Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

Maria’s relationship to her body, it’s a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room.

The short version is that Maria feels hopeless about herself and she’s trying to protect Steph from that. Maria can’t get off with other people. The moment her pants come off, she stops being in her body, she’s off in the clouds desperately trying to make an emergency peace with her own junk, trying not to think about how bad her junk has fucked up so much of her life and what she can do about it.

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they’re at least as boring as everybody else. Oh, neurosis! Oh, trauma! Oh, look at me, my past messed me up and I’m still working through it! Despite the impression you might get from daytime talk shows and dumb movies, there isn’t anything particularly interesting there.

Everybody cool is weird. This is how she mythologized her sense of being trans without understanding that she was trans.

Apparently sparkles on a trans woman are kind of a cliché, but this is the thing, the truth that underlies all of this makeup advice: nobody is expecting to see a trans person. Girls are allowed to wear sparkles on their eyes.

When she was twenty she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized; if you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

A vibe she’d known was out there without really knowing how to access it.

Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.

Maria, of course, would never use the word dick to write about her body. It’s way less traumatic to not use any words. Or a gender-neutral term like junk.

What’s a lot more common, a million times more common, and what nobody ever seems to talk about, is this thing where trans women are given male privilege all their lives before transition, but they don’t know what to do with it so it kind of stunts them socially.

Here is the stereotype I am trying to get to: trans women try to shirk their male privilege before transitioning, disappear into themselves, and then can never really get back out to become assertive, present, feminist women.

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.

The desire to self-obliterate isn’t as intense as the fear of dealing with people.

It feels shitty not to have gotten to say all the shit that Maria is just now realizing she needed to say, about patterns of checking out in her own life and stuff, but ‘I am not your girlfriend any more’ is pretty close to ‘I don’t have to listen to your shit any more,’ and plus, who actually wants to say those things out loud. No matter how bad you need to.

She’s a catharsis biker, not a distance biker.

She doesn’t want to be drunk, but she does want to be drinking.

Neither of them ever lets anyone else in: it’s like they have matching armor. Or complementary armor.

Piranha uses the word agoraphobic for herself, but it’s not clear how literally she means it.

An hour later, Piranha’s probably said a dozen words, and Maria has said a thousand times that. Piranha’s nodding and listening, asking open questions to get Maria to go on, but eventually she’s just repeating herself.

Piranha’s always got pills. She’s always got something going on, some kind of illegal Robin Hood self-care. But obviously it’s kind of a big deal. Heroin’s the cul-de-sac at the end of Drug Street.

So Maria is aware that heroin totally rules. Like, being asleep rules, and being high on heroin is like being asleep times twenty. You just feel at rest.

She’s gorgeous, but not the kind of gorgeous you want to shove your hand down her pants and your tongue into her mouth—the kind of gorgeous that you want to marry and keep next to you all the time.

Some trans women mostly date other trans women, but Maria probably isn’t strong enough to handle shared trauma like that. But for a second she wishes she could date Piranha.

On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it. You definitely liked the orgasms, and it’s not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there.

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 know?

Not giving yourself your shot is like slamming your fingers in a car door over and over, or forcing yourself to drown a kitten every morning or something. Totally unproductive.

The excitement that comes with the beginning of transition has worn off and now this is just a shitty thing she has to do to herself sometimes.

James has never actually seen a cubicle except in movies.

It’s supposed to be called autogynephilia.

Smoking weed rules and the fact that this girl just showed up in his life and now she is gone forever totally sucks.

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.

Twin Peaks or something.

There’s a much better understanding of what it means to be trans now: you just are trans. The fact that your transition might not go smoothly because of the shape of your body or the shape of your family or the shape of your personality or the way that your sexuality has been shaped does not mean that therefore you can just decide not to be trans. You can’t will it away.

I guess it’s kind of scary, she says. I guess watching your girlfriend become someone else, more of a grownup, but still stay herself, while meanwhile you’re still working the same job you always have, at the same level of broke with the same people who knew you years ago and knew you when you transitioned.

I guess the question is, like, how do you transition but then continue to evolve as a person, post-transition, when it seems like the only way you got through your transition was to assert loudly, even just to yourself, that you knew who you were and you knew what you wanted and you trusted yourself?

but he’s only old enough to join the army and die for his country, he’s not old enough to drink.