by Rachel Gold
What did it feel like to always be both in a world that split male and female apart so consistently and harshly? I might be dykey and walk around tough and act like a guy in some ways, but I never wanted to be one. I knew I wasn’t.
Ella held up a picture of Nico on her phone: yos hair gelled forward in the front, as much like spikey bangs as curly hair could be; the long, blue military coat I’d seen in the café; a pressed blue oxford shirt and suspenders showing under one side of the coat. Nico was smirking and tensing the muscle of yos jaw to make it more square.
“That’s the full Jack Harkness outfit,” Ella said.
I scrutinized the bold masculinity of it. I compared it to the image in my mind of Nico as Athena—hard to believe they were the same person. I tried to upload this new image to my mind, this aspect of Nico.
“If you want to be with Nico, you have to like all of this,” Ella said.
“I think I do. But I’m not bi. I’m not attracted to guys at all.”
“Then maybe you have to change your definition of lesbian,” she said.
How? By definition that was women with women, right? Except I’d learned that for some cisgender women, that meant no trans women, only cis women with each other, and that wasn’t my definition. Could I keep expanding it? Could it include people who were part woman?
“Part” didn’t sound right. Maybe people who were women but also men? Or nonbinary people who had woman in their repertoire?
If I did end up fixing this and dating Nico, I didn’t care what people called me as long as it wasn’t misleading or insulting. The real thing wasn’t the labels. I might be proud about being a lesbian, but hey I’d be proud about being any kind of queer.
The thing was: what if below the belt Nico had a penis and balls and the whole kit? I felt like a jerk to be thinking about stuff Nico hadn’t chosen to share with me. But once I started, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I got up and paced, which in a small dorm room didn’t help much. Ella stayed near the poster, arms folded, watching me.
If Nico had a penis, would I want to touch it? That night in the hotel when we were making out, if Nico had let me into yos pants and it was a penis down there, would I have felt turned off cold?
How shit would that have been for Nico to go from ultra-hot to nothing? No wonder yo didn’t want to go there.
My experience with penises was limited to exactly one that belonged to a guy I went to high school with. Curious, I offered to give him a hand job one day and of course he said yes. I was shocked about how soft it was. I mean the skin of it because as soon as he got it out and I started touching it, it was hard. But the way the soft skin moved over the hard interior was kind of amazing and I got what straight girls liked about that.
And yet, I felt nothing for him. Inside my head was like a scientist observing an alien species. Afterward, when I was home thinking back on it, it felt gross. It was wrong for me.
Would I feel that way about Nico? I didn’t think so. I’d never been attracted to that guy in high school and I wanted to be with Nico more than I’d ever wanted to be with anyone.
Assuming that at some point I could even have sex again.
I started laughing, a dry, barking sound, and had to go drink out of the bathroom faucet. Catching myself in the mirror, I flashed to Nico as Athena in the women’s bathroom putting on mascara, yos shoulders broad and strong under the flight suit, yos body masculine and feminine and graceful.
Nico did cosplay to show that all yos gender was performance, maybe to remind us that all gender itself was performance. But that’s not all cosplay could do. Claire had suggested I do something awkward. I felt darned awkward in costumes.
I asked Ella, “Do you think Shen would help me with some cosplay?”
“He will levitate with joy. I’ll text him. What do you have in mind?”
“Showing Nico that yo’s not the only one who can communicate through costumes.”
She stared at me and a smile pried up the corners of her mouth. “You might be on to something,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tucker
The next afternoon I got started on the costume for Nico. I walked over to the Math & Science dorm where Shen and his cousin Johnny lived. Last semester they went everywhere together, but now that Shen and Ella were intensely dating, I hadn’t seen Johnny around much. I met them in the gaming common room.
“What if someone likes cosplay and I need to dress up in something complementary—can you help me out?” I asked them.
“Give us more to go on,” Johnny said. “Saying someone likes cosplay is like saying someone likes television.”
