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.

Page 88 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Middlesex (2002)

  handshake. Dr.Craigsqueezedhard,Winterslessso. Theywere care- fulabout notseemingtooeager.Likemenmeeting afashion model, they trainedtheir eyes awayfrommybodyand pretended tobein- terested in measaperson.Lucesaid,"Callie'sbeen hereattheClinic forjust about a weeknow." "Howdoyou likeNewYork?"askedDr. Craig. "I'vehardlyseen it." Thedoctorsgavemesightseeingsuggestions. Theatmospherewas light,friendly.Luce put hishandonthesmall ofmy back. Menhavean annoyingwayofdoingthat.Theytouchyourbackasthoughthere's a handlethere,anddirectyouwheretheywant youtogo.Ordieyplace theirhandontop ofyour head, paternally. Menandtheirhands. You've got towatchthemeveryminute.Luce'shandwas nowpro- claiming:Heresheis.Mystarattraction.TheterriblethingwasthatI respondedtoit;IlikedthefeelofLuce'shandonmyback.Ilikedthe attention. Here wereallthese people who wantedtomeetme. PrettysoonLuce'shandwasescorting me downthehallinto the examinationroom.Iknewthe drill. Behindthe screen Iundressed whilethedoctorswaited.Thegreenpapergownwasfoldedonthe chair. "Thefamilycomesfromwhere,Peter?" "Turkey.Originally." "I'monlyacquaintedwiththePapuaNewGuineastudy,"said Craig. "Among the Sambia,right?" asked Winters. "Yes, that'sright,"Luce answered. "There's ahighincidenceofthe mutationthereaswell.TheSambiaareinteresting from a sexological pointofview, too. Theypracticeritualizedhomosexuality.Sambia malesconsidercontact with femaleshighlypolluting.So they've or- ganizedsocialstructurestolimitexposureas muchaspossible. The men andboyssleepon one sideofthevillage,the womenandgirls onthe otherside.The mengo intothewomen's longhouseonly to procreate.Inandout.Infact,the Sambiawordfor Vagina'translates literally as 'thatthing which istrulynogood.' " Softchuckling camefrom the otiier side ofthe screen. Icameout,feeling awkward. I wastallerthan everyoneelseinthe room,thoughI weighedmuchless.Thefloor feltcoldagainstmy barefeetasIcrossedto theexamtable and jumped up. 420 Ilay back. Withouthaving to be told, Iliftedmylegsandfitmy heels inthe gynecologicalstirrups. Theroomhad gone ominously silent. The threedoctorscame forward,staringdown.Theirheads formeda trinity aboveme. Lucepulled thecurtainacrossthetable. They bent overme, studyingmyparts, whileLuceled a guided tour.I didn'tknowwhatmostof thewordsmeant butafterthethird orfourth timeIcouldrecitethelist byheart."Muscular habitus.. . no gynecomastia...hypospadias ...urogenitalsinus ... blind vagi- nal pouch.. ." Thesewere myclaimtofame. Ididn'tfeelfamous, however.Infact, behind thecurtain,Ino longer felt asifIwerein the room. "How oldisshe?"Dr.Winters asked. "Fourteen,"Luceanswered. "She'llbefifteenin January." "So yourpositionisthatchromosomal statushas beencompletely overridden by rearing?" "Ithinkthat'sprettyclear." AsIlaythere,lettingLuce, in rubber gloves,dowhathehad to do,Igot a senseofthings.Lucewantedtoimpressthemenwith the importanceofhiswork.Heneededfundingtokeep the clinicrun- ning.Thesurgeryheperformedontranssexualswasn't a sellingpoint overattheMarchofDimes.Togettheminterestedyouhadtopull