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 Detransition, Baby (2021)

  angry man who postures and shouts, “Bring it, bro,” a possessive brute who would look asinine and ridiculous in heels and a blouse. She selected a pair of beat-up jeans and a hoodie—with a broken nose front and center, no one at work would question her outfits. Over the next few days, many of the feminine grooming habits she enjoyed revealed themselves as silly. Why bother with makeup when your nose lists to the left? She felt much more comfortable dressing in a loose androgynous manner, all boots and dark neutrals, letting the nose look tough on her behalf, so that no one asked any questions, so that no opinions ventured into her vicinity. She had, of course, long come to understand that masculinity dulled her, that it dissociated her from herself. But honestly, that’s all she wanted at that point. A pocket of space to separate herself from the bright emotions of shame and fear, a veil between herself and the curious eyes on the subway and at work, a sheath over the sharp edge of furious betrayal that lacerated her whenever she met Reese’s gaze; and likewise, a sheath over that awful longing for Reese as she had so innocently seen her before Stanley. A week before Reese’s birthday, Amy stopped taking her anti-androgens. She and Reese took their last shot together on the night of Reese’s birthday, before they went out for sushi, and that brief return to the vividness of estrogenated emotions so scalded that the next week, Amy faked taking her shot. She never took one again. Two months later, she got a new job at an advertising agency, and confessed to Reese that she’d actually applied under a male name. When they fought about it, she shouted, in that same deep bellow that had emerged in front of Stanley, “Didn’t you want a man? Isn’t that what you're into? That’s what I remember!” Only this time, she didn’t feel ridiculous. She felt righteous in her anger, replenished and intoxicated by it. She punched a cabinet, and it yielded to her fist, the wood veneer door caving in with a satisfying, terrifying splinter. Reese left her shortly after. CHAPTER NINE Ten weeks after conception Ra HAS ALREADY been to Katrina’s apartment three times. She even slept over one night, in the second bedroom—the baby’s future room. She awoke in the morning to poached eggs with Katrina, in a borrowed silk robe, while trying her best to ignore the confusing intimacy of a half sleepover/half post-unconsummated-hookup vibe. Yet despite having now spent hours in the apartment, only tonight does Reese finally place the sense of déja vu that comes over her when she looks through the bank of windowpanes that make up one wall of the living room. They overlook a narrow brick balcony, which is itself hung in a deadened air shaft.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  For this reason, falling in love occurs more frequently among young people, since they are profoundly uncertain, unsure of their worth, and often ashamed of themselves. The same thing applies to people of other ages when they lose something in their lives— when their youth ends or when they start to grow old. —FRANCESCO ALBERONI, FALLING IN LOVE, TRANSLATED BY LAWRENCE VENUTI 205 206 • The Art of Seduction novel was about to be published), he needed to make more money. Caught off guard by this sudden announcement, and overwhelmed with happiness, Jessie agreed to everything, and they became lovers. Soon, however, the familiar pattern repeated: criticisms, breakups, an- nouncements that he was engaged to another girl. This only deepened his hold on her. It was not until 1912 that she finally decided never to see him again, disturbed by his portrayal of her in the autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers. But Lawrence remained a lifelong obsession for her. In 1913, a young English woman named Ivy Low, who had read Lawrence's novels, began to correspond with him, her letters gushing with admiration. By now Lawrence was married, to a German woman, the Baroness Frieda von Richthofen. To Low's surprise, though, he invited her to visit him and his wife in Italy. She knew he was probably something of a Don Juan, but was eager to meet him, and accepted his invitation. Lawrence was not what she had expected: his voice was high-pitched, his eyes were piercing, and there was something vaguely feminine about him. Soon they were taking walks together, with Lawrence confiding in Low. She felt that they were becoming friends, which delighted her. Then sud- denly, just before she was to leave, he launched into a series of criticisms of her—she was so unspontaneous, so predictable, less human being than ro- bot. Devastated by this unexpected attack, she nevertheless had to agree— what he had said was true. What could he have seen in her in the first place? Who was she anyway? Low left Italy feeling empty—but then Lawrence continued to write to her, as if nothing had happened. She soon realized that she had fallen hopelessly in love with him, despite everything he had said to her. Or was it not despite what he had said, but because of it? In 1914, the writer John Middleton-Murry received a letter from Lawrence, a good friend of his. In the letter, out of nowhere, Lawrence criticized Middleton-Murry for being passionless and not gallant enough with his wife, the novelist Katherine Mansfield. Middleton-Murry later wrote, "I had never felt for a man before what his letter made me feel for him. It was a new thing, a unique thing, in my experience; and it was to re- main unique." He felt that beneath Lawrence's criticisms lay some weird kind of affection. Whenever he saw Lawrence from then on, he felt a strange physical attraction that he could not explain. Interpretation.