Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He’s relieved when she makes a slight conversational detour away from his own story. She’s suggested, in the way that naive cis people do, with a hint of self-congratulation at their own broad-mindedness, that it seems like trans people are starting to be everywhere, that maybe gender doesn’t matter that much. In his reply, he can’t help but let loose an old defensiveness on this topic. “I think it’s the opposite,” he says too sharply. “The whole reason transsexuals transition is because gender matters so incredibly much.” “Does it matter to you like that still?” she asks. “Yeah,” he admits. “This fatherhood thing is proving that I think it'll always matter to me.” “So even though you detransitioned, you still consider yourself transgender?” Her question isn’t cruel; it’s fact-gathering. She has recognized an important data point. “T don’t think it’s something you outgrow.” She peers at him, squinting a little in the sunlight. “Why did you detransition, then?” He scoops up a handful of sand, feels it run through his fingers. “Do you want the cold facts or the abstract reason?” “The cold facts.” “Two things happened that were related. I convinced myself that I couldn’t protect and satisfy the girl I loved, also a trans woman, while being trans myself. The other thing that happened was that I got beaten on the street and no one helped me. It was the last straw. Living as a trans woman just seemed too fucking hard after that.” “In New York?” “Brooklyn. But not what that makes it sound like. It was a rich white guy who did it. In Williamsburg. He wore khakis. His getaway car was an Audi SUV.” Katrina gave him a once-over, as though looking for wounds or evidence, as if he were saying it had just happened. “So you got sick of being trans?” “T got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn’t need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.” Ames could run through this routine without even thinking about it. How many times had he tried to explain his detransition to other trans women? Tried to assuage the sense of betrayal that their wariness obviously communicated? In Ames’s formulation, trans women knew what trans women were, they knew how to be, but they didn’t know how to do. All the intra-trans fights online, all the arguments with cis people: All of it was just to define what it meant to be a trans woman; to say what she was. But when you're a trans woman, there’s almost nothing out there on how to actually live. In his last year of living as a woman—the year in which Ames stopped being so angry with how cis people treated trans people and

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  on. Then she suddenly changed the subject: he was having difficulties with his second wife. Surely that must hurt him? This was a sore spot, and Pahlavi got angry. He tried to change the subject, but she kept returning to it. Why waste time talking about wives and women, he said. He then went Always a little doubt to set so far as to criticize women in general—their lack of creativity, their cru- at rest— that's what keeps one craving in passionate elty. Fallaci kept at him: he had dictatorial tendencies and his country love. Because the keenest lacked basic freedoms. Fallaci's own books were on his government's black- misgivings are always list. Hearing this, the shah seemed somewhat taken aback—perhaps he was there, its pleasures never become tedious. • Saint-dealing with a subversive writer. But then she softened her tone again, Simon, the only historian asked him about his many achievements. The pattern repeated: the mo- France has ever possessed, ment he relaxed, she blindsided him with a sharp question; when he grew says: "After many passing fancies the Duchesse de bitter, she lightened the mood. Like Kissinger, he found himself opening Berry had fallen deeply in up despite himself and mentioning things he would later regret, such as his love with Riom, a junior intention to raise the price of oil. Slowly he fell under her spell, even began member of the d'Aydie to flirt with her. "Even if you're on the blacklist of my authorities," he said family, the son of one of Madame de Biron's sisters. at the end of the interview, "I'll put you on the white list of my heart." He had neither looks nor brains; he was fat, short, chubby-cheeked, pale, and had such a crop of pimples Interpretation. Most of Fallaci's interviews were with powerful leaders, that he seemed one large men and women with an overwhelming need to control the situation, to abscess; he had beautiful avoid revealing anything embarrassing. This put her and her subjects in con- teeth, but not the least idea that he was going to inspire flict, since getting them to open up—grow emotional, give up control— a passion which quickly got was exactly what she wanted. The classic seductive approach of charm and out of control, a passion flattery would get her nowhere with these people; they would see right which lasted a lifetime, notwithstanding a number through it. Instead, Fallaci preyed on their emotions, alternating harshness of subsidiary flirtations and and kindness. She would ask a cruel question that touched on the deepest affairs. . . . • He would 376 • The Art of Seduction excite but not requite the insecurities of the subject, who would get emotional and defensive; deep desire of the princess; he down, though, something else would stir inside them—the desire to prove delighted in making her to Fallaci that they did not deserve her implicit criticisms. Unconsciously jealous, or pretending to be jealous himself. He would

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In fact, HIV is one of the original trans flavors! Check your recipe books. Back in the eighties the big institutions looking at AIDS noticed a population with wildly high rates of infection—a population that wasn’t captured in the usual categories of “gay” or “Men Who Have Sex with Men.” A certain kind of people slipped through the gaps, people who went by all sorts of names: transvestites, drag queens, sissies, cross-dressers, transgendered, transsexuals, fairies, and on and on. But institutions require categorical names in order to function—the guys at the CDC can’t be writing a new grant or reworking studies every time a nancy starts calling herself a nelly. So they assigned a name to this population: the umbrella term “transgender’—and since transgender women wanted access to resources, that’s what we ended up calling ourselves. But make no mistake, HIV and the invention of transgender women are inextricable. Transgender is the name selected to recognize a vector of disease. But maybe it couldn’t have been any other