by Elliot Wake
A hero. For existing. “Thank you. That’s very kind.”
“Could I—I’m sorry, but could I get a pic with you?”
Good girls always apologized for their desire. Only boys and sluts were permitted to show it openly.
This world is impossible for women.
“Don’t be sorry. It’s my pleasure.”
In the pic she blushed and my dark eyes looked off into the distance. At Cress, who watched us.
Restlessly I wandered the Cathedral. Other girls touched my arms, my face. Smiled and held for a moment and let go. Their touches clung to me, tingling, a second skin spun from electric frustration and want. I found Blythe dancing alone, her hair ice blond in the frozen light. I watched her as I’d watched Armin. What made this girl so sure of herself, of her place in the world? Every day she took shit for being a woman, and queer, and bipolar, and faced it without apology or shame. Her whole personality was a middle finger to the universe. I’d seen her stand up to strapping frat boys, throw a drink in a jerk’s face. Argue TERFs into the ground. Blythe was pure id, acting on every impulse, fierce and feminine at once.
A face floated through the crowd, eerily familiar: one eyebrow cocked, a knowing slant to his lips.
Was it real? Or was I just seeing him in every man?
“Are you babysitting me?” Blythe purred as I drew closer.
“No. You’re an adult. Technically.”
“Then let’s dance.”
Her fingertips glided against my neck, a smirk coiling the edges of her mouth. Her smell was dizzying, dark and sweet, blackberry wine, and for a moment I forgot my fears. It was hard not to fall in love with Blythe McKinley. I’d thought I’d fallen for her, once. But it was the T. Spend five minutes with any pretty girl and you’ll fall in love.
Before transition, I had preconceptions about men. Thought they experienced emotion less acutely, with less range. That they felt only horniness and hunger and hate. Fuck eat kill. What I found once my T level hit cis male average was that emotions, for men, were single-minded, slavish. Intense to the point that they could not be processed mentally, only felt in the body.
Armin told me about emotion maps—images that showed where people physically experience emotions, where the actual blood flows and nerves fire. Sadness is primarily in the lungs. Anger is in the fists. Happiness permeates the whole frame. It struck me how certain feelings—pride and anger, for instance—looked almost identical.
Women are better at this, he’d said. There’s wholeness in the way they feel things. Their maps are diffuse, more evenly spread. For us, it’s a lightning strike. A discrete devastation.
What stuck with me was the way he’d said, so casually: for us.
“What are you thinking about?” Blythe said.
“How you’re more of a lightning strike than a thunderstorm.”
She grinned. “Don’t know what that means, but I like it.”
We danced close, her slimness sliding against my muscle. I felt the weight of others watching. From afar we looked like two beautiful people, anointed with sweat and rainbow glitter, completely without care. Inside I was a depressed mess and Blythe was barely staving back bipolar disorder.
So much of a person lies beneath the skin. You never know what you’re really seeing when you look at someone.
That familiar man’s face drifted in the crowd again. When I looked at it, it turned.
“I need air,” I told Blythe.
Outside, the pavement was still warm and sun-softened, like a body settling down to sleep. Wind wove ribbons of coolness down wide streets. You could never see stars in the city but the moon was clear, and the lights of cars and shops and lamps made a cosmos at ground level, as if I waded through spindrift full of stardust. People passed me, snippets of dialogue floating by like I was walking in and out of a hundred films.
For someone so haunted, I felt pretty fucking alone.
At the Adams Street Bridge I took the stairs down to the river. An oil painting of the city lay reflected in the water, gently melting into pure light. I stepped close to the edge and let my toes hang off. My center of gravity was still in my hips. When I was learning how to pass I practiced walking with my weight held high in my chest, which felt ridiculous, like some cartoon bodybuilder. Later I realized it wasn’t just biomechanics that made men move differently—it was sociological. The way men took up space in the world was different from the way women did. They took it without permission or hesitation, took as much as they could get away with. I watched them manspread on trains, their legs in wide Vs, devouring extra seats while women folded themselves up like Swiss Army knives. I watched them play chicken and shoulder-check each other on the street, coldly refusing eye contact. If you didn’t participate in these little violences it only made them keener to target you, dominate you. Put you in your place. So I took up more space than I needed. To avoid attention. To pass. And I thought: What a simpler, saner world this would be if men were socialized like women.
