Detransition, Baby

by Torrey Peters

This was why she still put up with him: He got it. With him, she’d discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous. Cis women, she supposed, rubbed against a frisson of danger every time they had sex. The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—a single fuck to fuck up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn’t ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. His cock could obliterate her.

The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.

Ames had thought a fair amount about this. “I don’t think she appreciates queerness so much as she came to feel ambivalent about heterosexuality. I know those two aren’t the same thing. She’s attracted to masculine bodies, of that I’m sure.” He flicks his wrist in a semi-ironic indication of his own now-curve-depleted body as evidence. “Although perhaps not men as a class. A lot of what she liked about me, she says, is how different I am from the other men she’s dated. I think what she might be attracted to is my gender, the traces of queerness about me—with me she gets queerness without ever having to name it or dredge up any attraction to women. But now that she knows I was once a transsexual, she acts like it’s the only reason I am how I am. Everything she liked about me before is suddenly fraught. She’s not taking it well.”

But every other chaser? Why bother convincing clueless, gun-shy boys on OkCupid of the sexiness of a girl with a cock when there are thousands of men out there who already know it, and among whom you get to have your pick? Want a movie star? You can have one (albeit a B-lister if you’re willing to satisfy a guy’s curiosity about bottoming for a transsexual, otherwise a C-lister). Want a tech scion to show you his yacht? Great! The ones with powerboats are best, guys with sailboats will make you pull random ropes, and to imagine yourself as a cool Jackie O is one aspirational self-delusion too far. Want a walking Bruce Weber photograph with washboard abs cut so deep it looks like he’s constantly side-lit? Take a couple of male models and save one for later. The only thing you can’t have is a decent guy who will take you home for Thanksgiving dinner, but

How many girls did Reese know who, to prove to themselves that they could be just like every other woman, found themselves sifting through thousands of men on some straight dating site, looking for the non-horrible ones—a task that even cis women find awful? And then, how many times had Reese heard about these girls who wasted hours, days, weeks, months trying to find one of the non-horrible ones who would be willing to give a trans woman a try, only to finally end up in his bedroom, standing exposed with only a stupid lacy lingerie set for armor, as he sized up the new-to-him proportions of slender hips to wider shoulders, and nervously muttered that it’s not for him? No way. That shit is way more traumatic than running into any chaser. Go to a fetish site for men who already know they want a trans girl, and select a decent one from among the many begging for you. In matters of the heart, Reese had one firm maxim: You don’t get to choose who you fuck, you get to choose from among those who want to fuck you.

So which of the three transsexual jobs do you do? Computer programmer, aesthetician, or prostitute? Reese always hoped the answer

would be prostitute, because prostitutes were the ones with a good sense of humor.

Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through

male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them—the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman. The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm. A girl could be twice the size of the man—that little ow reminds him that he is a man, she is a woman. Once, Reese’s friend Catherine was walking home drunk with her boyfriend when he tried to flirt with her by pushing her into a bush. She bounced back out of that bush like an enraged wolverine: spitting, scratching, fighting. For the rest of her relationship with him, he would say, “Careful, Catherine is aggressive,” and Catherine would wince, understanding her womanhood was on the line every time. A good woman, she heard in the subtext, would have stayed in the bush and cried. If only some man would push Reese into a bush, she’d know what to do.

And yeah, liberal feminists—especially the trans-hating variety—would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She’d be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady.

In the intervening years, she’d downgraded Sebastian from real love to a teenage affair, and her own feelings from tragic to immature.

Reese didn’t bother to ask what Amy did. She already knew the equation: white young trans woman plus apartment right beside the park equaled job in tech.

“You want to U-Haul already? You really are a lesbian, huh?”

“I got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn’t need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.”

Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives—and that’s if they were lucky enough to be white. They left behind only scattered exhausted voices to tell the angry lost young when and how the pain might end—to tell us what will be lost when we lash out with our considerable strength, or use the fragile shards of what remain of our social networks to ostracize, punish, and retaliate against those who behave in a traumatized manner.

The exception to this was the men she slept with back when she was a cross-dresser and called herself a sissy. She did not care about those men, was not attracted to men, and so didn’t care what their impressions were—they were simply another feminizing accessory, albeit a difficult and unwieldy accessory. But when deployed right, they were even better than a corset for making a girl feel dainty. Their job was to provide lots of masculine contrast to her girliness, a task they set about diligently, because most of them were straight-identified, married, and therefore invested in getting to enjoy her body while avoiding any thought that allowed them to ponder why the thing that made their cocks hard was a hard cock on a girl. The whole object of these encounters—and the men acted reciprocally—involved ignoring the man’s needs in order to instead focus on herself and what kind of person she must be that a man was using her for his own sexual enjoyment, even as she ignored the particular man and his particular need.

Amy remembered how one of them patiently explained that the term “autogynephilia” only works if you don’t think trans women are women. If you do, then you immediately see that the majority of women, cis or trans, are all autogynephiles, and that most men would be autoandrophiles—it’s not something special about trans women. Of course women are turned on by being women and men turned on by being men! Watch any porn and the sexuality of everyone in it is actually about their own auto-andro/gyne-philia. Listen to them talk. It’s all about validating their own gender. Oh yeah, I’m your little slut…yeah, baby, you like this big cock? And alone on their laptops somewhere: the viewers, turned on to identify with people identifying with their gender.

“I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives

given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.”

In lieu of the book, Reese read as many blog posts as she could find on the subject. Her friend was right: The notion of queer temporality was comforting. Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won’t correspond to the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so it is meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual’s lifeline as though they were horses on the same racetrack, released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for your run-of-the-mill queer. Now imagine that you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said, you should have saved two years’ income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the form of old MAC lipstick shades they’d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occasionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.

The surgery created the dysphoria even as the dysphoria created a need for surgery.