She doesn’t actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles. Since grade school, she’s always been able to pay attention way better if her hands are occupied, whether it’s to a teacher or a movie or her own thoughts. So she’s drawing guitars, girls with super heavy dark bangs, piglets, little wax paper bags of powders, syringes, a calendar.
Syringes and a calendar because she’s late for a shot of estrogen. Like, a week late.
Eureka, motherfucker. Maria is supposed to take a shot of estrogen every two weeks; some people take a pill or two every day, but she can never remember, so she shoots it into her thigh. And man, if you do not keep your estrogen levels consistent, you become a useless and fucked up mess. It’s just like, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she was going on romantic late-night adventures and drinking herself stupid because she needed a shot. That’s good to remember. Prioritize a shot tonight, she tells herself. There was a time when she was so willful about being trans and having her shots and everything that she carried her little cardboard box with needles and bottles and alcohol pads and stuff around with her everywhere. She’d just like lay out old syringes on the table at Veselka while everybody ate pierogies, just to be confrontational. But not so much any more.
It also explains why she’s been so goddam hung up on being trans. Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body. Normally she’s not all the way over being trans, but normally she is a lot more over it than this.
So, cool. Check. Noted.
She still has two hours to think about Steph and herself and Brooklyn and Kieran, but the bent-over little man who waits tables at six AM brings over her food and she slides her notebook aside and douses everything in ketchup.
14.
When Maria met her, Steph was this short punky femme with spiky bleachy multicolored hair and a ton of eye makeup. It was because of her more is better eye makeup philosophy that Maria developed the confidence to get as much onto her face every morning as she possibly can. But Steph was also this smart, angry little person with absolutely no sense of humor, in this way that Maria read at the time as super dykey. Maria was this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes she’d met when she’d been telling everyone she was a straight dude too, which meant that, in her social circle, she was kind of an anomaly who was tolerated, not really understood or respected. She was already out, she’d already been taking hormones for a while, but when she met Steph, Maria was still in the middle of the part of transition where you get harassed by strangers.
It was at a Christmas party somebody from the bookstore was throwing, but it was an interesting one because usually bookstore parties were mostly straight people. Like, queer people from the store would come and get wasted with the straight people because in neobohemia everybody’s cool with queers. But parties would usually be at straight folks’ houses and all their non-bookstore straight friends would be there. It was different the night Maria met Steph: this queer girl from the art department who’d leave in March to work at Random House was having a Christmas party at her big art-dyke loft collective apartment, way out past the end of Bushwick. That meant queer people Maria didn’t already know, kitschy Christmas decorations, a whole other vibe than she was used to. A vibe she’d known was out there without really knowing how to access it. As a theoretically straight theoretical guy, she had probably hung out with more dykes than the average straight guy, but it still wasn’t the sort of space she felt welcome in, or felt like she had access to, or really even felt like she belonged in. Actually it was kind of terrifying, not knowing what the unspoken rules in a space like that would be, or whether any of the queers at the party would be the kind of queers who had weird stuff against trans women.
So Maria felt like she was walking on eggshells all night, wanting to make a good impression and not say the wrong things to anybody—with an unsteady grasp on what the wrong things even were—so she kind of stood by the wall with a bottle of wine, trying to look like she wasn’t trying to look cool. Which is hard to pull off—she wasn’t totally succeeding. Folks came and hung out by her for a minute, she’d take the occasional lap around the party, but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.
She had mostly quit smoking, since you’re not supposed to smoke on estrogen, but in situations of excruciating awkwardness like that, all the self-invalidation and depression/anxiety, you make exceptions. She climbed up to the roof where everybody has been smoking all night. It was freezing. Like, too cold, the kind of cold where you can feel the rungs of the roof ladder through your mittens, but it felt good. Her whole face felt all rosy with wine.
She lit a cigarette and looked around. The city spread out in every direction, propping up the old moody and tragic and melodramatic mental self-portrait. Self-pity as respite from anxiety! Classy, Batman. Then Steph climbed up the ladder in this big, stupid knit hat, and it was a total first meeting from a Hugh Grant movie, like where Keira Knightley doesn’t like him at first. Except in her memory Maria’s not played by Hugh Grant, she’s played by, like, Milla Jovovich or somebody.
Except Milla’s kind of short, right? Maybe Maria is Keira Knightley and Steph is played by Milla Jovovich.
