IF YOU ARE a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals. What no one wants to admit about funerals, because you’re supposed to be crushed by the melancholy of being a trans girl among the prematurely dead trans girls, is that funerals for dead trans girls number among the notable social events of a season.
Who knows what people will say at a trans funeral? Will some queer make a political speech instead of a eulogy, so that for weeks afterward other queers will post outraged screeds about it on social media? How many times will a family member deadname or misgender the deceased from the pulpit, unabashed about it in his grief, peering out at this sea of weirdos who showed up unexpectedly to what he considered a family event? Did their son—er, daughter—really have all these friends? Which nice white cis person will remind the assembled mourners—a high percentage of whom are trans women themselves—that everyone must do more to save trans women of color, who are being murdered (murdered!), although this particular highly attended funeral is, of course, a suicide, because that’s how the white girls die prematurely.
Afterward, the mourners will all file out and then break into little clusters, trading solemn hugs, some shoulders shaking, while others dart suddenly apart due to a just-glimpsed ex, so that the macro effect is like watching sperm wriggle under a microscope. Everyone will dress themselves in some shade of goth—in goth apparel you can look sad while also showing off fishnets and boobs. A few queer microcelebrities (as opposed to microcelebrities who are queer) will grace the funeral; they will barely know the deceased, and to assuage a slight guilt over this, their names will be subsequently found on the attendant GoFundMe campaigns and memorial funds.
Reese goes to the funerals. Pretty much every single one. She attends for three reasons.
The first reason: not to miss out on the aforementioned social importance of the gathering.
The second reason: Funerals remind Reese not to kill herself. Not because she so badly wants to live, but because suicide as a trans girl leads to a mortifying posthumous stripping of all that you cherished by friends and strangers alike. If you are not there to stop them, the loudest, brashest, and clumsiest of your semi-acquaintances will scoop up all that was once you and simmer it down to a single mawkish narrative, plucking out all that is inconveniently irreducible, and inserting in its place all that is trite and politically serviceable. The word “mortifying”—as in existentially embarrassing—has as its root the Latin for “death,” so if Reese seeks to avoid mortification, she cannot kill herself: She simply must not die.
The third reason: Reese needs to know she is not a psychopath. Because whenever she hears the news that another trans girl has died, she is exasperated. Oh goddammit, not again. This reaction, of course, causes her guilt. What’s wrong with her? Everyone else rends garments and keens. But look at Reese: There she is, at the apartment where a cadre of the bereaved has gathered; she’s brewing coffee and refilling mugs, scrubbing dishes, setting out chips, so that in her domestic utility no one will notice that she’s a total psychopath unaffected by grief.
Attending the funeral is necessary for Reese to experience an emotion beyond irritation at the dead girl. Funeral after funeral has taught her to sit in the pews awaiting a moment of puncture: when some tiny detail pierces the smooth carapace of her indifference. Once, that detail was when the deceased-by-suicide’s girlfriend stood trembling in front of the crowd and finally conceded, “I am humiliated that she is gone and left me here.” Another time, it was a song, high-pitched and echoing off the stone walls of the church. Whatever that detail happens to be, when it finally penetrates Reese’s jaded and chitinous exoskeleton, for whole minutes at a time, the rage, self-pity, and lacerating frustration toward the thwarted, victimized nature of trans lives sears her directly, so that she twists and wracks her body, her emotions pedaling like the legs of an upturned beetle. To embrace that pain directly, to let the sorrow linger on her vulnerable interior without caveats or irony or armor, offers a purification. In those moments, she knows that she is not a psychopath. That she loved a friend who is gone.
When the moment comes to a close, when the funeral moves on, she begins to armor anew, and by the time the queers have gathered outside, she has repaired herself into a mildly irritated indifference sufficient to exit and face them—outwardly cynical and, for once, inwardly kindred.
Today’s funeral is held for Tammi, who fatally wrecked her car. That’s the story that people have been kind to repeat. The phrase “car accident” helpfully obscures the intentionality of the act. One can believe that, yes, when you drive your car at ninety miles an hour across a bridge, accidents do happen—had Tammi not spent the previous Saturday making drunken hysterical calls in which she slurred about no one loving her or caring when she’s gone. Tammi, whom many people loved, and after whom not a small number lusted.
