She sits back down on the futon. At some point she’s taken off her longer skirt and it would’ve been awkward to put it back on right then so she puts a pillow in her lap and she’s like, Yes James H., I’m trans. How did you know?
Which, she realizes as she’s saying it, is exactly the worst possible question she could have started with.
James is like, I dunno.
Oh.
He takes a hit from the pipe, holds the smoke. Maria waits.
Nah, he says, I mean, it’s not like it’s super obvious or anything, I just, like, I was like, I dunno.
So Maria asks if he has any coffee and he says he might, yeah, in the freezer, so she gets up and finds an ancient foil bag of pre-ground coffee all frozen together. She winces: this is not how we do coffee in New York. We have grinders and rituals and French presses and thesauruses to describe smells and tastes and mouth feels. James’s frozen coffee reminds her of her mom’s house growing up. This coffee is kind of depressing but it will wake her up, stave off a headache.
Here’s the deal, James H., Maria says spooning coffee into a dusty old coffee maker. Let’s start this conversation off again, on the right foot, and steer it away from normative models of understanding transsexuality.
She’s like, let’s start with this kid’s understanding of himself. Herself. Theirself. Wherever James winds up, you don’t get to pick a pronoun for someone even if you want to give them one you think they’ll like. She’s like, his life is going to be perfect, it’s going to rule, but then she realizes something.
Wait, she says. James H., are you trans?
He literally snorts.
You mean like am I really a girl? Nah.
No, she says. She starts gearing up to explain that the Really The Gender You Were Assigned At Birth model is cisnormative and poisonous, but stops. They’ll get to it. The question at hand is more important to address than that one. Maria has her first inkling that even though she’s worked out a cosmology in which a bunch of interconnected puzzle pieces of understanding about oppression and misogyny and transphobia and transphobic faux feminism and all the other things that make up the picture of why everybody always thinks trans women are crazy and stupid—she realizes that even though she’s built that up for herself, she might not be able to put all the pieces together for someone else. And it sucks. But she pushes it aside for a minute like no, stay on topic.
No I mean do you ever think you might be trans, not are you a trans guy.
Oh, he says. He makes her wait while he takes another heroic lungful. He holds it, exhales, and says, I dunno.
The way he looks over at her after he says that though—scared, maybe a little bit aggressive, but mostly like, do you believe me—makes his answer clear.
17.
There’s a thing Maria is used to doing on the Internet. Since 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. In fact, if there’s one thing a lifetime of Stockholm syndrome with hegemony gives you, it’s a thorough understanding of cultural tropes about trans women.
It came from the older practice of telling everybody who thought they might be trans that they must be absolutely certain that they were trans before they even considered buying some clothes or starting a testosterone blocker. It’s the old narrative, the Johns Hopkins in the seventies narrative: the only people who are really trans are the people who knew explicitly from a young age, are pretty without hormones, and can’t survive without transitioning. Trans women on the Internet looked around and were like, well, maybe surviving for the first part of your life in the role of a cis dude is an adaptive strategy. 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.
Plus the world has moved on from the narrative that says being trans is something to be avoided at all costs; it’s moved on from the narrative that says the only way to be trans is to be young and tiny and pretty and into men and to transition and then disappear. 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. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you’ll be back where you started: trans. Just older and more entrenched in a life that itself is not much more than a coping mechanism designed to keep you from having to be trans in the real world. If you’re trans you’re trans and if you’re obsessed with whether you might be trans you probably are trans.
For a while they were like, you must be entirely certain. Then they were like, I dunno man, it sounds like you’re probably trans, you should explore that. Then, eventually, when Maria and the trans women of the Internet couldn’t help but notice that they were 100% accurate in their message board diagnoses, they started just saying, Welp, you are definitely trans. Because even on the off chance that somebody finding a trans community to talk to about these things was not, actually, trans—whatever Actually Trans might even mean—maybe hearing somebody say, like, You are trans, would spur some useful thinking. Like, if you’re going to decide on your gender for the rest of your life based on what a couple idiots on the Internet tell you, you probably have problems beyond a false diagnosis of transsexuality. Plus, nobody said you had to commit the rest of your life to anything.
So when James says I dunno, Maria’s immediate response is something like: I knew it. I knew it. I am so fucking smart. This is the perfect opportunity to lay it out for him.
She says something like, Whoa, you don’t know?
I don’t know, he says. I mean, I think about it. But, I mean, look at me, you know? I have a job, a girlfriend. What am I going to do, just start wearing dresses?
He looks down at his hands. There’s a pipe in one and a lighter in the other. Without really thinking about he brings the pipe to his lips. His lighter thumb twitches but then he’s like, wait, this is dumb, it is a dumb idea to smoke right now, and he reaches over and puts it on the computer desk. It feels pretty mature.