Steph didn’t even want to talk to Maria. She was drunk and she didn’t have a lighter but Maria didn’t want to light Steph’s cigarette for her because she thought that might be, like, patriarchal, somehow? Like that’s what a dude does and women don’t do that for each other. Who fuckin’ knows, it made sense at the time Maria handed Steph the lighter so Steph had to take off her mitten and the glove she was wearing under it to light her cigarette. To this day Steph gives Maria shit about that.
No! Steph’s not Milla Jovovich, she’s like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, when Emilio Estevez is like, What’s your drink, and she’s like, Vodka, and he’s like, How much, and she’s like, Tons. She totally entertained herself while she smoked that cigarette by being flirty and confrontational and kind of mean.
When Maria was done smoking, she went back down to the apartment and left Steph up on the roof by herself to finish her cigarette, and then they didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the night. Pretty inauspicious.
Plus, if Steph was Ally Sheedy, that made Maria the only other female character from the breakfast club: Molly Ringwald, the spoiled princess. It’s a little uncomfortable for Maria how true this is.
15.
In one of Michelle Tea’s books (maybe The Chelsea Whistle?) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it’s like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria’s like, I’ll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it. The point is just, Michelle Tea nailed it like she nailed most other things: Maria’s on her third cup of coffee now and she is making Progress.
She needs to be single. It’s pretty obvious, right? When she’s having boring romantic predictable teenage emotions riding her bike around the city instead of being home with Steph, the reason she likes it so much is that she’s enjoying the tiniest little bit of freedom. She’s not in love with her bike because of the wind in her face, which chaps her lips, or because she can totally handle the difficulty of riding across bridges and in traffic wearing a long skirt. She’s in love with her bike because when she's on her bike, she’s not tied to anybody.
Further, she was dating somebody when she came out as trans. They broke up and then she was dating somebody else, and then they’d been broken up for a week when she started hanging out with Steph. She’s never been
a single woman, she’s only been a woman in the context of relationships. Those relationships have been acting as cushions, as safety nets, enabling her not to have to figure out who she is, what she needs from her life. Anything.
And it’s not like Steph’s even stoked about this relationship any more. They still fuck, which is cool, but otherwise what do they do? They throw money they don’t have at brunches so they can feel coupley; they sleep in the same bed most nights. This is literally every bullet point Maria can think of to write in her journal.
It’s scary and sad and a huge relief.
Suddenly she doesn’t feel all coffee exultant. She feels kind of tired and sees clearly that, like, hey stupid, you woke up at five AM, you are going to be exhausted all day. The graphic designers are gone. She doesn’t want to be at Kellogg’s any more. There’s still an hour and a half untill she has to be at work.
There’s a coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not a Starbucks, although who even would care if it was. Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.
Well. It is kind of depressing to try and kill an hour or two at a Starbucks. It’s hard, all trying not to hear people yelling into cellphones, getting depressed whenever anybody pays six dollars for a drink.
Maria packs up, pays the bill, and rides across the bridge into Manhattan.
Once the sun is risen, the early morning sky feels more like skin crawling than day breaking and she’s excited to lock up her bike and go to the little independent coffee shop near the bookstore. It’s not even a little coffee shop though, it’s huge and full of Internet terminals and magazine racks and, like, produce. Produce! Who knows how the thaumaturgy of commercial space rental in Manhattan works, but it seems unlikely that coffee and computer terminal rental and produce could possibly cover the rent on this cavernous coffee shop.
When you’re kind of feeling like you don’t know anything about anything, though, who cares. Whatever. How Zen. This is what enlightenment is like: it’s boring.
She decides to drink coffee and blog. Why not blow ten dollars on an hour of Internet access that you could be at home sponging from a neighbor for free right now. Figuring out your life is more important than rent money.
She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver’s license to get a computer. It’s weird but nobody has ever once given Maria shit for the gender on her license, not in the five years or whatever that she’s been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law. It’s expensive to get your documents changed, plus you have to go to city hall and be like, I am trans, please put that on a record somewhere, which gets harder and harder with every minute that people aren’t reading you as trans.
She’s assigned computer #27. The screen faces some tables, but eavesdropping on what somebody’s writing on the Internet is only interesting for a second, especially if there are large blocks of text that you would have to read. Nobody likes to read anything, even if it’s somebody writing like Oh, oh oh, when I look at myself naked in the mirror I see tits and a dick it makes me ever so sad. Which is funny. You’d think strangers would be interested in that kind of thing.
Maria, of course, would never use the word dick to write about her body. It’s way less traumatic to not use any words. Or a gender-neutral term like junk.
No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so is everybody, so it’s not very interesting. She’s been blogging since she was a tiny little baby, like eighteen or nineteen years old, when being online was just starting to be demystified into something Rupert Murdoch could make money from. She figured out that she was trans by blogging. Awkward.
