Humiliation

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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another. “Um, I was just looking outside at the, uh, at the hill and thinking about, um, the trees and the forest, like you were saying earlier, about the way—” The Old Man, who obviously did not tolerate vocalized rambling, cut me off. “I’m going to ask you to leave class, Mr. Halter, so that you can go out there and discover the relationship between the um-trees and the uh-forest. And tomorrow, when you’re ready to take this class seriously, I will welcome you back.” I sat still, my pen resting in my hand, my notebook open, my face flushed and my jaw jutting out into an underbite, an old trick I had to keep from looking sad or scared. Two rows behind me, I heard a chair move and turned around to see Alaska standing up, slinging her backpack over one arm. “I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. You can’t just throw him out of class. You drone on and on for an hour every day, and we’re not allowed to glance out the window?” The Old Man stared back at Alaska like a bull at a matador, then raised a hand to his sagging face and slowly rubbed the white stubble on his cheek. “For fifty minutes a day, five days a week, you abide by my rules. Or you fail. The choice is yours. Both of you leave.” I stuffed my notebook into my backpack and walked out, humiliated. As the door shut behind me, I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I turned, but there was no one there. Then I turned the other way, and Alaska was smiling at me, the skin between her eyes and temple crinkled into a starburst. “The oldest trick in the book,” she said, “but everybody falls for it.” I tried a smile, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dr. Hyde. It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I always knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn’t like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan Club. “I told you he was an asshole,” she said. “I still think he’s a genius. He’s right. I wasn’t listening.” “Right, but he didn’t need to be a jerk about it. Like he needs to prove his power by humiliating you?! Anyway,” she said, “the only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, García Márquez: geniuses. Dr.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  time when Europe’s temporal powers were all yielding to the logic of constitutionalism. That was a mark of how much the ultramontanes decided that the principles of liberalism were potentially subversive of their whole project.24 At least in its rhetoric, then, the late-nineteenth-century Catholic hierarchy set itself up against liberalism, whatever local accommodations it might make to circumstance. Perhaps that was inevitable when liberalism and nationalism humiliated the pope in his own city. Anti-clericals in the new Italian regime sponsored the erection of a statue of the sixteenth-century free-thinking Dominican maverick Giordano Bruno, placed in the Roman square where the Church had burned him alive – Pope Leo XIII was so upset that he threatened to leave Rome for good (see Plate 45). They also built a massive and leeringly visible monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of Italy, and with exquisite wit adorned the King’s tomb in the Pantheon with bronze ornaments cast from cannon which had formerly defended the pope’s Castel Sant’ Angelo. Meanwhile, year on year, the steam trains to the Eternal City carried crowds of devout Catholics like the young Thérèse of Lisieux. They savoured the sufferings of early Christians in ill-ventilated visits to the newly exposed catacombs, and they returned from these archaeological outings to show their vocal support for the suffering papal ‘Peter in Chains’, often provoking riots with angry Italian nationalists which anticipated the aftermath of international football matches in more recent decades.25 Such confrontations were a stark symbol of a new battle for popular allegiance throughout Catholic Europe. In this, Catholicism might outflank liberalism by proclaiming its commitment to social reform, just as increasing numbers of ordinary Europeans were looking beyond liberalism to socialism, voting for socialist parties in European parliaments. In England, the ultramontane Cardinal- Archbishop of West-minster, Henry Manning, was a key mediator in ending a bitter industrial dispute in London Docks in 1889, a turning point in the recognition of the rights of trade unions in Britain. It was the first occasion on which a Catholic priest had been able to play such a role in the society of Protestant Britain since the Reformation, and it was more than most Anglican bishops seemed able to do at the time.26 Manning’s achievement was important in the background to the encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII restated the Catholic Church’s commitment to social justice for the poor, even to the extent that it would promote trade unions with a Catholic base. Its tone was passionate and direct, with a passion whose direction was very different from that of Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors: some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-men’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  If putting a satellite into orbit gave a nation an advantage on Earth, the ability to populate outer space with citizens and armies gave a nation an advantage in the universe. And there was another reason to send human beings into space. If man could leave Earth’s atmosphere, he could reach the Moon. Forever it had hung there, beautiful and mysterious, calling to man yet always beyond his grasp. The Moon controlled tides, guided the lost, lit harvests, inspired poets and lovers, spoke to children. The nation that first sent a man to the Moon would have done more than make a giant leap in science and technology; it would have fulfilled a longing that seemed to originate not just in the mind but in the soul. —A few days after Laika was launched, it became apparent that the Soviets hadn’t designed the satellite to return safely to Earth. Western impressions of Communist cold-heartedness only worsened as the world waited for Laika to die. Embarrassed again by a Soviet satellite, the United States pushed to launch its own. On December 6, 1957, two months after Sputnik, a Vanguard rocket, carrying its grapefruit-sized satellite, counted down on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Unlike the Soviets, who conducted space operations in secret, the United States was broadcasting this launch to the entire country on live television. On ignition, the Vanguard’s liquid-fueled engine spat orange flames and the rocket began to rise, but just a few feet up it hesitated, tilted slightly, then sank back to the pad, incinerating in a huge explosion. About all that remained of Vanguard in the aftermath was its tiny spherical satellite, somehow thrown free from the blast and lying nearby, beeping like it had made it into orbit. The humiliation began even before the cinders had cooled. Media around the world called