by Casey Plett
It was nearly three years ago that Wendy’d gone to Montreal.
Her dad tried to talk her out of it initially. Are you sure? I mean are you sure-sure? It’s so permanent. I know. You’re sure you’re gonna be like this forever. Look, I had my stuff I was pretty sure of in my twenties too. You know? Just think about that! You don’t want to lose something good you can’t get back is all.
Besides, what if something goes wrong?
Wendy’d nodded, said Yes Dad, I know, I’ll think about it. He was just trying to be a good dad. It did mess with her! Not that she wanted to detransition. But surgery in general squicked her out and she hated hospitals and the whole procedure of it made her—goosebumpy. The pain alone (which was stupid right why would you let pain stop you from something so important) but also while yes she hated her dick she’d sorta learned to work with it? She didn’t know—you were supposed to know this in and out but she couldn’t untangle everything in her brain. She would try to re-set her thinking about it and build her reasoning step-by-step like it was a regular mundane choice—do I want to get to Point B, and if I do, is it worth the line from Point A? But everything folded in and out and back on itself. And her dad wouldn’t give it up, he was so weird about it (It’s not that I don’t want you to be a girl! he said. I know you’re a girl. I know. It’s just—) but at the end of the day she trusted the jump in her stomach that had come with the announcement that the province had listed vaginoplasty for funding. She marched right up to Klinic’s front doors the next morning and got there before they opened. She went to every appointment and filled out every form. Doubt and worry ate at her as it got closer, but every time she felt it was too hard, something mechanical in her just made herself do it. Right up until she left. It was like the only way to get it done was to not understand what was actually happening. To not think but just do.
When she left, Wendy barely told anyone she was going. She told herself the secrecy was rational: If cis people knew they’d be stupid about it, if trans people knew they’d be jealous about it—she didn’t even know anybody with a vagina installed at the time, besides the rich old lady who ran the support group at Rainbow. But honestly, deep down: She didn’t want a soul to know. She wanted to swap her junk out alone, in the dark, as if it was something not part of the world.
When Wendy first transitioned, there was someone to notice and comment every step of the way. Every physical twitch and surge and loss earned opinions from the mouths of strangers and lovers alike. She had no language for it at the time. And she didn’t think any of it out of place. Barring the more harass-y things, the commentary seemed natural: Like, duh, if you grew tits, your friends were gonna talk to you about your tits. If the fat flew out of your stomach and into your thighs, your girlfriend would say something about that. Wendy’s hair, Wendy’s freckles, Wendy’s jeans, Wendy’s jewellery, Wendy’s ass, it was all eligible for public remark. And some of it was benevolent and some of it was condescending and some of it was sweet and some of it was gross, but what it all seemed was inevitable. Of course people would talk. And then she started hooking up with dudes and they said a lot more things—it only occurred to her, years later, that no physical part of her womanhood had been allowed to be solely her own.
So by the time she was waiting out front at Klinic that morning, she grew attached to an idea, an idea that started off idle and grew into something large and unalterable, of her vagina as something that could be pure, new and untouched, something she could nurture, take care of, give only to those who would be good to it. Wendy knew it sounded silly, silly as the idea of virginity itself, and that was another reason she didn’t want to talk about it. In the sense that regardless of what she wanted, people still talked about her body, gossiped about her body, men on the street still shouted and groped at her body, old women at work touched her body like they would a doll or a coat. She felt this way far before she ever became a prostitute. (And then that had happened—.) In every section of the city it seemed Wendy had a memory of someone who had treated her body with the casualness they would only treat their own.
And so Wendy wanted her vagina to herself. She wanted to fly away to a land where she’d never been, and come back with a part of herself she would shelter and grow from the bottom up. She was always bitterly, bitterly jealous of people who’d transitioned away from home. That seemed legitimately magical—scary, but magical. So here was this thing for her body she could do and it would be hers. She only told a couple friends. She claimed at her day job that the four weeks she’d booked off in advance was to help a sister due with a new baby, far away. The boss believed her, didn’t know anything about her family, didn’t like giving her hours anyway (didn’t give her any more after she came back either).
