Shame

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 Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  There she dropped her middle name, Carolyn, in favor of her first name, Betty, and cut her long, stringy hair into a bouncy bob. One broken taboo spawned a host of others: movies, skating rinks, lipstick, slacks, bathing suits, men. The path to perdition is tediously routine for a Holy Roller girl. She went to church, she prayed, but God no longer dropped by. She met my dad in LA, a sinner boy who was everything my grandfather feared. He smoked and drank and indulged a taste for all things fast. Cars. Boats. Women. Mama’s religious beliefs and naïveté cast her as something of an exotic in my dad’s eyes. Her LA nickname, Betty the Body, tells the rest of the story. My dad wooed her with professions of love, promises of repentance, and declarations that she alone could save him. Six weeks after they met, my parents married. Asked why she married a man she hardly knew and one so different from her, my mother’s answer is typical: “I guess I thought I could help him.” The cost of bringing a soul into the fold was never too high.My grandfather’s response to the Las Vegas wedding was to the point: “I guess she had to get married.”I was born a year after my parents married. Still, I’ve always considered their wedding a shotgun marriage of sorts, a trigger-happy God pointing the gun, my mother’s guilt egging it all on. She had come close to the fires of hell one night, parked above Los Angeles in my dad’s car, the windows steamed with lust. They married soon after. The marriage lasted two years, most of which my dad spent scrambling for the door. He made his final exit when my mother told him a second child was on the way.Mama discovered he had another woman and her disgrace was complete.My mother returned to her parents’ house pregnant and prodigal with a toddler in tow. She had rebelled against her father. She had eaten of the tree of good and evil. She had known better. She was practically a divorced woman, and in the rural Pentecostal South that put her perilously close to being a hussy. Pentecostals conceded that divorce might be a necessary evil in extreme cases, but remarriage was condemned little more than legally sanctioned adultery. At twenty-three, my mother’s vision of herself as God’s own girl was lost. She was grateful when her parents allowed her to move into the apartment in the basement of their church. She was grateful when my brother was born healthy, grateful when she found a job, grateful her daddy never said, “I told you so.” She woke early Monday through Friday, dressed for work, dropped my infant brother and me at the babysitter’s, and headed to Whitman Trailers for another day of typing and shorthand.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  He patted us all and sent us back to our chairs, still crying.“Now, I want members of the evangelistic team who have grievances against each other to come down here to the altar and pray through.” He turned and waved the preachers on the platform forward.“Dockery, Red, Brother Gunn, if y’all can hear me, come on up here.”The tent men and their wives and kids walked to the front and kneeled. The families who followed the tent joined them. My mother slid off the organ stool and walked to the front of the platform and down the prayer ramp to kneel in front of it. Betty Ann told us to sit right where we were, not to move under any circumstance, and she, too, walked to the front and knelt. Brother Cotton left the platform and joined the others. His wife walked across the tent and stood with him. About twenty adults knelt together. Brother Terrell led the prayer.“Father, we let the devil turn us against each other. We’re supposed to be the light of the world, but we buried our lights under anger and bitterness and jealousy and evil thoughts.”“Have mercy, Lord.”The grown-ups moaned and wailed their repentance, their faces buried in their hands and bowed toward their knees.“Forgive us, Lord. Have mercy on us. Teach us to love each other. If we can’t love each other, what hope is there for the world?”All over the tent, people stretched their arms toward the front. “Bless ’em, Lord. Bless every one of ’em. Bless ’em, Jesus. Bless ’em, Lord.”Brother Terrell moved between the adults, laying hands on one, whispering in another’s ear. Everyone cried and prayed. The crowd of about three thousand slipped to their knees in front of their chairs or gathered around to pray for the evangelistic team. After about thirty minutes, everyone who traveled with the tent began to stand up. Red hugged Dockery. Mama hugged Brother Cotton. Betty Ann hugged Laverne. Dockery hugged Brother Cotton. Everybody hugged Brother Terrell. Everyone said, “Love yew, love yew,” over and over. Mama and Betty Ann patted each other on the shoulder. Neither a hug nor a profession of love passed between them.Usually a good praying-through made everything better, but something had passed between Mama and Betty Ann and Brother Terrell on the road to Atlanta that could not be undone. It was neither named nor denied, but after that night in the car, it was always with us. I brushed past it when I ran by my mother and Brother Terrell in the hallway, his hand reaching out to steady her when she stumbled. It stood behind Betty Ann in the doorway as she watched my mother and Brother Terrell sit on the bed, and count the offering, careful not to touch, stacking the ones, fives, tens, and twenties, stuffing the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into the paper rolls from the bank.