Nevada (22 page)

I was like, Piranha, man, why the fuck aren’t you fuckin rich, you are a genius, I said this kind of through tears, and she was like, Uh, Maria, I’m not rich because I’m trans and because I’m a woman. I was like, Oh yeah.

So anyway I spent the last couple weeks thinking about that stuff, right, thinking about how to reset those patterns, and how to, like, have feelings? And I was like, fuck, uh, re-reading a bunch of Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh would probably be a really productive thing to do right now; snorting a mountain of heroin would probably be, like, the opposite. Which made me think about the role of drugs and alcohol and stuff in my life and made me want to go straightedge and then once you’re straightedge you might as well go vegan and then I was like, actually, I’m coasting on my almost no savings, I can’t really afford to go vegan right now. You know? So I’m stuck with all this heroin, and I’m not going to try to fucking become a heroin dealer.

So basically, I’m like, who the fuck are you, Maria Griffiths? A fucking idiot, is who.

21.

James just listens while Maria goes off and finds himself kind of trusting her. Like not that much, obviously she has her shit and stuff, but if you’re going to have a story about why you’re claiming to have a bunch of heroin, that’s a pretty good one. And he starts to think, Well, maybe it would be worth it to take a trip to Reno with this person.

He knows he probably didn’t understand, like, two thirds of what she’s said. Hello: he is a checked-out fucking stoner, right, his life isn’t exactly hers but he’s been the weird kid his whole life, right, and he’s been jealous of girls his whole life, right, so like, maybe that means something? But at the same time he’s like, god, this girl is a fucking mess, and the more you look, the more you can kind of tell that she’s trans just by looking at her. And he keeps thinking about that flash of forehead. Whatever.

What happens if you sprinkle heroin on a bowl of weed?

His brain is all full but he hears himself say, Yeah, I could go to Reno with you.

She’s like, That’s your response to that? To everything I just told you?

He’s like, I dunno.

She laughs. All right, she says, Yeah word, let’s go to Reno. But James H., I want you to tell me who you are, too. Your turn. Charon’s fare.

Maria disappears into the bathroom for five minutes. Then they finish the shitty coffee and bail.

22.

The first thing they do in the car is to drive through a coffee place so Maria can get real coffee. It’s a little drive-through coffee hut by the highway and she gets kind of mad when there are no bagels. When James doesn’t get any coffee she’s like, Oh, do you want some downers instead, reaches over to pop open the glove box, and gestures at a blue-striped athletic sock rolled up in another sock and tucked under some maps and a literal pair of raggedy gloves with the fingertips cut off. He’s like, really, that’s where you keep your heroin, just in a sock in the glovebox? Then they’re on route 80 and he’s kind of like, still mostly wrapping his head around the stuff Maria told him back in the apartment, trying to figure out how to talk about himself in a similar way.

I mean, he thinks, what the fuck
is
my deal? I am a dumbass stoner who’s fucking shitty at being in relationships, too, only I’m not breaking up with my girlfriend. But also this overwhelmed feeling is dissolving into a feeling of, like, coming down and feeling kind of excited. He hasn’t smoked since before they ate breakfast.

So, Maria says when they’ve been on the highway for a minute, What’s your deal, James H.?

Ha, he says, Okay. I just turned twenty, I grew up in Star City Nevada, which is a stupid fucking town and I hate it, and I’ve worked at Wal-Mart since I was sixteen. I have a girlfriend named Nicole. She’s cool but we’re kind of in a fight, I should text her. My parents live here too, I see my mom kind of a lot. I don’t know.

She does this, like, studied and intentional staring straight forward kind of thing, where it’s like he can tell that she wants him to talk about gender stuff or whatever but he has no idea what to say. Every time it seems like he comes up with something concrete to mention—like, masturbation, or sex, or fantasies, or finding himself crying in the boys’ bathroom line at camp when he was eight—it seems like there are eight or twelve things to say about it and all of them are important and since he can’t pick one he doesn’t say any of them. Sex with Nicole? The dress in his closet? Stupid Internet porn? Is now the time to explore whether smoking hella weed is a cover story for whatever the fuck it’s a cover story for? Fuck all that. And like... how much does this relate to the stuff Nicole always says about how she wishes he would just make a decision? It’s all too connected to even start to pick apart to talk about. He draws a line in the dust on the dashboard, right next to the air vent, exhales, sees that his skinny pale fingers are shaking, and breathes in.

