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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!
People quit all the time, because not everybody can deal with the abuse that comes from this job. 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.
Then, when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time—as boring and clichéd as this is—for as long as she could remember, she had felt all fucked up.
She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the I am addicted to masturbation dot, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an unselfconscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don’t think I’ve cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot.
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?
It’s a familiar sense of removal that has bothered the hell out of every partner she’s ever had. I’m sorry, she always thinks, I learned to police myself pretty fiercely when I was a tiny little baby, internalizing social norms and trying to keep myself safe from them at the same time. I’m pretty astute with the keeping myself safe.
It’s about self-pity, though, not about caring about Steph cheating. She could give a fuck who her girlfriend fucks. It’s herself she’s sad about. Mopey ol’ lonely Maria, the little kid with the bags under her eyes, the lonesome romantic bike fucker, the girl who likes books better than people. It’s an easy automatic go-to to characterize things as boring but it is boring to have the same exact things come up whenever anything comes up: poor me. 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.
You’re so weird! she says again, louder. Are you upset? I know, oh, you don’t have access to your feelings, you’re all shut down, if you were a goth you’d say you’re broken—I know you, Maria, but it still freaks me out, the way you deal with things.
She had long stringy terrible hair that she wouldn’t let anybody cut and the insinuation of an eating disorder. But as far as she could tell, she was a mostly straight boy who just didn’t want to eat sometimes.
She just knew that she felt weird—but literally every teenager feels weird. Who doesn’t feel weird? All the music she listened to was about feeling weird. All the books she read were about feeling weird. So when she was seventeen it didn’t seem strange to hang out with, like, a kid who was really into racism and another, a future truck stop mechanic, in a tent, with a ton of flannel and a bottle of Everclear or a dozen hits of acid. In a cow pasture.
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.
Six years on and it’s still weird to be called Miss. Not bad, just like, oh yeah, I guess I did that. Who knows whether that part of being trans ever fades. Probably not. Or more specifically, probably not when you still have to shave, when your junk still gets in the way and makes your clothes fit wrong every morning. It probably doesn’t go away until you are rich.
It is a bookstore, though, so she gets, like, I am looking for this book, it has a blue cover, a lot. It’s supposed to be the worst annoying thing you can ask a bookseller, but she’s into it. People always think they know less than they actually do about a book. She can usually draw it out of them and figure it out. When did you see it? Where did you hear about it? Is it a happy book? These conversations can almost be like a moment of actual human connection, except it’s basically a one-direction connection. Maybe in another life Maria will be a therapist or a social worker or something.
usher. 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.
Things she doesn’t hate: trans women who have just figured out that they are going to need to transition but don’t know what to do about it, so they’re super nervous but also kind of relieved. She doesn’t hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they’ve acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they’re working on it and starting conversations about it and being accountable to trans women. She doesn’t hate puppies.
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She forgot that she was making a list. She takes the little flask out of the bag and lifts it to the light. There’s only about a quarter left. She thinks, wow, I am pretty lucid for a forty and six hundred milliliters of whiskey, and then she thinks, what was I thinking about? A list? And then she’s at the bottom of the bridge, waiting at the weird turny corner light. Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it’s obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.
for Maria, being trans is like, here is this shitty thing I have to deal with, but for Kieran it’s like, fuck yeah! Being trans, all right! Trans guys seem to have this relationship to being trans a lot more often than trans women. It’s understandable. Sometimes trans guys come out of radical activist dyke communities where having a punk rock gender is kind of like, chic, or whatever. Whereas for trans women, this tends not to be the case. 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
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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.
It seemed like, from then on, she’d be building a body of work about the interesting sex she’d had, but those stories never really materialized.
Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She’s a good friend.
Because shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone.
you want blood moon magic but you only bleed a couple days a month? I bleed every day.