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Fine,” Amy said. How incredibly stupid. Fine! The least committal, most unsexy word you could say. “Fine” was what you said when someone asked you how you were, and you didn’t want to talk about it. She might as well have said, “I am confused and ashamed.” To counter for her shame, she began to lick, hoping to convince Delia of the eagerness she was supposed to have. Maybe this was how you did it. “Higher up,” Delia said from above. “What?” “Use your tongue higher.” Delia had her eyes shut again, frowning like she was concentrating hard on some thought. Amy cringed. It was awful how much she didn’t know. Amy tried again, and after a moment Delia stopped her. “Look,” said Delia, as she spread her labia with two fingers, “this is my clit.” Amy nodded, but a second later, she realized she’d been too ashamed at having needed the instruction and hadn’t paid attention. She’d focused instead on examining Delia’s face for mockery or derision. This is not a big deal, she told herself. It is your first time. Delia knows that. She can’t expect you to be good. “Ts it good?” she asked Delia. “Yes,” said Delia flatly, in a way that Amy knew was a lie. What else could Delia say? “Good,” Amy said. “I like it too.” Two lies. The only thing worse would be if Delia faked an orgasm. Amy had seen an episode of Sex and the City where the four women talked about inadequate men they’d had to fake it for. Delia’s leg twitched as if in involuntary pleasure, and Amy, to punish herself, thought: Fake. How long did it go on for? Until Amy felt Delia gently touch her hair, which was short, fuzzily growing out from a buzz cut she’d impulsively given herself one night. “Let’s take a break,” Delia said. “Maybe just have sex. I like sex best.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  When Amy detransitioned herself, she promised never to let anyone see her as she had seen William that night. Never to pant for inclusion from trans women. Ames wanted no pity and rejected their disgust. But despite Ames’s rigid need for dignity, for all the careful lines he drew to respect the differences in how he lived and how trans women lived, they called to him in a siren song. Whenever a girl passed, the William inside of him begged to be let free, to run toward her pleading pathetically to be noticed, to bask in every moment of her icked-out attention. The obvious answer to keeping other girls’ pity and disgust at bay had been the hardest—the addict’s moment of clarity: Cut off those girls cold turkey. Because a single indulgence, and youre William. The past is past to everyone but ghosts. Except now, hear the whispered call, feel that ache: Girl, you wish. A temporary chain-link fence rises behind the bench on which they sit in the park, casting fish-scale shadows on Reese’s shoulders and face. “Okay, Daddy-O, so you got some woman pregnant,” Reese says. “I’m still waiting for what that has to do with me.” The “Daddy-O” indicates half his work of explanation is done: The insult would have no bite if she thought he had come to terms with fatherhood. “Come on, Reese. Just be civil.” “Daddy,” Reese says. “You might as well get used to hearing it.” “Not if you’d listen instead of taking shots at me!” Reese pulls back. “What do I have to do with it? So far as I can tell, ’m not taking shots at you. ’'m defending myself from whatever you called me here to rub in my face.” “You have everything to do with it!” Ames’s voice rises into an exasperated near-shout so that a couple of passing college girls, maybe a little tipsy, stare at him, then make wide eyes at each other and glance at Reese like: You poor woman. This is how Reese has always fought with him. Preemptive defense. Ames puts his hands on his lap, with the palms facing up. A few months ago, he’d seen an interview with the actress Winona Ryder in which she said that when she wanted to appear unthreatening in her films, she often sat with her hands folded palms up on her lap, because this communicated openness and vulnerability, a gesture that Ryder had credited for her reputation as delicate. Ames has been trying out the gesture ever since, in an attempt to defuse arguments, especially ones where maleness comes across as threatening. Carefully and quietly, he says, “Tm trying to tell you that I want you to consider being a mother to this baby.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Nice try, Yoga Lady with the perfect body! No way is Reese going to tell these cis women the stuff that troubles her—lack of womb, desperately sad need for sex with fuckboy men, a sourceless despair that arrives punctually at five o’clock every evening, a weird spot on her inner thigh. Instead she writes lack of energy, a compromise in between that she hoped would make her appear flawed and relatable enough to ingratiate herself with Katrina’s friends, while revealing a genuine vulnerability. She peeks down at the woman sitting cross- legged on the rug at her feet. The woman has written binge eating, no sex drive. The frank confession shocks Reese. A flash of shame for how judgmental she’d been toward these women. When the other women read their ailments out loud, many of them also share problems that are nakedly vulnerable: depression, back pain, postpartum depression, insatiable appetite, mood swings and irritability, insomnia. Who were these women, who trusted that there wouldn’t be some silently judgmental bitch among the others? And what did it mean that Reese was that judgmental bitch? Only Katrina appears to noticeably hedge her vulnerability—stress at work, hormonal—and Reese wonders if it was her own caginess that led Katrina to withhold vulnerability in her presence. Reese hasn’t been in such a ritualized gathering of straight cis women in a long time. Since when did they have the self-assuredness to trust each other? Reese listens, trying to understand what is happening. Ultimately she decides that they don’t seem to be sharing their problems out of an excess of self-confidence or trust. Mostly they sound weary, near resigned, fanning just an ember of genuine openness to the hope that an essential oil could solve their issues. Which is to Reese, the most incredible aspect of all. How bad must things be to place faith in highly scented snake oil? Reese would expect a similarly motley list of misery in a room full of trans women, but at least trans women— with all the necessary contact to medicalized bullshit that transition entails—would be cagey about sharing their ailments, whether to a doctor of Western medicine or to a huckster of essential oils, no matter how fit either looked in her ripped jeans and tank top. Due to their apparently cushy, enviable, and alien lives, these women haven’t developed a morbid and highly skeptical subculture to temper their credulity. She would like to introduce some doubtful lesbians into the next essential oil spiel. About halfway through Sexy-Smart’s sales pitch, a generically handsome and tanned man arrives—the kind of white guy who might have a bit role as a doctor in some television drama.