Reese first came across Tammi at Saint Vitus, a dank club that primarily hosted music of the angry male variety. Every surface of the interior was painted black and therein such ample moshing had occurred over the years that the accumulated musk of sweaty post-adolescent boys forever lingered in the circulation-free air. A straight Tinder boy who was into noise had suggested meeting Reese there one night, and she agreed, primarily because she’d know immediately whether he was worth fucking or whether to flee after a drink, and either way, her apartment was two blocks away. Onstage, a cadre of boys hunched over keyboards. Among them, the only thing truly worth looking at in the whole club: a trans woman on guitar. Six foot three, tattoos jagged on lean porcelain arms, slashes of asymmetrical dark hair bisecting a face made up so expertly vampiric that had Elvira known about it, she’d have stopped by to learn something. The woman less played her instrument than throttled it every ten seconds or so, between which attacks she gazed with poised stillness at some unfixed point over the heads of the audience, listening to the reverberations of her own sudden violence, as a hiker who has shouted over an empty alpine lake holds quiet for the moments it takes his echo to return.
At least Tammi had been merciful in her method. No one had to find the body, save those qualified to do so: EMTs and firemen. Tammi’s last grace was that flimsy veil of plausible deniability to deflect the charge of suicide just enough that her friends could tell themselves that perhaps, perhaps she had just been venting some frustration, and in the midst of that, lost control of the vehicle—that they had not failed her, that the epidemic of trans girl suicides had not taken another young lovely.
In the stone courtyard of the church, Thalia gives Reese a hug, then asks, “Want to hear a joke I thought up during the service?”
Reese does. The joke is this:
Q: What do you call a remake of a nineties romantic comedy where you cast trans women in all the roles?
A: Four Funerals and a Funeral.
Another girl, early in transition, wearing a black velvet dress, is standing near them. Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender. The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head—insensitive!—staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes.
Reese pulls rank. “Oh come on.” She points to Thalia. “You know who gave Tammi her first shot? Thalia. Right in the butt. Who are you to say if she can make a joke or not?”
“Maybe just not where other mourners can hear it,” the girl sniffs.
“Here’s a better idea,” Reese snaps. “Maybe don’t stand around eavesdropping.”
“Reese,” says Thalia simply, “it’s fine.” Then to the girl: “Sorry.”
The girl bobs a tight acknowledgment, then raises a brow at Reese, waiting for her apology as well. But Reese refuses. She is granite willing the girl to go away. Fuck that girl. Let her go to as many of these things as Reese has been to and see if she doesn’t manage to develop a sense of humor. Eventually, the girl leaves, and almost immediately Reese regrets whatever enmity she made for herself in that unnecessary encounter. She’s lost patience for the baby transes—never a good look on an older girl.
A little fountain burbles in the courtyard. It smells pleasantly of algae, and Reese moves closer, drawn by the cool of ionized air. Pennies flash in the pool at the base of the fountain, which seems blasphemous: wishing on coins in a church courtyard, when you could be inside praying for whatever it is that you want.
“I heard this thing”—Thalia holds the back of Reese’s elbow, pulling Reese back to the present—“from Andy, who made arrangements with the funeral home. He went to those two older women who run that family funeral home in Bed-Stuy—those two nice black ladies who did Eve’s funeral. After a few hours of setting things up, one of the two ladies asks him, ‘I’m sorry, but was Tammi a transgender woman?’ And Andy goes, ‘Yeah,’ and they, like, kind of exchange looks. One of them says they’re going to change their plans and will be getting the body from the morgue within the next few hours to bring to their funeral home.”
“Why? Why would it matter that she was trans?”
“The accident was out on Long Island, and I guess she got transferred to a morgue here. Apparently one where the morgue workers gawk at bodies of trans women—poke and laugh and shit.”
This outrage, so fresh and yet unsurprising, punctures Reese anew. And yet, she can’t quite enrage herself, because for once, other people beyond trans women—a pair of older black women who likely have concerns of their own—have cared enough to protect a dead queer trans girl’s dignity.
“You could tell something was wrong with her a month or two ago,” Thalia goes on, and Reese understands that she means Tammi. “When we went to wait at the Callen-Lorde purgatory together, she had completely stopped shaving. She wouldn’t have been caught dead with a shadow like that a year ago—oh fuck, I’m sorry, very horrible expression for this moment. Thank Jesus Miss Twitter wasn’t here for that too.”
Reese’s phone rings, and instinctively, she fumbles it in an attempt to silence the tones. A New York number. She gives Thalia another hug and finds an alcove down the block to call back the number because she’s been fielding a lot of calls from vague acquaintances looking for logistics about the funeral.
A woman picks up. “Reese! Thank you for calling me back! Is there any chance you’re free tonight?” A pause. “It’s Katrina, by the way.”
“Katrina!” The name, the pregnancy, her whole connection with Katrina, the yearning for a baby, seems like it should exist in a dimension that doesn’t overlap with this funeral. Like running into one’s teacher at the grocery store, it takes Reese a moment to close the dimensional gap and reorient herself. “I’m, uh, at a funeral right now.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll call back.”
“No, wait. What’s happening?”
“Well, I was hoping I could talk to you. I might have…How do I say this? I might have betrayed Ames.”
