Stag Dance

You're so beautiful, I feel sick.

The more I try to explain, to list the tiny grievances that added up to an intolerable day in my life, the more I sound unhinged. A man hissed at me on the bus. A bunch of teenagers loudly discussed whether I was really a guy. A girl I knew only on the Internet left a suicide note. The cashier at Whole Foods smirkingly called me “bro.” The TV at the nail salon, playing soundlessly, featured some nonsensical ghoul that I realized, with a shock, was someone’s idea of a trans woman, someone’s idea of me. The guy at the local corner store revealed that he knew where I lived and shrugged when I asked how: “Everyone around here knows about you.” And now, I get irritated at one thing, a free drink, and I sound crazy complaining about that, right? Some total loony acting traumatized ’cause a bartender tried to be kind.

...from the disturbing knowledge that comes from distinguishing in others the parts of yourself that you most hate, I just know...

The whole world monitors and mocks my every waking moment!

I recall well how the manly aspects of a person can overgrow and overtake him, cancer-like, to becoming beastly and monstrous—the way canker causes a tree to encrust itself in bark so thick that it comes to appear deformed and tumorous in its own treeness.

I looked down upon the firelit scene, my bare hair tousled by a stiff cold wind, a good head taller than every other reveler, watching them enjoy me from the angle of a god.

It’s not a gang. It’s a promise. You just promise to love trans girls above all else. The idea—although maybe not the practice—is that a girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire, but if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.” “That sounds like some kind of trans girl utopia.” I’m so rattled, it’s not even sarcastic. She laughs. “Please. You’ve met a trans woman before, right? Do you think the words trans women and utopia ever go together in the same sentence? Even when we’re not starved for hormones, we’re still bitches. Crabs in a barrel. Fucking utopia, my ass.” She glances at me. My nervousness must show plainly. I can’t tell if I’m safe or not. “Here’s what it is,” she says, a little more gently. “We aim high, trying to love one another, and then we take what we can get. We settle for looking out for one another. And even if we don’t all love one another, we mostly all respect one another.” After a pause she says, “I remember how I used to be before the contagion. Embarrassed to be seen with another trans woman, for fear that her transness would reveal my transness and we’d both get clocked. T4t is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that’s better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen.

I nodded, but it did not fully assuage me because I had a helpless notion that I might have been lovely to someone.

Like, please, I already know I’m trans, just let me forget it for a second while I try to be a girl on a date with a boy.

But my face wouldn't comply. I felt my own rigidity, my brick shithouse cladding ─ scowling, fierce, dignified by anger ─ and in that way, I gave myself away. I was not a jack who wore a bush in jest, or lark. I was guileless and obvious: My bush mattered ferociously to me. It was a declaration made despite myself.