the project “Flopnik,” “Kaputnik,” and “Stayputnik,” while the Soviets took the chance to revel in America’s embarrassment, offering the Americans a helping hand through a United Nations program designed to provide technological assistance to primitive countries. On January 31, 1958, the United States tried again. This time, the rocket climbed straight up, its whiplash of flames lighting the midnight sky, witnesses yelling “Go, baby!” as the fire grew distant and the sounds fainter. In a few minutes a 30-pound satellite called Explorer was in orbit around Earth. This was a warning shot that announced how quickly things could change when a country believed its survival to be at stake. A week later, President Eisenhower, the old general, waged his own battle on behalf of the Space Race. He created the Advanced Research Projects Agency, called ARPA, an innovation center for the military where researchers pushed the boundaries of science and technology. (In the 1960s, the agency would attempt to network computers across the United States, a project that became the Internet.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  resoundingly declared to Englishmen that ‘Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man … that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for ‘t’. But that is precisely what Locke himself had done when (as one of the first hereditary peers created in English North America) he helped first to draft and then to revise a constitution for a vast new English colony in the south called Carolina, at much the same time in the 1680s as he was writing Two Treatises. Blacks were different.24 Slave numbers rocketed at the end of the seventeenth century: blacks outnumbered whites in South Carolina by the 1710s, and in Virginia the proportion of blacks to whites shot up from less than 10 per cent in 1680 to about a third in 1740. This is the context for the remarkable liturgical innovation of one South Carolina Anglican clergyman, Francis Le Jau, who added to the baptism service a requirement that slaves being baptized should repeat an oath ‘that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from the Duty and Obedience you owe to your Master while you live’. This reflected a clerical dilemma in a Church so dominated by the laity: when masters were putting up much resistance to converting slaves, was it better to let souls perish or to accept the norms of the society in which the Church found itself?25 As early as the mid-seventeenth century, Virginia in the south and New England in the north had created two contrasting forms of English-speaking colony. Both were firmly committed to their different patterns of established Churches, just as in Europe, though Rhode Island remained as a thorn in the side of the New England establishments and was a model for their gradual loosening of official restrictions on other Protestant congregations. Between the two regions, a variety of ‘Middle Colonies’ was set up, not all initially English. Swedish Lutherans settled on the Delaware River, and the Protestant Dutch seized a spectacular natural harbour in the Hudson estuary which they named New Netherland and which quickly emerged as the focus for European shipping along the North American coast. An English flotilla annexed this tempting prize during the Anglo-Dutch Wars in 1664, and its capital New Amsterdam on the Manhattan peninsula became New York, only briefly retaken by the Dutch in 1673. Once more the aim of the Swedes and Dutch had been to reproduce the national Churches back home, but even before 1664 the religious cosmopolitanism of the northern Netherlands had already been reproduced in New Amsterdam, whether the Dutch Reformed Church liked it or not. That included pragmatic Dutch toleration of a wealthy Jewish community, since there were a significant number of Jewish shareholders in the Dutch West India Company, the colony’s proprietor. English rule was the coup de grâce to any

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  embarrassment for propaganda, or press a military advantage. And yet... If NASA could meet Kennedy’s deadline, it would be a statement—to the American people, the Soviets, and the world—that there was nothing the United States could not do if pushed hard enough, that even after losing round after round in the Space Race, falling behind in missiles and bombs, and suffering a humiliation like the Bay of Pigs, the United States could rise in a way no other nation could rise and pull off a miracle. And that’s what Congress seemed to hear as Kennedy kept talking and their applause began to build: that landing a man on the Moon and bringing him back safely might be the single greatest scientific and technological challenge mankind had ever faced, but doing it by the end of the decade was impossible, and it was only by attempting something impossible that a nation could truly know who it was. — While Americans buzzed about Kennedy’s plan, the Soviet Union yawned. It remained far ahead in the Space Race, and had even sent a probe 42.5 million miles away, which had passed by Venus a few days before Kennedy’s speech. In June, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy during a two- day summit in Vienna at which the men discussed Communism and democracy and the relationship between the two superpowers. “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me,” Kennedy told a New York Times writer. “I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts.” Four months later, on October 30, 1961, the Soviets exploded a device known as Tsar Bomba over northern Russia. Packing a force of nearly four thousand Hiroshima bombs, it was by far the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated or even built; for the briefest moment, it equaled 1.4 percent of the power output of the Sun. The device’s blast wave orbited the globe three times and its mushroom cloud rose to more than seven times the height of Mount Everest. The ground around the blast site melted and turned to glass, while people fifty miles away were knocked flat. A year after Tsar Bomba, Khrushchev placed nuclear missiles in Cuba.