At this, the parabolic dish of Reese’s focus swivels to aim squarely at Katrina. “Wow. That sounds very dramatic. Very romantic.”
“No, not that kind of betrayal.”
“That’s a shame.”
Katrina makes a noise of protest, then understands she’s been teased and laughs graciously.
“Look,” Reese says, “I’m actually really happy you called. The timing is a bit weird because of where I am. But we’ve got so much to talk about. I do want to get together.” Reese holds her breath, waiting to see if she will get away with that “we,” the “we” that couples use when they both own and take responsibility for a pregnancy. We’re having a baby, say both men and women, often together, as if their roles were interchangeable and required equal commitment. Reese recognizes her own “we” is a little creepy, but fuck if it doesn’t feel good to say.
“Oh, that is so nice to hear,” Katrina says, sounding genuinely moved. “I can’t interrupt a funeral, though.”
But Reese has smelled something new and curious. Yes, she’s supposed to take care of her friends tonight, but a betrayal of Ames? Katrina wanting to talk to her? Reese has had such opportunities seldom enough that when one comes, she knows to move. “Honestly, the girl was closer to my friends than me, so I’m mostly here for support.” This is half-true.
“Who was she?”
“A trans girl from around.”
“I’m sorry.”
Reese mmhmms in the mournful manner one properly receives a condolence, waits the necessary moment to avoid unseemliness, then asks, “So what’s this betrayal all about?”
“Can we talk about it in person? I might have outed Ames to the whole company. I’m not sure of the etiquette for that. I’m happy to come to you to make things easier.”
Reese moved into an apartment in Greenpoint with Iris a year and a half ago: a low-ceilinged ancient-brown-carpeted second-floor unit in a three-story building with asbestos siding that sits at the base of the Pulaski Bridge. The apartment had at some point in history been a one-bedroom, but by barely hewing to the New York real estate law that a room must have a window and a closet to qualify as a bedroom, a long-ago landlord had squeezed three bedrooms into the space by building a maze of walls. Each oddly shaped bedroom had exactly one window and a closet that protruded from the wall like a box.
Iris took the largest bedroom and in the smallest bedroom, she had placed a massage table and decorated the walls with tapestries and candles, turning it into a part-time erotic massage parlor. Iris had enrolled in massage classes the year before as she cleaned up and got sober. She had been working since then at a spa in Williamsburg. Iris divided up her male clients into two categories, daddies (positive!) and dickbags (negative!) and liked to detail at length their various behaviors for Reese after work. Occasionally, Iris offered good daddies who dropped the right hints the chance for sessions with happier endings at the apartment.
Reese lived in the medium-sized bedroom—what had once been a bathroom. Since the bathroom had a window, it had been made into a bedroom, and the living room closet made into the bathroom as building codes did not require bathrooms to have windows. Every night she rested her head on a pillow that lay in the space where the toilet had once been.
Reese and Thalia wait for Katrina in front of the McDonald’s by the Greenpoint stop on the G train. Thalia came along without requiring an invite. Reese had earlier volunteered to keep her company that night, her motherly attempt to staunch both grief and Thalia’s temptation to go out drinking with all the queers from out of town, both perennial ingredients in the recipes that Thalia fell back upon whenever she cooked up a truly messy evening. In return for allowing Reese to mother her so intrusively, Thalia felt entitled to the chance to witness and color-comment Reese’s own messiness.
“So what’s your plan here?” Thalia asks Reese, flicking through photos on her phone while they await Katrina. “You’re just going to bring this nice pregnant lady back to Iris’s amateur erotic massage parlor?”
“Amateurs, by definition, don’t get paid,” Reese counters. “I live in a professional erotic massage parlor, thank you very much. But I texted Iris to put away the massage table.”
“And what did Iris say to that?”
“She hasn’t responded.” Reese retrieves her phone. “Oh wait, no. She texted. She says to fuck off, she’s not hiding anything for Amy’s baby mama.”
Thalia laughed. “That sounds like Iris.”
“Yeah,” Reese sourly agrees. “It does.”
“Why did she hate Amy again?”
“She didn’t hate Amy. She just thought Amy was a snob. She was there the day when I met Amy.” Amy and Iris’s mutual distaste had begun the night that Amy launched into a tirade against the prevalence of Candy Darling–worship among trans girls. The rant revolved around Amy’s oft-elaborated claim that trans girls never do anything. The best they ever hope for is for someone else to discover them, take an interest, and make them into a muse. But muses are passive. They have no agency and they reap no rewards—the rewards are reserved for those who use them for inspiration. Among the Factory girl trancestors, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis actually did things. Those two had a reputation for danger in their wit, vengeance, and unpredictability. They held Andy Warhol to account. But trans girls don’t worship those two. Candy Darling? She was just some helpless languid blonde waiting around for a man to save her and make her famous. Iris, a languid blonde waiting for a man to save her and make her famous, had tolerated Amy’s lecture in silence. When Amy finished, Iris coolly raised her skirt to reveal the photorealistic tattoo of Candy Darling’s face that decorated her entire upper thigh.
