Detransition, Baby

by Torrey Peters

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 pondered whether he ought to cancel his subscription to HBO in order to afford this sperm bank. He couldn’t fully comprehend the enormous weight of fatherhood and generational lineage, but he could easily comprehend how much he did not want to cancel HBO.

to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one’s precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy—the heart demands a human explanation.

made this joke that my marriage was like a push-up bra: It looked pretty good underneath a shirt, but you know it’s all just padding and by the end of the day you can’t wait to take the damn thing off. My

Unless he could find a way to escape the gravity of the nuclear family, no matter what he called himself, he’d end up a father. He didn’t need to explain this to Reese. She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as.

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.

After all, Every woman adores a Fascist. 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 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.

Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.

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.

The expression “suite of personality disorders” had been said to her about Reese by two different people. Amy couldn’t say whether the expression had been repeated simply because it was a catchy queer-approved pseudo-psychological way to talk shit or whether the phrase arose independently each time because it apparently described Reese so well.

“Weddings are so kinky. I think most non-kinky people just never realize it. Think about it! You put a woman in a special elaborate outfit, and then one man gives her to another man like some kind of BDSM scene, and then they put like a symbolic collar on the woman’s finger, and then the man lifts her dress to show everyone there—maybe hundreds of people!—her garter and lingerie. Then he picks her up and takes her away to fuck her while everyone else knows it’s happening! It’s so dirty. It’s like the kinkiest thing I could ever imagine and it actually happens all the time. So I like to think about it happening to me.”

“Always look for the empire waist,” Jen encouraged, holding up a yellow dress with a sash under the bust. “Everyone always thinks it’s about minimizing the shoulders, but no, it’s about the right ratio between shoulders and hips. Empire waists flare out, give you hips.”

She wants to be inured to hope. When it comes, it always disappoints, and unlike in her twenties, now it never comes simply, instead it arrives twisted, with caveats and strings.

It wasn’t the same as seeing herself that way, but she enjoyed borrowing their eyes. After all, isn’t that the Gatsby glory of the New York dream: telling the grandest story about yourself that you could hope to have others believe in the distant hope that you’ll believe it yourself?

The table fixed itself with totemic power into Reese’s brain. The butcher-block craftsmanship became for Reese an absurd-but-serious mental marker of a female bourgeois heterosexual temporality forever beyond her envious grasp: When a woman reaches a certain point in her thirties, she looks around and finds a good dining set with which to settle down.

More to the point, Reese maintained that foreheads drive trans women insane precisely because there is a surgery to alter it. The surgery created the dysphoria even as the dysphoria created a need for surgery. To know that surgery is out there, but that you can’t yet have it, even as you stare in the mirror and want to die, means that the temptation of want will forever taunt you.

Not because she so badly wants to live, but because suicide as a trans girl leads to a mortifying posthumous stripping of all that you cherished by friends and strangers alike. If you are not there to stop them, the loudest, brashest, and clumsiest of your semi-acquaintances will scoop up all that was once you and simmer it down to a single mawkish narrative, plucking out all that is inconveniently irreducible, and inserting in its place all that is trite and politically serviceable.

Funeral after funeral has taught her to sit in the pews awaiting a moment of puncture: when some tiny detail pierces the smooth carapace of her indifference.

How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard?

She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

Reese lays in bed, slowly growing more and more outraged. AIDS panic? Has Katrina been listening to eighties-era Jerry Falwell sermons? It’s bad enough that Katrina somehow has entitled herself to feelings about Reese’s sex life, to judgments over Reese having slept with some other bitch’s husband—but AIDS panic? In a situation in which only one person has HIV and it’s undetectable? What the actual fuck?

But institutions require categorical names in order to function—the guys at the CDC can’t be writing a new grant or reworking studies every time a nancy starts calling herself a nelly. So they assigned a name to this population: the umbrella term “transgender”—and since transgender women wanted access to resources, that’s what we ended up calling ourselves. But make no mistake, HIV and the invention of transgender women are inextricable. Transgender is the name selected to recognize a vector of disease.