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  What was Amy’s thing? Pop-punk and baseball? That’s what people thought. Amy had pierced her ears over the winter, but her coach made her take the studs out. When her mom saw the little studs, she called Amy a dork. She didn’t think her mom was using the word “dork” correctly, and that probably the word her mom was looking for but didn’t know was “poseur.” Still, getting called a dork hurt her feelings, because she understood what her mom meant, and if even her mom could see it, the other kids absolutely could too. “Do you have condoms?” Amy asked. She had never worn a condom. “No, I’m on the pill. One of the few things my parents and I agree on.” Amy nodded, and Delia smiled and cocked her head to the side. “Take off your boxers.” Amy did as she was told. She was not hard. She didn’t know if her penis was good. Besides size, she didn’t even know all the other ways it might not be good. Probably it wasn’t, and she fought the urge to cover herself with a sheet. “Come here,” Delia said, and Amy cuddled up close to her. Delia’s hand touched her. Amy was desperate to get hard. She began to concoct a fantasy. Something that fit with what was happening, but wasn't actually what was happening. She was Delia’s pet. Her owner wanted her to get hard, and she didn’t want to disappoint. It would happen whether she wanted it to or not. Her owner thought she was pretty. She looked at one of the bras laying on the floor and told herself, That’s my bra, she took it off of me. “Oh, you like that,” Delia said. Amy was hard. “Yeah,” Amy whispered, afraid that the intrusion of reality might disperse the fantasy that let her get hard. “You ready?” Delia asked. “Yeah.” Delia threw off the sheets, lay on her back. She guided Amy in. The first thoughts Amy had were of warmth. “Slow at first,” Delia said. She had a half smile. It was too much. Too close to being laughed at. Amy shut her eyes and focused. But she could feel the sexual charge leaving her. She pulled the fantasy back up: She wasn’t really fucking Delia. Delia was fucking her. She belonged to Delia. She was Delia’s girl. “Yeah,” Amy said, and Delia made a noise like an affirmation. What did she wish Delia would say to her? Maybe something like youre mine. “You're mine,” she whispered to Delia. Delia’s eyes widened in surprise and she pulled Amy closer. Delia liked it, Amy realized. Delia liked what Amy liked.

• 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)

  “No,” she said. “You don’t get it. It means you begin to entertain creeping suspicions that after all you’ve been through together, years of learning to be adults together, the man who you married might only be with you because he fetishizes Asians—even though I have felt not quite Asian enough my whole life. He couldn’t even fetishize me accurately.” “What’s that kind of chaser called?” Ames asked. “That kind of what?” He pulled the covers around him, suddenly cold. He had the sense of having wandered out blindly in a winter storm to discover that he’d stumbled onto a thinly frozen lake. He had only ever encountered chasers in one context. “Like, uh, a tranny chaser. What’s an Asian chaser called?” She appraised him with a strange look. “A rice chaser,” she said flatly. “In Vermont, growing up, the kids who saw my dad with my mom —their favorite way to bully me was by saying my dad had yellow fever.” Ames saw suddenly that she thought he was asking about himself. That she thought he wanted to know the slur for what having slept with her made him. He stifled an overwhelming urge to protest in horror. To tell her: God, no, I would never think having sex with a certain person could mark me as something—I just really do get what it’s like to be fetishized. I get what it’s like to have someone think that his desire for me degrades or lowers him. But even at that moment, such an admission seemed too risky. What if coming out as a former transsexual meant never getting into bed with her again? What if it meant the end of their professional relationship? No, better to wait for the opportune moment. Now and again, Ames scrutinized Katrina, and imagined what it would be like to tell her. How she would react. When he was alone, he told himself that maybe, maybe, she’d even be into it. That maybe the deepest reason for her divorce from Danny had been sexual. That while not exactly queer—she wasn’t totally into the married straight life either. For real, she was a freak in bed. Their sex was way wilder than he had imagined in his crush stage. Their first hookup had been drunken, and involved pretty typical hetero dynamics. Their second hookup—which occurred dead sober, midday a week later after she took a day to “work from home” and told him, as her employee, to do the same—had been decidedly bent. In her kitchen, she had opened her fridge and leaned into it. The shape of her from behind, along with the thick sexual tension, sunk him to his knees and he half kissed, half nuzzled her jean-clad ass. She looked back from the fridge, with an expression of near concern, at the same time she reached behind her and grabbed a handful of his hair.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  He was on when I got here twenty minutes ago. He must have skipped Smart Boy Math. Why, are you scared Jake’s gonna drive down here and kick your ass for letting her go?” “Whatever,” I said, thinking, This is precisely why we shouldn’t have told him. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and lit a cigarette. Takumi came in not long after. “What’s up?” he said. “Nothing. I just want to know what happened to her.” “Like you really want to know the truth? Or like you want to find out that she fought with him and was on her way to break up with him and was going to come back here and fall into your arms and you were going to make hot, sweet love and have genius babies who memorized last words and poetry?” “If you’re pissed at me, just say so.” “I’m not pissed at you for letting her go. But I’m tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her,” Takumi answered. I stood up, lifted the toilet seat, and flushed my unfinished cigarette. I stared at him for a moment, and then said, “I kissed her that night, and I’ve got a monopoly on that.” “What?” he stammered. “I kissed her.” His mouth opened as if to speak, but he said nothing. We stared at each other for a while, and I felt ashamed of myself for what amounted to bragging, and finally I said, “I—look, you know how she was. She wanted to do something, and she did it. I was probably just the guy who happened to be there.” “Yeah. Well, I was never that guy,” he said. “I—well, Pudge, God knows I can’t blame you.” “Don’t tell Lara.” He was nodding as we heard the three quick knocks on the front door that meant the Eagle, and I thought, Shit, caught twice in a week, and Takumi pointed into the shower, and so we jumped in together and pulled the curtain shut, the too-low showerhead spitting water onto us from rib cage down. Forced to stand closer together than seemed entirely necessary, we stayed there, silent, the sputtering shower slowly soaking our T-shirts and jeans for a few long minutes, while we waited for the steam to lift the smoke into the vents. But the Eagle never knocked on the bathroom door, and eventually Takumi turned off the shower. I opened the bathroom door a crack and peeked out to see the Colonel sitting on the foam couch, his feet propped up on the COFFEE TABLE , finishing Takumi’s NASCAR race. I opened the door and Takumi and I walked out, fully clothed and dripping wet. “Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” the Colonel said nonchalantly. “What the hell?” I asked. “I knocked like the Eagle to scare you.” He smiled.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  cannot be. An Econ would not be susceptible to priming, WYSIATI, narrow framing, the inside view, or preference reversals, which Humans cannot consistently avoid. The definition of rationality as coherence is impossibly restrictive; it demands adherence to rules of logic that a finite mind is not able to implement. Reasonable people cannot be rational by that definition, but they should not be branded as irrational for that reason. Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasonable argument. I often cringe when my work with Amos is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model. Although Humans are not irrational, they often need help to make more accurate judgments and better decisions, and in some cases policies and institutions can provide that help. These claims may seem innocuous, but they are in fact quite controversial. As interpreted by the important Chicago school of economics, faith in human rationality is closely linked to an ideology in which it is unnecessary and even immoral to protect people against their choices. Rational people should be free, and they should be responsible for taking care of themselves. Milton Friedman, the leading figure in that school, expressed this view in the title of one of his popular books: Free to Choose. The assumption that agents are rational provides the intellectual foundation for the libertarian approach to public policy: do not interfere with the individual’s right to choose, unless the choices harm others. Libertarian policies are further bolstered by admiration for the efficiency of markets in allocating goods to the people who are willing to pay the most for them. A famous example of the Chicago approach is titled A Theory of Rational Addiction; it explains how a rational agent with a strong preference for intense and immediate gratification may make the rational decision to accept future addiction as a consequence. I once heard Gary Becker, one of the authors of that article, who is also a Nobel laureate of the Chicago school, argue in a lighter vein, but not entirely as a joke, that we should consider the possibility of explaining the so-called obesity epidemic by people’s belief that a cure for diabetes will soon become available. He was making a valuable point: when we observe people acting in ways that seem odd, we should first examine the possibility that they have a good reason to do what they do. Psychological interpretations should only be invoked when the reasons become implausible—which Becker’s explanation of obesity probably is. In a nation of Econs, government should keep out of the way, allowing the Econs to act as they choose, so long as they do not harm others. If a motorcycle

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  And so Ames gives the particulars, the way you might introduce yourself to a new acquaintance: your work, where you're from and if youre a New Yorker, your neighborhood, and maybe, if your sangfroid is really pumping, your age. For Katrina, Ames reports these variables as: his boss at the ad agency; she’s from Vermont but has lived in New York since college; she’s got a two-bedroom in Brooklyn, and she’s thirty-nine; she had a miscarriage before. But having repeated these facts, Ames feels like he hasn’t said anything important, anything that captures Katrina at all, or why he thinks she’d share raising a baby. A dog bounds toward Reese, interrupting his explanation. Reese gives the dog a pet and the dog’s owner apologizes. In refocusing on what he had been about to say, Ames attempts to dispel from his mind the slivers of moments, opinions, and impressions particular to his intimacy with Katrina that obscure the bold plain structures of her, in order to describe her as a dispassionate stranger might see her. “When I first met Katrina,” he says, “she seemed kind of basic to me. Maybe it was because she was my boss and so that was part of her professional distance. But as I got to know her, I came to see her basicness as a disguise, or a defense mechanism. But not something conniving or intentional. Its more like she’s layered all this weirdness together in her life experiences, from growing up in Vermont, then leaving her husband, and just a fundamentally idiosyncratic personality; and then, as though she’s shy about it and doesn’t want anyone to notice, she’ll cover that with being a foodie and doing Pilates or whatever. But underneath, she’s wild. Not at all conventional. She might go for this.” “What’s she look like? I want to picture her,” Reese says. He considers pulling out his phone to show her a photo, but he doesn’t really want to get into a moment where Reese is comparing herself or evaluating the looks of another woman. “She’s average height, kind of delicate. Really cute toes.” “You perv! That doesn’t help me see her. Is she a blonde? You always liked blondes.” “No, straight brown hair. She’s mixed-race, actually. Her mom is Chinese and her dad is Jewish. But she got her dad’s last name, Petrajelik, and freckles all across her nose, so she passes as white with white people. In Vermont, she grew up with only white kids around, so she says it was a shock when she went to Amherst and other Asian kids immediately recognized her as Asian.