Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

You fake orgasms because you want your partner to feel like she’s doing a good job fucking you, because you feel self-conscious about how closed off from your body you are and how hard it is for you to have a real orgasm.

How do you tell your girlfriend that? How do you make that okay? More specifically, how do you make that okay enough to calm down and get off?

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they’re at least as boring as everybody else.

Like, what if they are a liberal, and want to show how much compassion they have? ‘I have this trans friend’ instead of ‘Hey trans friend I like you, let’s have a three-dimensional human relationship.’

That stereotype about transsexuals being all wild and criminal and bold and outside the norm and, like, engendering in the townsfolk the courage to break free from the smothering constraints of conformity? That stereotype is about drag queens. Maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear.

It’s an annoying, predictable cliché, but Maria always sympathizes with the monster.

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.

So fuck promotions and fuck career advancement. You just shelve books for enough years, collecting annual one-dollar raises, until you die rich.

Like I guess I got comfortable and when I’m comfortable all I want to do is read.

It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all.

It is stupid and there are these hoops you have to jump through, boxes you need to check:

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.

Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.

As far as Maria knows she was never abused, but maybe repressing and policing yourself so hard for so long before transitioning can look like abuse, function like abuse.

Coming out as trans was the first change she ever actually made to her 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.

The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren’t sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

Some trans women mostly date other trans women, but Maria probably isn’t strong enough to handle shared trauma like that.

That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit:

It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.

The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it?

I am exhausted from thinking about being trans all the time and I wish I could stop.

already. It sucks that being from the computer generation means she can’t write longhand, like, at all.

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.

They are basically instant messaging via email, like our ancestors did,

How can you be so disinterested but so willful at the same time? Weird shit, James.

If it were a Tarantino movie maybe he’d kill everybody. In a David Lynch movie it wouldn’t even be clear what happened next but you would know it was something. But obviously this isn’t a movie and he’s just a stupid clueless pervert stoner with no idea what the fuck is going on in his life.

There’s a much better understanding of what it means to be trans now: you just are trans.

The fact that your transition might not go smoothly because of the shape of your body or the shape of your family or the shape of your personality or the way that your sexuality has been shaped does not mean that therefore you can just decide not to be trans.

If you’re trans you’re trans and if you’re obsessed with whether you might be trans you probably are trans.

it’s fucking wild if you think about it, how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal American masculinity.

The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism became a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.

let’s be real here about the fact that when we’re not allowed to have something we want, we get all fuckin weird about it. Sometimes that weirdness looks like a kink.

It’s like, how do you take down that bravado in order to evolve as a person?