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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 kind of wants to call Steph right now but it’s a dumb idea.
They’ve been doing this for as long as she’s been at the store, which is awkward, because he seems not to have noticed that she transitioned. He still calls her by a name that nobody else in the world is allowed to call her. He will stomp into the store, she will be wearing a dress and showing cleavage, and he will yell, Mister Griffiths! Who knows why it’s charming instead of infuriating, but it’s kind of nice.
She painted her nails sometimes though, this otherwise normal bro, with like, shaggy hair and coral nails. People would actually ask what was wrong with her, too. Why would you do that, they’d ask, and then she’d try to imply that it was because she liked rock ’n’ roll or something.
Personally I got this when I read all those lesbian separatists.
What the fuck, defense mechanisms, just once it would be cool to be able to stay present when something happens, but nope.
Then Maria is all the way gone and out of the conversation. The word blog. Maybe Maria can’t deal with criticism or maybe when Steph gets attacky Maria gets defensive which means shut-offy.
Maria kind of wishes she could videotape what Steph is saying and take it in later, one sentence at a time, pausing it whenever she starts to dissociate.
but Maria’s thinking: well, living in meta-analytical space is a coping mechanism, isn’t it? When I was little, I internalized that I wasn’t a girl, and couldn’t be a girl. Not even like my parents beat gender normativity into me, the way the repression therapists recommend you do to trans kids nowadays. Just more, like, y’know, you learn from the television that a man in a dress is a hilarious, funny thing, and that he is still a man, even if he is wearing a dress, and nothing can change that, and nothing can change the fact that it’s funny. Or you have an uncle who sees that you are wearing
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The explicit bullying and violence is retrospectively easier to deal with. Clearly wrong, easier to de-internalize. It's the subtle messages about what is possible, what is funny, what is pathological, that are most insidious, hardest to remove.
how I can barely get you to come back even when I’m fucking you—
just mean, I’m barely here in my life, and I need to figure out what’s not working. Everybody feels that way! Steph yells.
It's a gift and curse that every trans feeling is a variety of a not-specifically-trans feeling.
it. You know this story, Steph, I’ve told you about how I can’t figure out a model for my life, my body, anything.
I mean I kind of know what is wrong with me, but seriously, what is wrong with me?
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. It sounds all dramatic but the funny thing about it is how undramatic it is when it’s you doing it to yourself. It’s just a thing you do. She thinks about looking into what abuse survivors can do to dissociate less so she can maybe adapt that to her own life but mostly she spends the afternoon running through the conversation she’s going to have with
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She’ll be honest regardless of whether anybody gets hurt, which is hard when you’ve spent your whole life like, I don’t care if I g...
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second nature, or maybe just her nature, for Maria to put other people ahead of herself. 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,
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.
and feel like you will turn around go home and die if you can’t stop thinking about the public humiliation of transitioning, scalpels slicing into the meat of your body, your parents telling you outright that they never want to see you again.
This is a method I used to talk myself out of transition many times - vividly visualizing the details of surgery
The meeting itself was also terrifying because there was no way to play it off as unimportant.
It didn’t take long to feel all alienated from them.
She was still terrified of makeup, and even more terrified of looking like a guy wearing makeup.
It got obvious that this was a pattern everywhere in her life: she sat back, kept company with herself in her head, and didn’t really interact directly with anything.
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.
She stops at a red light, even though when there’s no cars you’re supposed to totally blow through stoplights to show how anarchist you are.
She’s a catharsis biker, not a distance biker.
there’s this trope that trans women are these fragile creatures who are getting killed all the time. Who are easy to kill. But if Piranha’s an example, trans women are actually some of the hardest motherfuckers in the world to kill. She’s one of those good people you hear about, to whom bad things happen.
Rock ’n’ roll and high school are kind of the same thing, though.
Okay, Maria says. Here is the thing: I have a million bajillion trans things that I need to figure out, still. I am totally the Buddhist monk who’s all convinced she’s attained enlightenment! The day you’re convinced you’ve got it is when the older monk needs to pop you in the head and tell you that you are a stupid baby. And the fact that I haven’t been able to talk about my shit at all is that pop in the head.
when I first started suppressing stuff I knew I couldn’t say in public. Like, y’know, that feeling without words that I had my whole life, like oh my god something is seriously fucked up with my body and the way everybody is reading it.
So basically, Piranha says, your development is totally stunted, and what you need is the kind of adolescent adventures you didn’t have when you were younger.
The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren’t sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.
Eventually Maria figured out in therapy that their friendship worked because she was emotionally shut off trying not to be trans and he was emotionally shut off being an addict, so they could hang out and be emotionally shut off together.
Maria probably isn’t strong enough to handle shared trauma like that. But for a second she wishes she could date Piranha.
Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever.
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh too real
had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work.
gah I did not sign up to be in this book
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.
When you are trans, you are supposed to know everything about men and everything about women and the ways they interact and the important differences that lubricate the dating book market and how ultimately everybody is fundamentally the same but also fundamentally different. And when you first transition? For the first couple years, you totally think you do. You have dated girls all your life, but as a boy, so you have this experience of knowing what it’s like to be a straight boy, but now you are a girl, and, more and more, the world is seeing you as a girl, and also the girls you are dating
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yep, I'm kind of still there, aren't I
There was an undertone of mopiness to your performance and experience of boy which isn’t really there for most boys who aren’t trans.
when you first started spending more time with women in a nonsexual way, they weren’t treating you like a boy, and they were letting you in kind of similarly to how they normally let other women in, but you were this effusive, messy, uncertain person of indeterminate gender who was prone to freaking out and having breakdowns over things like, say, boys giving flowers to your friends but not to you.
And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade, and you’d heard about dissociation a lot of times, and then you finally put together that, actually, that’s what it was when you had to stop paying attention to the person you were fucking so that you could fantasize about any number of situations that didn’t have anything to do with having a penis and fucking somebody with it. So you have no idea what it’s like to have a loving relationship with fun sex in it, which you assume everybody else has, although really how are you gonna
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Do you think being tall, thin and white has anything to do with the way you’re treated now?
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. Kate Bornstein was right when she said none of this gender stuff is real, but she didn’t go far enough. All of this gender
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Part of transitioning is trial-and-erroring your way through the social interactions that most women trial-and-error their ways through around puberty, learning just how to make a rando who’s hitting on you go away without getting mad. But when you’re twenty-nine and you haven’t learned this stuff, it feels impossibly mortifying.
Maria starts doing mental calculations about how to fit the word Irresponsible across her knuckles. IRSP NSBL? Maybe. That looks kind of stupid though.
The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.
Maria, he says, making sure to draw out her name in a way that makes it clear he remembers it wasn’t always her name,
The reality though is that she has a bunch of places to crash, so it would be appropriative to call herself homeless.
riiiiiiiiight.
And then you can look outside and see the rain, watch it run down the windows, and nobody can realistically ask you to go outside and play.
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.
Her whole life is the abusive boyfriend she’s finally leaving and everybody is rooting for her.
This may be the best chapter in all of literature