I balanced on the wharf’s edge and walked along the river. In the damp darkness beneath the bridge, there were too many echoes. Someone else was there.
Cressida stepped out of the shadows at the far end.
I didn’t stop, because men are too dumb to back down. We march headlong into confrontations we know we’ll lose. Otherwise we’re making a statement on our penis size or something.
I passed her and kept going.
“Ren,” she called.
Dammit.
Beneath her jacket she wore a plain white tee. Her curls were pinned back. In the dimness her skin glowed a burnished umber, as if it still held the autumn sun, too.
“Look,” I said, “stalking isn’t okay just because you’re a woman. It’s still creepy and threatening.”
She frowned. “Do I threaten you?”
“No. But that’s not the point.”
Pause. Then, “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
I shrugged and made to leave. She touched my arm, brief, light, but the imprint of her heat lingered on my skin.
“We’ve had a bad start,” she said.
“Seemed pretty intentional on your behalf.”
“You must understand I’m curious about you.”
Internally I cringed. Another curious cis girl. “Google it. I’m not a spectacle.”
“I’m curious about Cane. My new partner.”
Wait, what? Laney hadn’t said shit about this.
“We’re not partners,” I said. “I’m suspended.”
“The Wolf sent me to tell you that you’re officially unsuspended.”
“Great. So now you’ve got my old position. Where does that leave me?”
“We’re sharing this position, so I suppose it leaves us tangled up together.”
My face went hot. I kept my mouth shut.
Cress leaned against the tunnel, her boots jingling faintly. Knee bent, arms crossed. Wry pout. Like a black girl version of James Dean. It was infuriatingly attractive.
“We haven’t been properly introduced,” she said. “I’m Tamsin Baylor.”
Her name did something to me. Another little surge of heat.
“Renard Grant,” I said.
“Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Grant.”
That “Mr.” made my belly tighten. I couldn’t look away from her mouth. Lush lips, tinted dusty violet. “Likewise, Ms. Baylor.”
“Forgive my aloofness, Renard. I’ve been wearing your bruises for weeks.”
“You left your calling card all over me, too,” I said, and lifted the hem of my tee to show a fading scar.
Her eyes went straight to my Adonis belt. Then climbed, slowly, up the ladder of my abs. I let the shirt fall.
“I see why the girls talk about you,” Tamsin said. “You have a certain charm.”
“I’m not trying to charm you.”
“It’s working anyway.”
Our eyes held for a moment. The air seemed to tremble palpably on my skin. When I breathed I felt the fullne
ss of my chest and shoulders, thick and tight. “You were wrong about me, Tamsin.”
First time I’d said her name. Her lungs swelled, her breasts lifting.
So I was getting to her, too. Good.
“You said I hold back too much. But that’s something I only do with women.”
“Don’t think they can take it?”
“No. I know they can.”
“Then why?”
I stepped out of the tunnel, into the purple dusk. “I don’t hurt women,” I said, “because I know how it feels.”
———
Armin’s condo complex had a nice gym, and he’d given me the door code. I found him on the rowing machine. Everything shone: sterling mirrors, chrome barbells, his skin polished with sweat like buffed copper. We nodded wordlessly to each other. I stripped my shirt off and hit the squat rack; he spotted. Despite his being a head taller and naturally V-tapered, I had more muscle. Broad shoulders, chiseled pecs, a six-pack even at rest. The tats across my chest rippled when I moved: Poseidon whipping the sea into furious foam, a centaur swinging a wicked ax. Reminders of what hadn’t killed me. My sweat brought out the olive-gold of my skin. I was a pretty damn good-looking guy.