“No,” disagrees Thalia, “Iris definitely hated Amy. She told me.”
“You two shouldn’t be gossiping about me.”
“We weren’t gossiping about you, we were gossiping about Amy.”
At that moment, Katrina ascends from the station and pops out her earbuds with a tug on their cord at the same time that she calls out a greeting to Reese. She’s wearing yoga pants and an oversized duster sweater woven in a corporate approximation of a Native American pattern. To Reese’s surprise, Katrina comes in for a hug. Katrina’s shoulder blades slide delicately beneath her hands.
“I haven’t been up to this neighborhood in so long! But Girls was filmed here, wasn’t it?”
“Oh wow!” Thalia interjects. “Amazing you should mention that! Reese loves that show!”
Greenpoint’s chance at being a cool area ended when Lena Dunham set the first season of Girls there, and it became associated with clueless white girls in both fact and popular conception. “It’s the opposite of my favorite show,” Reese corrects. “Meet Thalia. Thalia, Katrina—Katrina, Thalia.” Thalia flashes Katrina one of her gorgeous smiles that knocks aside everything in its path.
Occasionally, Reese worries about the appearance of her living in Greenpoint—to live in Brooklyn and inhabit one of the few neighborhoods overwhelmingly inhabited by white people? It doesn’t look good. Still, Reese likes Greenpoint precisely for its Polish people. Her apartment is located on the North End, along Newtown Creek, the Superfund site that separates Brooklyn from Queens, and the one part of Greenpoint that’s largely retained its Polish residents. In South Greenpoint, on the border with Williamsburg, the Poles have sold their ramshackle buildings to developers and retired to Warsaw as millionaires. Her block hasn’t yet succumbed. Living among the old Poles suits her. Elsewhere girls complained about aggression, catcalls, slurs, the constant fear of catching the attention of some man who realizes he’s been attracted to a transsexual and has himself a good ol’-fashioned panic. But those old women pushing around their grocery dollies, the white-whiskered men in faded windbreakers, they cannot trouble themselves to so much as glance at Reese. Any effort to get them to consider such a thing as some American’s gender presentation is destined to break apart against the stony shores of a massive Slavic indifference. The only women who approach her with anything resembling curiosity or friendliness are those who mistakenly greet her in Polish; their faces slam shut when she responds in apologetic English. Greenpoint is the only place she’s ever lived where she feels no injunction to put on makeup before a quick errand, because no one deigns to take note of her one way or another.
“I hope you weren’t waiting too long,” says Katrina to the two women. She doesn’t expect a real response—lateness in the era of smartphones having become a social rite for which one apologizes without quite taking responsibility, as when you apologize for a spell of bad weather to a friend visiting from out of town.
“No,” says Reese, and she begins the walk north, toward her apartment. Thalia politely steps a few feet ahead, allowing Katrina and Reese to walk side by side—the sidewalk is too congested to walk three abreast.
On the way, Katrina glances over Reese’s shoulder at the Brooklyn Bazaar. “Do a lot of trans people live in this neighborhood?”
“What? Not at all. I’ve only seen a handful since I moved here, and I don’t know them.”
The question amuses Thalia. She turns, taking a couple backward steps. “Reese and Iris are trying to escape the rest of us.”
“Oh, okay.” Katrina nods. “I asked because there’s a sign that says ‘Tranny’ right there.”
Of literally all the things this cis lady might say in front of Thalia!
Reese flinches. Thalia’s graceful body freezes rigor mortis–stiff and she asks, “Did you say ‘tranny’?”
Katrina points across the street. “Right there. Tranny.”
Reese whirls. Pasted on the front wall of the Brooklyn Bazaar is an amateurish black-and-white graffiti-style poster with a single giant word: TRANNY.
Reese can’t make sense of it. She and Thalia have come fresh from a funeral. As she stands there gaping, anti-transgender bills ferment in various state senates. Even the liberal media—The New York Times and The New Yorker and New York magazine—have taken to publishing anti-trans screeds penned by conservatives, the editors disingenuously wringing their hands and pleading “balance” or “wait for the science.” Radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists have teamed up to insist that trans women are all pedophiles, that such predators can’t be trusted around children or in women’s spaces. Every year, the list of murdered trans women, most of color, grows longer. Among those cases, the number of victims who were misgendered in their own obituaries is greater than the number of victims whose murderer has been identified.