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Christianity arose in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire (see pp. 854–5), but for more than a century before, there had been revivals throughout the Islamic world, reactions to the humiliation of the failing empires of the Ottomans and Mughals. In the face of growing European military success in late-eighteenth- century India, Shah Wali-Allah began considering how Muslim society might adapt for the first time in its history to losing political power. He pleaded eloquently both for Islamic social reconstruction and for a reconciliation of Sunni and Shī‘a within Islam, and his son ‘Abd al-’Aziz sustained and developed his movement, combining tradition with a recognition of the reality of British India.39 On the fringes of Ottoman power in Arabia, an austere revivalism founded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb (1703–87) gained support from tribal leaders of the Sa’ūd family; al-Wahhāb rejected more than a millennium of development within various branches of Islam, to return to basic texts, in a move not unlike the Protestant Reformation. In 1803 the Sa’ūd temporarily conquered the holy city of Mecca, and thereafter remained a significant force in the politics of Arabia until eventually they became its rulers.During the nineteenth century, this Wahhabite religious movement in a peninsula dominated by desert and with no great political or economic power seemed to have little wider importance. It was in North and West Africa that a new surge of life extended Muslim frontiers, and the agent was a very different form of Islam led by mystical Sūfī orders: the first significant sign of Islamic renewal that Christian missionaries encountered anywhere. If Christian expansion in Africa did eventually become linked to military success, reforming Islam had already set the pattern in late-eighteenth-century West Africa, through the strength and proselytizing zeal of the pastoralist Fulani people. Their establishment of a string of emirates in place of previous kingdoms was spearheaded by movements of jihad (struggle) to establish a purer form of Islam, the greatest of which was led from 1802 by the campaigning Sūfī scholar Shehu Usman dan Fodio. In the early nineteenth century, the most plausible picture of the future was that black Africa would have become overwhelmingly Muslim, and Muslim growth there remained spectacular all through the century.40 In fact, Christianity came to equal Islam in outreach in Africa, and this spurt of Christian growth was in the first place a mission pushed forward by self-help. Only belatedly did it gain increasing protection from European military power; even at their apparently most powerless, Africans made their own choices within the offer of Christian faith. There was certainly demand for the new message. People all over Africa, uprooted by local wars or the recent interference of Europeans, were as eager as industrial workers in Georgian England to find new purpose and structure for

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Weak and debilitated from his time in prison, Kaiser on July 17 was forced to participate in a disputation with none other than Johannes Eck, Luther’s antagonist at Leipzig, who had even gone to Rome to procure the bull against him. It is unclear whether Luther knew before his collapse that Eck had taken an interest in Kaiser’s case. Luther had been the butt of Eck’s coarse humor at Leipzig, and now Eck mocked Kaiser to his face as a man “whose wares are even worse than his salesmanship.” 43 Unable to burn Luther, Eck meant to burn Kaiser. Protected by the Elector Friedrich and his successor Johann, Luther was safe. In fact it was now he who was on the side of the authorities, as he had wryly noted after his encounter with Karlstadt in the Black Bear Inn: “I who ought to have become a martyr have reached the point where I am now making martyrs of others.” 44 Karlstadt was very much on his mind, too, and shortly before the breakdown, Luther had become convinced that he would never win him back to the fold. At the climax of his collapse he worried that his death or the Devil’s attacks would prevent him writing against the sacramentarians, and he felt the weight and isolation of leading the movement: “Oh what dreadful misery the Schwärmer [enthusiasts] will cause after my death!” 45 The events of Kaiser’s martyrdom followed closely upon Luther’s breakdown. On July 18 he was taken to Passau and again given an opportunity to recant. When he refused, he was ritually defrocked in a ceremony carried out in front of a large crowd, which included Eck. Piece by piece, his priest’s robes were stripped from his body by the bishop of Passau, and he was shaved. Then he was dressed in nothing but a smock, or Kittel, a black slashed beret was put on his head, and, now an ordinary layman, he was handed over to the city judge. This ritual was not the end of his humiliation, however. Kaiser was kept in the castle dungeon for yet another month, and then paraded in chains around the town, before being taken to his home town of Schärding, where he was executed on August 16. Kaiser died true to his Lutheran faith.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He was the first maybe-trans person she had ever met. He probably wouldn’t have called himself trans. Just a cross-dresser. Which was what Amy called herself at the time. But no one had ever seen her dressed up. Not even on Halloween. She had figured that by the time she got to college and had a lock on her door, she’d spend a bunch of her time behind it dressed up pretty. But even by her sophomore year, she had barely accumulated the basics of a wardrobe. Her makeup remained in an equally dismal state. She’d had no one to teach her the art of makeup so she stuck to the three cosmetic basics whose application was more or less explained by their packaging: lipstick, eyeliner, and mascara. Her frequent attempts to shop for women’s clothes failed more often than not. She never went into women’s boutiques—it’d be impossible to explain herself in there. Instead, she haunted department stores—Walmarts and Targets—taking circuitous routes around the edges of Women’s Wear, feigning interest in adjacent kitchen appliances, then snatching something, anything: a swimsuit, a purse, a bra. The whole exercise humiliated her. She looked like a creep, she knew. But she couldn’t be cool. The closer she got to actually buying clothes, actually browsing in the women’s section, the more her blood rushed and her face reddened. The more her hands shook. There wasn’t any way to be casual while holding a pair of panties and looking like you’re at risk of passing out. Because who did that? What the fuck was wrong with her? And how much other random shit did she buy attempting to hide those panties? Did she think the checkout girl wouldn’t think a college boy buying a baby- doll dress was weird if the purchases also included three bags of chips, some beef jerky, and a folding chair? She found Patrick in the fall of her second year at college. Forty miles away. A thirty-six-year-old divorced hotel clerk posting in a Yahoo group that he wanted someone to dress up with. Just two guys, dressing up in lingerie, to relax. He undercut his own casual, no-homo, bro-vibe by adding that he was versatile. Nineteen-year-old college student. 5'8" 140 Ibs. Do you have lingerie for me? It took Amy two hours of deliberation to send that message. No, but there’s a store for cross-dressers where I get mine, Patrick replied. Ill pick you up from your school if you want and we can go tomorrow. Which was how Amy ended up standing on the street in front of her dorm, wearing a hood low over her eyes, as if her pervert tranny intentions could be read plainly on her face by any other passing student who glanced her way. Picture an anonymous strip mall, veneered in a too-red brick, housing a Subway franchise, a vacuum cleaner store, and sandwiched between the two, a dingy painted sign that read: GLAMOUR BOUTIQUE. Now picture Amy’s disappointed face.

