Nevada Quotes

“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.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“...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, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“It's fucking wild if you think about it, how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal American masculinity.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“It’s a problem, you grow up reading about punk and grunge and earnest dude rock in all the magazines andinternalizing the idea that artifice is totally bullshit, man, and we wear these clothes because they’re comfortable, not for any kind of fashion statement, and we’re just trying to communicate, not be cool, and then you transition and realize, oh shit, there is going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present my body and my actions. I am going to have to break the patterns of clothing and voice and hair I’ve had in place all my life if I’m ever going to be read the way I want to be read. Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het, and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“...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.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“She just knew that she felt weird – but literally every teenager feels weird. Who doesn't feel weird? All the music she listened to was about feeling weird. All the books she read were about feeling weird. So when she was seventeen it didn't seem strange to hang out with, like, a kid who was really into racism and another, a future truck stop mechanic, in a tent, with a ton of flannel and a bottle of Everclear or a dozen hits of acid. In a cow pasture.

That was just, like, what you did. On one level you just went along with what was going on but on another you mythologized what a cool outlier you were and so you internalized a sense of your own weirdness as a badge of pride even as you emotionally dissociated yourself from it. Everybody cool is weird. This is how she mythologized her sense of being trans without understanding that she was trans.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“you can't be one of the people in a relationship if you're busily refusing to be a person.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they'd like to know: he ignores the shit out of her.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“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.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Because shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Like, okay. Do you know any straight, male-assigned men who kind of get it? Like, they try to be feminist, but they acknowledge that it is a complicated, maybe impossible thing for a man to be a feminist, so they're respectful of women, and give space, stand back, whatever. And it would be totally great except that it leads to them never doing anything? Like they just stand back, and, say there are some books that need to be shelved, the windows are all dirty, there are boxes that need to go outside, and some kid threw up somewhere. You will start, say, carrying the boxes outside, and then when that's done, you start mopping up the puke, and he is just standing there, so you're like, What the fuck! Are you going to move these books or clean a window? And they're like, Oh, okay, totally, in this very enlightened way that gives you space to fucking do everything, except they need you to show them how to clean a window, because they don't want to do it wrong?

That kind of guy. I will admit: it's more complicated than that, right, I shouldn't be mean. Straight dudes have it kind of rough if they don't want to shake out their male privilege all over the place. But really? You don't know how to make a bed? You don't know how to fucking cook the onions and garlic before you throw in all the other vegetables?”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism become a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“...your kinks aren't arbitrary things your brain comes up with. They're not coincidences from childhood that you fetishize. Or: they could be. But kinks are arrows giving you directions. If you're hot for being whipped, that probably says something about your relationship to guilt and punishment, or pain, or something... It's always complicated and emotionally volatile but there's also no reason to be ashamed of it.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Coming out as trans was the first change she 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 the grain because she felt like she'd die if she didn't.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“The alleged ‘science’ of autogynephilia is about making up categories to understand why J Michael Bailey wants to bone some trans women but not others. It’s about framing trans women as men in order to understand deviant male sexuality, without ever looking at female sexuality.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“Sometimes it seems like being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria. Like she’s got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her, and with that shell there she can’t move. Probably what Maria needs more than anything is for something pretty bad but not catastrophic to happen to her. Maybe this breakup can be that thing, but probably not. It sounds like Maria’s already spinning it into an opportunity for self-mythologizing instead of for learning or growth or whatever. Which Maria will go on to talk about when she meets her own next girlfriend. Here is what I’ve figured out about myself, here is how emotionally honest I can be, here is how vulnerable I am. With cussing.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“So basically, I'm like, who the fuck are you Maria Griffiths? A fucking idiot, is who.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada: A Novel

“Trans people are very often very funny. Jokes can be a defense mechanism, a trauma response; if you can make someone laugh before they remember that they hate people like you, you might get out of a 7-Eleven before they can hurt you.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada: A Novel

“That stereotype about transsexuals being all wild and criminal and bold and outside the norm and, like, engendering in the townsfolk the courage to break free from the smothering constraints of conformity? That stereotype is about drag queens. Maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada: A Novel

“There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all. Meaning hormones.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada: A Novel

“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. 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. And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada