All women go through a lot to be perceived as acceptable in society, but what trans women go through is particularly terrible. It’s one thing to fear being called ugly if you’re not wearing makeup, but another to be afraid of being called the vilest of slurs, beaten up, or worse. Even when Jenner has made a huge amount of effort to present herself according to conventional beauty norms for cisgender women, she continues to endure transphobic comments denying her womanhood, whether by Internet trolls or by prominent feminists like Germaine Greer and Elinor Burkett.

Early in transition, when the world perceived me as male but I wanted to be seen as a woman, makeup was a fundamental step in getting other people to see me the way I wanted to be seen. I bought several makeup books and converted an old computer desk into a dedicated vanity. I used eyeshadow to pull focus away from my strong brow and contouring to soften my angular chin. Lipstick highlighted my pouty lips, the most feminine part of my face.

With effort, I found that makeup gave me the means to have some control over how other people perceived my gender. And for an early-transitioning trans woman whose daily life was beset with moments when other people policed a womanhood I felt deeply within, I became addicted to the control that makeup gave me.

Like a drug, the high that makeup supplied was temporary, and I depended on it more and more to feel whole. I would walk down the street to the admiring gazes of men, but every once in a while, someone would notice something – the hardness of my face or my Adam’s Apple, maybe – and the admiration so easily turned into disgust. And my reaction was to cover up even more, find even more ways to shroud myself in makeup so no one would see the ugliness they saw and that I saw in myself.

I became less self-conscious as the years went by, and I relied on makeup less as hormones softened my face. But whenever I needed to make a good impression or feel better about myself, I still picked up my makeup case and spent those hours painting my face, to become momentarily intoxicated with the image I saw in the mirror, even though I knew that the makeup only masked my unhappiness. That’s why I found myself with a strong urge to separate my sense of self from the makeup I’ve been so dependent on for such a long time.

So when a friend asked me to contribute to an article about New Year’s Resolutions in 2015, I publicly resolved to give up being conventionally feminine, and the first thing I put away was my makeup. After years of living in fear of my bare face, I wanted to assert that there’s nothing wrong with who I actually am. I wanted to exist without constantly thinking I was only acceptable if people saw me as beautiful and normal. I wanted to spend time without makeup so that I could better understand my relationship to it — what it gave me and what it took away.