“Um, Battlestar Galactica and…” I paused trying to remember the names of the other stuff Nico liked.
“Is this for Nico?” Shen asked.
I nodded.
He thought for a while and he and Johnny said a bunch things to each other that I didn’t follow. I heard Athena and Battlestar Galactica, plus Captain Jack Harkness and Torchwood.
Finally Shen turned back to me and said, “Ianto Jones.”
“I don’t know what that is but can you help me make one?”
Shen was more soft-spoken than Johnny, at least when they weren’t gaming, but he laughed just as loud.
When they got done laughing, Johnny said, “I don’t know. Ianto is kind of a wuss.”
“On the first season. He improves,” Shen told him. To me he said, “He’s a character on Torchwood. He dates Jack Harkness.”
“For real? Gay-dates him?”
“Yep,” Johnny said. “He does other things too. I mean, he’s part of the team.”
“I don’t know if you call it gay dating because Jack is bisexual,” Shen added.
“But they kiss on screen?”
Shen nodded. I hugged him. He patted me on the back like he wasn’t sure what to do, but he was chuckling.
“You’re a genius!” I told him.
“He knows,” Johnny said and slapped his shoulder. “Come on, we’ll show you what Ianto looks like.”
I followed them to their dorm room. On Shen’s laptop, they called up images of a clean-shaven, baby-faced guy with a predilection for suits, ties and vests.
“We can get you the ID badge and tactical earpiece,” Shen said. “Can you do the clothing and hair?”
“Sure can. Thanks a ton.”
I lit out of there and over to my room where I called Bailey.
“Not again,” she said.
“I don’t need the car,” I told her. “I need a haircut and dye. What’s your day like tomorrow?”
“I can get you in. What do you have in mind?”
“Short and boyish. I’ll show you a pic tomorrow.”
“Jess, when are you going to let me do purple?”
“Next after this, I promise,” I told her.
* * *
I met Bailey for dinner near campus and showed her a picture of Ianto. She drove me to her salon and did my hair like his: short, spikey in the front, and brown. She got creative and shaved the back closer than his hair, but it worked great.
“Why you want brown escapes me,” she said around the clip she held in her teeth.
“I’m trying to get a date,” I said.
“That’s valid. Which girl? Hold still.”
“The person you saw with the car. We had a…I said something wrong, this is the apology.”
“Good luck. How’s that therapy going?”
I’d set up to borrow her car for it again next week. “Actually helpful.”
“Huh, who knew?”
“Yeah.”
When I got back to my room, Ella’s light was on. I tried on the purple shirt, dark gray vest and striped tie that I’d picked up from a secondhand store. Then I texted Shen and asked when he could bring the other stuff. He was heading over to Ella’s in a few and said he’d swing by.
When he saw the outfit so far, he nodded. “Good color on the shirt. Here’s your badge and earpiece.”
The laminated plastic badge said: “Torchwood Institute, Ianto Jones, General Support.” The earpiece looked awesomely science fictiony.
“Where’d you get these?” I asked.
“I made the badge. We have a laminator just for such emergencies. The earpiece was from a costume Johnny had a few years back.”
He helped me get the earpiece in place and texted Ella to come across from her room. She opened the bathroom door and leaned in.
“Why is my boyfriend texting me from your room?” she asked. And then in a much higher pitched tone, “Oh my God, your hair.”
“I’m Ianto Jones,” I said.
“Who?”
I was glad that she didn’t know who he was either. Hanging around so many geeks was making me feel culturally out of step.
“He’s the boyfriend of Captain Jack Harkness,” I told her.
Her head cocked to one side and she got this huge grin on her face. “Being vulnerable too so Nico sees it’s not one-sided. Tucker, that’s really clever.”
“It was Shen’s idea. At least the Ianto part.”
She turned to Shen who flashed her a smile that got bigger the longer he looked at her.