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian ideas, which may become reassuring in the context of the terror of death. Other experiments have confirmed Freudian insights about the role of symbols and metaphors in unconscious associations. For example, consider the ambiguous word fragments W_ _ H and S_ _ P. People who were recently asked to think of an action of which they are ashamed are more likely to complete those fragments as WASH and SOAP and less likely to see WISH and SOUP. Furthermore, merely thinking about stabbing a coworker in the back leaves people more inclined to buy soap, disinfectant, or detergent than batteries, juice, or candy bars. Feeling that one’s soul is stained appears to trigger a desire to cleanse one’s body, an impulse that has been dubbed the “Lady Macbeth effect.” The cleansing is highly specific to the body parts involved in a sin. Participants in an experiment were induced to “lie” to an imaginary person, either on the phone or in e-mail. In a subsequent test of the desirability of various products, people who had lied on the phone preferred mouthwash over soap, and those who had lied in e-mail preferred soap to mouthwash. When I describe priming studies to audiences, the reaction is often disbelief. This is not a surprise: System 2 believes that it is in charge and that it knows the reasons for its choices. Questions are probably cropping up in your mind as well: How is it possible for such trivial manipulations of the context to have such large effects? Do these experiments demonstrate that we are completely at the mercy of whatever primes the environment provides at any moment? Of course not. The effects of the primes are robust but not necessarily large. Among a hundred voters, only a few whose initial preferences were uncertain will vote differently about a school issue if their precinct is located in a school rather than in a church —but a few percent could tip an election. The idea you should focus on, however, is that disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true. More important, you must accept that they are true about you. If you had been exposed to a screen saver of floating dollar bills, you too would likely have picked up fewer pencils to help a clumsy stranger. You do not believe that these results apply to you because they correspond to nothing in your subjective experience. But your subjective experience consists largely of the story that your System 2 tells itself about what is going on. Priming phenomena arise in System 1, and you have no conscious access to them. I conclude with a perfect demonstration of a priming effect, which was conducted in an office kitchen at a British university. For many years members of that office had paid for the tea or coffee to which they helped themselves

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The stories were dangerous. But she knew, from the self-evident existence of the site, that all over the world eyes were eating up the text and penises were spurting at the climaxes of the stories of when the cross-dressers themselves first took dick, or when a former-boy- now-buxom-shemale was humiliated and raped, or when a strong man was feminized against his will. The femininity forced upon the males was the ultimate in degradation and humiliation—and what did that say about her opinion of femininity? Amy hated how much she loved the stories, the orgasms that came as she read them at all hours of the day, sneaking in a story in the twenty minutes between classes, or whole nights spent in a jerk-off marathon, story after story, until reality began to fade. She knew that anyone she knew who discovered it wouldn’t understand. They’d just think she hated femininity and equated it with humiliation. She’d be shunned, and deservedly so. For years—until she transitioned, until she met women into rape-play, into servitude and infantilization, women who had eroticized and sexually defanged every unspeakable shame and violation life had thrown at their womanhood—she couldn't actually think of a single argument to counter the undeniable orgasm- certified evidence of her unpardonable misogyny. Patrick waited for a response. But Amy couldn’t seem to find any words. Neither a confirmation nor a denial. “Tl take that as a yes,” Patrick said. “Yeah,” Amy admitted. “I know Fictionmania.” “Which stories do you like?” Patrick asked. Then without waiting for an answer, he continued, “I like the extreme body modifications, when they get given huge boobs. I don’t like the stories where they transform through magic. I like the surgery, though. Because it really exists, so I know it might happen to me one day.” Patrick’s voice took on a note of brightness that Amy hadn’t yet heard. The possibility of anyone choosing to foot the cost of surgically implanting Patrick with enormous breasts struck Amy as no more or less likely than an elf witch casting a spell to give Patrick boobs. But still, Amy knew what he meant. She didn’t like the magic either. She liked the stories that were as close to her life as possible. A shy college boy. Domineering older women. What she really liked was when the women made the trans girls have sex with men. When the older women watched and laughed. But there was no way she’d admit that to Patrick.

