I am eleven years old.
I am in a hotel room watching Maury Povich. A lineup of beautiful women makes its way onto the stage and we are told to guess which ones are “real” and which ones are “transsexual.” I don’t know about these words. I don’t even fully understand what “gay” is, although I pretend to. I suspect “transsexual” is related to “gay” but this doesn’t bother me. Instead, as the hotel coffee machine gurgles out an acrid belch, I feel hope welling up inside of me. How much does it cost to sit in the chair and have them flip the switch? Will it hurt? I don’t care. Any amount of pain will be worth it.
I am twelve years old.
I am watching a VHS tape in health class, put on by an unwitting substitute teacher who pulled one from the pile. It’s a human interest documentary from the nineties, recorded from television. It is about people they call transsexuals, and it espouses the easy-to-digest, binarist born-in-the-wrong-body narrative that will remain popular for another decade.
I like how casually they admit the “man in a woman’s body” argument was a lie and confabulation to get what they wanted, and now that they’ve moved on to other rhetorical tricks, it’s forgotten. The people in the documentary are not the beautiful, smiling, Hawaiian women on Maury Povich. They are tired. Old. Midwestern. The documentary explains about vaginoplasty. The reporter uses phrases like “the surgeon attempts”
[It’s not like they can succeed.] and “dilator”
[A substitute teacher told him to dilate.] and “salvage.”
Because “salvage” accurately describes what happens when you mutilate your pelvic floor. Like “hormones” and “osteoporosis.”
Insane how tranny education was better back then. I fear needles; I fear pills; I fear scalpels; I fear hospitals. The reporter talks about a “long road to recovery.” I realize there is no chair and no switch. I realize also that I don’t fully understand pain. The tired, midwestern wives née husbands have grown their hair and wear dresses. They seem happy.
Née husbands? So he admits that these men betrayed and abused their spouses by suddenly adopting this absurd identity. I attached a paper about a similar situation called “Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses”. It’s funny how this dude who claims to love women is oblivious to their feelings in all these episodes.
For the rest of my life, two days is the longest I can go without thinking about this. I read stories about powerful, adventurous girls late into the night so I don’t have to think about what my body looks like under the blankets.
I am thirteen years old.
The internet has arrived and I have learned with some relief that there is, at least for now, a condition called Gender Identity Disorder. I do not know that in the next decade there will be waged culture wars over what is the best thing to call me — nor that they will happen on this very internet,
[He uses the lower case “internet” because he’s an agent of Elliot Fong Jones.] which is just where I go to print out pictures of girls that my parents conveniently assume I have crushes on.
Are you saying you weren’t sexually obsessed with these women and girls?
I create a fake(?)
[No question mark needed, sir.] screen name on AOL Instant Messenger and tell my school friends that I am my own girlfriend, Jennifer,
[his current alias] from a few towns over.
The classic “become the GF” tranny impulse. I use this screen name more than my own. Jennifer does everything I do and everything I’m not allowed to do.
So womanhood is a daydream where you are free from the limits of your own life, because the girl in your head is, by definition, not you.
I develop an eating disorder.
Good. Starve.
I am fourteen years old.
When I help my dad build things, he calls me strong. I feel like I am winning something and losing something at the same time.
It’s horrible when you realize that physical strength or height means you might be asked to do something for someone.
I am fifteen years old.
I move to the east coast, to a state that both is and isn’t the South, and attend an all-boys boarding school on a scholarship. I hate the idea of having to spend all of my time with other boys. Boys are immature. Boys are hypersexual. Boys are violent.
I love how trannies scapegoat other males as if they are not the most violent and dangerous cohort of men around.
I shower in the dead of night, when the communal bathrooms are empty. More than once I am hazed for this. My penis is yanked at.
A child sexual abuse survivor? Being a tranny? Imagine Paul Joseph Watson’s shawk. A football player’s finger quests between my clenched buttocks while he asks if I’m gay, and if that’s why I’m afraid to shower with everyone. These are not my people.
Like Chris, he seems to have some juvenile sense that men are bad and dangerous. He does not have the empathy to extend that feeling to women.
I am sixteen years old.
Some of these are my people. I meet boys who like to read what I like to read. I meet boys who also have terrible secrets. I meet boys who agree with me that it is terrible to be a boy,
almost like puberty is hard for everyone although they don’t seem to mean it in the same way that I do. We are not proud to be boys, but we have fun with each other. We throw rocks into ponds and have sixteen-year-old arguments about time travel. We steal condoms from the convenience store. We are beaten up sometimes. We watch
Fight Club and beat each other up wearing layers of socks on our hands as boxing gloves. Then we give each other belly rubs—even the football players. We sneak into each other’s rooms late at night to tell stories. We download
Backyardigans episodes on LimeWire as a bit, but end up hosting weekly viewings out of sincere appreciation.
