feeling that I am not his best student, even though some days, I am his one disciple. It is this self-competition that spurs me to remain. I have long been conditioned to be Peter, Jesus’ first elect, or nothing at all. And I have long believed that Peter’s devotion, the way he offered up himself as the foundation for a church – his body in exchange for the everlasting of Christ’s body – is resoundingly queer. To be subsumed into another man, so as to avoid the question of my own manhood. That is love.  

'Wujiaochang is nice this time of year.' This description for a nearby shopping centre becomes code known to only two on this entire planet, and it means, you can come closer now. The words banished the distance between D and I, and whistled once again for the whipped dog in my heart who only wanted to curl around the feet of a master. Good, or not.  

Peter felt this way, but lost is the hidden phrase shared only between him and Jesus, to draw together and then pull apart. I know that it would have all been at Christ’s discretion. The beck and call of one worshipped as God.   

Once, I walked with D through a park and our talk shifted to sex. He had been raised with a strange diet of select American mid-century values and traditional Chinese ethics, all purchased at some kung fu studio outside Boston where he devoted his life. It culminated in a kind of big brother protectiveness for women which I took too long to unmask as misogyny. 

‘The prostate,’ I told him, at his furtive insistence. ‘Anyone can stimulate it, it's not a gay thing.’ 

‘And you just — ’ He held up a finger, knobbed with calluses.  

I nodded, nervous that this conversation might outpace the both of us. I was new to queer intimacy in practice, and worried more than anything about the truth-telling proximity of a man’s desires. He looked at his own finger with new capacity, and then he caught me looking, and then he shoved his hand into his jean jacket, and then Wujiaochang lost its luster for a while.  

At that time, two transport giants, Mobike and Ofo, were flooding the Shanghai market with rental bikes, until streets were impassible for towers of twisting metal. There would always be so much of everything, I thought, even this scarce affection. 

4. Rounded Extremities Stance 

It is an April morning warm enough to smear our faces in Hainan mango juice and watermelon slick. Yellow drips down my face, sponged up in a thick black beard; a blush-red bleeds down his bare chin. D is always fastidious about daily shaving, his skin and head pockmarked from an old razor.  

‘I can’t do this back home.’ He repeats, spooning more of the watermelon into his mouth, ‘And you can’t either. One Black man and one whatever the hell you are – covered in fruit on the back step? No class!’  

I laugh, and enjoy a conspiratorial closeness, even though his fears are alien to me. In Barbados, I can suck yellow off the skin of a mango, regardless of its stain — nowhere do I imagine denying myself the fruit’s gift. But I also understand the history of Black Americans and watermelon, the outcome of grossly caricaturing such simple joy. Our thighs touch as we eat, people pass and wonder why we would picnic in view of the road when tables are available inside — but this was at D’s insistence, clear that he relishes making a show of our glorious, perfectly ordinary filth. To be Black, and eat watermelon, and radiate defiance.   

‘It’s not done until the pit is white,’ I tell him, sucking on the furred mango oblong. I know full well that I am just trying to draw out a moment. Usually, spoiled for mangoes, I leave the seed to move on to more meaty flesh, but there have only ever been a handful of moments in my life when heterosexual men have let me into this kind of bonding. D slaps me on the back and smiles, wiping his mouth with his other hand. It is both impossible to imagine being disallowed access to this light and deeply shameful, knowing that there is a whole part of me I alone have disinvited to this impromptu feast.  

Later, with the light tinting orange, in the cloister of a dorm room, I take a German boy’s hand in my own to paint his nails. My strokes are shaky, betraying my thumping heart. When I kiss him, he is deer-startled despite answering yes, and we do not try again. Somehow, my lines are smoother in rejection, and his right hand comes out better than his left.  

When I sat eating the fruit – when I kissed the long-haired boy with the delicate fingers – I was testing a theory with my body in the world. The question was, how do I go about belonging here?  

I imagined myself as a hydra desperately trying to prune an unstoppable growth of heads. Self-mutilating until a face that others could tolerate was on display. A safe face. A legible face. It seemed to come so easily to others, but I hacked and hacked, never revealing a head that wanted to stay in this world.  