way? Don’t HIV and gentrification always go together? How else do you forget a plague? Isn’t HIV exactly the symbol of an indigestible queerness that even the most assimilated queers haven’t figured out how to break down? No, those wounds have never healed, they have only been built over and moved past—only been gentrified. No wonder Katrina choked when she caught even a whiff of HIV flavor. At this point in her rant, Reese’s fury begins to sputter. The more she thinks about it, the more she loses her grip on righteousness, and the more the hurt of betrayal licks at her. Maybe motherhood with Katrina would never have worked in the first place. If Katrina would give up over this, maybe it was inevitable that she would give up at some point anyway—she was just waiting for the spell to break. And Reese doesn’t want a fight. She wants Katrina to understand that Reese hasn’t done anything wrong—or okay, nothing that is really any of Katrina’s business, certainly nothing on the level of ending life plans. They have a child together! Sort of! How could Katrina put their baby at risk? Reese sets her laptop to the side of her in bed, her email still open, half-written. Isn’t this what this exercise was for anyway? To burn out her anger before she does something stupid? To show her what really matters? A despondence indistinguishable from sleep overcomes her.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  These types are closet sadists and will torture you with their unreachable goals. 142 • The Art of Seduction 5. In 1762, in the city of Turin, Italy, Giovanni Giacomo Casanova made the acquaintance of one Count A.B., a Milanese gentleman who seemed to like him enormously. The count had fallen on hard times and Casanova lent him some money. In gratitude, the count invited Casanova to stay with him and his wife in Milan. His wife, he said, was from Barcelona, and was admired far and wide for her beauty. He showed Casanova her letters, which had an intriguing wit; Casanova imagined her as a prize worth seducing. He went to Milan. Arriving at the house of Count A.B., Casanova found that the Spanish lady was certainly beautiful, but that she was also quiet and serious. Something about her bothered him. As he was unpacking his clothes, the countess saw a stunning red dress, trimmed with sable, among his belongings. It was a gift, Casanova explained, for any Milanese lady who won his heart. The following evening at dinner, the countess was suddenly more friendly, teasing and bantering with Casanova. She described the dress as a bribe—he would use it to persuade a woman to give in to him. On the contrary, said Casanova, he only gave gifts afterward, as tokens of his appreciation. That evening, in a carriage on the way back from the opera, she asked him if a wealthy friend of hers could buy the dress, and when he said no, she was clearly vexed. Sensing her game, Casanova offered to give her the sable dress if she was kind to him. This only made her angry, and they quarreled. Finally Casanova had had enough of the countess's moods: he sold the dress for 15,000 francs to her wealthy friend, who in turn gave it to her, as she had planned all along. But to prove his lack of interest in money, Casanova told the countess he would give her the 15,000 francs, no strings attached. "You are a very bad man," she said, "but you can stay, you amuse me." She resumed her coquettish manner, but Casanova was not fooled. "It is not my fault, madame, if your charms have so little power over me," he told her. "Here are 15,000 francs to console you." He laid the money on a table and walked out, leaving the countess fuming and vowing revenge. When Casanova first met the Spanish lady, two things about her repelled him. First, her pride: rather than engaging in the give-and-take of seduction, she demanded a man's subjugation. Pride can reflect self-assurance, signaling that you will not abase yourself before others. Just as often, though, it stems from an inferiority complex, which demands that others abase themselves before you. Seduction requires an openness to the other person, a willingness to bend and adapt. Excessive pride, without anything to justify it, is highly anti-seductive.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  daycare she liked the thoughtless way a child would reach to take her hand. She liked watching kids puzzle out something new, their wonder, their awe and excitement, which was, when she let it be, contagious. She liked their sudden acts of altruism. She recalled this one kid at the daycare, maybe four years old, who built a tower out of blocks then tugged on her sleeve with the offer, “Do you want to kick it down?” He understood that the knockdown was the best part of building and he wanted to give it to her. Who else could give you something so pure but a child? In the lobby, the group of trans women from the cable show whom Reese had noticed earlier swirl by in their gowns, and one of them gives Reese a nod. She might have stopped to chat, but something about Reese’s face, or the intensity on the faces of these two people who sat with Reese stopped her. Reese waits for her to pass, and when she responds to Katrina the words flow easily, borne by a current of anger, with none of her usual arch reticence. “I want to be a mom for the usual reasons. Most people have a hard time putting them into words. The kind of thing that people usually call a biological clock, which isn’t a term that works for me, but still describes something I feel in my body. Yes, I agree with you. The women you're talking about, the marginalized women—they’re told that they shouldn’t have children, not that they shouldn’t want children. The wanting of children seems to be an accepted universal fact for women everywhere. Not to play the trans exception card, but I’m sorry, it’s not the same for transsexuals. It’s not considered natural when I say that my biological clock is ticking, because I’m not granted a biological clock in the first place. I ache when I see other moms with kids. I’m so jealous. It’s a jealousy of my body, like hunger. I want children near me. I want that same validation that other moms have. That feeling of womanhood placed in a family. That validation is fine for cis women, but it gets treated as perverted for me. Like, the only reason ‘a man in a dress’ would want to be near kids is not a good one. Let’s come out and admit it: Everyone acts like moms are real women and real women become moms. Women who never have kids get treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love.” Ames, silent until now, allowing the discussion to play out, interjects, “No one thinks that women without children are silly whores.”