She’d never been east of Minneapolis before going. And instead of flying both ways, she ended up going there on the train—she turned her phone off once she got on, most of the trip was forest, thirty hours, it was the middle of summer and lush and gorgeous—it was late getting into Toronto to connect and she had to run through the station—it was so busy, there were so many people—that train was delayed too—and when she got to Montreal it was night, and raining, and far to the hostel she’d booked, and it didn’t occur to her a cab wouldn’t really be that expensive. She was so tired when she schlepped in, wet and exhausted, squishing up with her wallet to a young, young Québécois boy at the front desk with sunken yellow in his eyes.
In the two days before surgery, she walked around the city, and she didn’t turn her phone back on. She walked around the city and for the first time in a long time she discovered new things that were old to everybody but her. She loved this. She went into strip joints, cafeterias, museums, office buildings, dusty bookstores, surrounded by language she didn’t comprehend (like most Anglophone Canadians, she’d taken seven years of French and remembered exactly twenty words). She spent five hours in a T-girl joint called Citibar, a place Dex had mentioned only once in passing and now by complete chance, she walked by as she was wandering, and she got blind drunk spending a fortune watching these beautiful tall strong girls and sweetly declining the trickle of men propositioning her. She wore a white T-shirt with the neck cut out and short black shorts and moved seamlessly through the rush of people, without a car, without a phone, didn’t talk to anyone, meet anyone, run into anyone, or understand anyone. It was beautiful. Beautiful. If there had been a way for her to make peace, clear her brain of the weight and loaded-ness and false grandiosity of what she was there for, and leave in its place only the simple purity of her body exiting one state and entering another, that was it.
Two days later she woke up drugged and bleeding with the weight of a toddler pressing on the vagina that until she died would always remind her of a mush of uncooked dough. She didn’t talk about her trip back home to anyone, any part of it, and she never would, with one exception. If other girls asked (as more and more would when more girls came out and the Klinic pipeline got long) she would say the one true thing she could: No she wasn’t any happier, no she didn’t feel any more like a real girl. But she was calmer now, like a small buzzing part of her brain had been turned off, and was now forever at rest.
That thought came to her gradually as she lay stoned and in pain back home at her dad’s, who by the time she’d left actually ended up graciously cute about the whole thing. He’d demanded to put her up: I’m still your father! You’re gonna let me take care of you! As if she would scream resistance—Okay, no argument Dad. (There were, perhaps, things he could do to help her as a girl.) The heat was awful and she lay on the couch in a haze in front of the TV and a box fan, under the window that opened to the back lane, the soft volume of voices mixing with the sounds of bikes and teenagers and dogs. Her dad made her cold soups (a different kind every few days, from scratch, Ben had always loved to cook), he made her coffee in the morning, made up her bed on the couch when she was in one of her mandated baths. He had, in defiance of all sanity and reason, watched a YouTube vid
eo of the actual procedure while she was away. Jesus CHRIST! he’d said on the drive back from the airport. That was like, just, Je-sus, like, ahhhhh! AHHHHHH! he said with his thighs squirming. Dad, she’d said, fuzzed-out with her head on the window. Why. Would you. Watch something like that. And he said, I don’t fuckin’ know, I wanted to know what was happening to you. There was a peace and gratitude from those combined weeks that she managed to wrap and carry with her far after she recovered, that would power her for many years in a way that was so much precious more than just her pussy. Like: Enough. Some things were enough.
Not even a month post-op, she was at a party at Lila’s place. Wendy’d been sitting on a couch chatting with an older guy who already knew Lila was trans. He asked if Wendy was trans. He’d seemed like one of those dudes who was dumb and a drunk but fun in low doses. It was her first good night getting hammered since she’d went under, and Wendy was feeling pleasant and giggly in a weak, low-energy kind of way. She mentioned she’d just had surgery—that pulled the guy in for a lark.