• From Middlesex (2002)

  When the floor of the porch creaked behind us, I jumped. I with- drew my thumb from the Object's pants and sat up straight. I saw something in the corner of my eyes and turned. Perched on the rail- ing to our right was Jerome. He was in his vampire costume, despite the heat. The powder on his face was burning off in spots but he still looked very pale. He was gazing down on us with his best haunted expression. His Turn of the Screw expression. The young master led 390 astray by the gardener. The boy in the frock coat who'd drowned in the well. Everything was dead except the eyes. His eyes fixed on us— on the Object's bare legs lying in my lap— while his face remained embalmed. Then the apparition spoke: "Carpet munchers." "Just ignore him," the Object said. "Carrrrpet muncherrrrs," Jerome repeated. It came out in a croak. "Shut^!" Jerome remained still and ghoul-like on the rail. His hair wasn't slicked back but fell limp on either side of his face. He was very con- trolled and intent about what he was doing, as if following a time- honored procedure. "Carpet muncher," he said again. "Carpet muncher, carpet muncher." Singular now. This was between him and his sister. "I said quit it, Jerome." The Object now tried to rise. She swung her legs off my lap and started to roll out of the swing. But Jerome moved first. He spread his jacket like wings and jumped off the rail- ing. He swooped down on the Object. Still his face was completely impassive. No muscles moved except those of his mouth. Into the Object's face, into her ears he kept hissing and croaking. "Carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher." "Stop it!" She tried to hit him but he caught her arms. He held both of her wrists in one hand. With his other hand Jerome made a V with his fingers. He pressed this V to his mouth and between this suggestive triangle flicked his tongue back and forth. At the crudity of this ges- ture the Object's calm began to crack. A sob rose in her. Jerome sensed its arrival. He had reduced his sister to tears for over a decade; he knew how to do it; he was like a kid burning an ant with a magni- fying glass, focusing the beam in hotter and hotter. "Carpet muncher, carpet muncher, carpet muncher . And then it happened. The Object broke down. She began to bawl like a little girl. Her face turned red and she swung her fists wildly before finally running away into the house. ." . At that point Jerome's fierce activity ceased. He adjusted his jacket. He smoothed his hair and, leaning against the porch rail, stared peacefully out at the water. 391 "Don't worry" he said to me. "I won't tell anyone." "Tell anyone what?"

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the back, circled around, and reached de l'Orme's house without being canal, head first. The lady, terrified by such a sight, seen. Prove Yourself • 325 Grammont knocked at the door, and a servant, mistaking him for the began to cry and to run in duke, let him in. He headed straight for the lady's chamber, where he found the direction of her house, her lying on a couch, in a sheer gown. He threw off Brissac's cloak and she where upon arriving, she fainted. As soon as she gasped in fright. "What is the matter, my fair one?" he asked. "Your could speak, she ordered headache, to all appearance, is gone?" She seemed put out, exclaimed she that someone go and see still had the headache, and insisted that he leave. It was up to her, she said, what had happened to Saint-Preuil, who in truth to make or break appointments. "Madam," Grammont said calmly, "I know had not stayed very long in what perplexes you: you are afraid lest Brissac should meet me here; but the canal, and having you may make yourself easy on that account." He then opened the window quickly put his clothes back on, hurried to Paris where and revealed Brissac out in the square, dutifully walking back and forth he hid himself for several with a horse, like a common stable boy. He looked ridiculous; de l'Orme days. Meanwhile, the burst out laughing, threw her arms around the count, and exclaimed, "My rumor spread that he had died. Madame de la dear Chevalier, I can hold out no longer; you are too amiable and too ec- Maisnnfort was deeply centric not to be pardoned." He told her the whole story, and she promised moved by the extreme that the duke could exercise horses all night, but she would not let him in. measures he had adopted They made an appointment for the following evening. Outside, the count to prove his sentiments. This act of his appeared to returned the cloak, apologized for taking so long, and thanked the duke. her to be a sign of an Brissac was most gracious, even holding Grammont's horse for him to extraordinary love; and mount, and waving goodbye as he rode off. having perhaps noticed some charms in his naked presence that she had not seen fully clothed, she Interpretation. Count Grammont knew that most would-be seducers give deeply regretted her cruelty, and publicly stated her up too easily, mistaking capriciousness or apparent coolness as a sign of a feeling of loss. Word of this genuine lack of interest. In fact it can mean many things: perhaps the per- reached Saint-Preuil, and son is testing you, wondering if you are really serious. Prickly behavior is he immediately resurrected himself and did not lose

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  When his queen visited the sick in the northern colonies every other Thursday, he would whisper to his court, “Find me a new and wonderful Unique for tonight,” and then he would begin washing and singing and braiding his enormous beard. When the candles were lit, he sat on his throne, wearing a tiny toga, and the Unique was brought in, holding a penis sandal made of heavy black ribbon. She had been bathed and scented and told strange stories about mountain zebras mating, and she had been closely instructed in the art of lacing the penis sandal. The king would ask her to kneel before him and he would open his legs, and she would lace the ancestral sandal around his swelling penis, telling him the new jokes that were circulating in his kingdom. He would laugh loudly, and his penis would become as hard as applewood and knotted with veins, whereupon he and the Unique would begin kissing eagerly on his