at the heartstrings.Youhadtoputafaceonsuffering.Lucewastry- ingto dothatwithme.Iwasperfect,sopolite,so midwestern. No unseemliness attacheditselftome, nohint of cross-dresserbars or adsinthe backoflouche magazines. Dr. Craigwasn'tconvinced."Fascinatingcase,Peter.Noquestion. Butmy peoplewill wantto knowtheapplications." "It's averyrarecondition,"Luceadmitted."Exceedingly rare.But in termsofresearch, its importancecan't be overstated.Fortherea- sons Ioutiined inmy office."Luceremainedvagueformy benefit, butstill persuasiveenoughfortheirs.Hehadn'tgotten wherehewas without certain lobbyistgifts. MeanwhileIwasthereandnotthere, cringing atLuce's touch, sproutinggoosebumps,and worryingthat I hadn't washedproperly. I remember this,too. Alongnarrowroomona differentfloorof the hospital. Ariser set upatoneend beforea butterfly light.The photographer puttingfilminhiscamera. "Okay, I'm ready,"he said. 421 Idropped myrobe.Almostused toit now, Iclimbed up onthe riser beforethe measuring chart. "Hold yourarmsout a little." "Like this?" "That'sgood.Idon'twantashadow." He didn'ttellmetosmile.The textbookpublishers wouldmake sure tocovermyface.Theblackbox: a fig leafinreverse,concealing identitywhile leaving shameexposed. EverynightMiltoncalledusinourroom.Tessie putonabright voice forhim.Milton triedtosoundhappywhenIgoton theline. ButItooktheopportunitytowhineandcomplain. "I'msickofthishotel.Whencanwegohome?" "Soonasyou'rebetter,"Miltonsaid. Whenit was timeforsleep, wedrew the windowcurtainsand turnedoffthelights. "Good night, honey. Seeyouinthemorning." "Night." ButIcouldn'tsleep.I kept thinkingaboutthatword:"better." Whatdid myfathermean?Whatweretheygoingtodotome?Street soundsmadeit up totheroom,curiouslydistinct,echoingoffthe stonebuildingopposite.Ilistenedtothepolicesirens,theangry horns.Mypillow was thin. It smelled likea smoker.Acrossthestrip ofcarpet mymotherwasalreadyasleep.Beforemyconception,she hadagreed tomyfather'soudandishplanto determinemy sex. She haddone this so thatshewouldn't be alone,sothatshewouldhavea girlfriend in thehouse.AndIhadbeenthat friend.Ihadalwaysbeen closetomy mother. Our temperamentswerealike.Weliked nothing betterthan tositon parkbenchesand watchthefacesgoby.Now the faceIwas watchingwasTessie'sintheotherbed. Itlookedwhite, blank, as ifher coldcream hadremoved notonlyher makeup but her personality. Tessie's eyesweremoving, though;underthe lidsthey skatedbackandforth. Calliecouldn'timagine thethingsTessie was seeinginher dreamsbackthen.ButIcan.Tessie wasdreaminga fam- ilydream. AversionofthenightmaresDesdemona hadafter listening toFard'ssermons.Dreams of thegerms of infants bubbling y dividing. Of hideouscreaturesgrowing up from pale foam. Tessie didn'tallow herself to thinkaboutsuchthingsduringthe day, so theycameto herat 422 night. Wasit herfault?Should shehaveresisted Miltonwhenhe tried to bend natureto hiswill? Was there reallyaGod afterall,and didHe punish peopleonEarth? TheseOldWorldsuperstitionshad been banished frommymother's consciousmind,buttheystilloper- ated in herdreams. From the otherbedIwatchedtheplayofthese dark forcesonmy mother's sleepingface. 423