But all of that has been far away from Reese. She lives in Greenpoint specifically because it is all far away. That is news that lives on the Internet. Not on her walk down the street. She spots another similar poster: TRANNY. Only this one has an indistinct face and a date. Suddenly, she realizes what the posters want to advertise: a promotional tour by Laura Jane Grace, the transgender lead singer of the punk band Against Me!, for the release of a memoir titled with the same slur.
And suddenly Reese is furious. These rich trans bitches. These fucking assholes who transition with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to protect them from ever hearing someone say “tranny” to them on the street, so that one day, they can write tranny on the streets themselves, and congratulate themselves on being so punk. As if, in a climate of political dread, no one has ever written jew, or faggot, or hung a noose, or painted a swastika where some poor target tried to pass a small life.
Katrina looks back and forth, from Reese to Thalia, aware that a minor drama largely illegible to her is being written.
“I guess it’s the title of a memoir,” Reese says, forcing herself to shrug. “Laura Jane Grace,” she adds to Thalia, who clearly can’t yet make sense of the poster.
“Oh, okay.” The tension in Thalia’s posture releases. “What an edgelord. Her and her transgender blues.” Thalia spits the word “transgender” derisively, with a hard g.
“Who?” Katrina asks.
“A trans punk singer.”
Katrina hesitates, then decides to address the moment. “I’m sorry I pointed it out. I didn’t know it was a sore subject.”
“It’s okay,” Reese says. “Thalia and I are both a bit raw today. Anyway, it’s not your fault. Signs are meant to be read. So people should be thoughtful of what they put on them.”
Katrina gives a slight nod, relieved that the tension has trailed away. “Speaking as someone in marketing, it’s not what I’d have chosen. You have to imagine a high percentage of her audience is trans. Can you imagine a trans woman buying that book? I mean, what, is she going to read it on the subway? It’d be like holding up a label on herself. Or go into a bookstore and be like: ‘Hi, I’m looking for Tranny.’ ”
This observation endears Katrina to Reese with unexpected force. That Katrina has imagined a trans woman buying the memoir and reading it, and how that might feel, required a descent into empathy three or four flights deeper than even Reese herself had taken.
In the apartment, Iris sits on a stool at the kitchen counter in panties and a tank top, sipping on white wine chilled with ice cubes. In a fig leaf of decency, she has at least tucked before Katrina’s arrival. She’s interrogating Thalia about the funeral, collecting information on who was there and what was said. She insouciantly dismisses those poor unfortunates on her years-long shit list with insults that make florid use of her abandoned English degree—insults being the only circumstance in which she puts it to use: Those Truvada libertines! Ugh, I can’t stand a hooker with a financial advisor! Listening to that dickbag’s opinions is a form of self-harm! Her? She’s like Starbucks—any idiot can enjoy her and, two hours later, forget he did. Insults are Iris’s version of mourning. She and Thalia are putting on a show for Katrina’s benefit, while pretending indifference to her presence. Where do they get the energy? At certain moments, when Thalia has wrested back the stage for one of her own monologues, Reese catches Iris regarding Katrina with undisguised curiosity.
Finally, Iris can no longer contain herself, and comments directly though obliquely to Katrina, “God, I wish I had subordinates to have affairs with me.”
Katrina catches the inference and makes a face.
Iris says, “Oh please. I’m Reese’s roommate and plus I have known Amy for as long as Reese has! Who else is she going to gossip with?”
Why, Reese asks herself, has she not taken any one of the thousands of opportunities presented to her to smother Iris in her sleep?
But Katrina collects herself almost immediately. It’s impressive, actually. In the past Reese has brought over guests, perhaps those who have seen too much drag, who make the mistake of thinking that shade is an invitation to match Iris in her performance. Which is exactly the point at which Iris grows serious, while the interloper, still a step behind, bumbles alone through some embarrassing attempt at sassy.
“Did Reese tell you why I’m here?” Katrina asks.
“No…” Iris puts her fist under her chin in a pantomime of attentive listening. “But do tell.”
“You don’t have to tell her anything,” Reese says to Katrina.
“How dare you,” Iris says, but she doesn’t break her pose.
“Oh my god, look at her,” Thalia says of Iris. “It’s like when a dog smells your food and freezes in a begging position.”
“How dare you too,” Iris repeats, still refusing any lapse in the discipline of her pose.
“I’m going to take her into my room away from your prying,” Reese announces.
“Actually,” Katrina says, “maybe a variety of opinions is the best. I mean, I came for trans etiquette advice, and here we are.” She makes a gesture around the kitchen. Iris sticks out her tongue at Reese in victory.
“And I never knew Amy at all,” Katrina continues. “So I don’t know anything about Amy when he was trans, or even before he was trans when he was Ames the first time—”
“James,” says Iris.
“What?”