• 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)

  In addition to Reese’s generalized one-size-fits-all-trans-women opinions on plastic surgery, she had her own particular self-serving reason to insist that Amy get a nose job. The day would come that Reese could enroll on Amy’s insurance. With a precedent set by insurance already having covered one employee’s gender-affirming surgery, the path for a second widened. Reese would need it widened too, because she wanted more than just a nose job; she wanted her long-awaited vagina and, yes, her brow reconstructed as well. Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn’t mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a_ political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body. She would happily cheer on any other woman who flaunted her orbital ridge in the name of challenging cis-normative beauty standards, but she would have the first available misogynist dick of a surgeon burr her skull Barbie smooth. As long as she tortured herself with a traitorously retrograde sense of what made a woman beautiful in her heart of hearts, she would assuage herself with cis-passibility in her face of faces. Reese sat down on the bed beside a sleeping Amy. She gazed at that pretty face, with its lips parted slightly, innocent and unaggrieved. The faint odor of lacquer that Amy seemed to emit, that Reese had come to find comforting, clung to the sheets by her side. Amy stirred. It had been a month since they had done anything but give each other hand jobs. Reese leaned over to kiss Amy’s cheek, while slowly trailing a hand across Amy’s hip. Amy opened her eyes. “Hey,” Reese said. “I can’t sleep. I want some.” Amy gave a wan smile. “I’m sleepy, I don’t think I have the energy. I can get you off, though.” Reese shook her head, and took back her hand. “Tm sorry,” Amy said, but she was already falling back asleep. Reese wished Amy understood how the offer of an unreciprocated hand job made her feel like a creep, like she was some kind of pawing teenage boy. In the daylight hours, the thought of broaching the subject of their abortive sex caused tendrils of aphasia to constrict around her throat. Remember Amy and Reese in their first weeks together? When Reese would come home late and Amy would slip down off the bed to crawl panting after her into the shower like some kind of kinky sleepwalker? Where did that go? Reese wanted a dining set, but also maybe she wanted to have bruising sex all over that dining set.

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

  But the basic fact is that the law of divorce, from Constantine to Justin- ian, was primarily about property; the changed moral climate, driven by Christianity, contributed, but secondarily.  Until Justinian. As with same- sex eros, so with marriage and divorce, the legislative reforms of Justinian marked a breakthrough and reveal what a legal program truly driven by Christian norms could look like. For the fi rst time, in his reign, Christian ideas determined sexual policy irrespective of ancient, intricate patterns of relationship between state and society. “We command that everyone live as chastely as possible,” the Christian legislator commanded. “Because marriage is such an honorable matter that, by the mercy of God, it has brought immortality to the human race and sustains our continual renewal so far as is possible by giving an eternal nature through the procreation of children under the auspices of matrimony, it is proper that we devote our care to it.” Th e rules instituted by Justinian matched his rhetoric. In AD 542, Justinian revisited the law of divorce, sharply limiting the class of off enses for which divorce could be sought. Th e only cause of divorce that received wider scope was, revealingly, the hus- band’s sexual malfeasance. If he kept a woman “in the very house where he lives with his wife,” or even if he was guilty of “frequenting a woman in his city in another house,” the wife had cause to dissolve the union. Although this rule fell far short of sexual equality, it was the closest any ancient law- giver went. But the radicalism of Justinian’s reform lay elsewhere. He pro- ceeded to abolish divorce by mutual consent. Th e immemorial capacity of couples to part ways by agreement was abrogated by the Christian state. Th is reform marked a considerable advance of the state’s tutelage over the mar- riage bond, and it can be explained only by a fi rm will to suppress divorce itself rather than to mediate the circulation of property through society and across generations. Justinian’s law, in short, reveals a moral activism. It is again the middle of the sixth century that marks the terminus of a fateful passage toward the alignment of Christian morality and public power.   FROM SHAME TO SIN THE TRIUMPH AND DISINTEGRATION OF THE FREE WILL Th e sack of Rome by a Visigothic army in AD 410 was a profound moral and mental shock; in its aftermath, confusion and recrimination quickly followed. Among the most visceral horrors of the experience was that the immemorial adjunct of war, sexual violence against women, was visited on the eternal city. Th e rape of wives and virgin daughters was a bitter tragedy; the rape of nuns was, for many, unambiguous proof that the Christian God was uninterested in Roman fortunes.