• From Middlesex (2002)

  show bearerwhereto changeandwhere togetoff,asthisperson doesnot speak English.Bearerisbound to:GrandTrunk Sta.De- troit." Theysat nexttoeachotherinunreserved seats.Leftyfaced the window, lookingoutwithexcitement. Desdemonastared down at her silkwormbox,hercheekscrimson withtheshame andfuryshe'd been sufferingforthelastthirty-six hours. "That's thelast timeanyonecutsmyhair," shesaid. "Youlookfine,"saidLefty,notlooking. "You looklike znAmeri- kcmidha? "Idon'twant to looklike anAmerikanidha? Intheconcessions area at EllisIsland, Leftyhadcajoled Desde- monatostepinto atent run bytheYWCA.She'd gonein,shawled andkerchiefed, andhademergedfifteen minuteslaterin adrop- waisted dressand a floppy hatshapedlike achamberpot.Rage flamedbeneathhernew facepowder.As partofthemakeover,the YWCAladies hadcutoffDesdemona's immigrantbraids. Obsessively,inthe wayapersonworries a rip deepinapocket, shenowreached upunderthefloppy hattofeelherdenudedscalp for thethirtiethorfortieth time."That'sthelasthaircut," shesaid again.(She wastruetothisvow.From thatdayon,Desdemonagrew herhair outlikeLady Godiva,keepingitunderanetinanenormous massand washingiteveryFriday; and onlyafterLefty dieddidshe evercut it,givingit toSophieSassoon,whosolditfortwohundred andfiftydollars toawigmakerwhomadefiveseparatewigsout ofit, oneof which,sheclaimed, waslaterboughtby BettyFord, post White Houseandrehab, sothatwegottoseeit ontelevision once, during Richard Nixon'sfuneral, my grandmother'shair,sittingon theex-President's wife's head.) But therewas anotherreasonformy grandmother'sunhappiness. Sheopened thesilkworm boxinherlap.Inside werehertwo braids, stilltied with theribbons of mourning, but otherwisethe boxwas empty.Aftercarrying hersilkworm eggs alltheway fromBithynios, Desdemonahad been forcedtodump themoutat Ellis Island.Silk- wormeggs appeared onalistofparasites. Leftyremained glued tothewindow. Alltheway fromHoboken he'd gazed outatthe marveloussights: electric tramspullingpink faces up Albany'shills; factoriesglowinglike volcanoesintheBuffalo night. Once, waking asthetrainpulledthrougha cityat dawn, Lefty 82 had mistaken a pillaredbankfortheParthenon, andthoughthewas in Athens again. Now the Detroit River spedpastandthecity loomed.Lefty stared outat the motorcarsparkedlikegiantbeetles at thecurbsides. Smokestacks rose everywhere,cannonsbombardingtheatmosphere. There werered brickstacksandtallsilverones,stacksinregimental rows orall alonepuffingmeditativelyaway,aforestofsmokestacks thatdimmed thesunlightandthen,allofasudden,blockedit out completely. Everything went black:they'denteredthetrainstation. GrandTrunkStation, now a ruin of spectacular dimensions, was then diecity'sattempttoone-upNewYork.Itsbasewasamammoth marbleneoclassicalmuseum, complete with Corinthian pillarsand carvedentablature. Fromthis templerosea thirteen-story office building.Lefty,who'dbeenobservingallthewaysGreecehadbeen handed down to America,arrivednow atwherethetransmission stopped. In other words: the future. Hesteppedofftomeetit.Des- demona,having no alternative,followed. But just imagineitinthose