throne. Then he would say, “Untie the sandal,” and with one pull, as she had been trained to do, the girl untied it, so that it hung dangling for a moment from his royal turgidity. “Stuff me full of your hot substance, oh mighty king, for I am Unique,” the girl would say, as she knelt over him on the throne, planting her hands on his enormous chest. And at the moment of their perfect union, King Bohuslav would seize his black braided beard and hold it to her mouth, whereupon she would clamp down on it to stifle her cries. Thus the memory of innumerable couplings entered his beard. This went on for almost ten years. Bohu’s beard by now had a huge double braid and looked like a loaf of pumpernickel challah. It was said by some in the court that if you held your ear to his beard, you could hear the pleasure cries of a thousand women. One night, though, a Unique of uncommon intelligence was lacing up the penis sandal. King Bohuslav groped for her breast and tried to kiss her, but suddenly she pulled out a large pair of shears and lopped off his beard with one powerful snip. King Bohuslav let out an agonized bellow and lost consciousness. The girl ran out the side door and hid carefully for a week in the hills with a friend. Meanwhile the prince had sent guardsmen and black dogs out in search of his braided beard. “How can we hide it?” asked the girl of her friend.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Stanley leaned on the horn, shockingly loud and still close. A Camry accelerated jerkily out of his way, and he pulled out. Humiliation poured all over Amy, and she sobbed again, feeling the glare of the gawkers. She pushed herself up with one arm, knees bent, pressed together and off to one side so that her weight shifted onto her hip; a ridiculous pinup pose, but one that kept her legs tightly together. She sobbed a great loud honker from deep in her diaphragm that she heard further reveal her as a man. None of the gawkers made a move to help. The two dyke teens had scrambled up at the early shouts of the scuffle. Now watching the scene from between the bars of the fence, they traded looks of baffled disdain, far from the faces of allies, and nothing even resembling kinship. Some transvestite or whatever had picked a fight and made a spectacle. So weird. “Go ahead and stare!” Amy squawked, her voice thick and phlegmy. She made eye contact with a mother, who had a young son by the hand, and had paused as they fled the intensifying drizzle. Let’s feed the nostalgia of these fucks. McCarren Park like it was two decades ago, with some real edge again. Transsexuals getting called faggots and stomped. “Amy, stop. Shhh, stop.” Reese’s hand was on her forehead, her face over Amy’s. “Youre bleeding.” “Go away!” Amy cried. There was blood and snot in her mouth. Reese tried to tug Amy’s skirt down, a futile attempt at modesty, but Amy pushed her hand away. Reese’s nostrils widened. “Amy, youre hurt.” “Go away!” Amy shouted again, heavy and wet. Reese ignored her, pulling Amy’s hair away from her face, so Amy grabbed her hand. “This is your fault.” Reese rocked back on her heels, looked around at the people staring. “Fine, Amy, fine.” Then she stood, and stiffly began to walk away. Amy hadn’t quite believed that Reese would walk away. Yet there was the back of her, stiffly moving away in Amy’s dress, the red umbrella blooming above her head with a grotesque festivity. Amy curled forward and moaned. Her fingers went to her face and came away sticky with blood. She sobbed again. Then felt around her face. Came across the sting of split skin over her brow, then her fingers moved on. They touched her nose and she half felt, half heard the dried-wood creak of cartilage shifting and a sensation like rubbing a hair between her forefinger and thumb. Then eye-watering pain radiated outward from her face and she yelped involuntarily. Her nose was broken. The nose for which she had fought so hard, for which Reese had fought so hard to get covered by insurance. Ruined. She was ruined. A man got out of his car and approached her, but she screamed again, a deep tear of a scream, that stopped him mid-step. He called out to her instead. “Should I call the police?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “No, I know,” Carrie assures her. “I know. She is a man.” The way Carrie nodded, as if convincing herself, felt wrong to Katrina on an intuitive level. “Hold on, what are people saying exactly?” Carrie grimaced a little. “That he used to be a woman, you know, that he is a transgendered man.” “Oh fuck.” Katrina slumped back in her chair and stared at the drop-panel ceiling. Carrie put her hand on Katrina’s desk and leaned forward, concerned. “No! Katrina! He passes very well! It’s not a problem for anyone here. I only want your help in creating a supportive environment. We don’t have any policies yet for transgendered employees, so I think it’s important to do this correctly now...” Katrina’s first urge was to call Ames. But the situation was humiliating for them both. Katrina couldn’t face it on top of everything else. Instead, she thought to call Reese. “Okay,” cackles Iris, “so they think he was assigned female at birth? That he’s female-to-male?” “Yes,” says Katrina with a sigh, “that’s what I’m gathering.” Reese is enjoying this turn of events more than she should. “Can you blame them? That pretty boy. His beard hasn’t recovered from laser, and oh my god, even after that pert little nose got broken, it must be easy for them to imagine him as a trans guy.” “Amy isn’t that tall, right?” Thalia asks. “I’ve only seen pictures of her.” Each of the women in that room has some favorite complaint about her body, through which she can’t help but assess the bodies of other women. At six foot two, Thalia’s was her height. “Like five eight, maybe nine,” says Iris. “Perfect trans guy height.” “But you actually know trans men,” Iris corrects Thalia. Reese has to catch her laughter. This is really just so delicious. “Yeah, you know to clock a burly dude. Cis people are off looking for, like, Gwyneth Paltrow with a little mustache.” “In other words: They’re looking for Amy.” Iris’s face looks as pleased as Reese feels. Katrina’s interest has snagged on a different detail. “Burly?” “Oh yeah,” say the other women in emphatic unison. “If you want a manly man,” Iris counsels her, “find yourself a trans man. They’re the only ones you can be sure want to be that way, instead of compensating their way into it.” “Huh,” says Katrina. The sails of Katrina’s sexuality billow with new considerations. “Thalia likes the FTM4MTF romance,” Iris teases. “She’s always got a boy panting after her. She’s got a dancer right now.” “Really? Why didn’t you tell me?” Reese’s feelings get hurt when Thalia shares her love life with Iris but keeps it from her. “Lemme see a photo!” “Tonight is not about me,” Thalia snaps. “Fine.” Reese shifts focus back to Katrina to hide her miffed feelings. “So anyway, what advice do you want about this situation?”