18.
The stupid thing is that obviously James knows that transitioning isn’t just, like, you put on a dress and go to work. He knows that’s what stupid ridiculous people think. And he was already kicking himself for saying really a girl a minute ago. He knows better than that. But it’s weird how hard it is to talk about stuff even though you want to talk about it. His brain just shut off and went all stupid.
Maria really wants to talk about it though .
She’s like, So it’s something you’ve thought about?
And he’s like, I don’t know, I guess so.
And she’s like, Like, seriously?
He’s like, I don’t know, I guess so.
She has this gleam in her eye like she is just so totally stoked that James is telling her this but his brain is freezing up even more, like there are a hundred million things he wants to say but he wants to say them all at once so all he can say is like, Do you wanna smoke? and I dunno and Uhhh, and Duuuhhhh. He sees pizza boxes and dust in the corners of the room, a layer of dust on everything, and he can’t quite get his head around the fact that this person is here and in his apartment.
Maria is like, So you knew I was trans?
And James is like, I dunno, yeah.
Because obviously you don’t just tell someone you could tell they were trans and how do you tell someone that you figured out they were trans and that the reason you could tell isn’t anything they did or anything about them, it’s because probably on some level every day you’re looking at everyone and hoping you can figure out evidence that they are trans so you can make friends with someone who is trans who can tell you that you are trans too and like solve that problem for you?
Anyway she winces but then she, like, she shakes herself almost, like when a dog is totally flipping out about finding a dead animal that’s been run over a bunch of times but it knows it’s not going to be allowed to eat the dead animal so it backs away a couple of steps and shakes itself off like it’s soaked, like it just climbed out of a river, like it’s trying to reset its nervous system or whatever. Or whatever the opposite of that feeling is, the bad version of finding a carcass you’re excited to lick, either way she shakes it off and she goes, Yeah.
James goes, Yeah.
She’s like, Well, uh, I guess if you want to talk about it I transitioned a long time ago and I know a lot about trans stuff and mostly I came back into the Wal-Mart because I kinda guessed that you were trans but I wasn’t sure but you kind of looked, um, exactly like me when I was twenty and I was like, I wish I had had somebody to talk to about this stuff when I was that age, instead of just the stupid 2002 Internet?
James has this weird feeling of dots connecting, or like the fog of being a dumbass stoner from the desert who works at Wal-Mart was lifting for a second, like maybe a moment of clarity or whatever. Because honestly since she asked if he was trans it was like this fog descended, like not weed smoke but something thicker, and he checked out pretty hard. Which made him want to smoke more, even though he was already smoking and smoking. But it was like for a second a beam of light cut through that fog and all these things hit him at once: she’s trans but she’s not like the weirdo trans people on the Internet. No offense. And: I think I just told someone out loud that I think about being a girl sometimes, even if I didn’t admit how much or how bad I think about it. And like, at the same time, there are these two conflicting feelings: like, on one hand, who the fuck is this girl trying to talk to me about shit I don’t want to talk about, but on the other hand, maybe I could get into her car and leave town with her and live with her and wear her clothes and bum her hormones and maybe everything would be totally okay forever. So James feels a little bit like his breath got punched out of him but also like this new and better kind of breath got punched into him? Or something, it was weird.
But all he could say was, Yeah, the Internet. It’s like sometimes I think about being a girl but I would want to be like Nicole, you know, not like these ladies with the makeup and the boring stupid jokes and beige shoes or whatever the fuck
Yeah, Maria says, The problem with the Internet is that most of the trans women who manage to transition and still be dirtbags or punkers or weirdos or dykes or radicals or whatever stay way away from those people, too, and there’s this narrative of ‘deep stealth’ that makes it seem like maybe we don’t exist or we stop being trans but actually what happens is that we keep living our lives and being dirty weirdos we just—I should only speak for myself, I guess, but I just got bored of talking about it. Like, I have a livejournal, and I know some people on the Facebook who I’ve met IRL a couple times but mostly, like, the Advocate doesn’t want anything to do with trans women who can’t afford face surgeries and hate capitalism so it can even just be hard to meet anyone
James is like, Well I don’t know anything about capitalism or anything.
Maria is like, Well let’s talk.
James is like, We are talking.
Maria laughs and James is like, What.
Okay sorry, Maria says, Let’s not talk about capitalism or anarchism or anything except I do want to say that those things ended up being totally essential to my understanding of being trans and feminism and my location and the things that suck about being trans. All that stuff. So maybe like we can table them for now and get back to them.
James is like, Okay.
Maria’s like, Well, what do you want to talk about?
James thinks for a second, and then thinks for another second, and then when he realizes that actually he’s probably too stoned to come up with anything he’s like, Do you want breakfast?