The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word. It couldn’t have been very compelling to read, but writing about it at length made her pay attention to patterns and stuff and introduced her to the first real-life trans people she met, even if they were on the Internet and didn’t know what they looked like. She’d stay up all night, night after night, gushing her feelings all over the Internet until she figured out she was trans, transitioned, and wound up having the exact same problems as every other messed up, emotionally shut-off person in New York. She doesn’t post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they’re trans look up to her. It’s kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren’t for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
Her computer is booted up and she is logging in when a man in a navy blue pea coat sits down at the computer next to her. He is stubbly.
Hello, he says.
Oh god dammit, she thinks.
Straight men are so weird. So weird. Like, she can already tell that he wants to be her boyfriend. He is sitting next to her and smiling like he knows something, or like he is intentionally trying to look unintimidating. Great.
Hi, she says.
You are doing what this morning, he asks with a Russian accent or something.
I’m going to read my email, she says, wishing she had the nerve to say: Go away, I don’t want to talk to you. But that feels like it would draw attention to herself in a weird way for being too forward, and if she draws undue attention to herself this dude might figure out she is trans and then there would be a scene, except probably a small one because people whose first language isn’t English tend to have their own self-consciousnesses to worry about and also not to want to draw complicated attention to themselves, too. Given the fact that nobody ever reads Maria as trans any more, she thinks: what would Courtney Love do here? How does Courtney Love turn away the attention of strange men she doesn’t like.
Then: no, even better, what would Steph do?
This is what Steph would do.
I’m posting an ad on Craigslist for people to date who also have chlamydia, Maria says.
You are funny, he says.
Yeah, she says, turning away from him and back to the computer. It works, he doesn’t keep trying to talk to her. Good thing, too, because it’s too early and she’s too tired to deal with this dude who thinks chlamydia infection disclosure is flirting.
She feels bad for a second though. She’s never had it, but it probably sucks to have chlamydia. What if she were some girl in the coffee shop who had chlamydia and overheard that? Maria makes a mental note not to joke about chlamydia and never to turn away heteronormative advances with sexual-health-normative maneuvers. Seriously.
She reads blogs and writes in her own. She tells the Internet about her early night, her early morning, the haircuts in the diner, figuring out her life. She used to write in this thing, like, every day, but she’s lucky if she can update it once a week any more. Although it’s probably luckier not to stare at a computer all the time.
She writes.
Oh man. Can we talk about stereotypes and staring at the computer? Okay. I imagine that you’re familiar with the stereotypes around transsexual women: that we’re all sex workers, that we’re all hairy, potbellied old men, that we’re all deep-voiced nightlife phoenixes, that we’re all drag queens, that we’re all repressed, that we’re all horny shemales with twelve-inch cocks. Sometimes the stereotypes are contradictory. Those ones are weird. Can we talk about what the actual stereotypes around transsexual women should be. The ones that hit a little too close to home to be funny.
1. We are not sex fiends, we are Internet fiends. This one is easy to understand. When you come out as trans, it’s hard to tell your wife, or your het bros, or your dad or your, I don’t know, bookstore coworkers. For whatever reason, though, it’s pretty easy to tell some people f
rom Alaska or California or, y’know, England. In this weird way, Internet message boards, livejournal, all these things feel like they’re a safe way to talk about being trans—to exist without this problematic body you’re stuck with, when you’re offline in meatspace, like they used to say in the eighties, in William Gibson novels. Which rules.
But so there is this whole Internet community, which makes sense. It’s maybe the best thing about the Internet, how you can access information you need, safely and anonymously, except that just like any other community, especially any other Internet community, it’s become this closed-off thing, with stuff it’s okay to talk about and stuff it’s not okay to talk about, perspectives you’re allowed to have and ones you’re not, and its own patron saint.
Her name is Julia Serano and like most figureheads, she’s very smart and sweet and right-on and almost entirely unproblematic, but her acolytes totally get obnoxious, taking her writings as doctrine.
Not to mention, if you are a total baby panda at Internet communities asking, like, How do I get hormones, Internet trans women are very nice: they will tell you. But when you ask a more complicated question, like say, how do you resolve a genderqueer identity with a female identity when it seems like acknowledging the restraints of female identity and then bursting them doesn’t make you no longer female, just empowered, and therefore is genderqueer a privileged identity that’s mostly available to female-assigned people with punk rock haircuts, in college, everybody gets all butt-hurt and you get in trouble.
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