Until I stood side by side with Armin. Then I might as well wear a neon sign flashing FEELINGS OF GROSS INADEQUACY.
He caught my eye in the mirror. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I dropped into a squat and stood with ease. My body was a well-oiled engine, my muscles pumping like pistons. I’d grown used to it over the years but sometimes I remembered, viscerally, how I’d once felt like I was inside a puppet, only partially in control. Tugging at strings and praying it would obey. Praying no one would notice it was actually a girl.
Armin bumped my elbow at the end of the set. “Want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“Whatever’s eating you.”
Instead of answering I threw myself into the next set. And because I was overcompensating, I lost the rhythm and failed the third rep. The barbell clanged onto the safety hooks. Armin braced me as I stumbled.
“Ren.”
I shrugged him off. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. That’s what I’m supposed to say, right? Bottle it up. That’s what men do.”
“That’s what men-children do. You’re not a child.”
I stuck out my lower lip. He smiled, that male-model freeze-frame every time.
“Is it about what happened with Laney?”
“No. Yes. A little. I don’t fucking know.” I sighed.
“Something else happen?”
I dropped onto a weight bench. He got me to talk after all. “My anniversary is coming up.”
Armin sat beside me. “Of your transition?”
“Yeah. Starting T.”
“How many years will it be?”
“Five.”
“Wow.” He swept a hand through his hair. That body of his was insane. I like girls—at least, 99 percent of my attraction is to girls—but T ramped my libido so high that preference sometimes mattered less than a beautiful body in my immediate vicinity. I looked away. Armin went on, “I don’t know if I have it in me to devote myself to something like you have.”
“It’s not devotion. Devotion is a choice.”
He thought about that. “Getting tired of it?”
“I’m not sure.” I raised my head, felt the tethers of muscle twining down my neck. “I sort of feel tired of everything.”
“That sounds like depression. Still seeing your therapist?”
“Yep,” I lied.
Not going to tell him I didn’t have the cash.
Not going to fess up that exhibiting myself to a million viewers twice a week paid peanuts. That I needed a real job but had probably boxed myself out of ever having one. Google my name and you’ll find Renard Grant’s entire medical history. His surgeries. His scars. This TERF blogger actually put together a mock medical chart for me, full of words like mental disorder and elective amputation. So thoughtful of her.
People don’t hire weirdos like me. Once you cash in on your weirdness, you’re stuck milking it for a living.
I would always be seen as trans before anything else. I’d guaranteed it.
“Okay,” Armin said. “But you don’t have to save it all for him. We’re your friends, Ren. Talk to us.” He clapped my delt. Strong but gentle. “We’ll shoulder your burdens with you. That’s what friends do.”
I looked away again, with a different sort of awkwardness.
Testosterone inhibits crying. It’s a documented biological phenomenon: men don’t cry less than women because we’re uncaring assholes; we cry less because T jams it up. We still feel everything that makes women cry. We just can’t express it as freely.
So I sat there with my throat closing around a tiny pearl of pain, unable to push it out.
Armin twisted a towel and said, “By the way, there’s a job opening at that clinic you go to. Intake screening, no medical training required. I could drop your name.”
I frowned. “You know people there?”
“I volunteered. After Laney’s . . . exposure of my past, I wanted to serve other people. To offset what I’d taken.”
Penitence.
Strange, how Laney was more forgiving of her demon than I was of mine.
“It’s merely an offer,” he said. “You don’t have to—”
“Did she tell you I’m broke?”
He shrugged, noncommittal.
“Armin, I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t want a handout.”
“It’s not a handout. You do the work, you get paid.”
“I don’t need your help.” I totally did.
“Okay. Like I said, simply an offer.”
