Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

The moment her pants come off, she stops being in her body, she’s off in the clouds desperately trying to make an emergency peace with her own junk, trying not to think about how bad her junk has fucked up so much of her life and what she can do about it.

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.

Pretty much you have to prove that you’re totally normal and straight and not queer at all, so that if they let you transition you will be a normal het woman who doesn’t freak anybody out, and so we often, as individuals, internalize these things, and then we, as a community, often reinforce them. All of which is relevant specifically because you are supposed to have known you were trans since you were a tiny little baby.

plus gender is totally one hundred percent performative, right? Whatever! All you gotta do is perform Lady, totally embody it, and then nobody will care about anything.

She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.

But when you ask a more complicated question, like say, how do you resolve a genderqueer identity with a female identity when it seems like acknowledging the restraints of female identity and then bursting them doesn’t make you no longer female, just empowered, and therefore is genderqueer a privileged identity that’s mostly available to female-assigned people with punk rock haircuts, in college, everybody gets all butt-hurt and you get in trouble.

Part of transitioning is trial-and-erroring your way through the social interactions that most women trial-and-error their ways through around puberty, learning just how to make a rando who’s hitting on you go away without getting mad. But when you’re twenty-nine and you haven’t learned this stuff, it feels impossibly mortifying.

But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.

Whoa. Sometimes your internal monologue surprises you.

Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Real little kids are as dirty, impure and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be.

It’s just that once you start using their terms, she says, You’re putting yourself into this restrictive box they made up that doesn’t leave room for figuring out who you are or what you want. It’s a box labeled Dude and Pervert—Bad and Terrible Secret. When in my experience it shouldn’t have to be a secret that if you’re a woman, you might be hot for being a woman when it’s an appropriate time to be hot; when, in fact, if you are a woman—trans or cis—it makes sense to like the idea of being a woman in bed. It’s not a perversion at all. It’s like the opposite of being a pervert. It’s the least perverted thing, for your sexuality to match your gender! So like, autogynephilia theory just is basically designed to reinforce the idea that trans women are men, and that women don’t have sexualities, and that straight dudes are good people to talk about queer women’s sexualities.