Torrey Peters

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 they were horses on the same racetrack, released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for your run-of-the-mill queer. Now imagine that you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said, you should have saved two years’ income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the form of old MAC lipstick shades they’d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occasionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.

The butcher-block craftsmanship became for Reese an absurd-but-serious mental marker of a female bourgeois heterosexual temporality forever beyond her envious grasp: When a woman reaches a certain point in her thirties, she looks around and finds a good dining set with which to settle down.

Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body. She would happily cheer on any other woman who flaunted her orbital ridge in the name of challenging cis-normative beauty standards, but she would have the first available misogynist dick of a surgeon burr her skull Barbie smooth. As long as she tortured herself with a traitorously retrograde sense of what made a woman beautiful in her heart of hearts, she would assuage herself with cis-passibility in her face of faces.

Everyone wanted a cute pristine baby, not some child with insurmountable baggage. Amy knew this to be true about herself, she wanted a kid who might somehow be mystically hers, who would imprint on her. It was selfish, she knew, but when is the impulse to create a little person in your image not selfish? Most of the people she knew with kids didn’t conceive for the kid, they conceived for themselves, to accord with some notion of family, or purpose, or life stages that the child would bring them. Insert whatever worn-down cliché about life not having meaning until one becomes a parent. But whatever, she could get over that. No kid turns out as the parents had hoped. She sure hadn’t.

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.

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.

Funerals remind Reese not to kill herself

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.

Masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel

Maybe, gender aside, he’ll be a good dad.