Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

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. Oh, neurosis! Oh, trauma! Oh, look at me, my past messed me up and I’m still working through it!

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.’

Trans women have the same exact shit that everybody else in the world has who isn’t white, het, male, able-bodied or otherwise privileged. It’s not glamorous or mysterious. It’s boring. Maria is totally exhausted by it and bored of it, and if you’re not, she is sorry. Terribly, appallingly, sarcastically, uselessly and pointlessly sorry.

If she were a goth she’d tell you about how broken she is, but since she’s an indie-punk DIY book snob, like, here we are.

They are probably looking for reasons to fire her, because she’s been here so long and she’s gotten so many mandatory union raises that she can almost afford food and rent, so being late is kind of a big deal. Like, when you’re in the union, they can’t just fire you.

but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.

It’s so easy just to check out and leave your body. This is like an abuse thing, isn’t it? Abuse survivors dissociate like this? 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.

The light changes and Maria realizes: wait, shit, hold on, I am elated. It’s that feeling like you just left on a car trip for Arizona or Michigan or something, and you don’t have to worry about rent or work or feeding the cat or anything at all for a whole week. Except there’s no time limit. I don’t have to take care of myself. Or sleep. Or bathe! This might be kind of a bad news train of thought.

I’m just at this point where I’m stomping around like I know everything about everything, just because I transitioned and now creepy old men on the street hit on me—when really, I’m stunted back at like age thirteen, age five, age zero, when I first started suppressing stuff I knew I couldn’t say in public.

It didn’t even occur to me to go out and get drunk after I got fired, which is interesting. It’s almost like I got drunk all the time when I was dating Steph and working a shitty job not because I am a total addict, but because it was a coping mechanism to deal with being unhappy.

Maybe having a transsexual pass out at your bar for a couple hours is just the kind of gritty authenticity that a bar on the lower east side of Manhattan needs now that everybody’s moved to Brooklyn.

The Bouncing Souls do a song called ‘Lean on Sheena,’ about a girl leaving her abusive boyfriend and how nobody’s ever going to see her again because she is leaving leaving. Maria feels like Sheena. Her whole life is the abusive boyfriend she’s finally leaving and everybody is rooting for her.

James just doesn’t know how to be in a relationship because he doesn’t know how to be himself and you can’t be one of the people in a relationship if you’re busily refusing to be a person.

Since nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e., nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what’ll happen at work, I’d love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buy a new wardrobe that I don’t even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then end my short life in a bloody murder.

I think what I meant was that I need to stop feeling responsible, to everybody all the time, for presenting this consistent and static face. And I needed to get over the idea that being responsible in a relationship means being consistent and stoic and out of touch with my own feelings. What a bunch of dude bullshit to have internalized.

I’ve written elsewhere about how lots of ideas conceptualized by cis people to describe things experienced by cis people don’t map neatly onto trans experiences—like for example male privilege. (Do trans women have male privilege before transition? Kinda. Do trans guys have male privilege after transition? No matter what Maria Griffiths might tell you, the answer is probably also: kinda.)

one of the most common ways for trans women to self-flagellate is with a whip labeled “I should have come out sooner.” It’s not fair to ourselves. It takes as long as it takes to figure out what you need to figure out, and to figure out what you need to do about it. But we still do it.