Secret trick number three is to get as much eye makeup on your eyes as you can. People will disagree about this but fuck them. It took years of research but the current theory on the reason this works, and complimentarily why lipstick makes you look all unhinged, is that you are drawing the beholder’s eye toward your eyes, away from your beard shadow area. Lipstick draws the eye toward the bottom of your face, where the hibernating stubble lives. Fuck that.
this is the thing, the truth that underlies all of this makeup advice: nobody is expecting to see a trans person.
Maria is tall and thin, though. She’s already getting the benefit of the doubt. None of this stuff might work
Smoking weed makes you totally stupid, and Maria’s already pretty dumb. No, to be more specific, smoking weed makes her useless and unable to do anything, and she’s already pretty bad at making herself do anything besides beat herself up for not doing anything.
She keeps getting sucked in and has to force herself not to just lie around reading.
She’s furtively flipping through an Ali Smith book and getting kind of sad when Kieran does that thing where he taps her twice on the back of one shoulder but he’s standing on the other side, so she spins around the long way looking for him. He is annoying.
sad bc Smith covers cis girlhood & cis sapphic awakening in a melancholic but sweet way and Maria doesn't get to have those things
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’s like, I’m the sort of person who has too much self-regard to stay at this job, too, except I guess I’m all damaged.
Meaning: trans. Not in, like, an ‘I should not have transitioned’ sense. More like, okay, I have been trans since I was a tiny little baby. Whether it was something in my brain from before I was born, like people argue sometimes, or it was something I picked up developmentally after I was born, like other people argue sometimes, or whether somebody sexually abused me and then I repressed the shit out of it and then that repression transmogrified into transsexuality, as some other folks will argue, who fucking cares.
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.
She’d known that Those Kinds of People were out there somewhere, but it felt like there was nothing but us normal people in here. This is what everybody thinks.
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 puts on extra too many sparkles around her eyes out of zealousness. Other people really feel this way regularly?
She’s like, Jesus, can I get twenty minutes where I don’t think about being trans, please?
one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.
It also explains why she’s been so goddam hung up on being trans. Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body.
Like, queer people from the store would come and get wasted with the straight people because in neobohemia everybody’s cool with queers. But parties would usually be at straight folks’ houses and all their non-bookstore straight friends would be there.
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.
Plus, if Steph was Ally Sheedy, that made Maria the only other female character from the breakfast club: Molly Ringwald, the spoiled princess. It’s a little uncomfortable for Maria how true this is.
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.
not in the five years or whatever that she’s been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law. It’s expensive to get your documents changed, plus you have to go to city hall and be like, I am trans, please put that on a record somewhere, which gets harder and harder with every minute that people aren’t reading you as trans.
Nobody likes to read anything, even if it’s somebody writing like, Oh, oh oh, when I look at myself naked in the mirror I see tits and a dick it makes me ever so sad.
since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren’t for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
She feels bad for a second though. She’s never had it, but it probably sucks to have chlamydia. What if she were some girl in the coffee shop who had chlamydia and overheard that? Maria makes a mental note not to joke about chlamydia and never to turn away heteronormative advances with sexual-health-normative maneuvers. Seriously.
Not to mention, if you are a total baby panda at internet communities asking, like, how do I get hormones, internet trans women are very nice: they will tell you. 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
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This might be the only appearance of explicitly non-binary identity in the book? (Though I think this passage points more to Maria's limitations than the book's.)
Like, okay. Do you know any straight, male-assigned men who kind of get it? Like, they try to be feminist, but they acknowledge that it is a complicated, maybe impossible thing for a man to be a feminist, so they’re respectful of women, and give space, stand back, whatever. And it would be totally great except that it leads to them never doing anything? Like they just stand back, and, say there are some books that need to be shelved, the windows are all dirty, there are boxes that need to go outside and some kid threw up somewhere. You will start, say, carrying the boxes outside, and then when
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Here is the stereotype I am trying to get to: trans women try to shirk their male privilege before transitioning, disappear into themselves, and then can never really get back out to become assertive, present, feminist women. And this is why everybody thinks we’re weird.
You have to actively look at the women around you, if you’re lucky enough to be close to any women, to figure out that women take up tons of space, however much they want, all the time—they just tend to do it differently than men.