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  As the head of the Liberal Party, Gladstone had a nemesis, Benjamin Disraeli, the head of the Conservative Party. He considered Disraeli amoral, a devilish Jew. At one session of Parliament, Gladstone tore into his rival, scoring point after point as he described where his opponents policies would lead. Growing angry as he spoke (as usually happened when he talked of Disraeli), he pounded the speaker's table with such force that pens and papers went flying. Through all of this Disraeli seemed half-asleep. When Gladstone had finished, he opened his eyes, rose to his feet, and calmly walked up to the table. "The right honorable gentleman," he said, "has spoken with much passion, much eloquence, and much— ahem— violence." Then, after a drawn-out pause, he continued, "But the damage can be repaired"—and he proceeded to gather up everything that had fallen 144 • The Art of Seduction from the table and put them back in place. The speech that followed was all the more masterful for its calm and ironic contrast to Gladstone's. The members of Parliament were spellbound, and all of them agreed he had won the day. If Disraeli was the consummate social seducer and charmer, Gladstone was the Anti-Seducer. Of course he had supporters, mostly among the more puritanical elements of society—he twice defeated Disraeli in a general election. But he found it hard to broaden his appeal beyond the circle of believers. Women in particular found him insufferable. Of course they had no vote at the time, so they were little political liability; but Gladstone had no patience for a feminine point of view. A woman, he felt, had to learn to see things as a man did, and it was his purpose in life to educate those he felt were irrational or abandoned by God. It did not take long for Gladstone to wear on anyone's nerves. That is the nature of people who are convinced of some truth, but have no patience for a different perspective or for dealing with someone else's psychology. These types are bullies, and in the short term they often get their way, particularly among the less aggressive. But they stir up a lot of resentment and unspoken antipathy, which eventually trips them up. People see through their righteous moral stance, which is most often a cover for a power play—morality is a form of power. A seducer never seeks to persuade directly, never parades his or her morality, never lectures or imposes. Everything is subtle, psychological, and indirect. Symbol: The Crab. In a harsh world, the crab sur- vives by its hardened shell, by the threat of its pincers, and by burrowing into the sand. No one dares get too close. But the Crab cannot surprise its enemy and has little mobility. Its defensive strength is its supreme limitation. The Anti-Seducer • 145 Uses of Anti-Seduction

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  future moment, Amy would find the shame of this moment intolerable, the image of herself reflected in Reese’s scorn—scorn for the posturing vestigial instinct of a once-male, indignant with the rage of insulted masculinity, dressed ridiculously in the outfit of a demure woman. But in the present Amy didn’t have the time nor inclination to gather up the implications of Reese’s expression. Amy’s anger had a blinkered momentum unto itself. She could as much parse the meaning of Reese’s scorn from inside her rage-fugue as count the passing floors while falling from a skyscraper. Meanwhile, Stanley had stepped closer. He really was very big. “Yeah, I know all about you. You were the one who moved her out of my apartment. You came into my apartment and took what was mine. You violated my space and stole from me. I have a lot I owe you.” He seemed to be talking almost to himself now. Working himself up. “Stanley!” Reese shrieked. She pushed past Amy’s shoulder to throw herself between them. Casually, Stanley grabbed her as she came and flung her into a heap on the grass behind him. Reese was larger than Amy, and he tossed her without strain. Fury roared over the chorus that pleaded for caution at the edge of Amy’s mind. Amy hit Stanley then, striking with a guttural bellow as Stanley turned back away from Reese. Closed fist, solidly on his jaw, near his ear. Stanley staggered, taking a step backward. Reese screamed, and Amy looked away from Stanley, over at her. Then Amy saw white, like when she was a kid, lying on her back in gym class, staring up at those big aluminum-caged halide lights that left trails across her vision, even with her eyes closed. The concrete of the sidewalk cracked against the side of her face, and a thump to her midsection stole all breath from her. She gasped but her lungs would not fill. Short breaths in the fading halide light. She cracked her eyelids, and saw Stanley opening the door to his SUV. “Reese, get in the car,” he commanded. But Reese, still on the ground, ignored him, and half pulling herself up, moved toward Amy. “Faggots,” Stanley spat. Amy heard the jingle of his keys, the slam of a car door, and the ignition. She opened her mouth to pull in more air. And when she exhaled, it was a loud deep sob. The shock of what had just happened, how quickly, pressed away all will. Her white blouse was turning transparent in the rain. Her skirt had ripped, and her legs and panties were showing. Her tuck had come partially undone—balls out the side of her panties, hanging dainty and vulnerable over the damp concrete. She pressed her legs together in shame. People in the park had stood up to peer and drivers had stopped, trying to make sense of the scene through the streaks of their windshield wipers.