Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

She can’t stay asleep at night. She wakes up grinding her teeth, or worrying about something totally productive like whether she’s really a straight girl who should be dating straight boys, or else she just wakes up because there’s a cat on her face, purring. Whatever.

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.

Maria’s not really even that into drugs any more. Nowadays taking drugs just seems exhausting, four hours of yay and then like three days of ugh.

Nobody ever really gets six inches from your face and scans for stubble though, plus lots of girls have hair on their face, plus it kind of hides behind foundation a little bit, plus gender is totally one hundred percent performative, right? Whatever! All you gotta do is perform Lady, totally embody it, and then nobody will care about anything.

Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.

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 get in trouble.