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Over the next few years, Amy sharpened this mode of dissociative sex, mostly in order to fulfill a social obligation that she felt from both girls and boys. Girls, who wanted to see Amy respond to their beauty, their flirting, in the correct ways. Boys, who wanted to brag about conquests, or more commonly, bond over them. In Amy’s late teens, sharing attempted conquests had become the primary and most thrilling activity among boys. The way they got to know and trust each other. The girls were incidental. More than that, they were vaguely disdained in subtle manners by the boys—in college, a girl Amy talked to about her high school years made a strong case for calling this disdain misogyny—because girls frustratingly didn’t always conform to the boys’ plans. Still, enough of them did for Amy and her friends. And so the important questions were: How many girls would be at the party? Did you see that short girl? Did you get with her? She had nice titties, didn’t she? Did you give it to her? No? She left you blue-balled? Sucks, bro. Bitches be cray. The more Amy went along with this, the more she grew to fear sex. To fear the comedown afterward, when she couldn’t dissociate any longer, and had to confront her obvious brutishness. She came to resent the tight cliques of girls who saw how other, dangerous, and terribly male she was. They might have said she was cute, noticed her abs or her pretty-boy face. But she was not to be allowed in among the girls. Amy was disgusted at the way she craved approval through behavior that made her feel like a cosmic joke: an asshole with no self-esteem who wanted to be one of the girls so badly there weren’t even the words for it, so she got close in the crudest ways instead. At times the resentment spiked into self-loathing—whole weeks when she either couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror or didn’t want to do anything else. When she watched the girls she knew, a burning jealousy would stab through her. Little things. How they plucked their eyebrows. How they put their hands on each other’s arms. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous. So it was easy for her to call girls bitches. To dismiss their concerns, which cruelly could never apply to her. To charm the boys with jokes about the ridiculousness of girls, of femininity in general.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames hadn’t expected Katrina to question him on his own trans knowledge. He’d forgotten how much the culture had changed even in the few years since he detransitioned. Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox on the covers of magazines, straight people talking about Drag Race the way they used to talk about Survivor. And of course, trans motherhood had always been Reese’s particular obsession. But he doesn’t yet want to start talking about Reese to Katrina. “Yeah,” he admits. “On RuPaul, those are brown girls talking. Same for trans women of color. They had mother relationships.” Katrina laughs. “Wait, I ignored your self-pity about how it sucked to be a woman, but now you're saying you feel sorry for yourself ’cause you were a white girl?” On matters of race, Ames feigned a casualness at odds with his actual tendencies to avoid the topic. Of Katrina’s two races, he subconsciously found himself often appealing to the white one, and at times over the course of their relationship, she had recalled for him that he was not, in fact, speaking to a white person just like himself. In those moments, as now, a wash of defensiveness lapped at the edge of his emotions. Usually the elephant story really buttered people up. When he speaks again it is without any plan. “Yeah. I have the bad habit of saying trans women when I mean white trans women, which is how you can tell I was a white trans woman; it’s endemic among white trans women. I’m not saying it’s harder for white girls at all. ’m saying that the white girls I knew—the generation that I transitioned into, the milieu that basically invented screaming online—were a tribe of motherless women without survival or social skills, prone to destruction, suicide, and romanticizing their own abjection. I’m saying that no matter whatever sloganistic squishy ideology I might have pretended to adhere to, deep down I was ashamed to be one of them, and ashamed of the thwarted life I led. Even the white women who survived and managed to mature didn’t want to deal with mothering all that, and immature white girls were too angry and self- righteous to accept mothering anyway. God knows that all the brown trans women I knew were careful to call themselves trans women of color and not just trans women—and I don’t blame them for emphasizing the distinction. I suppose that the black and brown mothers out there might take offense to my including their daughters among the orphaned elephants.” Katrina shrugs and addresses the understatement with another understatement, “Yeah, probably.” But beyond that she only asks, “So what did you do?” “T stopped being an elephant. I became something else.