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e story of same- sex love in the centuries between Constantine and Justinian unfolds with fi erce predictability. Vituperative attacks on same-sex love are strewn across the late antique homiletic literature. Notable is the direct infl uence of a Pauline conception, in which same- sex love per se is an encompassing category, inclusive of all forms of erotic contact between males and females. At a rhythm that mimicked the deeper diff usion of Christian norms, the late antique state gradually turned its attention to the repression of same- sex encounters. Th e Th eodosian age (ca. AD 379– 450) was still marked by the predominance of old categories of masculinity as a regulatory platform, but there is a new, hostile energy in the air that it is not unsafe to attribute to religious fervor. Th e assimilation of Christian ideol- ogy and sexual policing culminates in the reign of Justinian (AD 527– 565), whose Institutes for the fi rst time classifi ed sex between males as a crime without distinguishing between active and passive partners. Justinian also passed a law against pederasty and enforced it ex post facto in spectacular fashion. Most remarkably, if Procopius is to be believed, men could be accused of sexual crime even by slaves, signaling a total breakdown of the ancient sexual order. Th e ecclesiastical campaign against same- sex love was vicious but highly sporadic. By contrast, the struggle against fornication, porneia, was a full-fl edged war, which saw the church muster its forces in deliberate array against an ancient style of sexual life. Th e preaching was endless, the peni- tential enforcement real. But the sex industry was too entrenched for the Christian state even to compass its repression. Instead, the Christian emperors focused on an aspect of the sex trade whose moral and material signifi cance should not be underestimated: they banned forced prostitution. Th e brutal exposure of vulnerable women rested on a public indiff erence so vast that it lay invisibly at the very foundations of the ancient sexual order. As Christianity progressively absorbed society, and could ever less comfortably  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N present itself as a dissent movement apart from the world, it was forced to reckon with the silences in its own sexual program. Because prostitution was at the center of an ancient sexual culture, an order of relationships between state and society built on the concept of shame, the progressive realization of its injustice is a privileged index of Christianization. Th e aggressive campaign of Justinian against compulsion in the fl esh industry marks the end of a distinctly ancient sexual order, one whose distant origins lie at the very beginnings of the archaic Mediterranean city- state and fi nally crumble in the midst of his rule. Chapter 4 follows the Christian revolution in sexual morality through the medium of imaginative literature. Th e fi ctional word is an essential

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Duck sex provides a premier example of sexual conflict over fertilization and allows us to investigate how Darwin’s proposed “taste for the beautiful” creates the opportunity for the further evolution of sexual autonomy. A key insight is that both fundamental mechanisms of sexual selection in waterfowl—mate choice based on female aesthetic preferences for male displays, and male-male competition for control over fertilization—are occurring and in evolutionary opposition to each other. This observation is actually quite subversive. As we’ve seen, ever since Darwin’s publication of The Descent of Man, the mainstream, adaptationist, Wallacean view has considered all forms of sexual selection as forms of natural selection. Whether it’s elephant seals or birds of paradise, this view holds that only the objectively “best” males will succeed at mating. But what happens when female mate choice and male-male competition operate simultaneously, and they are clearly running in different directions, as they do in waterfowl? The winners of these two distinct competitions cannot all be the “best.” If the most sexually aggressive males are actually the best, why don’t females prefer them? Clearly, the winners in mate choice and male-male competition cannot all be the same. Rather, sexual violence is a selfish male evolutionary strategy that is at odds with the evolutionary interests of its female victims and possibly with the evolutionary interests of the entire species. By maiming and killing females, such violence lowers the population size of the species. And by further skewing the sex ratios, these violent deaths make sexual conflict even worse, because there will be more males losing out in the mate choice competition who will therefore be motivated to pursue this counterproductive strategy. Thus, sexual conflict in ducks demonstrates yet again Darwin’s insight that sexual selection is not equivalent to natural selection. —

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In good intact families, children are not ordered to spend major blocks of time with one parent or another on a rigid schedule about which they have no say. Why treat children of divorce with less consideration? The outcome for Joan was more serious. I talked with her shortly after she graduated from college. “Tell me about your dad,” I said. “I haven’t seen much of him since I graduated from high school,” she replied with a shrug. “Did he help with your college tuition?” “Well, not much. He sent me money from time to time. But he never really helped with tuition.” Joan was bitter. “My mom had to mortgage our house.” I was not surprised at her anger but I wondered if other feelings lay buried under the surface, especially feelings of love, disappointment, or regret. “Did you ever make any attempt to get closer to him?” She answered angrily. “I remember forever those dreary weekends and those lonely Julys without my friends when I cried my eyes out. I have no reason in the world to be in contact with him and so why should I bother?” There was no mistaking Joan’s anger and sense of having been treated unjustly by powerful forces over which she had no control. As we talked, I had a sad sense that both father and daughter had missed a unique opportunity to get to know and cherish each other. Their spontaneous interest in one another had been blocked by a system that could only antagonize an adolescent and discourage a father from having to make the effort to find points of mutual interest with his daughter. By relying on his “rights,” he lost her. What a pity. How foolish we are to think that we can legislate or direct the human heart. When Joan was twenty-eight years old I asked her about her social life. “Oh, I go out a lot,” she said. “And I get hurt a lot. Maybe it has to do with my being dominated all those years by my dad and the court. But it’s hard for me to stand up for what I want. I never learned to fight for myself.” Joan clearly made a connection between the powerlessness she felt as a child and her current relationships with men. If she is right—and I believe she is—then our interventions are not only misguided but may have harmed an entire generation of young people who grew up under similar circumstances. How many are still reacting to their feelings of having been bullied and made to feel powerless? Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right THE AMERICAN LEGAL system is under the impression that its activities and decisions are geared toward safeguarding children after divorce.