“If this doesn’t work, I’m going Klingon next,” I told Ella. “Do you think it will work?”
“I’d go out with you,” she replied. But then she took Shen’s arm and pulled him through to her room.
“Sweet,” I said in my empty room. I took off the pieces of the Ianto costume. When could I use it? And how?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nico
Ella came down on Thursday with Shen to have a long weekend in the city. My cabaret performance was Saturday night. She and Shen were staying over at her place, but she left him at the house and came out to dinner alone so we could talk.
Walking to the restaurant from my car, I caught our reflection in the window. A flash of bitterness rose in me. Ella was pretty, petite, her fine, blond hair caught up on one side with a cute barrette. I was in another crisp button-down shirt, khakis and suspenders. Curls oiled tight to my head, my jaw more square from the anger I’d been carrying around.
We looked like the perfect heteronormative pair. We looked the way Ella had wanted us to be when we were dating.
I picked a chair with its back to the window so I wouldn’t have to see my reflection behind her. The server brought breadsticks as we went through the basics of what we’d been up to.
Me: dancing, Dad, destroying the patriarchy from the inside, pending surgery, deconstructing gender.
Ella: Shen, Shen, Shen, biology class, Shen.
When I got sick of the romance, I made a circle with one hand and a Vulcan symbol with the other. I bumped them together and asked, “Are you two still living long and prospering?”
She was used to me pantomiming sex with a variety of weird hand signs and got the idea right away. She put her hands over mine, pushing them down to the table.
“Cut it out,” she said.
“But it’s good, right?”
“Yes, it’s super good. Listen, Tucker wants to apologize to you.”
My heart jumped at the mention of her name. I hated that. I tore a breadstick in half and then in half again. Ella pulled the fluffy middle out of my fingers.
“You know she was reacting to Summer,” Ella said. “Summer set her up because she’s pissed at Tucker.”
“Why?”
“Apparently Women’s and Gender Studies is in love with Tucker and Summer feels like she stole her spot,” Ella said. “And she didn’t mean for all that to happen in the Union like it did. She was just jabbing at Tucker. I think even Summer feels awful about you getting caught in it.”
“Oh.” I got back to the core problem. “Yeah, but Tucker said ‘disgusting.’ About me.”
“She said it about an idea. She didn’t mean you.”
I tore another breadstick in half. Put a bite in my mouth and chewed and swallowed before replying.
“What would you have done if you came out to Shen and he called you disgusting? Or not even you? What if he called the idea of trans women disgusting?”
She sighed. “You know what I’d have done. I’d have cried for weeks. And then I’d get someone else to talk to him because I’d be too chicken to do it.”
I waved the torn half breadstick at her. “And you’re supposed to be that someone else in my situation with Tucker?”
“I could be. If you want that. Nico, she really likes you and she’s great like ninety-nine percent of the time. Plus, with everything, she’s so off balance. I don’t want to see you two fall apart over something Summer did.”
Fall apart? We’d hardly been together. We’d barely kissed at Cal’s before she panicked. And then I’d blocked her on my phone for weeks, which hadn’t been at all fair to her. Despite that, she drove down right away when she heard about the surgery. She came to a convention and played Starbuck with me. Making out in the hotel, panicking in the middle, how hard that had to be for her.
What she’d said in the Union hurt deep, but she was struggling too, confused, broken apart. She hadn’t been trying to hurt me. Maybe I wasn’t being fair.
“Invite Tucker to the cabaret,” I told Ella. “But I’m not promising anything.”
She bounced in her seat and grinned at me, but got from my tone that we were done with this topic. She asked, “How are you feeling about the surgery?”
“Freaked the hell out,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to write ‘don’t take the boobs’ on my chest in permanent marker. If that’s what I decide.”
“Couldn’t hurt. I’ll do it for you if you want it more legible,” Ella said. I fell in love again with her and her serious, lost elf face.
