Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they’d like to know: he ignores the shit out of her. Probably he freaks out a little.

Her hair is almost exactly the same color as her sweater, but a little bit darker.

I bet it’s Ángela Chase’s hair color!!!

he walked with this magnetism or swagger or something, like he knew he was a big deal, and Maria carries herself kind of the same way.

Protective presentation

Because if he’s being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn’t processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.

I wonder if this ever stops happening or if it is always a total thrill to, like, clock someone on the subway and want to tell them they're radiant and amazing and killing it

He’s envisioning like lying down in the sprawling fields of the marijuana farms of Northern California but she keeps stomping in. Even though it is his go-to fantasy,

You could tell. But not in like an obvious way, like if a drag queen came parading up the aisle. You couldn’t really tell from the way she looked, or the way she talked, or anything. Probably? But then you have to ask yourself, like, well, how could I tell? It was probably some kind of combination of things. But could other people tell?

To be totally honest he thinks about it all the fucking time, he just can’t imagine actually being trans in the real world. Does he wish he was a girl? Fucking—obviously he wishes he was a girl.

Like there are a million reasons why he obviously is not trans or is not the kind of trans person who transitions. He has never said it out loud or even explicitly thought it but he is probably kind of genderqueer, so he doesn’t even know what to think about it. He’s looked at a lot of people’s websites and blogs and read up on autogynephilia and what hormones do and don’t do and he knows that if he’s transsexual he’s definitely not, like, a normal kind of transsexual, normal transsexuals all fucking know they’re transsexual when they’re little kids and fucking tell their parents and get yelled at for it or else start hormones when they’re thirteen

He definitely just was like, oh my god, a trans person! But he choked it down and didn’t say anything because he is totally good at choking things down and not saying anything.

But there’s a tug at the telephone wire that connects her heart to her brain. It’s more taut than usual.

probably something to do with the way that being trans interrupts normal human development, but instead of getting stuck at the anal stage or whatever you end up getting stuck at the tween stage, the Nickelodeon stage, the I can take care of myself but I suck at it stage.

Maria can explain to you exactly what she’s figured out and how she figured it out and can smell cisnormativity from like a hundred yards. She just sucks at pretty much everything else.

and it sure doesn’t seem likely that I’m going to get to Oakland or San Francisco, or drive up to Portland, to Seattle or Olympia, and find somebody there who will sit me down and explain what I need to do to exist like a three-dimensional person who cares about her body and her mind and her life and her friends and her lovers and is able to exist in a relationship with another person. How to exist as a person who knows what she’s feeling and can express that to another person.

how do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you?

ow ow ow ow ow

The only way to be a buddha is just to be a buddha, to disregard the shit that’s in the way of being a buddha.

There’s an expression on her face that’s kind of hard to look at, like she’s just about convinced herself that she’s cool and in control. But not quite. It’s like, you almost can’t see that she’s terrified.

But James was already thinking about Nicole and he doesn’t want to date anyone ever so she’s a good excuse but he actually also, like, is in a relationship with her. In real life.

No I know, Maria says, But what do you want? It’s easy to say that where you are and what you have are dumb, but it’s harder and probably more productive to name concrete things and aspire to them. You know?

James hasn’t even thought about actually wanting things before,

For real though, Maria says, Think about specifics. Do you want to be in a band? Do you want to go to college, write a novel, sit in a tree so that nobody can bulldoze it? Do you want to have lots of weird sex, no sex, lots of weird vegan food, a haircut that reads like a secret code that identifies you as a member of a subculture to other members of that subculture? Be specific, James H., because now is the time in your life when you can do anything. And anything is gonna turn out great.

Old Faith No More, she says.

Deep cut!!!

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.

And his apartment doesn’t look like the apartment of a person. It isn’t the standard twenty-year-old boy apartment though—there’s no sink full of dishes, no armpit smell. It’s like a nonapartment, a ghost apartment.

every syllable in those exchanges made him feel like the world was ending. What’s up anxiety.

I talk about being trans all the time! Just not out loud.