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese shook her head unhappily. Everyone knew that rules didn’t apply to Babs. Babs was like if the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis beer commercials were actually a trans femme. One of those nonbinary beauties whose impossible-to-properly- gender gorgeousness was so discomfiting that, faced with her, people took an involuntary and alarmed step backward, as if they had just opened the door to their house and glimpsed inside to see all their belongings ablaze. One could not include Babs in any kind of meaningful comparison. Babs and her daughter were probably riding around the mangrove forests on a pair of manatees or something, even as Reese and Thalia discussed them. “Look,” Thalia finally said, after Reese had refused any hope that a Babs comparison might offer, and so forced Thalia to move on to a more aggressive line of argument, “I can’t make you stop feeling sorry for yourself.” She raised her voice to cut any attempt for Reese to disagree. “But,” Thalia continued, “I can drag you to Riis with me. It’s supposed to be the first warm day of the year, so everyone is going, and maybe there you will remember you have friends who aren’t detransitioners and yuppies.” Thalia is right. They arrive at a beach clear of both Ames the Detransitioner and Katrina the Yuppie. But Reese cannot twist this lack into a benefit. Something has curdled in her overnight. Ricky, the trans boy with the motorcycle whom Reese had once dated many years back, sits beside Reese on her towel and recounts his spring, mentioning a series of protests he helped to organize in response to bathroom bills and the banning of trans children in schools and sports. Reese has not attended any protests. Ricky’ monologue, though seemingly about his own exploits, is a manner of gentle prodding that he has mastered the last few years, as he’d entered his thirties and made the move from party boy to trans activist. Reese reads his meaning plainly: What has happened to you, Reese? Why don’t we see you anymore? Aren’t you one of us? In fact, don’t you have a responsibility to us? She is unable to respond clearly to this subtext, and dissembles, unwilling to talk to him about anything so square as the child or family that preoccupy her, then lapses into silence. He waits a few moments, then makes an excuse, and goes off to talk to a group of guys admiring each other’s swim shorts beside a boom box thumping Latin trap. Reese watches him go. She wishes she had said to him: I am angry. I don’t care about your protests. They are not enough. Then she feels ashamed of herself. Why does she deserve to be so angry? What has she truly lost? Quietly, to herself, she answers her own question: I have lost a child.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yes,” says Katrina. “Ames is quite the charmer. I’m constantly surprised at just how varied his life has been. He seems to have a way with all sorts of interesting people.” Her delivery buzzes with malice. “He has the most unusual past.” Ames wants to kick her under the table, but she’s sitting too far away. He suddenly realizes that she is very drunk in addition to being very upset. He’s done this himself at times when the pressure of discomfort at some social event valves over into some increasingly recursive internal monologue, until he is ready to lash out at everyone near him. But the men don’t take the bait on Ames’s past. They are interesting men themselves. “Charmed me,” says Biz Dev. “Ditto,” agrees Marketing. “T wonder,” says Katrina. “Okay,” says Ames, striving to end this moment. “What about dessert?” “Transsexuals,” Katrina says, ignoring him. Ames sighs, and runs a finger down the bridge of his nose, where it had once been broken. “You’re going to do this? Now?” “Pardon?” asks Marketing. “Transsexuals,” repeats Katrina. “Ames has a history with transsexuality.” Biz Dev can’t help himself. “You like transsexuals?” Unbidden, Ames pictures Reese as she had been when they lived together, as she had been when she thought herself unwatched in their shared apartment—her eyeliner wings smudged at the end of the day, wisps of hair along the sides of her face escaping a now- loosened ponytail, her public-facing dancer’s posture lowering into a slouch after she’s locked the front door and slumped down on the couch. “Yeah,” agrees Ames, and he wipes his mouth with a napkin. “T like transsexuals.” A challenge sits at the edge of his voice. “No,” says Katrina. “That’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying that—” Water spills as Marketing sets down his glass of water with a clunk, and Ames flinches. Ames is willing himself to recede from the scene, but maybe not fast enough. He’s angry, not sure he can handle even the mildest slur about trans women from these guys. “Now, look,” Marketing says, addressing no one in particular. “I’ve been married fifteen years and no one has ever asked me about my wife’s genitals. Any man who does can expect a punch in the mouth, and I'd expect Ames to do the same for whatever woman he loves.” He ends this declaration with a masculine nod.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames might have thought she was doing impressions of a drunken hostess desperately willing her party to be fun, had he not made a face at her and seen in response a private look of near anguish cross hers. A moment later, she covers for it. “Listen, Ames! Listen to him chew!” she suggests. Ames obliges and bends in toward Marketing’s mouth. The man bites down. Out comes the little flatulent squeak. “Yep,” agrees Ames, “it squeaks!” Ames tries to bring up the pros and cons of flash-based programming for the Web version of the app, but Katrina keeps interrupting by asking personal questions of the men. Finally, Ames gives up and attempts some small talk with Biz Dev about where Ames had grown up, how his grandparents had actually gone to supper clubs in upper Wisconsin—a similar culinary experience entirely in brown: meat and potatoes and gravy and beige carpeting and instant coffee and grease-darkened oak tables. When the waiter passes by, Katrina orders a bottle of wine. “Whatever is good and white,” she instructs. It arrives and another glassful disappears—he’s so taken aback by her performance that it’s only when the food arrives that he wonders if the drinking is a sign meant for him to interpret. The pregnant woman downing alcohol. Even Biz Dev is beginning to notice that the rate of wine consumption has gotten awfully high for a dinner like this. He puts his hand over his glass when the