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Patrick grunted and lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator. “Roll down the window,” he told her. “The fan in this car is broken and I can’t see through these windows.” When she cracked the window, the sound of tires hissing over the wet pushed in, and droplets sprayed the left side of her face, and with it came the pungent odor of the wet forest, a rich mixture of damp dirt, decay, moss, and sprouting leaves. Amy liked the way rain amplified the mustiest and most comforting smells of the forest, making the forest much more foresty, just how a dog when wet smells so much more doggy. The smell of the forest appeared to act as aromatherapy for Patrick too. His posture released. He wiped at the window, then leaned back and drove at a reasonably slow speed. “That was awful,” he said into the sound of rain and wind roaring past the cracked window. “Those women coming in.” “No, it was okay,” Amy assured Patrick. “I mean, why should we be embarrassed? It’s our store.” The possessive just slipped in. She wasn't sure how the store became theirs, but the mother had said it too. Your store. The store for people like them. “Tt wasn’t okay,” Patrick said. Amy nodded. He was right. It wasn’t okay. She didn’t feel at all okay about it. She would do almost anything to never again be looked at the way those women had looked at her. It wasn’t that they had even been rude. They had simply seen her. Seen a true thing in her that she had spent her life making sure never to show to anyone. Once, when she had been about ten or eleven, her mother had gone on a business trip and come home with gifts for Amy: a pair of fluorescent-blue Rollerblades with neon-yellow ratchet straps, and a t-shirt on which the words FLORIDA KEYs and a picture of a tropical fish had been embroidered in thick thread, rather than screen- printed. The thread on the inside of the shirt was very scratchy. After about a week of wearing the shirt, Amy had a very good idea. She went to the front porch, where her mother was planting geraniums in the window boxes. “T love this shirt, it’s my favorite,” she announced to her mother, “but it is scratchy. It rubs. Can I borrow a bra?” Her mother continued potting the flowers without turning around. “I’m sorry, can you do what?” Amy’s voice wavered, less confident on her second time asking. She pulled her shirt away from her nipples to illustrate the problem. “The embroidery is scratchy.” She had worn her mother’s bras in secret, when she was home alone. Now she had an excuse to have a bra of her own. Some of the girls in school were getting them, but she knew she wouldn’t without some careful maneuvers on her part.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Her school had a tradition, Student Switch Day, where once a year, each student drew another student’s name from a hat, then dressed like that student for a day and attended that other student’s classes on their schedule. Amy got Mary Anne’s name. Mary Anne was full-figured and gorgeous and probably would have been popular had she not loved horses so much. Mary Anne had been in child pageants. A popular rumor about Mary Anne, one that may or may not have had factual basis but nonetheless had staying power: When Mary Anne hit puberty very young, nine or ten, her mother made her eat toilet paper to starve the fat going to her hips and chest. The fiber in the toilet paper would curb Mary Anne’s appetite, her mother said. Nevertheless, by fourteen Mary Anne had the biggest breasts at school. Other girls told Amy to ask Mary Anne to lend her a dress and do her makeup. And Amy longed to ask Mary Anne for that, longed for it so badly it was terrifying. The night she drew Mary Anne’s name, Amy stared at herself in a mirror, trying to picture what Mary Anne’s eye shadow and mascara could do for her face. But she never asked Mary Anne for anything. Instead she found a triple-F bra at Goodwill, stuffed it, and did nothing else to impersonate Mary Anne. Amy arrived to school on Switch Day with the bra stuffed under Amy’s otherwise everyday clothes. Mary Anne’s face fell the second she saw Amy; it was a look of pure hurt, crestfallen with disappointment in what Amy found to imitate in her existence and body. “Why are you so mean?” she asked Amy. And suddenly Amy saw what she had done: a pair of tits. She was saying that’s all Mary Anne was. And at that moment, when she might have apologized, might have found the courage to ask Mary Anne for help, to tell her she wanted to understand her better, that she wanted to be like her if only for a day, Jon McNelly came by, pointed at Amy’s stuffed bra and said, “Nailed it!” Mary Anne managed a smile with her mouth, but her eyes went wet, and she nodded and said, “I hope you have a good day being me.” Amy considered taking off the bra, abating her cruelty for Mary Anne’s sake. But she didn’t. She wore it all day. She liked wearing a bra. She liked people commenting on her boobs. That night, she wore the bra again when she jerked off to the fantasy of Mary Anne forcing her to dress up in her clothes, then tossed it in a dumpster on her way to school the next morning. If that afternoon at Delia’s had been Amy’s first time having sex with a woman, Patrick had been her first time having sex with a guy. Although whether Patrick was, in fact, a man, Amy later came to doubt.