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese wanted to end their games, to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness. After all, Every woman adores a Fascist. Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them—the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman. The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm. A girl could be twice the size of the man —that little ow reminds him that he is a man, she is a woman. Once, Reese’s friend Catherine was walking home drunk with her boyfriend when he tried to flirt with her by pushing her into a bush. She bounced back out of that bush like an enraged wolverine: spitting, scratching, fighting. For the rest of her relationship with him, he would say, “Careful, Catherine is aggressive,” and Catherine would wince, understanding her womanhood was on the line every time. A good woman, she heard in the subtext, would have stayed in the bush and cried. If only some man would push Reese into a bush, she’d know what to do. Anyone who had shared a hotel room wall with Reese and Stanley could attest that Stanley had laid hands on Reese before. He took his belt to her ass on their second date and told her he wouldn’t stop until she cried—tears fell after six strokes, she sobbed after eight, and twenty minutes later she shuddered her way to a tectonic orgasm. A few years back, Reese might have thought their play extremely racy, titillating, and far beyond the sexual ken of most women—she thought of the desire for violence in sex as some kind of resulting damage from being trans. Then, at around age twenty-three, she watched the Catherine Deneuve film, Belle de Jour, and recognized her own sexuality in the upper-crust Belle’s secret desire to be mistreated and abused as a whore. Which meant that the strain of masochism that ran through her sexuality was only as racy as a fifty- year-old film that shared a marquee with romances starring Doris Day. Everything about Reese’s sexuality, she realized, was banal. Sex at the edge of abuse is banal. And when it comes to gender, consent makes it all pretend, which left consensual violence lacking real value in Reese’s tally of gender affirmation.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Prior to this PR stint, Reese dreaded the moment at every social event—especially the ones with Amy’s sensible and fully employed friends—when her turn came to say what she did for a living. Waitress, she’d say, and she’d watch the calculations whir behind the eyes of whomever she was speaking to, see them tally up a waitress’s salary, what it cost to live in a two-bedroom by Prospect Park, and what Amy likely made; then, with the equation completed, they’d slot Reese into a position dependent on Amy’s largesse. The girlfriend- mooch-child. Even if her interlocutor treated her politely afterward, engagingly even, Reese nonetheless begrudged the moment that pulled back the curtain to reveal her reliance on Amy. With a job in PR, however, Reese began to anticipate the what-do- you-do interrogation with confidence—it didn’t matter that she only worked part-time or that her role occupied a rung in the firm’s hierarchy just above glorified intern or that she actually made less money than she had waitressing—proximity to fashion and the occasional celebrity anecdote put her on equal footing with Amy. Stories like Reese’s were why people came to New York. Reese entertained the bizarre sense of having hoodwinked people into seeing her as a full-fledged adult, maybe even a successful one. It wasn’t the same as seeing herself that way, but she enjoyed borrowing their eyes. After all, isn’t that the Gatsby glory of the New York dream: telling the grandest story about yourself that you could hope to have others believe in the distant hope that you'll believe it yourself? The idea of herself as an adult made other long-delayed considerations possible. She and Amy had been together nearly five years. Surely that counted as enough time for them to be a family now. The future beckoned. Or rather, maybe the future had arrived to the present. In her twenties, she watched straight people progress in their careers or get married or discuss employer-matched 401(k)s. She had once confided to her fashion designer friend, a young gay man, of her sinking feeling that she had fallen behind. In response he bought her a book on the concept of queer temporality. The book was deadly boring. In lieu of the book, Reese read as many blog posts as she could find on the subject. Her friend was right: The notion of queer temporality was comforting. Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won’t correspond to the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so it is meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual’s lifeline as though

• 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)

  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)