But James is like, no way, that breath he just took was for saying something real and stupid left-wing radio can’t take that away from him. Instead of letting that breath go, he talks, loud, over the radio.

He’s like, Do you know what autogynephilia is?

Maria does like a cross between an exhalation and an Ooooooh. Like, oh, that is a shame. But what she says is, Yes, I know about that.

Okay, he says. Well, sometimes I think I like, have autogynephilia? Or am an autogynephiliac, if that’s a thing.

There’s this long, tense silence and James wants to get his weed out of his messenger bag and just smoke right up, right now, but you can’t just change the subject like that. The silence goes on for a really long time but probably not, like, that long, and then Maria laughs. Like, pretty hard. James is like, are you fucking kidding me, but he doesn’t say it out loud.

Maria’s like, Yeah I know about that. I um. What do you mean, when you say you are an autogynephile?

I don’t know, he says, feeling immediately cornered and angry, which might be kind of weird. Like she did just correct him, kind of subtly, but who cares, it’s more than that. This shit isn’t really funny though and it’s ruining his life, so he’s like, I don’t know, I’m like, into girls and stuff, but I guess like, mostly what I’m... turned on by... is being a girl? Like, not just being a girl but like. You know. I don’t know, it’s complicated.

He realizes he’s angry and glaring out the window, lighting cactuses on fire with the rage in his squinty-eyed fury or whatever.

Maria is like, Can I tell you about autogynephilia, James H.?

23.

Sure, he mutters, not even really sure why he suddenly feels so fucked up.

Check this out, she says. When I was younger, right, it was really easy to just not be invested in myself or what was going on. I could wear shapeless clothes, have relationships with people where we just talked about bands and video games and, y’know, nothing, and never went deeper than that. It was all super easy, right? This is that checked-out pattern I was talking about before. When people think you’re a dude, they pretty much expect that shit from you. But the only time I couldn’t lie to myself about who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be, and like, the way I needed to exist in the world if I was going to actually exist in the world, is when I was jacking off.

James’s squinty-eyed glare pops open pretty wide at the fact that this girl he met yesterday was talking about jacking off with him, but he doesn’t say anything.

I was thinking about being a girl while I jacked off, she says, Like, as soon as I started jacking off. For years I thought it was because I was a pervert, that I had this kink I must never, ever tell anyone about, right? Which was sad. There weren’t really any misogynist or otherwise fucked up connotations to the specifics of what I was thinking about—I just wanted to be a woman, which gets framed as
a priori
quote unquote ‘
perverted
.’ Right? Like the only unperverted kind of sex is being a dude and getting a boner from looking at a girl’s boobs and then putting the boner in her vagina. But guess what, that shit is all culturally constructed and culturally bound, blah blah blah. My point is just, like, then I got online, and I started looking at porn made by people who had the same alleged kink as me and I was like, why is this all so fucking stupid and misogynist and poorly written and just, like, disgusting—but since there wasn’t really much gender-change erotica or whatever that wasn’t totally fucked up, I ended up spending a ton of time with some totally creepy and busted stuff. It took years for me to come to understand that the things that are hot in that shitty porn—the power exchange, the specific gestures and accoutrements and paradigms—can exist separate from the totally fucked up way they get implemented by the people making that porn.

