Nevada

by Imogen Binnie

All the music we listen to is about carrying the past around with us. All the books we read are about carrying the past around with us. Whatever.

dead white man worship is a function of patriarchy.

She doesn’t hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they’ve acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they’re working on it and starting conversations about it and being accountable to trans women.

Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

closes the fridge and goes back to sleep on the couch in the kitchen. So bohemian.

Maria makes a mental note not to joke about chlamydia and never to turn away heteronormative advances with sexual-health-normative maneuvers. Seriously.

Anyway, that is what happens when you try not to use your male privilege, but don’t have any models for alternatives. You withdraw. Here is the stereotype I am trying to get to: trans women try to shirk their male privilege before transitioning, disappear into themselves, and then can never really get back out to become assertive, present, feminist women.

Coming out as trans was the first change she ever actually made to my own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against that grain because she felt like she’d die if she didn’t.

You’d heard about dissociation a lot of times, and then you finally put together that, actually, that’s what it was when you had to stop paying attention to the person you were fucking so that you could fantasize about any number of situations that didn’t have anything to do with having a penis and fucking somebody with it.

This has been her favorite kind of weather since she was a little kid; she loves going inside after being in the rain, when you’re kind of wet and cold but you immediately start warming up, and you finally start to feel just how wet you are as soon as you start to dry out. And then you can look outside and see the rain, watch it run down the windows, and nobody can realistically ask you to go outside and play.

you don’t get to pick a pronoun for someone even if you want to give them one you think they’ll like.

But instead I froze up in the face of institutionalized patriarchal misogyny, ageism and transphobia and I couldn’t say anything.