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  At one point, Patrick stood on one leg, working a pair of pantyhose up the calf of his other, while Jen stood in front of him with a French maid outfit at the ready, when the bell above the door chimed. In walked a pleasant-looking woman, plump with loosely curled blond hair, and her teenage daughter, who looked healthy, like maybe she was on the soccer team, an impression that Amy had because she was wearing casual athletic gear. The two of them were mid-laugh—perhaps lured into the store by the super-fun-sounding name—Glamour Boutique. What mother and daughter wouldn’t have fun with a little glamour on an outing together? Alarmed comprehension dawned on the mother’s face as she took in the store. But by then it was too late. Patrick, Amy, and Jen had all seen her come in. Turning in horror would let everyone know what she thought of them. No, she would show her daughter how to play it cool. Amy’s joy in having found a feminine space meant especially for her dimmed, as the light fades when a heavy cloud crosses the sun, then winked out completely. The sense of safety that she had spun over the store vanished. Everything on the racks shrugged off their previous disguises to reveal themselves as tawdry and desperate. Inwardly, she disavowed the space. This store did not reflect her. She did not truly belong there. Patrick, still only half in his pantyhose, blanched to a beige color and made a fast-walk beeline for the curtains that hid the changing area, stepping on and dragging the half-donned hosiery as he did. Jen winced, still holding the French maid dress. This must have happened to her many times, the panic among customers she’d just coaxed into comfort when civilians wandered into the store. After a moment, the mother decided on a course of action: She would browse. After all, it was a store and she was allowed to browse, wasn’t she? In an attempt to look natural, the mother pawed through the closest rack and bravely held up a top complex with straps and spandex. “Oh, look at this. It’s interesting. What do you think?” Despite her bravado, a cringe squeaked into her voice. “Yes,” said her daughter, panicked, without even glancing at it. Her gaze raked the walls, hung thickly with gaffs, breastplates, wigs. Amy saw the store through her eyes: a Silence of the Lambs-—level display of disembodied female body parts. Worst of all, the red-faced men, one now hiding, the other creepily fingering panties and who knew what else. The specialty panties—with wider gusset for women of all anatomies!—that Amy held in her hand and had been examining with curiosity when the bell above the door announced the women’s entrance, burned radioactively. She longed to drop

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  On the bus home after school the day of the baseball awards, Delia traced the stitching on Amy’s jeans with her finger and said, “My parents aren’t home.” Which was how Amy’s own parents ended up sitting together at a baseball awards ceremony, increasingly embarrassed, as the coach repeatedly called out the name of their always-baffling teenager to come receive a plaque while other parents stared at them questioningly. At that moment, the teenager in question was eating pussy. Something she’d never before done. She’d fingered a girl once, a girl who, to show she wasn’t a slut, unbuttoned only the top button of her button-fly jeans, leaving Amy little room to actually maneuver or learn anything in the space between denim and body. When Amy went in for a kiss and got an ear, the girl began to giggle, and Amy was relieved to withdraw her hand; she’d been terrified and ashamed that she was doing everything wrong. That her inept and cramped fumbling would make obvious to the girl what Amy already knew: that there was something wrong with her masculinity. That she was flawed in deep and terrible ways as a boy, and worse, that anything to do with socially expected sex would cause these flaws to reveal themselves. The only consolation came from the young adult authors she’d read, the books for girls that she’d taken from her sister and read in secret, where the common theme involved the anxious awfulness of teenage sex. In light of these stories—except for the blustery eagerness to partake in sex that all the boys were supposed to have, an eagerness she barely registered in herself except as a social rite that was dangerous not to perform—she could almost convince herself she was normal. Why had she gone home with Delia? She knew her parents would be furious that she had skipped the awards. They had been so grateful that she’d finally given them something proper—a son who was good at baseball—of which to be proud as parents. And then she’d stolen that from them. And why? So she could tentatively go down on Delia. She had her face close to Delia’s vagina, her body tense, like a cat attempting to sniff a candle’s flame, ready to pull away at any sign of pain from this apparition. And yet, still, why? Did she want Delia’s vagina? Did she want to taste it? That was what she was supposed to want. How many boys had she heard describe the taste of pussy? She opened her eyes and looked at it. She didn’t know what was what or where. Stupid. How stupid she was. And above her, Delia waited, with her own eyes shut. Then Delia craned her neck forward and peered at Amy. “How are you doing down there?