Which guess what, she says, There is a good reason for that: cool dykes, and I guess probably dudes and probably straight girls too, I don’t know, whatever, they’ve published a lot of work about being a responsible pervert! But pretty much everybody making porn with trans women in it is a man. Like, someone who is invested in his own male privilege, and in reifying power systems where he is on top, and in deeply misogynistic constructions of what it means to be a woman and therefore what it means and looks like to quote unquote ‘become’ a woman, and just like, all this stuff. It’s complicated and gross but the point of it is just, that porn is produced by a misogynist paradigm by people who don’t even give a fuck about questioning misogyny. In a way they’re eroticizing misogyny, which, like, is totally cool if you’re doing it intentionally and consciously, but when you’re doing it and oops you are reinforcing it as a cultural norm, fuck you. Like, seriously, fuck you.

Put that aside for a second, she says. The term autogynephilia was made up by a psychologist. It was popularized by this guy J Michael Bailey, who mostly studies deviant sexuality.

I know about J Michael Bailey, James says.

Okay, she said. So he writes this book explaining that there are two kinds of transsexual women. There’s homosexual transsexuals, who were gay men before transitioning and who become attractive to heterosexual men after transitioning, and then autogynephilic transsexuals, who just have such a big hot boner for being women that they decide to become women even though they are ugly and unlovable.

I know about this, James says, still kind of pissed, partly because he doesn’t know how to talk about his own shit and partly because Maria was explaining a bunch of stuff that he already knew about.

Okay but humor me, she says. Ignoring for a second the weird asymmetry here—if you are trans then you are either hot for men or for yourself. And ignoring for a second the total lack of feminist analysis, ‘homosexual transsexuals’ make pretty women not because they are already familiar and comfortable with being the object of the male gaze, but instead because they are into men. And ignoring—obviously—the glaring fact that queer theorists, and generations of feminists before them, have shown clearly that sex and gender are separate from each other, and that sexuality is related to, but not produced by them. Ignoring all these things, let’s ask the obvious question: what is the parallel paradigm in women? Where are the autoandrophiles?

Actually, they’re around, she says, But the point isn’t that these are somehow legitimate labels that get misapplied. It’s the whole framework, how inherently by making the conversation about the classification of trans women into a conversation about trans women’s sexuality, you’ve already determined that the defining characteristic of trans women is their sexuality. 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. Has anybody ever done a study where they used cis women as a control group to compare trans women to? I don’t fucking know. Further: do trans women who are attracted to women who aren’t themselves even exist?

It’s all totally fucking stupid, she finishes.

She sounds kind of choked up or whatever so James looks over and she actually is about to start crying.

So he’s like, Uh, okay. Because he doesn’t really understand what she had just said.

It’s just that once you start using their terms, she says, You’re putting yourself into this restrictive box they made up that doesn’t leave room for figuring out who you are or what you want. It’s a box labeled Dude and Pervert—Bad and Terrible Secret. When in my experience it shouldn’t have to be a secret that if you’re a woman, you might be hot for being a woman when it’s an appropriate time to be hot; when, in fact, if you are a woman—trans or cis—it makes sense to like the idea of being a woman in bed. It’s not a perversion at all. It’s like the opposite of being a pervert. It’s the least perverted thing, for your sexuality to match your gender! So like, autogynephilia theory just is basically designed to reinforce the idea that trans women are men, and that women don’t have sexualities, and that straight dudes are good people to talk about queer women’s sexualities.

Okay but I didn’t even say I was transgender, James says. I don’t know what I am, but I do know that autogynephilia kind of fits so whatever.

Well yeah but even still, she says, pausing for a second, Our kinks aren’t just random things that happened to us. They tell us things: wanting to get tied up is usually about the deep, fucked up and normative coercive relationships we have to the different kinds of freedom; wanting to have somebody spank you is usually in some way about shame. In practice these are really complicated things and they’re complicated by any number of other factors but let’s be real here about the fact that when we’re not allowed to have something we want, we get all fuckin’ weird about it. Sometimes that weirdness looks like a kink. That kink is even stronger when it’s you that’s doing the denying. What’s the relationship between fetish and taboo, you know? Whether or not you’re trans. Being hot for being a girl makes sense if you’re a girl who’s not allowed to be a girl. It is like the opposite of complicated.