Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

You can try to fake it but if you don’t convince anybody, nobody gets off, and then you spend the afternoon talking about your relationship. The end part is great, the wine and cuddling and stuff, but the hours of insecurity and tears and feelings leading up to the reconciliation are totally not worth it.

Hold on, Maria says, trying to give the impression that she’s so far gone into the sublime that she can’t even talk. Ha.

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!

Maria, though, is so emotionally closed off and has so much trouble having any feelings at all that she’s like, well, it’s union, I’m making enough to afford my apartment, and I know how to get away with pretty much anything I want to get away with. I’m not leaving unless they fire me.

That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing.

Maria’s brain is shut down because she knows that there are things she’s supposed to be thinking and feeling: betrayal, anger, sadness—but it’s like she’s just watching herself, thinking, hey, you stupid boy-looking girl, why aren’t you having any feelings?

The problem is that, when they say ‘real people,’ what they mean is people who aren’t burdened with ironic senses of humor, college educations that help them put up an analytical barrier between themselves and the actual world, and the pressure of living with the reality that they all grew up middle class, chose a broke-ass bohemian life and now have to deal with the fact that they can’t afford the comforts they grew up with.

That was just, like, what you did. On one level you just went along with what was going on but on another you mythologized what a cool outlier you were and so you internalized a sense of your own weirdness as a badge of pride even as you emotionally dissociated yourself from it. Everybody cool is weird. This is how she mythologized her sense of being trans without understanding that she was trans.

All the music we listen to is about carrying the past around with us. All the books we read are about carrying the past around with us. Whatever.

She held on to anything she could find that told her there were things going on outside her own experience: the Church of the SubGenius, Sandman comics, Maximum Rocknroll, ‘alternative rock,’ bizarre Canadian sketch comedy.

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.

There’s a schedule for sleeping as late as you can, if you’re economical enough with your time in the morning.

You’ll know it’s time to replace the blade when your face is a gory mess every day after you shave and you keep thinking, you want blood moon magic but you only bleed a couple days a month? I bleed every day.

So put lots of black shit around your eyes, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. You will look kind of goth. Can you pull off kind of goth? Do you want to? If not, here is secret thing number four: sparkles.

The three career paths at the bookstore are either: you get fired before you can even join the union, or you join the union and rack up legitimate infractions like lateness until you are fired, or else you are promoted to management, leave the union, and then are fired on a whim. So fuck promotions and fuck career advancement. You just shelve books for enough years, collecting annual one-dollar raises, until you die rich.

Turns out she was right and it was Adderall that she took, which means she is super focused and gets a ton of work done. She dusts the shit out of a bunch of displays, rearranges them, shelves a million books, helps tiny old ladies find old, tiny books, and barely even sneaks out the side door for extra bonus breaks at all, except a couple times.

Jesus Christ, really? She’s thinking: is this what my life really looks like? Obviously everybody’s life looks like this, when little kids have Flickr accounts and old men are on Match.com and if you’re not online anywhere then you are making a statement, but for fuck’s sake. He saw her on Myspace? Surreal. Kind of embarrassing for everyone.

Opportunity number two for an odyssey of city exploration as a metaphor for self-exploration: poof, down the tube. Whatever. She does have this feeling for a moment though of what it would be like not to be tied to Steph, to their apartment, to her job, but then she thinks: that’s some straight dude bullshit, the self-sufficient loner. She felt liberated for a second, though.

She tries not to think about whether that means she’ll be here till she dies.

There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. 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. Meaning hormones. It is stupid and there are these hoops you have to jump through, boxes you need to check: I have only ever been attracted to men, I have never fetishized women’s clothes or done anything remotely kinky, I have never been sexual with the junk I was born with. 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.

When she was twenty she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized; if you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It’s fucked up.

Whatever! All you gotta do is perform Lady, totally embody it, and then nobody will care about anything.

