From discrimination through to physical violence, being transgender is a hard road to traverse. Though finding a signature scent might seem insignificant at first, it can offer a little insight into the complexities of changing gender, as Anita Bhagwandas explores...

Illustration: Noma Bar

We rarely stop to consider how scent plays into our identity. But the fragrance choices we make – or don’t make – define us by telling the world how we want to be perceived, received and recognised by others. It can define our mood and help us feel ‘whole’ – the finishing touch on a night out or before we leave the house, signifying that we’re ‘complete’. That’s why it feels so alien to wear a perfume that just isn’t ‘us’, and why finding your signature scent is such a milestone.

Rhyannon Styles, 34 (author of memoir The New Girl, out in June), found her signature scent Daisy by Marc Jacobs [£54 for 100ml] a couple of years ago. “I was given a Liberty gift voucher but instead of buying something more ‘useful’, I decided to pick something that was an investment in me. I chose Daisy because it felt fresh and light – there was an innocence to it. It reminded me of being a child and picking rose petals with some girls in my village; we’d soak them in water and make our own perfumes, even though they always just smelt like wet flowers. Daisy embodies that for me, in a much more sophisticated way. It’s a foundation to be able to move through life and without it, I’d feel incomplete.”

When Styles first discovered Daisy, she wasn’t a teenager like so many of us are when we find our signature scents; she was 32 and two years into her transition from being a natal male to female (known as MTF) – her true identity. She’d worn other feminine scents before her transition, but this was the one that genuinely fit. “I feel like it matches who I truly am and how I express myself – it embodies the lightness I felt after my transition,” she says. That’s the joy of finding your signature scent, it brings together your entire identity, and for the many of us who are cis-gendered (meaning that we identify as the gender we were born as), that’s usually fairly straightforward – we walk into a store, try a few on and find something we like, or we admire something a friend wears. But if you’re transgender, finding a signature scent can be a little more complicated and emotionally wrought than that.

The scent journey

The process of transitioning – to live in your authentic gender identity – can take years and it’s a lot to go through, both physically and emotionally. It tends to happen in three stages. Firstly, there’s social transitioning, which is living in society as your true gender identity (required for at least a year before medically transitioning). Then there’s the legal transition, the formal – and lengthy – process of changing your identity records, requiring doctors’ notes. And finally, there’s medical transitioning – involving hormone therapy, plus optional facial and genital reconstruction surgery. Getting to this final stage is a milestone.

Transcending scent: the complex role that fragrance plays when changing gender