Nevada (20 page)

15.

They eat some frozen tater tots and then Maria just, like, hangs out. This is probably James’s first clue that this girl isn’t going to give him the adventure in personal growth, or at least the cool story, that he was sort of hoping for. It actually gets kind of uncomfortable: he keeps smoking even though she stops and then he’s like, well, I guess maybe we could watch a movie? She’s like, yeah, cool, and falls asleep upright on the futon pretty much as soon as he puts on whatever it was he put on. Twin Peaks or something. Then he’s like, fuck man, now what do I do? He sits down at his computer like, I wish I knew if she was a heavy enough sleeper that I could jack off.

Not really an appropriate thought.

But it starts to occur to him that this Girl From Somewhere Else isn’t going to show him what it means to be cool, or explain the secret of getting out of your shitty home town, or involve him in some mysterious occult ritual under the glare of the half moon or something. He probably should have just called Nicole. It’s like eight o’clock and he hasn’t even texted her so he digs out his phone.

Three new texts. Fuck.

They’re all from Nicole, increasing in forced nonchalance:

hey james what are you doing?

hellooooo

okay im making a mix tape nbd

He texts her back like, Hey im actually feeling kinda shitty, fell asleep after work, see you tomorrow?

She texts back right away: cool

He knows on some level that he’s being a stoner asshole but every syllable in those exchanges made him feel like the world was ending. What’s up anxiety. Fuck. He packs another bowl and smokes it. Stares at the computer. You can’t see the computer monitor from the futon and Maria is sleeping like she’s dead, but she’s definitely breathing so James looks at sleazy porn captions for a while without masturbating, lurks at a message board for an hour without absorbing anything, looks up a half-remembered Nickelodeon show from when he was little, puts in an ear bud and goes down a youtube rabbit hole of videos about transitioning, looks up and sees that it’s past midnight. Maria hasn’t moved, she’s like a garbage bag full of wet leaves on his futon. So James is like Oh, I guess you’re sleeping over, hunts down his sleeping bag in the back of his closet, and goes to sleep on the floor across the room from her.

He goes to sleep thinking about the last thing he googled before locking up the computer, ‘how do you politely ask if someone is trans?’

Pretty much everybody agrees that there isn’t a polite way to do it. But what else is he going to do? He smokes once more before bed but he can’t stop worrying about it. He kind of needs to talk to her about it.

Worrying when you’re stoned is the worst.

The next morning he just asks her, though. She’s laying there like in that way where you can tell she’s awake, she just doesn’t know what to do with herself, like rolling over and sighing and probably she has to pee but didn’t want to wake him up by getting up. A classic politeness stalemate. James tries to roll over really loud but she doesn’t look over. He coughs and fakes a sneeze, checks the time on his phone. It’s early, but she’s just lying there so James is like, okay, fuck it, and starts packing a bowl. He’s pretty quiet about it but she must decide that that’s enough movement and noise because she’s like, Oh hey.

James is like, Oh hey.

He tries not to notice that her face has, like, stubble.

So uh, he says, staring deep into the bowl of the pipe like he’s going to find something in it, breaking up a nug and trying to look like he wasn’t asking something inappropriate, You’re trans right?

Fuck, she mutters. She gets up off the futon, walks over to the bathroom and closes the door behind her.

16.

Maria, in the bathroom, is thinking, Dude just straightup asked if I was trans! That might not ever have happened to me before. When she was first transitioning, people would give her shit on the train and stare at her and she heard a lot of That’s a dude and You a fuckin man, but in James H.’s little bathroom with the water faucet that felt like you could snap it off by accident she’s thinking, Is that even rude?

Like, it had been her plan since yesterday to tell him she was trans so she could talk about it and they could get him to stare down his own trans stuff. And it should be a value-neutral question, isn’t it? In a world that was less fucked up about trans people, it would be a perfectly legitimate question: maybe kind of rude, like do you dye your grey hair or something. But in this world that question was making her hyperventilate.

She intentionally takes some long slow breaths, splashes some water on her face, decides that she won’t smoke any weed today no matter how politely this kid offers it to her—no matter how innocent and tired his face looks when he asks—and pushes down the panicked, angry, anguished, and affronted thing that had risen up her chest into her throat. She looks at her sleepy face in the mirror, yesterday’s mascara smudged under her eyes, a futon crease up one cheek: James H. is allowed to ask if you’re trans, stupid. That’s the whole fucking point, Maria! The fact that you’re not the one choosing when to disclose is probably for the best anyway since we left it up to you yesterday and all you did was get high and fall asleep.

She’s like, okay, I’ll just talk about being trans. No big deal. I talk about being trans all the time! Just not out loud. And she thinks, maybe it’s been a long enough time since I had to talk about this. Maybe now this conversation doesn’t have to be all panicky and sad.

Basically she’s like, okay, I can do this. Even though I guess I already decided to do this.

She thinks for a second about shaving and putting on makeup before leaving the bathroom. She actually really wants to; if you’re going to be talking about being trans it would’ve been nice to put on some small show of, like, look how passable you can turn out, look how pretty and poised and together you can grow up to be. Obviously that is a misogynist patriarchal mandate: look pretty! But let’s be real about the fact that before transitioning, how many trans women have a good handle on breaking down patriarchal mandates for women? Also, who hasn’t internalized that stuff? Stockholm syndrome with patriarchy, it’s unavoidable, even when you’re resisting it and not shaving your armpits, you have to hear about it from every mook on the subway every day. And when you’re a trans woman, patriarchal mandates about presentation get extra twisted up with narratives of disclosure, validity as a human being, violence, the possibility of ever being found attractive, and probably a bunch of other stuff you haven’t even identified yet. It makes it actually pretty complicated to leave the bathroom once you’re in it. Anyway the whole thing is moot because she left her makeup bag with her razor and stuff out in the car, so she finds a hairbrush and almost runs it through her hair before noticing, in the mirror, that this brush is pretty much bulging in every direction with long, stringy, dishwater brown hairs that she doesn’t really want to touch her head. Never mind. She puts the hairbrush down, runs her fingers through the length of her hair a couple times to untangle the knottiest knots, and opens the door.

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.