Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

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.

She figured out that she needed to transition because she’d been going to work, coming home, drinking whiskey and reading, every day, week in and week out, until one evening she watched the sun go down behind the Statue of Liberty out her fifth-floor window in Sunset Park and realized she hadn’t left the house all day. 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.

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.

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.