waiter tries to refill it. “Oh, yes, well, I should probably stop,” Katrina says, waving her hand lazily, signaling the waiter to top her up. She’s pretty drunk by now, eyes bright, cheeks flushed, just beginning to teeter on sloppy. “But Ames is in charge of travel, so he'll see that I make it home okay.” “Still,” Ames says diplomatically, “you don’t want to be hungover tomorrow.” “How the fuck do you know what I want?” The fun-loving hostess pulls off her mask. Behind it is Katrina herself, looking straight at Ames for the first time tonight with her usual fierceness, unable to hide her sudden fury. Biz Dev and Marketing both find something to examine in the food on their plates. Katrina points a cream sauce—covered spoon at Ames, but addresses everyone else. “He forgets that I’m his boss.” Ames makes a what-the-fuck! face. This is her project, her reputation as the firm’s weird genius who pulls off unlikely deals that she’s in the process of exploding. She’s mostly hurting herself. Obviously choosing words with care, Marketing says, “Ames has been just super on this project.” “Just super,” Biz Dev chimes in. “I didn’t think anyone could understand the pet insurance sector so fast, and then actually be funny about it.” “Yeah, we’re really about it.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Five hours later, she wakes to the repeated bamboo-clack alerts of her phone as a series of texts from Ames roll in. Clearly he’s awoken to his own sense of righteousness, ordering her to fix what she’s done, that she needs to apologize if she wants to appease Katrina and remain a potential mother in this situation. His righteousness refuels hers. A strange instinct, one she hasn’t before experienced in such a sustained tone, growls low in her chest, an instinct that other women might call the mama bear instinct, but that is too new for her to have named—a vague deep sense that Ames ts threatening her baby. Shifting over in the sheets, her shoulder presses against the laptop. She flops over, opens it up to her half-finished letter, and without even bothering to end unfinished sentences or sign it, she hits Send. She’s still lying in bed when her phone announces another text from Ames. You are such a hypocrite. Katrina never responds at all. CHAPTER ELEVEN Twelve weeks after conception J ON AND AMES see each other roughly twice a year, whenever something goes wrong in one of their lives. They had been on the baseball team together in college and shared a dorm room their senior year. When they lived together, Jon disliked discussing his emotions with anyone able to cross-check those feelings against the events in his life. Instead, when his emotions got to be too much, he called up another boy who went to school thirty minutes away and they would meet at a café to pour out their hearts to each other over breakfast. After college, Jon moved to New Jersey, where he worked for a family-run architecture firm, at which point Ames became a person who lived at an ideal distance from Jon’s daily life to discuss the matter of emotions. These biannual bilateral feelings summits have been a tradition for nearly fifteen years now—with the exception of a strained period of time during Amy’s early transition. Their relationship as buddies could not withstand the threat of heterosexuality. In deference to Amy’s professed womanhood, Jon opened doors for her, kissed her cheek in greeting, and complimented her appearance, which, while tremendously sweet, upset them both, and caused them to miss their previous ease and freedom. Theirs had been a masculine bond. Neither responsible for the other. Ames had imagined that were they ever to have been caught in a crisis—say a flash flood—each would swim manfully on his own without even a glance back, secure in the other’s competence.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “What? Not at all. I’ve only seen a handful since I moved here, and I don’t know them.” The question amuses Thalia. She turns, taking a couple backward steps. “Reese and Iris are trying to escape the rest of us.” “Oh, okay.” Katrina nods. “I asked because there’s a sign that says ‘Tranny’ right there.” Of literally all the things this cis lady might say in front of Thalia! Reese flinches. Thalia’s graceful body freezes rigor mortis—stiff and she asks, “Did you say ‘tranny’?” Katrina points across the street. “Right there. Tranny.” Reese whirls. Pasted on the front wall of the Brooklyn Bazaar is an amateurish black-and-white graffiti-style poster with a single giant word: TRANNY. Reese can’t make sense of it. She and Thalia have come fresh from a funeral. As she stands there gaping, anti-transgender bills ferment in various state senates. Even the liberal media—The New York Times and The New Yorker and New York magazine—have taken to publishing anti-trans screeds penned by conservatives, the editors disingenuously wringing their hands and pleading “balance” or “wait for the science.” Radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists have teamed up to insist that trans women are all pedophiles, that such predators can’t be trusted around children or in women’s spaces. Every year, the list of murdered trans women, most of color, grows longer. Among those cases, the number of victims who were misgendered in their own obituaries is greater than the number of victims whose murderer has been identified. But all of that has been far away from Reese. She lives in Greenpoint specifically because it is all far away. That is news that lives on the Internet. Not on her walk down the street. She spots another similar poster: TRANNY. Only this one has an indistinct face and a date. Suddenly, she realizes what the posters want to advertise: a promotional tour by Laura Jane Grace, the transgender lead singer of the punk band Against Me!, for the release of a memoir titled with the same slur. And suddenly Reese is furious. These rich trans bitches. These fucking assholes who transition with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to protect them from ever hearing someone say “tranny” to them on the street, so that one day, they can write tranny on the streets themselves, and congratulate themselves on being so punk. As if, in a climate of political dread, no one has ever written jew, or faggot, or hung a noose, or painted a swastika where some poor target tried to pass a small life. Katrina looks back and forth, from Reese to Thalia, aware that a minor drama largely illegible to her is being written. “T guess it’s the title of a memoir,” Reese says, forcing herself to shrug. “Laura Jane Grace,” she adds to Thalia, who clearly can’t yet make sense of the poster.