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  First, to determine my position vis-à-vis the shoreline. If I tilted my head too much, I felt my whole body start to roll, and on the long list of unpleasant ways to die, “facedown in soaking-wet white boxers” is pretty high up there. So instead I rolled my eyes and craned my neck back, my eyes almost underwater, until I saw that the shore—not ten feet away—was directly behind my head. I began to swim, an armless silver mermaid, using only my hips to generate motion, until finally my ass scraped against the lake’s mucky bottom. I turned then and used my hips and waist to roll three times, until I came ashore near a ratty green towel. They’d left me a towel. How thoughtful. The water had seeped under the duct tape and loosened the adhesive’s grip on my skin, but the tape was wrapped around me three layers deep in places, which necessitated wiggling like a fish out of water. Finally it loosened enough for me to slip my left hand up and out against my chest and rip the tape off. I wrapped myself in the sandy towel. I didn’t want to go back to my room and see Chip, because I had no idea what Kevin had meant—maybe if I went back to the room, they’d be waiting for me and they’d get me for real; maybe I needed to show them, “Okay. Got your message. He’s just my roommate, not my friend.” And anyway, I didn’t feel terribly friendly toward the Colonel. Have a good time , he’d said. Yeah , I thought. I had a ball . So I went to Alaska’s room. I didn’t know what time it was, but I could see a faint light underneath her door. I knocked softly. “Yeah,” she said, and I came in, wet and sandy and wearing only a towel and soaking boxers. This was not, obviously, how you want the world’s hottest girl to see you, but I figured she could explain to me what had just happened. She put down a book and got out of bed with a sheet wrapped around her shoulders. For a moment, she looked concerned. She looked like the girl I met yesterday, the girl who said I was cute and bubbled over with energy and silliness and intelligence. And then she laughed. “Guess you went for a swim, huh?” And she said it with such casual malice that I felt that everyone had known, and I wondered why the whole damn school agreed in advance to possibly drown Miles Halter. But Alaska liked the Colonel, and in the confusion of the moment, I just looked at her blankly, unsure even of what to ask. “Give me a break,” she said. “Come on. You know what? There are people with real problems. I’ve got real problems.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Thalia stands, rushes over to Reese, and hugs her. Ames hangs back with Katrina, waiting for Reese to notice them. He’s apprehensive, and Katrina, beside him, gives Ames’s hand a nervous squeeze. When Reese catches sight of the two of them, she pulls away from Thalia, her face darkening. A slight sunburn reddens her face and her skin stretches tight over her cheekbones. Her eyes move wildly from Ames to Katrina, then back to Thalia. “T called them,” Thalia says simply. “I didn’t know if you could pay or what you might need.” Ames knows Reese well enough to know that she is wavering between anger and gratitude, that she hates being seen in such a compromised position, but that anyone who comes down to a hospital in Midwood must, somewhere inside of them, care about her. Perhaps if it had just been Ames, she might have let herself go to anger, but with Katrina there, Reese’s teeth flash as she gives Katrina a nervous smile. “T didn’t do it,” she says, and Ames realizes that she is talking to Katrina. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself.” “Okay,” says Katrina simply. “Thalia said that. But she also said you've been upset. Anyway, you don’t have to explain anything. I drove here. I can give you a ride.” “Thank you,” Reese says. “I want to explain. This is humiliating, but I’m glad to see you.” There are papers for Reese to sign, insurance information for her to verify before she’s discharged. Ames asks if she needs help, or money, but she shakes her head. He stands beside her at the reception counter anyhow. When she’s done, he asks if she will please give him a hug. He intends the request as a gift—to spare her having to ask for one herself—and because, honestly, he needs one too. Katrina drops off Thalia first. Thalia gives Reese a kiss goodbye on the cheek as she gets out of the car, and thanks Katrina for the ride. Then, to Reese’s surprise, Thalia turns to Ames. “Take care of her,” she instructs him, and before Ames can respond, she turns and strides her long strides away from the car. “She’s a good friend,” Katrina says, pulling out. Reese sits in back, and Katrina has to duck forward to see Reese’s face in the rearview mirror. Reese nods without responding. “Do you want some food?” Ames asks. “Or just to go home?” “T want to go home,” Reese says. But then, a minute later, as Katrina turns the wheel and pulls into the traffic on Bedford, Reese says, “But I have to explain myself. I will never sleep if I don’t. And I never expected to have you two here, to have this chance.