  Father. Spoken from the mother. She lets go of his hand, and picks up her manila folder, then examines the papers herself now, avoiding eye contact as she goes on. “This is definitely not how I’d expect you to act if you truly believed it wasn’t possible. Happiness, fear, joy, anger, whatever. But your level of surprise is like if we got dinner reservations somewhere you thought you couldn’t get on short notice. Can you explain to me what is happening in your head?” Ames inhales. Waits. Exhales now. She’s waiting. Expecting him to say something, do something. That’s who he is now, he reminds himself, someone who makes decisions, who doesn’t let life just act upon him. Wasn’t that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles, that delay is a form of hiding from reality. That you just figure out what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don’t know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want. So do something. And maybe he couldn’t have picked a better spot than his office to tell her—he’d always thought it would happen over dinner at some place where they’d be stuck discussing it. But in view of the office kitchenette? At work? This is the one place where she couldn’t freak out, where she’d have to at least feign chillness. His silence draws out. Finally, Katrina makes a gesture with her hand, flipping up her palm, like, What? Just say it. So he does. “I was told that I was sterile by the doctor who gave me estrogen. I injected estrogen and took testosterone-blockers for about six years, when I lived as a transsexual woman. He told me I’d be permanently sterile after six months. So, like, given my past as a woman, fatherhood is a lot for me to handle emotionally.” “Tm sorry, you lived as a what?” Expression drains from her face. “T was a transsexual woman. That’s why I thought I was sterile.” He reaches out to her shoulder, to steady her. He’s about to ask if he can tell her everything. A quick jerk of her arm out from under his touch, and her file of vasectomy reports and the pregnancy test flies at his face. Instinct bobs him a quick step to the side. The manila folder glances against his shoulder, opens, and printouts scatter. He wants to soothe her, to try to touch her again—but she nimbly hops to her feet. “I can’t believe this. I feel, god, I feel—” She can’t seem to speak, and instead brings her hands to her collarbone as if to push out the words that have gotten caught. “Deceived! You deceived me. Why would you do this to me?”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  His cheeks puffed a couple of times, and then he blew.“That man is not your uncle, and everybody knows it!” He yelled loud enough for everyone on the block to hear, and hopped on his bike.I ran after him. “You better pedal fast, weeny arms.”The veil of normalcy under which my family and I thought we were hidden had been ripped away. None of my friends had questioned the identity of the man I called Uncle David, not to my face. I put my dog, Prissy, in the basket of my bicycle and rode up and down the streets for hours, soothed by the motion.That night at dinner Mama asked me what Bill had yelled. I told her it was nothing, that he hated losing to a girl, but I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew better. A month or so later, she announced we were moving to the country. I blamed Bill Dodge, but larger forces orchestrated the move. I wept when I told my teacher. She tried to ease my misery by pulling down the state map in our classroom and tapping her long pointer at the exact center of the map.“What do you see?”I sniffled. “A red heart.”“That’s where you’re moving, to the heart of Texas.”I looked closer. Printed next to the heart was the word “Waco,” the future scene of the Branch Davidian siege.Waco was the cover story. It was the place I was told to say we were headed. This was part of Mama’s and Brother Terrell’s strategy to throw off the Communists or the Antichrist or perhaps Betty Ann (though no one said that), should they come looking for us. We actually landed six miles outside of Marlin, a tiny community thirty miles east of Waco. Still, it made me feel better to think of us living close to a city that looked like a valentine on the map. Any romantic imaginings vanished when I laid eyes on our new home, a secondhand trailer squatting a few feet off Highway 6 on a hard patch of ground that would have been completely barren except for two spindly trees that produced bushels of inedible pears and no shade. An old white house with peeling paint and rotting wood leaned to the left of the trailer. Long stretches of mud-clotted land with outcrops of mesquite trees, ramshackle barns, and outbuildings separated us from the patchwork houses of our neighbors. Barbed wire delineated property lines. Everyone lived far away from everyone else.Mama tried to soften the blow. “You’ll have your own bedroom! This is ours. We own it.” When Gary and I remained unconvinced she added, “Look on the bright side, you can have more dogs.”My mother made good on her promise of more dogs, but they began dying soon after we moved in. First to go was Prissy, kicked to death by cows. Then we found Suzy, Prissy’s replacement, dead on the highway.