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Her landlord hasn’t yet turned off the heat for the season. The pillow in Reese’s bed sticks to her face, the sheets cling hotly. She flings off the bedding, opens her one window, turns on a little fan, and flops back facedown, with her arms at her side, beached-seal style. There is no chance that she will be able to sleep. She opens her laptop. She herself has never gone to therapy, but many of her friends have, and they enjoy repeating to whoever will listen the things their therapists say about them. By osmosis, Reese feels that she too has gone to therapy of sorts, and picked up ways to deal with anger and upset. One of her strategies is to write the bad feelings in a letter addressed to the object or source of those bad feelings. The point of the letter is not ever to send it, but to examine those bad feelings. So Reese drafts an email to Ames and Katrina. Reese has lived in a queer zeitgeist for so long that those years have honed instincts beyond her conscious control. Just as her fingers know how to apply eyeliner through muscle memory, her queer experience has instilled an instinct toward political righteousness as the surest way to win an argument, even between two individuals. Your roommate wants you to do the dishes? Okay, but doesn’t your roommate understand that your mom once worked as a domestic maid (for three months while on a break from college), and, actually, this demand to do dishes is a traumatic attack on your class status and upward generational mobility? Reese is a veteran of the horrific social gore that results when individuals fight personal battles with unnecessarily political weaponry on a queer battlefield mined with hypersensitive explosives. As a veteran, she usually steers clear of such tactics, an adherent of the Geneva Conventions. Unless of course, in a moment of hurt or outrage or vengeance, her bloodlust gets the best of her and she goes looking for maximum gore. In those cases, she might draft a letter like the one she now writes. A letter that hews to the deadly formula taught to her by her own rare defeats in verbal battle, those rare painful instances when she couldn’t help but imbibe her foe’s delicious ratio of seventy percent irresistible truth telling to thirty percent emotional poison. This whole sharing-a-baby enterprise is nothing but an elaborate exercise in the gentrification of queerness. Your whole queer kinship spiel, Ames, is nothing more than an overpriced and under-spiced fusion restaurant with Edison bulbs and brightly colored graphic design to allay gentrifiers’ fears of foreigners while congratulating them on their culinary adventurousness. Neither of you can handle spice. You can tell, because Katrina is throwing a fit over HIV and infidelity, both of which are delicious for anyone who has a taste for authentic non-gentrified trans flavors.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Now, finally! Something to be angry about! Reese’s cheating obviously caused Amy the most terrible anguish, the reasons for Reese’s cheating implicated Amy; they threatened the stability of Amy’s whole life. You don’t go charging at a beast that dangerous. You circle it softly, you eye it cautiously, looking for weakness. But a dress taken without permission? That was a rabbit. You just march over and break its neck. Reese opened the back door of the SUV and rummaged around, and during that time, Amy exited the iron-barred enclosure of the park and closed the distance between the two of them. Reese stood back up holding a folding red umbrella, and futzed with it. A tall man rolled out of the driver’s side, and said something to Reese—still fumbling with the umbrella—then rolled his eyes, took the umbrella from her, opened it, and handed it back to her. To Amy, the man was a study in neutrals. Nothing on his body popped with any kind of color—his hair and skin ran the gamut all the way from birch to pine. Amy examined his big oafish handsomeness. This was the kind of man Reese had professed to find very desirable, which Amy couldn’t quite believe, because the concept of attraction and such a man remained unacquainted with each other in Amy’s version of the universe. Neither Reese nor he noticed Amy, who had stopped on the edge of the sidewalk, along the fence. “You stole my dress for a date with him?” Amy said quietly. The man—Stanley, Amy knew—heard her, but Reese had turned toward the McCarren Hotel. He whirled, spotted Amy, and narrowed his eyes. “What?” “Tm not talking to you,” Amy said. “I’m talking to her.” Now Reese turned. Dawning was slow to arrive. She appeared to require a moment to process Amy in the defamiliarized context. For Reese, to have a lover of years, her close domestic companion, appear on the street where you do not expect her—a lover whose face is twisted in anger, her body shaking, her shoulders pulled in tight, clutching her purse as though someone meant to take it from her, her hair bedraggled by the damp—no, maybe Reese could truly not place her. This momentary pause infuriated Amy. In that second of hesitation, Amy decided that her own lover had been so taken by this sourdough lout that she had forgotten about Amy. “I want my dress back,” Amy said, without bothering with how unreasonable she sounded. Without observing at all how that bizarre demand lost her the moral advantages of the moment. Reese blinked. “What? Now?” “Yes. Give it to me,” Amy insisted. Stanley laughed. “What?” he said again. “Amy,” Reese said. “Don’t.” “Don’t do what? Cheat on you with a man? It can’t be that. That appears to be totally cool to do.” Stanley bobbed his head in a slow nod. “Oh. I get it. That’s who you are.” “Yeah, Stanley, that’s who I am,” Amy shot back.