Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

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. So they’re colonizing those normal people’s neighborhoods, colonizing their experiences. It’s pretty gross. Maria’s aware that she’s implicated.

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.

You can’t will it away. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you’ll be back where you started: trans. Just older and more entrenched in a life that itself is not much more than a coping mechanism designed to keep you from having to be trans in the real world.

… I should only speak for myself, I guess, but I just got bored of talking about it. Like, I have a Livejournal, and I know some people on the Facebook who I’ve met IRL a couple times but mostly, like, The Advocate doesn’t want anything to do with trans women who can’t afford face surgeries and hate capitalism so it can even just be hard to meet anyone.

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. James is like, Okay.

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