“I can’t decide if I want them to do anything else,” I admitted. “They could make me look all girl or more dude or whatever. But it feels like I’m giving in. To all the people who people who fought so kids with intersex traits wouldn’t get a random gender…”
I had to stop and blink hard and try not to cry. I didn’t tell her about the nightmares where I was walking through wards of hospital beds of mutilated bodies. Ella had heard this before, about all the babies who got assigned genders and operated on before they could even talk, about the people like Sharani who were forced into the gender their parents wanted them to be.
“You don’t have to pick anything now,” Ella said.
“But Tucker. If we don’t…I’d like a relationship one of these days. What does it even feel like to know you’re one gender?”
She stared into the distance, eyes unfocused. “I always assumed I’d grow up to be like my mother,” she said. “I saw myself like her. When I was really young, people would say boys don’t do that and I’d wonder why they were telling me. Mom was always going on about different world cultures, so I didn’t get a concrete set of expectations about what I was supposed to be. I didn’t freak out about it until Amy got her period. I realized that when I was her age, I’d be hairy and gross and smelly instead.”
“Does Shen know that’s how you think guys are?” I asked, smirking.
“That’s different. It’s cute when it’s someone else.”
“Even the gross parts?”
“Yes.”
“I cannot understand how culturally you are considered less weird than me,” I said.
“Who did you want to be when you grew up?” she asked.
I sighed. It wasn’t a simple answer.
“When I was little? Both my parents. I look like both of them, why not be both of them? I liked how strong Dad was, how he could pick me up and carry me on his shoulders all day, and I liked how thoughtful mom was, how she knew about everything and how well she listened.
“I still want that. I want strong and sure and that protective thing—that thing you see when a big guy cradles a baby. And I want complex and intricate, deep and receptive. Like when you talk about biology and it’s all these layers on layers of thought. And I want things that a
ren’t gendered or are genderfluid. I want to be at home in the performative culture of the kathoey. I am at home there. Gender is so messy and complicated, like nature. Nature loves diversity. And I was, I got there, I found it the last few years…and now they’re going to take it away.”
Ella put her hands on mine and squeezed. She looked down, thoughtful.
Was she thinking about her body? Because she’d taken drugs to block puberty, she’d never be able to have kids. Trans women who transitioned later could freeze their sperm, but Ella never developed enough along the male pathway to produce viable sperm.
She got rid of what she didn’t want, what wasn’t her, but she had to give up so much to do it. Was I about to do the reverse of that? Give up what I wanted to become something I didn’t?
Chapter Thirty
Tucker
Ella texted that I was invited down to the cabaret on Saturday night. At least I’d get to see Nico dance. Cal was driving down with Tesh and her girlfriend Alisa. I got the last space in the car. Summer wasn’t going anyway, but if she were, no way would she cram herself in a car with Tesh and Alisa.
I half paid attention to the conversation: Tesh obsessing about whether they should run for leadership of our LGBTQIA+ group when Cal’s term ended. Mostly I worried about Nico. Ella had had dinner with Nico but she didn’t say anything about it. The lack of detail was frightening—like she didn’t have anything good to say.
We pulled into the parking lot of the Noodle with enough time to use the bathroom and buy tickets. The long performance room had a stage at one end and rows of theater seating—mismatched castoffs from old movie theaters. There was a sound booth in the back on a raised platform and space to stand around it.
Everyone else from Freytag went to sit with Ella and Shen, as close to the front as they could get. I found a seat in the back. The distance and my new hair color would hide me.
As my eyes adjusted to the diffuse light, my brain un-adjusted to the people I saw. Two tall women in dresses passed up the center aisle. As they moved by me, I figured they were drag queens, then that they were trans women, then that they were cis women dressed as drag queens, or trans women dressed as drag queens, and around in that loop of gender guessing again. I wanted an “off” switch. I thought that I was cooler than this, but every person I saw triggered an attempt to understand their gender, their body.
