Nevada: A Novel

by Imogen Binnie

And it’s not even like it matters if somebody knows you’re trans. Who cares. You just don’t want your hilarious, charming, complicated weirdo self to be erased by ideas people have in their heads that were made up by, like, hack TV writers, or even hackier internet porn writers. It just sucks having to educate people. Sound familiar? Trans women have the same exact shit that everybody else in the world has who isn’t white, het, male, able-bodied or otherwise privileged. It’s not glamorous or mysterious. It’s boring.

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.

but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. 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.

Coming out as trans was the first change she ever actually made to her own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against that grain because she felt like she’d die if she didn’t.

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. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you’ll be back where you started: trans.

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.