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Which is how, in accepting a fifty on the way out of a restaurant from a guy she had been telling herself looked like a tool who bought scalped tickets to Burning Man, Reese found herself looking at an empty walk-in closet in Stanley’s bedroom. It was thirty-five square feet of recessed-halogen-lit floor that amounted to all the physical space in the world over which she held complete dominion—and even that space really belonged to Stanley. She stared at the empty hangers and thought about how she really had to get better at fighting back, because she had lost not just the upper hand in this battle of a relationship, but all her other limbs as well. As she thought such things, he pointed to a mirror he had recently hung on the back of the closet door and said, “And now, you can spend hours staring at your own reflection, like the parakeet you are.” Despite hate-fucks that led to a hate-courtship that built into a hate- relationship, six months passed before Stanley finally hit Reese and split her lip. The question of motive gets dicey, however. Why that moment, and not so many others? Even a mediocre lawyer could establish certain basic facts: Stanley bought Reese a particular pair of expensive designer boots, and she, knowing it would anger him, exchanged them for a pair she preferred. Then, in an attempt to deceive him, she purchased a pair of cheap knockoffs that resembled the original pair, which she endeavored to pass off as the authentic item. Whereupon Stanley immediately recognized the forgery and took her attempted deception as an insult. How dumb did she think he was that he wouldn’t notice the difference between some ordered-online-and- sent-from-China ill-fitting glorified socks, and the eight-hundred- dollar Stuart Weitzman signature suede Lowland above-the-knee boots that he had personally picked out and bought for her? It wasn’t bad enough that she exchanged his present? Then she went and faked like she hadn’t, like she thought he was too stupid to know what he’d held in his hand? No. Fuck that. Slap the bitch. But in the way relationships get twisted, in how lovers—or rather, combatants—develop their own private language of aggression, the Boots Incident was even more complicated than it seemed. In truth, Stanley already knew that Reese would hate the boots when he picked them out. He bought them for that exact reason—to spend money on a luxury designer item that she could never afford on her own, but that she also couldn’t enjoy, in order to see the conflict that such a purchase would raise in her. He bought the boots to demonstrate for her a simple calculation of power: She enjoyed living in style, but her dependence on him for that style made him the final arbiter of what she put on her body.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Which is how, in accepting a fifty on the way out of a restaurant from a guy she had been telling herself looked like a tool who bought scalped tickets to Burning Man, Reese found herself looking at an empty walk-in closet in Stanley’s bedroom. It was thirty-five square feet of recessed-halogen-lit floor that amounted to all the physical space in the world over which she held complete dominion—and even that space really belonged to Stanley. She stared at the empty hangers and thought about how she really had to get better at fighting back, because she had lost not just the upper hand in this battle of a relationship, but all her other limbs as well. As she thought such things, he pointed to a mirror he had recently hung on the back of the closet door and said, “And now, you can spend hours staring at your own reflection, like the parakeet you are.” Despite hate-fucks that led to a hate-courtship that built into a hate- relationship, six months passed before Stanley finally hit Reese and split her lip. The question of motive gets dicey, however. Why that moment, and not so many others? Even a mediocre lawyer could establish certain basic facts: Stanley bought Reese a particular pair of expensive designer boots, and she, knowing it would anger him, exchanged them for a pair she preferred. Then, in an attempt to deceive him, she purchased a pair of cheap knockoffs that resembled the original pair, which she endeavored to pass off as the authentic item. Whereupon Stanley immediately recognized the forgery and took her attempted deception as an insult. How dumb did she think he was that he wouldn’t notice the difference between some ordered-online-and- sent-from-China ill-fitting glorified socks, and the eight-hundred- dollar Stuart Weitzman signature suede Lowland above-the-knee boots that he had personally picked out and bought for her? It wasn’t bad enough that she exchanged his present? Then she went and faked like she hadn’t, like she thought he was too stupid to know what he’d held in his hand? No. Fuck that. Slap the bitch. But in the way relationships get twisted, in how lovers—or rather, combatants—develop their own private language of aggression, the Boots Incident was even more complicated than it seemed. In truth, Stanley already knew that Reese would hate the boots when he picked them out. He bought them for that exact reason—to spend money on a luxury designer item that she could never afford on her own, but that she also couldn’t enjoy, in order to see the conflict that such a purchase would raise in her. He bought the boots to demonstrate for her a simple calculation of power: She enjoyed living in style, but her dependence on him for that style made him the final arbiter of what she put on her body.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  As a set of objects, the boots were beautiful: finely stitched in a soft suede the same gray shade as a manatee’s hide, lined with satin, and set on a carefully molded rubber sole, with little SWs imprinted on the bottom, so that as you walk the earth, your steps imprint the designer’s initials. But once snugly up a pair of legs, the boots took on a second, more socially fraught function. With their incomprehensible combination of thigh-high length and flat soles, they seemed designed to allow for impossible models to flaunt how their legs refused to end—even in what might have passed for the slouchy bottom half of an elephant costume. Reese’s legs, by contrast to a supermodel’s, would take only a short, truncated journey in those boots, a brief trip that would come to a definitive end in the cul-de-sac of bodily dysphoria. Gigi Hadid wore high flat boots like this, but the squattest of lucha libre wrestlers did too. Stanley knew which of the two Reese’s cruel dysmorphia would reflect back to her from her parakeet mirror. Yet again, knowing Reese for a brand whore, Stanley expected she would still attempt to wear such expensive boots. However! In