Now I put a blouse over myself. Now a cropped sweater. Now a dress, cinched, club sunglasses and a new lipstick and another thing and another thing. It’s gotten old to me now, a fact I’m not sure the general public would permit me to own if I said it out loud—I am somebody with a penis that is exhausted with what was once a craftsmanship of feminine exploration, exhausted too with misogyny, struggling with a novel framework for ameliorating myself in the midst of how the world is. Having a boyfriend can help a lot. So can isolating oneself from everyone and everything for months, reading high literature and exercising and sinking briefly in the occasional finite romantic encounter. That’s another thing—I am met so often with a bemoan of romantic loss and seemingly hopeless yearning from other trans people, but I don’t personally have trouble satiating my desire for romance, and I think it’s simply because I know we must have a way of navigating our lives just as happily without it. I suppose I have less of a craving for romance than the next person, all I really need is one big love every couple years and a dabbling of meaningless hookups when I’m being a bit more narcissistic in the interim.
In the beginning of this summer I realized just how easy it is to pack a sick amount of hollow, almost vengeful romance, if you can even refer to such a practiced, physical demonstration with the term, into the span of a few months. Men usually want what they’re ashamed of, but prod at it with silent grimaces like bossy toddlers, whether the crux of their toiling be the prospect of crying or applying any dose of the perceived feminine to their presentation or making out with me. I’m realizing lately how annoying it is that men are always choosing to be angry. It’s almost in spite of those of us with real things to be angry about, actual losses and prohibitions and fears and a holy, personal light to shield all the while. Which isn’t to say that men don’t have a couple valid reasons to be upset, but I sparsely find a man who volunteers any frustration towards the viable cultural humanity-dampers set against him. Mens’ issue is they aren’t allowed to be weak or loving or whatever. I’m expected always to be weak. Not soft, weak. But strong enough to not be a burden. And endlessly loving. But from an undisclosed source which I tend in my own pure quarters, quarters which, if any man were to truly witness, let alone covet as equal to his, would promptly lose their inexplicable lacquer. The sheen on my innards, the particular, intangible wealth, it’s something of nostalgia, something of consecration. It’s ironic, then, to use my sexy clothes as a form of disclosure, when in truth none of my mind can bear to be unveiled—it would be a skinning, it would force a vast change from the landscape in which I’ve built countless things, spun a sainthood out of memories and perspectives and proven myself right in hard-earned time.
I used to reflect often on the first time I ever put on lipstick, my first pair of thrifted black heel boots, the raise maybe only a couple inches but more than enough to find me a spanning of the darkness, belonging to that which I’d been trained to be afraid of. When I was around fourteen I would walk around Hudson Yards at night, wearing sequined bottoms and faux-fur H&M jackets and mashed shades of Revlon lipstick and mascara smudged into smoky eyes and those chipping black pleather heels. Now I walk into a club and people don’t realize the sly machination it took to fight for this, to fight my way into this dress, to burn my whole back into the preconceived structures of family, of academia, of any given city street, any given country of the world. I am profoundly ascendant from that to which I do not belong, but spend most days treading in the midst of it, if not through it. Intolerance. Disgust. My boyfriend said he saw some other NYU student fixating on me with a mix of “craving and nausea” a couple nights ago, and that when he’d noticed this perpetrator of our evening he’d promptly squeezed my hand and death-stared the boy, enforcing this stranger’s fast glance down at the street. I don’t give a fuck at all, I told him. I don’t give a fuck at all. I was drunk, but I didn’t give a fuck at all. Who gives a shit. I’ve been in those boys’ beds, I know their minds, I was taught to have a self-perception akin to their sick, stifled perspective. My world is far beyond theirs now. I’ve promoted it. And at times it’s lonely, but in the dark, in heels, in the right makeup, right in pure feel, it’s suddenly loose inside, gripless. The possibilities are suddenly endless, there is no instruction, there is only color, my own imagination of it, there’s strictly play.
Constructs are built and destroyed by those who are too lived to continue operating within them, within the lovechild of the last time-torn nomad who couldn’t bear to be breathing by rules to which their life also did not align. I refuse to believe there is any one human being on this earth, though, for whom what we are given works, entirely works. We are all given an implicit instruction to conceal, to worship our inappropriate, undisclosed facets, but only in isolated stanzas, our own rooms. Those we love get to kiss their way into these hidden faces. We all know what it is to break free of the expected through the lens of a lover, your feet toiling under sheets that seem already a figment of memory in the moment an impossibly white morning light makes them languid, makes you impossible to pronounce. Love makes us all impossible to pronounce, because it encourages breaking anything that falsely adorns its object.
Perhaps this is why trans people crave romantic love with a curdling, obscure undercurrent of self-doubt, of rage. We are not able to be understood by way of category, at least the categories deemed invaluable, deemed possible to love within. We are hardly given the opportunity to be made into miracles by the conventional framework of knowing someone beyond prejudice—romantic love. And yet, we are visually, loudly, constantly performing in the pursuit of being understood to ourselves and to others, with hormones and surgeries and words and sometimes the shrinking of a whole world down to a singular man’s validation. But I’m dating a straight man, and I don’t know if I’m a girl, and I don’t know if I’m loveable, and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. All I know is I liked how I looked in this blouse, and it’s daytime so the sun is out, and tonight the moon will be behind the classic clouds of pollution, and tomorrow and next week and for the rest of my life, the world will be clicking with change. All I know is there has to be a reason to live that is larger than this, whatever this is, this thing called gender, a meek, unintelligent shackling. I insist on something greater, or rather, a greater nothingness. A standalone experiment of the self.