“Her name the first time was James. Then Amy. Now Ames. She didn’t change back to her original name. Like, it’s as though she couldn’t fully bear to go back to being James after detransition, so she dropped the J and now she’s Ames.”
Katrina glances at Reese to see if this is indeed true, and Reese confirms it with a little nod.
“The way she picked her names is so psychologically indiscreet,” Iris complains, emphasizing the word “indiscreet” to indicate the height of gauche. “She just parades all her issues naked in the front window.”
“See, this is good stuff!” Katrina says. “This is the kind of info that I can’t pull from Ames himself.”
“Wait a minute”—Reese points a straw that Iris has left on the kitchen table at Katrina— “aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be giving us the lowdown on Ames tonight?”
At the weekly Monday all-staff meeting, the head of human resources, a young-for-the-position Southern woman named Carrie, announced that the agency’s bathroom policy would be changing. Carrie came from the type of Southern culture where she pronounced the letter H in “white” and “wheel,” ordered “mehr-leow” at wine bars, voted Democratic as much for obscure heritage reasons as politics, and at seventeen had the kind of debutante “coming out” that had nothing to do with the gay. “One final change this week,” she intoned at the end of the company meeting. “About the law in my home state of North Carolina that prohibits transgendered persons from using the bathroom of their adopted sex. I happen to be personally very ashamed of my state for this”—she allowed a sorrowful pause for effect—“so I’m pleased to announce that the small bathroom across from the periwinkle conference room will now be designated gender-neutral.” Carrie clapped for her own announcement and the meeting broke up. Ames had missed the meeting that day, and once back to work, Katrina forgot about the bathroom business.
But as Katrina gathered her things for lunch, Carrie knocked on Katrina’s open office door, apologized for interrupting, and asked if they could chat for a minute. She was very delicate, so it took her a while to get around to the point, but she wanted to know if Katrina thought that one gender-neutral bathroom downstairs would be sufficient accommodation.
“I have no idea,” Katrina told Carrie, baffled.
“Oh,” said Carrie, “but you know, she works under you, so I thought maybe she might have communicated—”
“What?” Katrina cut her off.
“Ames, I mean. She reports to you.”
“Ames is not a she.”
“Oh, no, I know,” Carrie rushed to say. “I’m sorry. You know, it’s just that some other people have asked about it and, since it came out, people were talking about what our bathroom policy is.”
“Carrie,” Katrina said carefully, “you need to tell me exactly what you mean when you say ‘came out.’ What are people talking about?”
“Well,” Carrie said, then smoothed out her skirt and dropped her conciliatory demeanor, “what I was told was that on your trip to Chicago, you told Dave Etteens and Ronald Snelling that Ames used to be a woman. Ames said as much to them too. Abby is the project manager assigned to Dave and well, he told her about it, and then it got around the rumor mill here. And I just want to handle this with dignity, for everyone’s sake. The agency, but Ames too.”
Katrina groaned and let her face drop into her hands.
Carrie ignored this rudeness and continued. “Anyway. I think it’s good policy to have one gender-neutral restroom regardless. But since Ames is your direct report, please try to find out if we should designate one on this floor as well. I was thinking that the one by—”
“Carrie,” Katrina cuts her off again. “Ames isn’t a woman.”
“No, I know,” Carrie assures her. “I know. She is a man.”
The way Carrie nodded, as if convincing herself, felt wrong to Katrina on an intuitive level. “Hold on, what are people saying exactly?”
Carrie grimaced a little. “That he used to be a woman, you know, that he is a transgendered man.”
“Oh fuck.” Katrina slumped back in her chair and stared at the drop-panel ceiling.
Carrie put her hand on Katrina’s desk and leaned forward, concerned. “No! Katrina! He passes very well! It’s not a problem for anyone here. I only want your help in creating a supportive environment. We don’t have any policies yet for transgendered employees, so I think it’s important to do this correctly now…”
Katrina’s first urge was to call Ames. But the situation was humiliating for them both. Katrina couldn’t face it on top of everything else. Instead, she thought to call Reese.
“Okay,” cackles Iris, “so they think he was assigned female at birth? That he’s female-to-male?”
“Yes,” says Katrina with a sigh, “that’s what I’m gathering.”
Reese is enjoying this turn of events more than she should. “Can you blame them? That pretty boy. His beard hasn’t recovered from laser, and oh my god, even after that pert little nose got broken, it must be easy for them to imagine him as a trans guy.”
“Amy isn’t that tall, right?” Thalia asks. “I’ve only seen pictures of her.” Each of the women in that room has some favorite complaint about her body, through which she can’t help but assess the bodies of other women. At six foot two, Thalia’s was her height.
“Like five eight, maybe nine,” says Iris.
“Perfect trans guy height.”