“You’re kidding me!” And then he tugged the front of her skirt out and stuck his hand in with a twinkle-eyed cry, like someone doing magic for his grandkids, and his fingers momentarily felt like insects on her poor, healing cunt.
“Eek! Not shaved! You don’t shave like a girl yet, huh?” he said. And then patted it. Patted it like a teacher giving a friendly D; better luck next time. All these people around them. No one noticed.
Wendy couldn’t characterize this as sexual assault, even though it was sexual assault. He was just some dumb fucking guy! He was just some fucking guy. And then she realized how dumb, pointless, childish, and princess-like it’d been to think any part of her body could be kept sheltered and untouched and loved. The thought went up in ashes without remorse or sadness. But she did feel calmer now, and she had ever since. She was calmer now, she was calmer.
“It was easy,” said Wendy, snapping back to Kaitlyn’s couch. “I just went to Montreal, and they turned my dick inside out.”
Kaitlyn stared at Wendy glassy-eyed.
Then she said, “No shit.”
“Girl, I think you’re a lady,” said Wendy. “And I’m afraid I have to be going. But you know Klinic with a K? On Portage?”
“No.”
“Call them. Write it down right now. Ask for an appointment. At the trans health clinic. Klinic with a K. Look them up. You don’t have to do it tomorrow, just remember. Klinic with a K.”
“God, thank you,” said Kaitlyn. She sniffed.
“And I’m afraid I must be going.” She was already clumsily shoving herself into her boots and jacket and scarf. She turned around to grab her bag, then hurried into the wall. “I had a lovely time, thank you for hosting me.”
“Do you need a cab? I can call you one, you can wait here.”
“Nonono,” she said, words toppling over themselves, that magnum sloshing around in her fucking pisstank of a body. “I’ll get it!” She couldn’t stay another fucking minute in this apartment.
“This has really helped me,” Kaitlyn said at the door. “How can I thank you?”
Wendy walked out into the frozen air and crunched down the lane. She was drunk. And fucked up. Like, she’d seen plenty of pre-transition girls who talked like that. Like dudes. But …
She came to Wilkes Avenue and gazed into the ink of air and dots of faraway houses.
When had she begun to feel this kind of despair?
Years ago, a rich and supple-toned trick with a yin-yang back tattoo had come over and said, “I dream about my wife divorcing me so I can have a sex change. Yeah, yeah, wash me, that’s good,” as Wendy licked his ass in her shower. He’d worn a pair of Wendy’s heels.
Besides the yin-yang back tattoo, Wendy couldn’t remember what that man looked like except that he was in shape and white. And already she could feel that forgetting with Kaitlyn; her face, her voice, disintegrating and blending and layering in with all the rest, like every boy did with Wendy, tricks or no. Soon all she would remember about that place was the layout of the counter and the way Kaitlyn’s ass felt around her hand. And the stuffed koala. And all else about this night would dissolve in her memory.
She was so drunk and so fucked up, like every part of her body was going to come apart like it was going to spark on fire and burn up into frozen steam. She got out her phone to call Raina and silently pleaded for her to be up before calling a cab. Please don’t be at your girlfriend’s tonight, she desperately thought, and please still be awake. Please. But she took out her phone, and it was dead.
She’d known her battery was low too.
Okay. Okay. “Okay,” she said unsteadily in the middle of the road. She could go back to Kaitlyn’s house. Politely ask to use his phone. That would be fine. She turned around. What was the number? What did his house look like? His street was in the distance. She honestly couldn’t remember how to get back there. His address was—in her phone.
Now. What. How? Wendy swayed and nearly fell over in the ditch. She’d been drunk before she even got there. It was brutal out. She didn’t feel that cold, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in trouble, even that fact filtered down to her fogged, slushing brain. It was minus-forty-five or something … fuck. Fuck, focus!
Knock on doors? It was three-thirty a.m.