days! GrandTrunk!Telephones ina hundredshippingofficesringing away, still arelativelynewsound; andmerchandisebeing senteast and west;passengers arriving and departing,havingcoffee in thePalmCourtorgettingtheirshoes shined, thewingtipsofbanking,thecaptoesofparts supply, the saddle shoesofrum-running.GrandTrunk,withitsvaultedceilings ofGuastavino tilework,itschandeliers,itsfloorsofWelshquarry stone.There wasasix-chairbarbershop,wherecivicleaderswere mummified in hottowels;and bathtubsforrent; andelevatorbanks lit bytranslucent egg-shaped marblelamps. Leaving Desdemonabehind a pillar,Leftysearchedthroughthe mob inthe stationforthecousinwhowasmeetingtheir train. Sourmelina Zizmo, nee Papadiamandopoulos, wasmy grandparents' cousin and hence myfirst cousintwiceremoved.Iknewherasa colorful, older woman. Sourmelina of theprecariouscigaretteash. Sourmelina of theindigo bathwater.SourmelinaoftheThcosophical Society brunches. She woresatinglovesuptothe elbowandmoth- ered along line of smellydachshundswithtearstainedeyes.Foot- stools populated herhouse, allowingtheshort-leggedcreatures access to sofas and chaiselongues. In 1922, however,Sourmelina was only twenty-eight.Pickingheroutofthis crowd atGrandTrunk 83 isas difficultfor meas identifyingguestsin myparents'wedding al- bum, where allthe faceswearthedisguise of youth.Leftyhadadif- ferent problem.Hepaced theconcourse, looking forthecousinhe'd grownup with,a sharp-nosedgirlwith the grinningmouthof a comedy mask.Sun slanted infromtheskylights above.Hesquinted, examiningthepassingwomen,untilfinally shecalledout to him, "Overhere,cousin.Don't you recognize me?I'm the irresistible one." "Lina,isthatyou?" "I'mnotinthevillageanymore." Inthefive years sinceleavingTurkey,Sourmelina hadmanagedto erasejustabouteverythingidentifiablyGreek abouther,fromher hair,which shedyedtoa rich chestnutandnow worebobbedand marcelled,toheraccent,whichhadmigrated farenoughwestto soundvaguely"European," to her readingmaterial(Collier's,Har- per's) , toherfavoritefoods(lobsterthermidor, peanutbutter),andfi- nally to herclothes. Sheworeashortgreenflapperdressfringed at thehemline.Hershoeswereamatchinggreensatinwithsequined toes anddelicateanklestraps. Ablackfeatherboawaswrapped aroundhershoulders,andonherhead wasa clochehatthatdangled onyxpendantsoverherpluckedeyebrows. Forthe nextfewsecondsshegaveLeftythefullbenefitofher sleek,Americanpose, but it was stillLinainsidethere(underthe cloche)and soonherGreekenthusiasmbubbledout. Shespreadher armswide. "Kissmehello,cousin." They embraced. Linapressedarouged cheek against hisneck. Thenshepulled backtoexaminehimand, dissolvingintolaughter, cuppedher handoverhisnose."It'sstillyou.I'd knowthisnose any- where."Her laughcompleteditsfollow- through,ashershoulders went upand down,andthenshewasonto the next thing."So, whereisshe?Where isthisnewbrideof yours?Your telegram didn't evengiveaname. What?Is she hiding?" "She's...in thebathroom." "She must beabeauty. Yougot marriedfast enough. Which did youdo first,introduce yourselforpropose?" "IthinkIproposed." "Whatdoesshe looklike?" "She looks...like you." 84