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “T don’t know.” Katrina pauses a moment to find the correct words. “I suppose I thought there were rules. I Googled what to do if you think that you have outed a trans person. I read a bunch of feminism blogs on it. There are strict rules. Apparently number one is don’t out trans people in the first place.” “Yes,” Iris says, “that is a good rule.” “Right, so I thought ’d come over and confess what I did, and you”—she indicates Reese with a little thrust of her chin—“would tell me what to do.” The word “confess” startles Reese. “I’m not a priest, Katrina! ’'m not going to tell you to recite, like, ten Hail Transgender Marys and absolve your sins.” This is what happens when the only trans voices out there are the loudest, shrillest trans girls constantly publishing dogmatic Trans 101 hot takes to rebuke the larger cis public. You get people thinking that in order to avoid offending trans people, you must locate and follow a secret guidebook filled with arcane rites, instead of just thinking about them decently, as you would anything else. You get one lady assembling an impromptu transgender focus group to assess how she should take the kind of basic responsibility that she clearly knows how to take in the non-trans-populated situations of her life, while another lady is going around gender- neutralizing bathrooms because she doesn’t dare ask Ames what he prefers in a direct, respectful manner. “Right, obviously not,” Katrina says. “I was being a little facetious. So in all earnestness: Does detransition count the same as transition in terms of the respect it has to be given?” This is a topic of fierce debate among the three trans women. Iris maintains a “yes, absolutely.” Thalia agrees, but adds that everyone deludes themselves, including cis people, and the only way to force anyone to actively consider their gender is to equally disrespect all genders. In the abstract, Reese agrees on this principle of equality, but the fact is that Reese respects many genders, but doesn’t respect Ames’s current gender at all. In her heart, she doesn’t think Ames is a man. She just can’t believe Amy’s detransition is what it seems. How many times had she seen the way that Amy, even before detransition, used masculinity as a defensive cocoon? She’d learned to gauge it early in their relationship—Reese could tell how insecure Amy felt in any situation by how many traces of her days as a college bro she pulled to the surface. In those moments, the vitality of Amy’s presence receded, and Reese knew that a certain level of numbing male armor had come over her.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Some of the questions made no sense—but others betrayed by their wording a clumsy trend in the conclusions they would formulate. If you had spatial skills and active sexuality you were clearly a fetishistic man, and if you empathized with people and didn’t care about sex, you might be that rarest of things: a true transsexual, a woman trapped in a man’s body. But Amy wasn’t that. The test showed her to be the autogynephilic creep she already assumed she would be. Jen was obviously a true transsexual. Amy had never met a trans girl in person, and her fascination with Jen bordered on painful. Look at her. She looks like a girl. She sounds like a girl. More than that, Amy thought, she wanted something from Jen. Something like sexual attraction, but shaded differently. Something closer to the thrill she felt when a celebrity passed by. Of a nameless wanting in the direction of that celebrity. The abstract beckoning that celebrities exude. The gravitational pull of their fame that tugged at Amy so that she felt anxious to be close, to be seen, and to be valued. To feel those celebrity eyes move without friction across the smooth surface of a clamoring fandom, then suddenly catch upon her, stop dead, and return her gaze. That moment of mutual recognition, that’s the only way to have your existence stamped valid, to transcend the anonymity of mere fan, of inconsequential gawker. Jen’s was a noncelebrity celebrity that Amy could feel. A pull that maybe only she would feel. Amy kept turning to see where in the store Jen was. Shockingly, Jen seemed to be having a good time. Moreover, she kept saying things that countered what the COGIATI test said a true transsexual should feel. When Patrick asked about French maid outfits, Jen clucked in approval. “Back wall,” she said, pointing. “But also, we have some sexy ones in boxes in the back that we never put out because they take up so much space when they’re unfolded. It’s not the cheap Halloween style, they are the sensual kind with petticoats that actually fluff.” In mock sotto voce she admitted, “I got one myself. I have a thing for that flouncy feel. My boyfriend always wants me to tidy up in it for him. But no way. I just wear it around my apartment for special, uh, personal time.” She giggled at the admission and Amy thought that Jen might spontaneously combust from her own incredible and suddenly revealed transcendent hotness, an attractiveness that had only a tangential relationship to her appearance.