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Please,” Ames says. He is glad she’s spoken. His curiosity had grown to the point of morbidity, but he was afraid of Reese’s temper, and was being careful to remain solicitous of Katrina, who’d surprised him, after Thalia called, by telling him that she would drive him to the hospital. “Tm sorry about the letter,” Reese says, more to Katrina than Ames. “I was really angry. And I’m sorry that Garrett is your friend’s husband. I should have put it together sooner.” “You were partly right,” Katrina says. “I wanted the good parts of queerness without the hard parts. At the first hard part, I had a panic. It was homophobic. I’m embarrassed.” She leaves the rest of the letter unaddressed. Then, after a long period of silence, Katrina adds, “I didn’t tell Diana.” Reese nods. Then after another stretch of time without speaking, she adds, “I won’t see him again. You don’t have to worry. The messages he left me are not the kind of thing you say if you ever expect to see someone again. He’s scared of me now that I know his friends and could ruin his marriage, and that’s not sexy for him. He can’t treat me however he wants anymore.” “She'll probably leave him eventually,” Katrina says. “This is the season for it. For a while everyone was getting married. Then everyone was having children. Now it’s divorces. Diana always likes to do what’s in vogue in the moment.” Reese laughs, but without force. She asks Ames to turn up the heat in the car. In her beachwear she’s grown chilly. But not in a meaningful Wim Hof sort of way. Ames obliges, and directs a stream of air to the back seat. At the next stoplight, Reese says, “I didn’t go into the water for attention.” “T never thought that,” Ames assures her. “Yeah, but that’s what the doctor at the hospital clearly thought. He didn’t say it right out, but I could tell from his questions. Like, ‘how cold was the water really?’ And when I guessed the temperature was in the low fifties, he said that that water was never cold enough to kill me, only give me hypothermia. Instead, he suggested that I was making a scene in front of people at the beach for attention. Not even a cry for help. Just a cry for attention. It is literally the most ungenerous, most embarrassing conclusion that he could have come to. It makes me guilty that you came, because now it seems like I did it for attention, to get you here. And because I’m glad you came, it must really seem like that was my plan all along.” “So why did you go into the water?” Ames asks, trying to pitch his voice softly to make the question more tender than its blunt construction.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Patrick grunted and lifted his foot slightly from the accelerator. “Roll down the window,” he told her. “The fan in this car is broken and I can’t see through these windows.” When she cracked the window, the sound of tires hissing over the wet pushed in, and droplets sprayed the left side of her face, and with it came the pungent odor of the wet forest, a rich mixture of damp dirt, decay, moss, and sprouting leaves. Amy liked the way rain amplified the mustiest and most comforting smells of the forest, making the forest much more foresty, just how a dog when wet smells so much more doggy. The smell of the forest appeared to act as aromatherapy for Patrick too. His posture released. He wiped at the window, then leaned back and drove at a reasonably slow speed. “That was awful,” he said into the sound of rain and wind roaring past the cracked window. “Those women coming in.” “No, it was okay,” Amy assured Patrick. “I mean, why should we be embarrassed? It’s our store.” The possessive just slipped in. She wasn't sure how the store became theirs, but the mother had said it too. Your store. The store for people like them. “Tt wasn’t okay,” Patrick said. Amy nodded. He was right. It wasn’t okay. She didn’t feel at all okay about it. She would do almost anything to never again be looked at the way those women had looked at her. It wasn’t that they had even been rude. They had simply seen her. Seen a true thing in her that she had spent her life making sure never to show to anyone. Once, when she had been about ten or eleven, her mother had gone on a business trip and come home with gifts for Amy: a pair of fluorescent-blue Rollerblades with neon-yellow ratchet straps, and a t-shirt on which the words FLORIDA KEYs and a picture of a tropical fish had been embroidered in thick thread, rather than screen- printed. The thread on the inside of the shirt was very scratchy. After about a week of wearing the shirt, Amy had a very good idea. She went to the front porch, where her mother was planting geraniums in the window boxes. “T love this shirt, it’s my favorite,” she announced to her mother, “but it is scratchy. It rubs. Can I borrow a bra?” Her mother continued potting the flowers without turning around. “I’m sorry, can you do what?” Amy’s voice wavered, less confident on her second time asking. She pulled her shirt away from her nipples to illustrate the problem. “The embroidery is scratchy.” She had worn her mother’s bras in secret, when she was home alone. Now she had an excuse to have a bra of her own. Some of the girls in school were getting them, but she knew she wouldn’t without some careful maneuvers on her part.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Nice try, Yoga Lady with the perfect body! No way is Reese going to tell these cis women the stuff that troubles her—lack of womb, desperately sad need for sex with fuckboy men, a sourceless despair that arrives punctually at five o’clock every evening, a weird spot on her inner thigh. Instead she writes lack of energy, a compromise in between that she hoped would make her appear flawed and relatable enough to ingratiate herself with Katrina’s friends, while revealing a genuine vulnerability. She peeks down at the woman sitting cross- legged on the rug at her feet. The woman has written binge eating, no sex drive. The frank confession shocks Reese. A flash of shame for how judgmental she’d been toward these women. When the other women read their ailments out loud, many of them also share problems that are nakedly vulnerable: depression, back pain, postpartum depression, insatiable appetite, mood swings and irritability, insomnia. Who were these women, who trusted that there wouldn’t be some silently judgmental bitch among the others? And what did it mean that Reese was that judgmental bitch? Only Katrina appears to noticeably hedge her vulnerability—stress at work, hormonal—and Reese wonders if it was her own caginess that led Katrina to withhold vulnerability in her presence. Reese hasn’t been in such a ritualized gathering of straight cis women in a long time. Since when did they have the self-assuredness to trust each other? Reese listens, trying to understand what is happening. Ultimately she decides that they don’t seem to be sharing their problems out of an excess of self-confidence or trust. Mostly they sound weary, near resigned, fanning just an ember of genuine openness to the