• From Middlesex (2002)

  hallways and churchysmell,itsleaded windows,itsGothic gloom. The Latin primersdiecolorofgruel.Theafternoonteas. Thecurtsy- ing ofour tennis team.The tweediness ofourfaculty,andthecur- riculum itself, whichbegan,Hellenically,Byronically, withHomer, and then skipped straight toChaucer,movingonto Shakespeare, Donne, Swift, Wordsworth,Dickens,Tennyson,andE.M.Forster. Only connect. Miss Bakerand MissInglis hadfoundedthe school backin 1911, inthe words ofthecharter,"toeducategirlsinthehumanitiesand sciencesandto cultivateinthem a loveoflearning, a modestcom- portment,an amiablegrace,andaninterestincivicdutyaboveall." Thetwo womenhad lived togetheronthe farside ofthe campusin "The Cottage,"a shingledbowerthatoccupied a placeinschool mythologyakinto Lincoln'slogcabininnationallegend.Fifth graderswere givenatoureveryspring.Theyfiledbythetwosingle bedrooms (whichfooledthemmaybe),thefounders'writingdesks stilllaid withfountainpensandlicoricedrops,andthegramophone onwhichthey'dlistenedtoSousa marches.MissBaker'sandMissIn- glis'sghostshauntedthe school,alongwithactualbustsandpor- traits.Astatueinthe courtyardshowedthebespectaclededucatorsin a fanciful,springtimemood,MissBaker gesturing,Pope-like, tobless the air,whileMissInglis(forever thebottom)turned tosee whather colleaguewasbringingtoher attention.MissInglis'sfloppyhatob- scuredherplainfeatures. Inthework'sonlyavant-gardetouch,a thickwire extended fromMissBaker'shead,atthetopofwhichhov- eredtheobject of wonder:a hummingbird. ...Allthis was suggested bythespinninghockeyball.Butthere wassomething else, something morepersonal,tiiatexplained why I was itstarget.What was Calliopedoingplayinggoalie?Whywasshe encumbered bymaskand pads? Why wasCoachStork hollering at her tomake thesave? To answersimply: Iwasn't very goodat sports.Softball, basket- ball, tennis: Iwas hopeless ineveryone.Fieldhockeywaseven worse. I couldn'tget usedto thefunnylittlesticksorthenebulous, European strategies. Shortonplayers,Coach Stork put mein goal and hopedfor the best.It rarelyhappened.Withalackofteamspirit, some Wolverettes maintainedthatIpossessednocoordinationwhat- soever. Did this charge havemerit?Isthereanyconnectionbetween 293 my presentdesk joband a lackofphysical grace?I'mnotgoing toan- swerthat. ButinmydefenseIwill saythatnoneofmymoreathletic teammates everinhabitedsuch aproblematic body. Theydidn't have, asI did,two testiclessquattingillegally intheiringuinalcanals. Un- knowntome, thoseanarchistshad takenupresidenceinmy ab- domen,andwere evenhooked uptotheutilities.IfIcrossedmyleg thewrongwayormovedtooquickly,aspasmshotacrossmygroin. On the hockeyfieldIoftendoubledover, myeyestearingup, while Coach Stork swatted me onthe rump."It's justa cramps Stephanides. Runitoff."(Andnow,asImovedtoblocktheslapshot,justsuch a painhitme.My insidestwisted,erupting witha lavaflowofpain. I bentforward,tripping onmygoaliestick. AndthenI wastumbling, falling .. .) Butthere's stilltime to record a fewotherphysicalchanges.Atthe beginningofseventhgrade I gotbraces,a fall set.Rubberbandsnow hookedmy upperandlowerpalatestogether.Myjawfeltspringy, like a ventriloquistdummy's. Everynightbeforegoing to sleepI du- tifullyfit my medievalheadgearon.Butinthedarkness, while my teethwereslowlycoerced intostraightness,therestofmyfacehad begunto givein toa stronger,genetic predispositiontoward crookedness.Toparaphrase Nietzsche,thereare two typesofGreek: theApollonianandtheDionysian.I'd beenbornApollonian, a sun- kissedgirlwith a faceringedwithcurls.Butas Iapproachedthirteen a Dionysian elementstoleovermy features.My nose, at firstdeli- cately,thennotsodelicately,beganto arch.Myeyebrows,growing shaggier,arched,too.Somethingsinister, wily, literally "satyrical"en- teredmyexpression. Andsothe lastthingthehockey ball (comingclosernow, unwill- ingtoendure anymoreexposition)— thelast thingthehockeyball symbolizedwasTime itself,the unstoppability ofit,the waywe're chainedto our bodies,whicharechained toTime. Thehockey ball rocketedforward.It hit thesideof mymask, whichdeflecteditinto thecenterofthe net.We lost.TheHornets celebrated. In disgrace,as usual, Ireturned to the gymnasium. Carryingmy mask, Iclimbedout ofthe greenbowlof thehockey field, whichwas like anoutdoortheater.Takingsmallsteps,I walkedalongthegravel 294