Williamsburg is a weird little neighborhood in Brooklyn, right next to Manhattan, where a ton of artists and queers started living about twenty years ago, when Manhattan started being too expensive. They displaced a bunch of Hasidic Jews, which is gross, especially since now it’s all people who look like they’re in experimental disco punk bands because they are in experimental disco punk bands. It’s pretty creepy.

She has another sip and opens her notebook, one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.

She needs to be single. It’s pretty obvious, right? When she’s having boring romantic predictable teenage emotions riding her bike around the city instead of being home with Steph, the reason she likes it so much is that she’s enjoying the tiniest little bit of freedom. She’s not in love with her bike because of the wind in her face, which chaps her lips, or because she can totally handle the difficulty of riding across bridges and in traffic wearing a long skirt. She’s in love with her bike because when she’s on her bike, she’s not tied to anybody.

She’s never been a single woman, she’s only been a woman in the context of relationships. Those relationships have been acting as cushions, as safety nets, enabling her not to have to figure out who she is, what she needs from her life. Anything.

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.

She’s excited that she’s resolved to break up with Steph; it’s like her head has been plugged up for so long that she didn’t even realize it was plugged up, and then she coughed really hard, or wasabi went up her nose, and suddenly she could hear.

she’s had what, four epiphanies and two breakfasts, and she’s got to go into work.

I think I’m only happy when I’m alone.

Though maybe there is no good way to say I’m only happy when I’m alone.

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.

Then she was on her bed crying and fixating on the idea that this wasn’t a life, she was living something that wasn’t even a life, that she was putting even more work into hiding from being trans than actually transitioning would take.

It’s frustrating but you can’t just be like, okay brain, think. Because your brain is like, I am thinking! I am thinking at you, and then you’re like, Jesus, brain, relax, I just mean, we need to think about this conversation.

Steph cried and for a minute Maria felt like she might not and she felt heartless and mean down to the bottom of her lungs, but then she cried too. Just a little.

No, I’m getting totally wasted because she broke up with me first! I figured this all out, decided to break up with her, scheduled a time, and then she was just like, I am breaking up with you. What the fuck.

Mostly what she’s taken from her conversation with Piranha last night is that she needs to be extremely irresponsible in her life from now on.

wouldn’t be appropriative to write like Hemingway. OCTOBER 15TH, PART 2. I am a soldier in the First World War. I don’t have very many feelings. I drink a lot and girls like me. We had a long conversation about whether she should have an abortion, but we didn’t use the word abortion. The whole thing was a dream and I am dead.

Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation, she never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything.

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

She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support. And being completely irresponsible for the first time in her life is so appealing that she is fully willing to build a case for it.

I am Nietzsche’s fuckin uberlady, and oh man I am so smart all the time I just want to tell everyone how the world is. Then, after you have felt very smart and insightful for a long time, you start to realize that all your insights are kind of stupid.

Here is my insight: gender is stupid and annoying and I don’t want to talk about it any more ever. And if somebody is super-stoked to use me as an example of how gender isn’t real, or if anybody ever wants to talk to me about how my body is an example of genderqueerness at its most integrally crucial, or if anybody wants to tell me that they are through with their first year at a women’s college and that they represent the End of Gender, then that person can fuck off.

All of this gender stuff is stupid and it’s so complicated that it’s impossible to make sense of.

Whoa. Sometimes your internal monologue surprises you.

Maybe characterizing her new lifestyle as irresponsible isn’t right, exactly, but instead she should be justifying acting on every dumb idea she has as a very enlightened, Buddhist kind of living in the moment.

She’s drinking top-shelf scotch because it’s hard to break up with your girlfriend, even when you know the relationship is over.

she’s going to have some weird and epic adventure that doesn’t really make sense to anyone who isn’t her. By the end of it Maria will feel like she’s really accomplished something and like everything is different now, like she’s figured out her shit.

Part of that, of course, is that when you’re a cis woman you can’t just demand that your trans woman partner get comfortable with her own body, her own frustrating anatomy. But another part is that, after a while when your partner is faking her orgasms, you stop caring. You think for a minute, maybe I should start faking my orgasms too, but that is depressing if only because it would mean only ever actually getting off by yourself.