“It’s not okay.” Here came hothead Ren again. “I’m sick of people treating me like I need special considerations. Like I’m weak and helpless. I’m a normal fucking guy with an unusual history. That’s all.”
“Maybe I phrased it badly. Of course you’re a normal guy, Ren. You’re not helpless, or weak. But you are marginalized, and I’ve treated people like you poorly in the past. And people like Laney, and Blythe.”
“And Ellis.”
“Lots of people.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t change that. The world has always been harder for you than it is for me. But if I can tilt the balance in the right direction, I will. Using my privilege to correct imbalances is the right thing to do.”
“Sorry. I appreciate it, man. I’m just—touchy, lately.”
“Job offer stands. I’d rather it went to a friend.”
Me at an LGBT health clinic. Counseling scared kids whose parents didn’t know. Telling them it was going to be okay, the way I told millions of strangers online.
Way back, when I’d first googled all this stuff—how do I know if I’m really trans? and should I transition? and transition regrets—much of what I found was deliberate misinformation. It was planted by TERFs—trans-exclusionary radical feminists, an offshoot of feminism that wasn’t actually feminism anymore, but a hate group. “XX = woman,” they said, apparently having flunked Human Physiology 101. Two X chromosomes made you a woman no more than a vagina or breasts did. TERFs saw everything through a lens of hate and ignorance: they called trans men traitors to womanhood, and trans women rapists in dresses. It was a caricature of feminism, a veneer for misandry. It took months for me to sift through their bullshit and understand that vulnerable trans folks were prime prey for any nut with a chip on their shoulder.
Sometimes, I thought, Ingrid flirted with the fringes of TERFism. Her most vitriolic essays suggested that gender was socially constructed. That the differences between men and women were invented and performed, like roles in a play. Dress equals submission, pants equal dominance. An age-old system of social hierarchy that we’d confused for biological truth. All that made us different, she said, was what was between our legs, not our ears. “Masculinity” and “femininity” were made up.
Exc
ept that didn’t explain people like me. People so miserable in our birth bodies that we must either change or destroy them.
If masculinity was made up, why did it feel so right to me? Why did femininity feel so wrong? Why did I feel an overpowering need to alter this body from the inside out, not just my name and clothes and hair, my superficial expressions?
Why did starting testosterone feel like waking up from a deep, two-decades-long sleep?
It’s all in your head, Ingrid had said. Patriarchy taught you to hate femaleness. That’s what causes your gender dysphoria.
Resentfully, I thought, I don’t hate femaleness. I hate that it was forced on me.
But things were changing now. Whatever the origins of dysphoria, transgender rights won legal recognition. Trans people gained public visibility. Maybe I could use my voice to reach trans kids struggling with their identities, too. Shelter them from predators and liars. Show them what a self-made man looked like.
My phone rang, shrieking from the other side of the gym. I’d set it to priority. Only Ingrid.
And Ingrid never called.
When I answered she said, flatly, “Come home now.”
“What’s up?”
“Just come home. We need to talk.”
“Inge.” I cupped the phone closer. “What happened? Are Mina and—”
“They’re fine.”
The coldness in her voice unsettled me. What could be so wrong, so awful she couldn’t say it over radio waves?
What else but the one thing I’d been dreading and seeing everywhere?
“On my way.”
In the car Armin didn’t speak, but our silence was brotherly, close. Sometimes I worried I’d grown to loathe men, like Ingrid. That I’d exiled myself into a gender I couldn’t stand. We were the ones who did most of the hurting, the destroying. Men wrecked the world and women picked up the pieces. Armin was guilty, too. He’d hurt Laney and Blythe and Ellis. Hurt us all by extension. But beneath the baggage of gender he was simply human, like me. We fucked up. We tried to be better.
Progress wouldn’t exist if we never fucked up.
At my apartment building, the windows were dark but the curtain twitched and fluttered like a ghost. Inge met me in the front hall.
“What’s going on?” I said.