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Kathy pats her hand with sympathy and says cryptically, “That wasn't your fault, you know, but the difference is that Katrina has a choice.” At this, at the hint of old gossip, of some past brush with queerness, Reese perks up and looks at the Empress of Dry Cleaning with new interest. She tries to imagine what kind of queerness the Empress could have gotten into. Look at her, she’s so fresh and pert —there is no stink of deviance to her at all. Maybe she’s the kind to go for some butch player and get her heart broken. Katrina leans forward toward the Empress. “I know, I know, I was a little worried how you'd take it, but like, this is different, everyone knows what’s happening.” “Tm sorry,” the Empress says. “I’m trying to be open-minded. Maybe I’m, like, triggered, or something.” She gives a wan smile. “Oh god, ’'m making this about me. No, that’s not okay.” The Empress remains the only woman present with whom Reese has not managed to establish rapport, the only one who looks at her with suspicion. And everyone else regards the Empress with some expression of concern or sympathy. Reese can’t quite figure out a way to ask what happened, and so makes a mental note to ask Katrina about the Empress’s history with queerness when the two of them are alone. A half hour or so later, Reese tries to make a show of paying the check, but to her relief, the women deny her this gallantry—each tossing a shiny credit card onto the check. “No,” says Kathy, with the social grace that Reese is growing to appreciate from her. “It sounds like yow’re going to be a mother too, so we ought to be celebrating you as well. No way you're going to pay.” Reese is grateful for this too; there has been little talk thus far of Reese’s own impending motherhood. As expected, her motherhood is already an afterthought to Katrina’s—though she tries to accept that these are Katrina’s friends, and so naturally, they would pay attention to Katrina. As the women rise from the table, Reese glances at the door. She stifles a gasp and reaches out to hold Katrina by the arm. “Wait,” she whispers, turning her body so only Katrina can hear. “Wait with me a second.” Katrina frowns. “Are you okay?’ Reese jabs her chin toward the door in a rough gesture. “That’s him,” Reese says. “That’s my cowboy— No! Don’t look. Help me decide what to do. Should I say hi? I haven’t ever run into him in public before. What is proper affair protocol?” But Katrina looks at the handful of people lingering over where the cakes shine beneath the glass counter. “Who?” “The tall guy in the brown jacket. The handsome one with the stubble.” Katrina swallows. “Not the guy, like, between the glass dessert counter and the door?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He laid it out. Katrina wanted him to be a father. If Ames could not, in fact, be a father, then Katrina did not relish the idea of being a single parent, and would schedule an abortion. Ames, for his part, wanted to stay with Katrina, and he could envision himself becoming a parent, but not a father. He knew, however, that Katrina didn’t have the queer background to allow for that distinction, and that despite all his best intentions, she would default to the assumptions inherent in a man and a woman raising a child together. Unless he could find a way to escape the gravity of the nuclear family, no matter what he called himself, he’d end up a father. He didn’t need to explain this to Reese. She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as. “That’s where you come in,” Ames says, allowing for few pauses so that Reese couldn’t interrupt him until he got it all out. “I want you to raise a baby with me, and Katrina. With three of us, it'll be confusing enough to break the family thing. Katrina won’t know how to see me as anything but a father, but you will; and speaking from experience, your vision, your way of seeing things is infective. Together, maybe we could be a family that works.” Reese says nothing. “Think about it, Reese. You could be a mother. You could raise a child. Like we always wanted.” “Tm going to get up and leave,” Reese says finally. “You’ve lost it. I thought I couldn’t be shocked by your dumbass transformations anymore, but even I couldn’t have predicted that you’d come back to me proposing to become a bigamist. What the actual fuck.” But she doesn’t get up and leave. She doesn’t move at all. He catches his breath, waiting for her to say no, to say that she’d never raise a kid with him, to close the door on the best offer he’d ever have to put on the table. If she wouldn’t accept motherhood from him, she’d never accept anything. “Ts that how little you think of me?” Reese continues after a minute. “That I’d accept some second-rate motherhood? And meanwhile, why the fuck would this other woman carry a baby for a transsexual and an ex-transsexual. Who is this woman? What’s wrong with her?” “Nothing is wrong with her. I don’t even know if she'll be open to the idea. I haven’t proposed it.” “Oh my god, you came to me first? You absolute psychopath.” “She can say no! You can say no!” “Who is she?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Listen,” Stanley said, and indicated the McCarren Hotel, “we were going to go for a swim at the pool here. How about you come too?” “How about you shut the fuck up and let me and my girlfriend talk?” He widened his eyes as if slapped, and might have responded, but Reese stepped in front of him, a slight movement that cut him off. “How did you follow me, Amy? How did you know where I was?” Ugh, that was so Reese: She got caught cheating, and she acted like she was the victim. “If you don’t want to be followed,” Amy replied, “then you shouldn’t steal my things.” She heard how petulant she sounded—how weak and beside the point. Reese turned to Stanley. “Stay here. Please. Stay here.” He shrugged. Reese came close to Amy, not quite close enough that they both stood under the umbrella—Amy remained in the rain. “Let’s not pretend this is about the dress. You followed me and caught me with Stanley. Now what do you want to do about it?” “What do I want?” Amy repeated, incredulous. “Since when is it up to me?” “Since you're here. Since you came here and forced things.” “T want you to feel bad about what you're doing to me!” “I do, Amy. I really do.” Reese’s face, however, remained placid. The tolerant expression of an adult refusing to give in to a tantrum. A look that infuriated Amy. “You don’t look it! You don’t look upset at all.” “What do you expect, Amy? We're standing on the street. I don’t want a scene. So let me ask again. What do you want to do now?” Yes, what did Amy want? She wanted an apology. She wanted Reese to take her home. For Reese to hold her and tell her that she had made a mistake. That she needed Amy. Needed Amy’s forgiveness. But those wants were eons away from this moment. They were not what you asked of this woman staring at Amy with a stony face. This woman who had no remorse. More than anything Amy wanted to shock Reese out of her superior calm. “Right now?” Amy asked, meeting Reese’s hard glare. “I want to punch him in the face.” The declaration had the intended effect. Reese’s eyes widened, and she darted a quick panicked look toward Stanley. “What’s that?” Stanley asked. “You want to punch me in the face?” The words rolled around his mouth like a lozenge and he grinned, a strange eager grimace.