• 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)

  In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart. And yeah, liberal feminists—especially the trans-hating variety—would have a field day with her. She supposed that they would accuse her of misogyny, of being a secret man, a Trojan horse in slutty lingerie who sought to recapitulate under the guise of womanhood all the abusive tropes that they, in the second wave, had sought to put in the past. But you know what? She didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her? The New York Times regularly published op-eds by famous feminists who pointedly ruled her out as a woman. Let them. She’d be over here, getting knocked around, each blow a minor illustration of her place in a world that did its gendering work no matter what you called it. So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be a lady. For years, Reese had a rule: Don’t date other trans women. It was a hypocritical rule. Had anyone else ever ruled her as ineligible for dating on account of her gender, she’d have cried transphobia. But in her own secret heart, the idea of dating another trans woman repelled her. She understood but did not want to admit that the repulsion spoke to her own self-disgust. Instead, she explained it to herself by saying that she was hetero in the etymological sense: attracted to difference. It didn’t really matter what the difference was —although usually it was maleness to her femaleness, because men knew how to make her feel feminine, and feeling feminine turned her on; but she supposed she’d be open to other different types who could do the same. However, never someone just like her. No one should be that vulnerable to another. With another trans woman, she imagined she knew the exact locations of all the seams; she could unstitch them with a simple snip, and vice versa. But god, Reese couldn’t take her eyes off the baby trans sitting there with Felicity. She stared in a way that risked costing her all her veteran trans aloof cool. She stared like the most blatant of repressed chasers. She couldn’t help herself. It was like the concept of space warped so that her every line of sight could only lead straight to this girl’s face. Her only reprieve from overt lechery was her history. None of the dykes at that monthly trans lady picnic would suspect her of creepiness; a handful of them had tried it with her, and although she hadn’t explicitly articulated her rule, the other women had intuited its general outline and word got around.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Then, her mother turned, trowel in hand, and gave Amy a look of irritation. “Just wear another t-shirt under it.” “That will be too hot. A bra would be better.” Her mother set the trowel down with a clunk and gave Amy a strange look. She saw that her son wasn’t being stupid. It was the precursor to the look Amy had gotten from the women in the Glamour Boutique. “That is not something a son asks his mother,” her mother said carefully. And in her tone, beneath the impassive way she said it, Amy could feel something harder, a pit of revulsion, pulling tightly in on itself. Her mother had never said anything like that before. She was not the type to categorize behavior into what was and wasn’t done. Amy saw, in a flash, that her mother knew the request had nothing to do with scratched nipples and, worse, it had disturbed her. What seemed like a foolproof ruse had revealed everything. “Oh!” Amy said. “I forgot! I have that white tank top. I can wear that underneath, and that won’t be too hot.” She smacked her palm against her forehead. “Of course.” Her mother’s strange gaze didn’t change. Amy walked away with her mother’s eyes still on her, and then she avoided her mother for as long as she could. At least until dinner that night. Now, almost a decade later, Amy finally had her own bra. Not one pilfered from some girl’s underwear drawer and stuffed into a backpack at a party. She looked at the bag of her purchases sitting at her feet in Patrick’s car. She should have felt happy, but she didn’t. Instead, she felt as if she had given in to an urge that ought to be turned away from. As when people shut their eyes in horror at the possibility of an apparition. Don’t even acknowledge it—it'll fuck up everything you know about the world. In addition to the bra and breast forms, she had bought a pink dress—empire waist, as Jen had recommended—and a pair of white faux-leather stripper heels, six inches tall and made from cheap plastic, with a thin ankle strap and a two-inch platform. She’d also bought two pairs of panties. All this had been very expensive, nearly three hundred dollars. After those women left, the shopping never got quite as fun as it had been before. Jen seemed more aware of how skittish Amy and Patrick were, and her suggestions were more circumspect. Amy supposed that had those women not come in, she would have bought much more during that brief euphoric mood that made her forget for a short time that women’s clothing could be dangerous. She wished that she had at least bought a wig. She’d tried