She put a boot forward onto the road. Kenaston couldn’t be that far. Even if a gas station wasn’t open, there’d be pay phones. Okay. “Come on, champ,” she said, noiselessly slapping her sides with gloved hands. “Let’s go.”
It was really, really fucking cold. But she had walked for miles in this kind of cold before. That had happened. She’d lived.
Except—tonight, for some fucking reason, she was wearing sweater tights instead of pants, and her legs were numbing and her body was jerking and lurching around, she was so fucking drunk damn it—she concentrated on her breath and her feet, the muffled crunch her boots made in the snow, actively pressing her brain into pause. She walked. She walked. She walked and walked. For a long while.
Eventually, a street sign caught her eye.
Fairmont Road. Wendy stopped and did a 360 turn. She was nowhere close to Kenaston. Or anything. Where was Fairmont Road …? Were those lights down there Kaitlyn’s street? Was it somewhere else? Where? Who … Maybe she was farther out than she thought.
Her long-numbed toes were now feeling tiny electric shocks with each step. She kept walking.
Then a car came up from behind her, going east.
She turned around to wave it down. The car sped past.
That’s okay, she thought. The next one. Someone will think they see a helpless girl and want to stop for her.
The next car zoomed by her too. That’s okay, she thought. You’ll be fine. The next car slowed. A middle-aged woman, looking kind. Wendy gasped in relief and ran over. “Hi!” she said. She forgot how drunk she was, how she must have seemed. Had her makeup been smeared when she was in there—? She had no idea how she looked.
“Hi,” she said again. “My phone’s dead! Fuck, I’m so glad. I’m just trying to get to Kenaston. I don’t know where I am. I have cash. I. Help me.” The woman’s face went white and she sped away. “Hey!” she chased after her. “Hey!”
She kept walking. She was so, so, so cold. Another car coming east. She ran right out into the road this time. Waving her arms. “Help me! Helpmeplease I just needa get—”
The car honked and swerved around her and sped away. “Oh, fuck you! Please! No!” she screamed. The red brake lights disappeared into the immediate dark, and farther on, the faint bright of the city lighting up the prairie sky in an ocean of peaceful, starry black. Wendy felt herself crying, horking up snot, ugly glistening gobs that froze as they dripped down her face.
She made noises that didn’t sound like words.
She kept walking. She walked for a long time. Her legs felt like sticks.
A long time.
Then behind her coming east, a cab. With its light on.
Inside, before she could even thank him, there were also police lights.
A door opened and slammed. The cop came to the cab. He looked in, then looked back at Wendy. He was angry. He spoke to the cabbie. “You just pick her up?”
“Yes.”
“Miss,” he craned toward her, “we’ve gotten two calls now that a tall woman in a black coat has been freaking people out around here. Scaring the bejeezus out of them. Now, that was you, wasn’t it?”
“No one stopped for me.” Her voice came out heavy, as if behind static.
“Calm down! You run out all over the road! You scare people! So you just calm down. Where you going?”
“I’m going home, sir,” said Wendy. Desperately she reached into the depths of her body for stillness. “I’m going home. I have money, and I’m just going to ask this gentleman to take me straight home.”
The cop looked at her furiously. “I need your ID.”
She was too frazzled to lie. She handed over her driver’s license and the cop went away and she and the cabbie sat in silence for five minutes. Her head was slouched against the side window with the cop car lights strobing outside while her frenzied brain suspended itself, holding its breath.
The cop returned and gave the licence back. “Hey, Wendy.”
“Yes.”
The cop started to speak, then cut himself off. He laughed like he’d just seen the most amusing thing and had to keep it in. “What you doing so far away from home?”
“I was at a party.” The first thing that came to her head.
“Yeah? Where.”
“Fairmont Road.”
“What house?”
Wendy’s head drooped forward, and she let out an “Uhhh …”
The cop laughed again. “Don’t ever let me catch you out here again, Wendy.”