• 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

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Only twenty minutes later had Amy returned sufficiently to herself to begin to explain. Amy had made a seat with four pillows: Reese’s two and her two. She could tell her pillows and Reese’s pillows apart because she couldn’t seem to get Reese to stop sleeping in her makeup, so two of the four pillowcases, once a bright solid yellow, now had squiggly patterns, single eyeliner wings pointing off in haphazard directions among the centipede footprints of mascara- drenched lashes. Taylor Swift played from Reese’s laptop. “God, those poppers made me so dumb,” Amy ventured. “Of course,” countered Reese, who snapped shut her laptop now that Amy no longer appeared aphasic. “Poppers are supposed to make you dumb. A dumb little slut with zero inhibitions—just how I like you.” Reese hesitated. This was perhaps too direct. For as much as Amy was able to say that she was in love to the point of sickness— their sex had not been good. It had been tentative, quiet—both intense and mild. Penetration was aborted in favor of oral, or even more frequently, mutual masturbation—the more sex became like cybersex or camming, only in person, the more comfortable Amy seemed. Reese surmised that the majority of sexual situations in which Amy had genuinely felt at ease had occurred within easy reach of an Off switch. Reese had been trying to get Amy to loosen up, to begin to curb Amy’s habitual shutdown at the prospect of sex—to keep Amy present, and in the body Amy had spent a lifetime learning to avoid acknowledging. But it was a tightrope walk: Tell Amy what to do too forcefully, and her shame at the prospect that she was not great at sex would make her dissociate, but leave her to her own devices and patterns, and she’d dissociate from the start. Telling her what was cute might have been too much, so Reese added, “But poppers are not supposed to make you shiver and cry. I want you helpless, but not that kind of helpless.” Amy nodded. “I’m not sure why I shivered. Maybe my blood pressure dropped too much.” Amy’d seen signs at Callen-Lorde warning against the use of poppers while on Viagra because both caused drops in blood pressure. She hadn’t taken Viagra, but she had uncommonly low blood pressure, a consequence of her spiro, the testosterone blocker she took every morning in two round 100 mg pills that looked and tasted like breath mints made from corpses. Reese said gently, “But, baby, why did you start crying?” Amy tried out an explanation. “The poppers made me dumb,” she said. “That was the problem and what was so good. So dumb I had to be present.”

• 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)

  Amy remembered how one of them patiently explained that the term “autogynephilia” only works if you don’t think trans women are women. If you do, then you immediately see that the majority of women, cis or trans, are all autogynephiles, and that most men would be autoandrophiles—it’s not something special about trans women. Of course women are turned on by being women and men turned on by being men! Watch any porn and the sexuality of everyone in it is actually about their own auto-andro/gyne-philia. Listen to them talk. It’s all about validating their own gender. Oh yeah, I’m your little slut...yeah, baby, you like this big cock? And alone on their laptops somewhere: the viewers, turned on to identify with people identifying with their gender. Other trans women claimed that these psychologists had begun to be discredited, that their research methods were revealed to be the suspect practice of hanging around in bars without Institutional Review Board approval in order to pick up trans women, sleep with them, and later write clinical papers both based upon and obscuring those experiences. But Amy doubted those trans women. No one with expertise cared what the trans women had to say. Who were they to tell psychologists with doctorates—scientists!—that they were wrong? And hadn’t it even been a transsexual woman herself who’d written the COGIATI test? Of course a bunch of deranged creeps whose paraphilia revolved around womanhood would claim they’re women—crazy people never think they are crazy! Check and mate, sickos! Amy didn’t have to take the test to know her own result: a fetishist, a pervert. But she took it anyhow, a series of bizarre questions about imagining shapes and quantifying empathy. You are talking with a friend. Outside, far away, somebody is honking their horn regularly and endlessly. It is not very loud, you can just barely hear it in the quiet room. What is your reaction? You meet somebody and they are polite to you, but seem a little distant. They are actually secretly disliking you. How likely are you to know this? You will never, ever be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man, and you will only get more masculine with each passing year. There is no way out. What is your reaction? Youre in a desert walking along when all of a sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down to flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lies on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

• 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)

  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)

  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 Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What. At Room 43, after quickly offered and accepted apologies, the Colonel said, “We’ve made a tactical decision to push back calling Jake. We’re going to pursue some other avenues first.” twenty-one days after AS DR. HYDE shuffled into class the next morning, Takumi sat down next to me and wrote a note on the edge of his notebook. Lunch at McInedible , it read. I scribbled Okay on my own notebook and then turned to a blank page as Dr. Hyde started talking about Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. I’d only scanned through the reading—I’d been studying only enough not to fail—but in my scanning, I’d come across great last words. This poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, “Do you know how you’re going to die?” The merchant answered, “No. No one knows how they’re going to die.” And the Sufi said, “I do.” “How?” asked the merchant. And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, “Like this,” and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired. But Dr. Hyde was telling a different story, one that I’d skipped. “Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’” A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell. Alaska would have liked this Rabe’a woman, I wrote in my notebook. But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine her looking down on us, still aware of us, but it seemed like a fantasy, and I never really felt it—just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere.

• 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.