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.

It just sucks having to educate people. Sound familiar? 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.

When they come out trans women tend not to have the analysis that comes from having existed in a queer community where people talk about gender; the mistake some people make is assuming that this means trans women never put together an analysis.

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.

Jesus, can I get twenty minutes where I don’t think about being trans, please?

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.

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. You can’t will it away. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you’ll be back where you started: trans.

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