5. Single Leg Stance  

From the bathroom doorway, I watch another friend guide the electric razor’s chrome housing down the middle of their scalp. Only when their head is patchy and uneven do they call on me to go over what was missed. I remove the plastic guard, and the blade is so close to skin that I fear nicking it. Hair sticks to everything, it's on our hands and arms, I spit it off my lower lip as I work, and we joke about stubborn chicken feathers adhered to a boiled carcass. We invoke bald, gender-liberated celebrities. Long, short, curly, straight — imagining that changing our hair will change our lives.  

They start to cry at their reflection, free now from something as heavy and uncertain as the wrong hair. There is a tangible spirit of creation as we run our hands over their scalp like a crystal ball. A picture is taken: back-to-back, my newly growing curls nested atop their bald head. I tell myself that I am capturing their triumphant crossing of a marathon’s finish line, that only they have been attempting to outrun their home gender, but my bewildered heart thumps a clear warning.  

They attend D’s kung fu class. An ex-ballerina, their body bends into shapes even D’s cannot, and he wears a harsh scowl as his teaching is swiftly mocked for the vanity show it has become. After class, I stand before the two of them, the expectation of a choice apparent. 

Before D, I am embarrassed by my flamboyant self.  

Before this other friend, I realise with sudden disappointment how much I am willing to deny for D’s approval. The inevitably fatal cost of masking.  

The Dao De Jing calls for the sage to pursue ‘effortless action’. Everything already exists in correspondence to its truest nature. Chapter 15: ‘Are you willing to wait for your mud to slough off and the water to run clear again?'  

The mood stabilisers are working and, for the first time, a future beyond the unfathomable, tedious, grey seems inevitable. No more having to walk out into the lives of others and beg for my bowl to be filled, with just enough who am I, so that the night will be survivable. 

My diet now consists of both willingness and waiting.  

6. Striking the Extremities 

Whenever D takes a sip of water, he makes an audible ‘aaahhh’, as if it is the first time his thirst has ever been quenched. I mimic this idiosyncrasy until he grows exasperated, bruising my arm with a punch. Okay, I get it! He declares, but after that an enormous grin covers his face and he delivers ever more exaggerated performances. He sips, ‘aaahhh’, I sip, ‘aaahhh’, we gift the noise back and forth — birds of a feather, bound by a new call. It is the closest we ever come to intimacy.    

In this strike, the fist is swift and decisive, but I cannot inspire myself to violence. D and I bash our forearms together until twilight-coloured bruises form. He explains that repetition strengthens the bones, as if the skeleton is an antifragile system, made more robust with each imperceptible fracture. He delights in overpowering me, his bones already satisfactorily hardened. I delight in the aftercare, imagining the tiger balm thumbed into my forearms as a viridian green binding agent, seeping through my skin to fuse the new breaks. I long, through a process of kintsugi, for this green to supplant the banality of white bone — until every part of me has been replaced. It has become impossible to downplay how illegible my body has become. All my life I have only ever spoken my mother tongue but in mirrors my thighs, chest, penis, are suddenly translated into a language in which I have no mastery.  

With tender forearms, I download Grindr. I find a boy who lives on my floor, with brown curls which curtain his face, and piercing eyes that seem in photos almost oracular. He invites me over, and I sit on his floor as he recalls his jaunts through South East Asia. I try to nudge my way into the conversation, but it keeps tossing me out, as if my questions only invite more of his victory lap. We kiss, shed clothes, and jockey for space on his twin bed. He describes what he wants in specificity, then turns the question on me. Suddenly, my body is made present, stinging forearms, the bewildering turgidity of arousal. Through a process of negation, I can arrive only at what I do not want, which is unsatisfactory for its emptiness. He boasts of all the things he can do to me, and all the ways those stated no's can be overturned. Stepping away, I find the bathroom – a perfect replica of my own – and sit to pee. The lights go off. Then on. Off. On.  

‘You should let me fuck you.’ He sings, voice petulant.  

‘That’s a boundary.’ I call back, washing my hands, unsure how such walls have come to be erected around desire, and of what material they are made. Shame or fear.  

‘Boundaries are meant to be crossed!’  

The door opens, the simple lock picked. He stands there, barely able to fill the frame or maintain a full beard. I have a full fifteen pounds on him, and maybe a foot of height, but still my stomach cramps. I crave, in that moment, to uncover the violence D claims is within me — but he is seven floors away. When the boy cums, he instructs me to tell him that his penis is enormous. I lie, jealous of his ability to transform reality, his dick made larger through group affirmation, until it is the kind of appendage he can readily adore.  