“But you actually know trans men,” Iris corrects Thalia.
Reese has to catch her laughter. This is really just so delicious. “Yeah, you know to clock a burly dude. Cis people are off looking for, like, Gwyneth Paltrow with a little mustache.”
“In other words: They’re looking for Amy.” Iris’s face looks as pleased as Reese feels.
Katrina’s interest has snagged on a different detail. “Burly?”
“Oh yeah,” say the other women in emphatic unison.
“If you want a manly man,” Iris counsels her, “find yourself a trans man. They’re the only ones you can be sure want to be that way, instead of compensating their way into it.”
“Huh,” says Katrina. The sails of Katrina’s sexuality billow with new considerations.
“Thalia likes the FTM4MTF romance,” Iris teases. “She’s always got a boy panting after her. She’s got a dancer right now.”
“Really? Why didn’t you tell me?” Reese’s feelings get hurt when Thalia shares her love life with Iris but keeps it from her. “Lemme see a photo!”
“Tonight is not about me,” Thalia snaps.
“Fine.” Reese shifts focus back to Katrina to hide her miffed feelings. “So anyway, what advice do you want about this situation?”
“I 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 I’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! I’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.
Masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel. Early on after transition, Amy had fled that numbness; she had been for a time, with Reese, gloriously there and present and fragile. Amy had never shed her numbness completely, and later came to appreciate her own capacity for it as a useful tool. Iris, who excelled at sex work, talked about dissociation the same way: the superpower that let her succeed lucratively and heroically where the average mortal failed, succumbing to all the feels. Reese, however, didn’t believe in that spin; she could never quite complete the dogmatically radical leap that would transform dissociation from coping mechanism to superpower.
In the back of Amy’s closet—her literal closet, mind you, the one that they shared in their apartment—lurked a gorgeous men’s Zegna suit, cut classically slim, in a deep black matte of fine carded wool. Amy had bought the suit her last year in college, from a resale shop where she pulled it off the rack, put it on, and with no tailoring necessary, discovered the Reservoir Dog in herself. In the post-transition culling of boy clothes, Amy had spared the suit, allowed it to survive, and granted it a clandestine life in the back reaches of the closet. Reese would have happily understood the suit as a sentimental keepsake, except for the fact that on rare occasions, she’d come home to find Amy actually wearing it, those malamute eyes a thousand yards away, slinking around like some kind of louche, androgynous James Bond.
Generally and specifically, Reese had no patience for this nostalgic boy dress-up. Reese, despite herself, succumbed to a grudging respect for Amy in Her Suit, if only for how completely shut off and thus invulnerable Amy became when wearing it. Though the next day, she made sure Amy felt sheepish and bashful, as you do to a hungover friend whose careless drunkenness the night before forced you into a state of resentful awe.
Detransition had been Amy’s slow ossification across this unreachable distance. A place where Reese could no longer touch her to hurt her anew. That is not gender, Reese’s guilt would argue, that is pain. All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism.
Katrina and Reese sit cross-legged on a four-by-five-foot scrap of Astroturf laid over the black iron of the apartment’s fire escape to make a combination balcony/front yard. Thalia talked Iris into giving her a massage, so it’s just the two of them. Below, the rainfall from a brief thunderstorm earlier has collected into a sunken square of sidewalk concrete to create a perfectly quadrilateral puddle. A mother hurries along with a little daughter in tow, dragging her by the hand. At the puddle, the girl, with brown hair in a braid and a tiny pair of red galoshes on her feet, wriggles out of her mother’s grasp and stamps the puddle, making a little splash. Her mother calls out her name: “Józefa, no, stop that, it is late.” The girl ignores her mother, stamps again. Reese waits for the mother to get angry. But she doesn’t. Instead, she pulls out her phone, kneels, and says, “Okay. We will film.” The little girl jumps and splashes, and the reflections of streetlights shiver in the pooled water, while the mother films and says, “Okay, wait, one more, now jump, sweetheart, yes good, look at me!”
Reese and Katrina watch in silence from above. The moment elongates like pulled taffy. They are barely breathing, the two of them, their dark shapes two stories above, raptors transfixed by the scene. The mother, still kneeling, shows her daughter the video, the light of the phone illuminating the girl’s pleased face as she watches her recently past self giggling in the tinny audio. When the two walk away, they seem lighter. The mother no longer pulls at her daughter. A truck coming down the Pulaski Bridge engine-brakes with a loud fart, they turn the corner, and Reese exhales.
“Ooof,” Reese says.
“Yeah.”
“That hurt me to watch.”
“It hurt me to watch you watch.”
“Thanks, I think.”
Katrina snuffles, pulls her shawl around her. “So now what?”