She gives him a look like I can see that this dumb kid’s brain is full and says, Yeah, sure, probably.
19.
The only food James has is some old peanut butter, some bread in the freezer, and the butt end of that bag of shitty coffee, so they eat peanut butter toast and make more weak coffee. Having Maria in his kitchen makes James feel like his kitchen is a dusty, grungy and kind of sad mess, in a way that having Nicole in there never really does. He’s like, I guess my apartment sucks. Weird how you don’t notice that.
So they make food and he still kind of feels like his head is in orbit or whatever but eating food and changing the subject makes him feel like maybe intense stuff is put away even though probably in his body and his nerves he’s still feeling it. Like he is probably kind of lightheaded.
They don’t talk for a while, they just kind of make food and eat it or whatever but then out of nowhere Maria is like, You’ve been to Reno, right?
James is like, Yeah.
She’s like, You wanna go to Reno? Right now?
I don’t know, he says, mouth all stuck together with peanut butter, I kind of have to go to work this afternoon or whatever.
Your call, Maria says, But you kind of have to ask yourself, do I want to have the kind of life where I call out of work to go to Reno with a cool wingnut stranger lady, or do I want to have the kind of life where I work loyally for Wal-Mart until I die?
There is probably some middle ground between the two and also that kind of felt like a weird and manipulative thing to say, but thinking about it and swallowing James is kind of like, well, I guess I actually do want to have the kind of life where I bail on work to go to Reno with a transgender murderess I just met or whatever. And the more he thinks about it the more he’s like, whoa, this is actually what freedom feels like. Deciding to skip work to hang out with a stranger feels like something people in Star City don’t do, but it is probably something that cool people with weird hair and clothes he wouldn’t even know how to put on, like in Portland or Austin or something, probably do.
Okay, he says, But like what are we going to even do in Reno? Gamble?
Dude we are going to party as hell, she says.
Oh.
Yeah dude.
You know I’m not old enough to drink though right?
She makes a face like hmm and then swallows.
Well uh, she says. Then she’s like, Nah, never mind.
He’s like, What, and she’s like, Uh, well, this is kind of a weird offer but I kind of have a bunch of heroin?
20.
At this point James has to acknowledge this feeling that’s been creeping up and down his spine since he first saw her at Wal-Mart but which so far he’s been able to ignore. He’s like: who the fuck is this person in my apartment.
Probably she can see that he’s kind of weirded out so she starts talking but he kind of talks over her, he’s like, Uhhhhh, who are you? Like for real, all I know about you is that you’re trans and you have a pretend dog and cat and maybe you have pretend heroin, too, but maybe it’s real? What are you doing here?
She’s just like, Yeah, okay, and then neither of them knows what to say so again James is like, For real, who are you.
Maria is sitting on the floor and James is on the futon. She looks up at him from across the room with her bangs in her eyes, pushes her hair back off her forehead—her kind of big forehead—and sighs.
Okay, she says. Sure. I’m twenty-nine. I grew up in a shitty little cow town in Pennsylvania, moved to New York City after college, transitioned six years ago, and work in a bookstore. Well. I guess I used to work in a bookstor
e. I don’t know. Like a month ago I figured out that I was really unhappy with my life so I borrowed-stole my girlfriend’s car and, like, I guess I just pointed it west.
James thinks, like, yeah and you’re a heroin addict? And like, you were inevitably unhappy with your life because you’re trans, right? Meaning, transition doesn’t work. But what he says is, It took you a month to drive a couple thousand miles?
She smirks at him and pushes her hair back again. I dunno, she says. I guess so. I did a lot of hanging out in parking lots and stuff.
James goes, Like, on heroin?
She laughs kind of too loud.
Nah, she says, That whole thing is fuckin stupid. When I was like sixteen, I had a friend who was really into heroin, right? Used to buy hundreds of dollars worth at a time, right, and just do it recreationally. Shootin heroin on a Friday night. Or a Tuesday night, didn’t matter. It was, like, dumb teenage shit. Check out how tough we are. I latched onto him. When he’d go to Philadelphia and buy four hundred dollars worth, I’d give him a twenty and have him bring me back a couple dimebags. Whatever. No big deal.
She stops talking for a second and then nods, like she’s figuring out how much of this story to tell him, and she’s decided: all of it.
So yeah check this out, she says. I sort of just broke up with my girlfriend. We had been together for a bunch of years and developed this routine where we had an apartment and cats and stuff and our bills were under control, she had a grownup job that was turning her into a grownup kind of, and I realized. Like. I guess I just figured out that I wasn’t happy, right? I was blaming her for stuff and getting pissed that she was turning into a grownup or whatever but mostly I was just so checked out that I didn’t even understand if I was mad or sad or confused or what, you know?
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