When he is sated, he rubs my stomach, suddenly meek. He asks the question for which no answer exists. The question I have come to his bed for in the hope that, through our joint ministrations, we might solve.  

‘What can I do for you?’  

My body, in Tagalog, demands to be understood. It has grown indolent, bored of my cryptic disassociation. Every day it wakes, feeds, walks, digests, shits, creates and destroys — a capable machinery. When I tell the boy that I am fine, that I too had a good time, it is a form of censorship.  

Back in my room, I stand in the shower, lights out, door locked, and run my hands over skin. A twin sense of longing and disappointment, until the former overcomes the latter in utero, and all I have left is desire. For breasts. For a clit. For a softer voice. For the full beard on my face to rain like ash. I imagine going back to the boy with my list of clarified demands, for the surgery to commence wherein my mind is grafted to the kind of machine that can change at will. A body that can freely accommodate man, and woman, and not-man, and not-woman.  

When I wake, the longing is dulled. Small as a pebble in my shoe. Large as the boulder Sisyphus must all-day balance.  

D walks me to the airport taxi because I am the first of us to leave China. We embrace with the cordiality of those who have abruptly realised the end of a friendship’s tenure, and he repeats his future plans to join the Foreign Legion or disappear into Xinjiang Province. It is told with smirking hyperbole to obscure his true intentions, but his fabrications have always held power.  

‘Wujiaochang is nice this time of year.’ He tosses the words into the taxi before slamming the door. I watch him as he watches me. We both wave. The farther I drive, the more that smoke-stinking cab becomes easier to breathe in, another kind of masculinity – like an incomplete test – left behind.  

7. Jade Kings Stance 

And I could practice the fundamental steps with no shifu, one a week eroding from muscle memory. 

And I could marvel at how the body unlearned faster than the mind.  

And I could move to Ohio, tiring of my own attempts to outpace gender. 

And I could convince myself that I was a cult leader now, one leading one.  

And I could survive a pandemic year wedged in a Zoom-box performance, titled ‘Should I Start Hormones’? 

And I could work the question down to a meaningless paste in my hands.  

And I could return home to Barbados for a few weeks, offering the question to the ocean.  

And I could finally decide – yes – only for a nationwide oestrogen shortage to disregard my intention. 

And I could buy a month’s supply, dissolving the tablets under my tongue with a prayer. 

And I could change the prayer, every morning, unsure whose intercession was most powerful. 

And I could raise my shirt when the gender clinic nurse in Ohio says she is curious about my breasts. 

And I could allow the nurse to squeeze my oestrogenated breasts with wonder. 

And I could outlive my father asking, 'Who will love you like this?'

And I could have my friends question why I let the nurse touch me like that. 

And I could transition from the pronoun he, to they, to she, then back to they.  

And I could feel gluttonous for understanding.  

And I could, through intimate repetition, rename a penis into a clit. 

And I could sit under a mango tree reminiscing about two years on hormones.  

And I could grow so close to my family through overexposure, my body a public good. 

And I could understand my father’s question for what it really is — a mysticism, not a slight. 

And I could return to China after half a decade and decide to stop taking the little pills.  

And I could regrow a beard, despite the laser’s attempts to forest-fire it.  

And I could be farther from femininity than I have been in a decade.  

And I could get lost down long hallways of speculation charting the nearness or farness of things.  

And I could be so in my head my body runs amok. 

And I could speculate at the number of years still left to be consumed by the ludicrous gift of self-becoming. 

And I could recognise it, this time, as a gift.  

8. Supreme Ultimate Stance 

I have not spoken to D in five years. Still, I follow every sip of water with our birdsong of gratitude. It is self-conscious now, a tick that cannot be untrained. A Chinese finger trap of spoiled devotion. There are circles everywhere I look for them, in my unexpected return to this city, in the first reference to ‘Chinese Finger Trap’ being a 1953 advertisement in an Ohioan newspaper, in the nights when I worry that I will become the man he saw in me, regardless of my best intention. Regardless of being no man at all.  

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June. Submit here.

Image: Psychedelic Attack of the Blue Rabbits by Oleg Holosiy via WikiArt