a climactic twist that Stanley had not expected, Reese returned the insult. In her own passive-aggressive calculus, Reese never meant for Stanley to be deceived when she bought the knockoffs. She meant for him to easily recognize the difference between the designer boots and the poor imitations. She meant to show him that he was just as disposable to her as she was to him, that she had him figured out, and if he fucked with her in any way that she didn’t find, at minimum, sexy and fun, she’d take his money and lie to his face. This unexpected declaration of her power, which they both understood to be communicated as an insult according to the rules of their ritualized unfriendliness, is why he slapped her. But in ways that both of them felt but neither could fully admit, the entire saga of the boots that led to the slap was a form of pageantry. Beneath it lay Reese’s own sense of womanhood. The reason Stanley hit Reese reversed everything both of them wanted to be true: Stanley hit Reese because she wanted him to hit her.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  She had long since discovered that most talk about owning her turned her stomach liquid with desire. But at that moment, she had four hundred dollars in her bank account—cracks webbed her phone screen, she needed a plane ticket to see her mother, and just as the items she needed weren’t sexy, the idea of trading subservience for them wasn’t that sexy either. It wasn’t her fault that people paid finance douches millions and no one wanted to hire an uneducated transsexual. She had a funny-’cause-it’s-true joke that she liked to ask whenever she met a new trans girl. So which of the three transsexual jobs do you do? Computer programmer, aesthetician, or prostitute? Reese always hoped the answer would be prostitute, because prostitutes were the ones with a good sense of humor. “Subjugation is fun in bed,” Reese snapped back at Stanley. “Women don’t want that anywhere else, especially not poor trans girls who don’t have any choice.” He darkened and told her to sit up straight, that she had bad posture. She did as he said, feeling self- conscious and humiliated—but not in a fun way—and resolved to order only a salad, since this date would clearly be their last. She couldn’t afford to split the meal, but she wanted to make a show of non-obligation. When the food came, he criticized her use of utensils. “You don’t come to a nice restaurant and then eat like a slob. Didn’t anyone teach you?” He held his fork in his left hand tines down. “See? Like this.” “IT know how to eat. I work as a waitress.” “Nowhere I’d want to eat.” She glared at him. But when she tried to use her fork tines down, she couldn’t manage it. Not because she couldn’t eat that way, but because he had intended to humiliate her, and had succeeded, which threw off her coordination. In trying to pick up a piece of flaking salmon from her salad, she shredded it into tiny bits too small to be speared on the tines. She blushed, set down the utensils, and took a sip of water. “Oh, just eat your normal way. This is embarrassing to watch,” Stanley said. “But you need to practice your etiquette. Unless you want me to cut your food for you and you can use a spoon?” Having sufficiently humbled her, he grew friendlier, conspicuously popping chunks of steak into his mouth, speared tines down. On the way out, he wrapped a sudden arm around her and gave the side of her face a bizarre kiss, closer to a nuzzle than anything else, and then pressed a fifty on her, saying, “It’s late, take a taxi.” Reese hesitated, then pocketed the fifty, waited until the car he’d ordered arrived to take him home, and then walked to the train. No way was she wasting fifty bucks on what could be a $2.25 subway fare, with only one transfer on the way.

• From Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (2018)

  The words devastated Susan. On the spot, she knew she’d never forget them. But something about that incident steeled Susan’s spine. From the day Frank began dating her, he sensed an undergirding of strength in Susan. This girl, he thought, can handle anything. As high school drew to a close, Frank needed to decide on a future. He wanted to be a fighter pilot—a perfect way to combine flying and defense of his country. World War II had ended nearly a year earlier, but already tensions were building with the Soviet Union. No less an expert in looming tyranny than Winston Churchill now warned that “an iron curtain” had descended across Europe. Frank believed him. After scoring high on admissions exams, Frank enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point in the fall of 1946. Cadet Borman was all baby face and golden hair compared to his classmates. Many had already attended college, and at least half were veterans of World War II. In early fall, Borman tried out for the plebe (first year) football team. He’d been a star high school quarterback, but at this level he didn’t have the necessary arm strength. He joined anyway, as the varsity team’s assistant manager, in charge of gathering dirty socks and sweaty jockstraps. It was thrilling for Borman, who got to observe head coach Earl Blaik’s legendary intensity and to watch one of the young assistant coaches, Vince Lombardi, develop his own military coaching style. Borman fell in love with West Point. The rules, the order, the discipline—it all seemed designed to tune out distraction and allow a man to get on with what really mattered. As a kid, he’d already been different from his peers—he went after the things that were important to him, as if he were on a mission. At West Point, nothing mattered but the mission. He pledged himself to the academy’s motto—Duty, Honor, Country. It seemed to Borman that a person who believed in anything less wouldn’t get where he needed to go. All the while, Borman and Susan continued dating, if only by U.S. mail. She was still in Tucson, and they were separated by more than two thousand miles. West Point did not allow furloughs for plebes, even for holidays. Fearing he’d receive a breakup letter from Susan, Borman struck first, sending a letter to Susan saying they needed to cool their relationship. It only made sense, in light of their distance, his commitment to West Point, and the focus he’d need to make his new