And when you’re a trans woman, patriarchal mandates about presentation get extra twisted up with narratives of disclosure, validity as a human being, violence, the possibility of ever being found attractive, and probably a bunch of other stuff you haven’t even identified yet. It makes it actually pretty complicated to leave the bathroom once you’re in it.

Maria has her first inkling that even though she’s worked out a cosmology in which a bunch of interconnected puzzle pieces of understanding about oppression and misogyny and transphobia and transphobic faux feminism and all the other things that make up the picture of why everybody always thinks trans women are crazy and stupid—she realizes that even though she’s built that up for herself, she might not be able to put all the pieces together for someone else.

The way he looks over at her after he says that though—scared, maybe a little bit aggressive, but mostly like, do you believe me—makes his answer clear.

There’s a thing Maria is used to doing on the internet. 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.

It came from the older practice of telling everybody who thought they might be trans that they must be absolutely certain that they were trans before they even considered buying some clothes or starting a testosterone blocker. It’s the old narrative, the Johns Hopkins in the seventies narrative: the only people who are really trans are the people who knew explicitly from a young age, are pretty without hormones, and can’t survive without transitioning.

Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder.

There’s a much better understanding of what it means to be trans now: you just are trans.

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

James has this weird feeling of dots connecting,

on one hand, who the fuck is this girl trying to talk to me about shit I don’t want to talk about, but on the other hand, maybe I could get into her car and leave town with her and live with her and wear her clothes and bum her hormones and maybe everything would be totally okay forever.

Okay sorry, Maria says. Let’s not talk about capitalism or anarchism or anything except I do want to say that those things ended up being totally essential to my understanding of being trans and feminism and my location and the things that suck about being trans. All that stuff. So maybe like we can table them for now and get back to them.

Having Maria in his kitchen makes James feel like his kitchen is a dusty, grungy and kind of sad mess, in a way that having Nicole in there never really does. He’s like, I guess my apartment sucks. Weird how you don’t notice that.

mostly I was just so checked out that I didn’t even understand if I was mad or sad or confused or what, you know?

well shit, the problem is that I’ve been trying to be responsible, and accountable to everyone else, and to make sure that nobody was freaked out by me or my feelings or desires or whatever.

I barely made facial expressions in grade school.

it’s fucking wild if you think about it, how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal American masculinity.

When I was a little kid, when I started to develop a personality and a gender and to express that personality and gender, a tiny little dirtbag punker who didn’t know anything about being trans or saying: I want to be a girl. Or: I am a girl. Who only knew that she wanted to be in Poison, to dress and act like the rock stars who were boys but who got to wear all the makeup and outfits. Everybody everywhere started socializing that stuff out of me. I was an observant kid, you know, I looked around and I was like, well shit, I’d better listen to these messages I’m getting from TV and from the grownups around me, instead of whatever the fuck my obviously incorrect brain is telling me. You know? Being completely checked out, that shit started when I was a tiny little kid.

my obviously incorrect brain

I was like, whoa, I have a lifetime’s worth of unprocessed shut-down emotions to work through,

Hey stupid, did you ever stop to think that that pattern, that coping mechanism, was actually a brilliant strategy to keep yourself alive? She was like, Listen up dummy, when you are a little kid and it is the mid-eighties, saying ‘I need to be a girl’ is not the sort of thing that tends to be met with love and appreciation.

like, okay, I’ll play your game until I’m old enough to run away from it and figure out my own stupid game. She was like, Which you did, right? You moved to New York. You transitioned. You fuckin solved it. The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism became a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.

why the fuck aren’t you fuckin rich, you are a genius—I said this kind of through tears—and she was like, Uh, Maria, I’m not rich because I’m trans and because I’m a woman.

or finding himself crying in the boys’ bathroom line at camp when he was eight—

how much does this relate to the stuff Nicole always says about how she wishes he would just make a decision?

When I was younger, right, it was really easy to just not be invested in myself or what was going on. I could wear shapeless clothes, have relationships with people where we just talked about bands and video games and, y’know, nothing, and never went deeper than that. It was all super easy, right? This is that checked-out pattern I was talking about before. When people think you’re a dude, they pretty much expect that shit from you.

Well yeah but even still, she says, pausing for a second. Our kinks aren’t just random things that happened to us.

Comes from Steph