Reese’s machinations fire up, but just as quickly sputter out. Her head tilts back against the shingles of the building, and a wave of resignation comes over her. She has nothing left to think about Ames, no more advice to give. “I don’t know, Katrina. I’d just tell Ames you outed him before someone at work does. He’s not new to gender hijinks.”
“I mean about the baby. That could be us.”
Reese wants to say the right thing, but has no idea what that could be, so waits, hoping Katrina will go on.
“Your friends, Iris and Thalia, you know, when you were in your room changing, they jumped all over me. Told me what a great mother you would be.”
“Oh, so that’s it. They acted so weird when I came back out.”
“It’s just a question if you can find a place for yourself in this.”
“Yeah,” said Reese. “I want it. But I’m afraid I’ll resent my place.”
“It doesn’t mean you won’t be a mom too.”
Reese nods. She can’t bear to meet Katrina’s eyes when she speaks. “There are moms and then there are moms. I know another trans woman. She had two little girls before she transitioned. They’re four and six now. Do you know what those girls call their mothers?” The question is obviously rhetorical.
Reese goes on. “Mommy and Mommy Lucy. The trans woman, she is Mommy Lucy, the mommy who needs a qualifier. Not Mommy. When there is a woman who carried the baby biologically, and a sort-of dad, and his transsexual ex-girlfriend, which of us do you think will be the mommy with no need of a qualifier?”
“So it’s all or nothing, then?”
“I’m not in a position to be setting terms. You are.”
Katrina reaches out and grabs Reese by the wrist, not at all gently. She pulls Reese’s hand, and fumbling, holds it in both of hers, against her chest. It’s a gesture of such intimacy, but when Katrina speaks, her tone is hurt and angry. “You think you’re the only one who thinks this is unfair? You think I’m not being treated unfairly? The only one whose expectations have been disappointed? When I found out I was pregnant, I thought I had what you wanted: a baby with a reliable man. But that’s not what I turned out to have, and I’m getting over it.”
Katrina’s chest is hot through her shirt against Reese’s hand. Reese speaks, “Whatever you are, I’m lower.”
“Tell me something. Do you resent me for being pregnant?”
“Yes.”
She drops Reese’s hand.
“I thought so.”
“I’m jealous. God, I’m so jealous. And resentful too.”
“I want to figure out how to be something to you, Reese, or with you.” For a moment, Katrina appears ready to mount a second, more impassioned argument, but instead, in a deflated voice, she says, “Well, I don’t know how to do that if you’re just going to be resentful and jealous. Being pregnant isn’t as magical as you think.”
Reese rolls her eyes. Cis women are always complaining about the burden of their reproductive ability, while secretly cherishing it. Hysterectomies are widely available, but even women who don’t want children aren’t exactly lining up to get them.
Wind stirs the water in the puddle beneath them. When Reese speaks, she doesn’t respond directly. “There’s that Reagan-era saying that weed is a gateway to hard drugs like heroin. I feel that way about a vagina. It’s a gateway drug. I used to want surgery; but I’m pretty sure that would just have been the gateway to wanting a uterus. And if I had a uterus, that would be the gateway to wanting a baby in it. I hear how that sounds. You add it all together and it sounds like my deepest desire is to go shopping for some other woman’s organs. I don’t lie to myself about my situation. If I want a baby, I have to take one from some other woman. Can you imagine how that feels for me? I gave everything for my womanhood and here I’m talking about taking things from women. I’m bitter bitter bitter about being in that place.”
Katrina pauses, then asks, “Why do you have to use these words? ‘Take’? ‘Give’? This isn’t a zero-sum game. I’m not even offering to give you anything. I’m inviting you to join me, to put in commitment and work. I don’t think of a child as something given back and forth, and I actually think you wouldn’t either. That’s not how families work.” Katrina gestured to where the mom and girl had been on the sidewalk. “You think that scene doesn’t make me ache? That’s a scene that you build, not a scene you take from someone else. That’s what I want to build with other people. With children and mothers.”
Reese pursed her lips, as if Katrina had invoked something sour. “Do you remember that I just went to a funeral? I’ve been doing this for the better half of my life. I know how things turn out when it comes to trans girls. Believe me, there can only be one mommy. You’ll see. It’ll be the one with the right body for it.”
Katrina opens her mouth. Abruptly she laughs. “I can’t believe that I’m more willing than you to think openly. Maybe the way you’re seeing things isn’t working. You’re so sure how things are, how to do things. But the way you do things ends in funerals. Maybe instead of saying what the inevitable outcome is, just make a fucking leap. Because maybe I’m ready to. Maybe try recognizing the chances you have, recognize this chance with me, and be a mom if you want to. In a few weeks, my doctor is supposed to call and initiate care. I’ll get an ultrasound to hear the heartbeat. Why don’t you come along?”