hope that an essential oil could solve their issues. Which is to Reese, the most incredible aspect of all. How bad must things be to place faith in highly scented snake oil? Reese would expect a similarly motley list of misery in a room full of trans women, but at least trans women— with all the necessary contact to medicalized bullshit that transition entails—would be cagey about sharing their ailments, whether to a doctor of Western medicine or to a huckster of essential oils, no matter how fit either looked in her ripped jeans and tank top. Due to their apparently cushy, enviable, and alien lives, these women haven’t developed a morbid and highly skeptical subculture to temper their credulity. She would like to introduce some doubtful lesbians into the next essential oil spiel. About halfway through Sexy-Smart’s sales pitch, a generically handsome and tanned man arrives—the kind of white guy who might have a bit role as a doctor in some television drama.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Tonight, one of the twinks asks about sharing chores in a relationship—the twink has found that in his relationship with a masc dom, he is doing much more household work, so can he employ feminist arguments for a more equitable share in the domestic labor? To which Thalia responds that no, he is a little bitch, and in the midst of a shortage of actual true-to-god dom tops, he had best start scrubbing if he wants to keep his man happy. However, Thalia adds, the whole premise of the question ought to be rejected, because there is no such thing as a pure masc top—everyone will eventually want something in their butt, because that is the nature of having a butt— when the moment comes that things get equitable in bed, so should they be in domestic labor. The twinks giggle happily, but Thalia rebukes them, and demands they give her quarters for her own laundry, because her parents have cut off her money as a consequence for yelling at them on the phone. For emphasis, she shakes her tip bucket from the pedestal/deejay booth from which she reigns, then segues into one of her favorite themes: her parents. Her parents are good, long-suffering people, she tells the assembled twinks, and these good, long-suffering people still support her at age twenty-nine, because she is a spoiled brat who has never had a job—a weekly show at a queer bar doesn’t count—which is an embarrassment to her. And what does she do to repay her parents for their generosity? She spits the words into the mic so acerbically that it pops with her consonants, then pauses a second before answering her own question in a mock outraged oration. She changed her gender! Just to stymie and confuse them! And now she yells at them on the phone and hangs up on them if they misgender her! That’s what they get for supporting a child with artistic tendencies! But what else did they expect? Did they think they could just let their child wear capri pants and that there would be no consequences? “And do you know the worst part?” Thalia demands of her twinks. “The worst part is that most parents get to one day have a moment of comeuppance, when their kids become parents, and then those kids reassess their own childhood with a parent’s eyes and regretfully admit that Dad knew best all along. And Mommy was so generous! So kind! And also beautiful and young!” “But not my parents,” Thalia concludes with a cackle. “Because with all the hormones, now I’m sterile! I stole that comeuppance from them!”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The exception to this was the men she slept with back when she was a cross-dresser and called herself a sissy. She did not care about those men, was not attracted to men, and so didn’t care what their impressions were—they were simply another feminizing accessory, albeit a difficult and unwieldy accessory. But when deployed right, they were even better than a corset for making a girl feel dainty. Their job was to provide lots of masculine contrast to her girliness, a task they set about diligently, because most of them were straight- identified, married, and therefore invested in getting to enjoy her body while avoiding any thought that allowed them to ponder why the thing that made their cocks hard was a hard cock on a girl. The whole object of these encounters—and the men acted reciprocally— involved ignoring the man’s needs in order to instead focus on herself and what kind of person she must be that a man was using her for his own sexual enjoyment, even as she ignored the particular man and his particular need. Amy lost her virginity when she was fifteen to a seventeen-year-old cougar named Delia. Delia was punk, with piecey bleached and waxed hair and threadbare vintage shirts that advertised intentionally uncool brands—Pepsi! Taste of a New Generation—an overall gestalt that read to the adults in their lives as “troubled.” Delia had been in and out of hospitals with an eating disorder, had tried both coke and heroin, and the rumor at school was that she had done anal after a rave with a twenty-eight-year-old. Whether or not that was true, she always made out with other girls at parties. Three weeks after Delia and Amy slept together for their one time, Delia’s parents mortgaged their house to send her to one of those military detox schools in the middle of the desert, where semi-professional guards locked kids in their rooms or left them in the middle of the wilderness. Amy never saw Delia again after that. The afternoon she lost her virginity, she was not supposed to be with Delia. Instead, she was supposed to be going home, putting on a decent collared shirt, and returning to school for an awards ceremony for her baseball team. Her team had come in sixteenth in the state, a feat that sounded solidly unimpressive, but because her school was a fraction of the size of the giant baseball breeding farms in the rural areas of Minnesota, had become something of a miracle story. Amy, in her own miracle, ended up stealing the most bases in the league that season, a feat she accomplished by leaning into pitches, getting hit, and taking a free base, then stealing her way around like a twitchy squirrel. Bruises brindled her left arm and torso from March until June.