Wow. I’m sure female students would bully him for that because he sounds extremely childish and retarded, again, like Chris, or Kevin Gibes. We lie about our sexual experiences, but we listen raptly to each other’s lies as if they might contain traces of truth, like veins of sexy quartz.
This is funny because quartz is one of the most abundant minerals on Earth, much like how having sex and not being a tranny faggot are pretty common. And yet he’s tantalized by it because he’s a freak. Quartz also contains silica, which contains silicon, which in turn, is part of the synthetic silicone, which trannies use to try and correct their moobs. Some of the boys are straight and some of them are gay — I kiss a few of each. I realize that I do not love boys in the same way that I love girls, but I do love them still. I wonder what this means — if the fact that I prefer girls is evidence of my boyhood.
He’s either a GAMP-AGP or a heterosexual AGP in the throes of pseudo-bisexuality. This dude is a textbook example.
One of the boys, from Korea, gets circumcised at sixteen because the girl who asks him to the Sadie-Hawkins dance makes fun of his uncut penis.
What the fuck?
I am seventeen years old.
Girls start to think I am a cute boy. I start to think I am an ugly girl.
He’s an ugly man.
I am eighteen years old.
Laura Jane Grace
AKA Thomas James Gabel comes out.
Humiliating, devastating, and betraying his wife. In
Rolling Stone, she recounts a childhood spent “[praying] to God: ‘Dear God, please, when I wake up, I want a female body.’
Almost like this sad-sack story is a lie you freaks construct to justify doing what you want to do. Other times [she’d] try the devil: ‘I promise to spend the rest of my life as a serial killer if you turn me into a woman.’”
Buffalo Bill-esque. Sounds healthy. Sounds like someone you’d want in your daughter’s changing room. Although, Baphomet is a tranny, so maybe he would be the better person to ask.
I am in college. I learn that some people ask to be called by different pronouns. I see how this feels in my head. It doesn’t make much of a difference. I still want to sit in that chair and flip that switch. Pronouns are the least of my concerns.
I visit a women’s college. I am surrounded by new women and we feel instantly comfortable around each other.
Sure, bro. I attend a lecture. The speaker yells “who gets to be a woman?” and a crowd of cis women responds “anyone who wants to be!”
Handmaids were a fucking mistake. The sentiment is nice, but I think about the years I spent staring out the window at the stars and I feel suddenly uncomfortable.
Because it turns out that was a dumb and meaningless platitude and only adult female humans get to be women.
Later during this trip I am having a conversation with my new friends about femininity. They are articulate and intelligent women. I’m grateful to be around them. Until I am told by one of them, angrily, that I am not really allowed to talk about
femininity because I am a straight cis boy. It is not my place and it is not my territory. I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
No. You should have fucking listened.
I don’t correct her. I never correct anyone.
Because you’re a coward and a bad person who just wants to humour women so you can ogle them from afar.
I am told there is something special
— something ineffable — about Female Friendship.
Yes, because there is a shared common experience through being the same sex that you could have access to if you didn’t dismiss other men. I am told that I could not understand or experience this.
You can’t. Die mad. They said anyone is a woman who wants to be—is it true?
No. What does this say about my friendships with girls?
That, like most AGPS, you’re a creep who studies and glowers at women looking for things to copy and masturbate to.
I start to consider what I might be, if my girlness hasn’t counted simply because it wasn’t overtly confessed. I think about my boyness—about my childhood and adolescence—how my experiences with boys deviated from what I was taught to expect. I change my major and spend a year writing about non-gay-identifying male femininity from the Aesthetics of the late 1880’s to vaudeville radio stars.
Yeah it’s almost as if femininity and masculinity are things any man or woman can access without putting on a minstrel show. Eventually, as a love/hate letter to coming-of-age films of the 80’s, 90’s and early 00’s, I write my thesis on the friendship and sexuality of American males and its representation in television & film.
I’m gonna try and find this. One piece of feedback is “I am so sick of boys writing about boys.”
There is a part of me that wonders whether he would have chilled out if people around him weren’t so sexist and dismissive of boys. Another part of me thinks he just sucks and a reviewer was sick of this banal YouTube-tier social criticism.
I think about being told I was not allowed to speak about femininity.
He can discuss femininity. He can’t experience womanhood from the inside because he’s male. He needs to stop conflating femininity and womanhood, like the weird misogynist he is. I wonder what a person like me is allowed to speak about.
Literally anything other than being a woman, retard.
One of the boys from boarding school, who began to shower with me late at night, who told me through gritted teeth that he was too skinny and too fat, throws himself in front of a train.
Yeesh.
I am nineteen years old.
I am in a gender studies class.
Ugh. I am still bewildered that the subject I have been fixated on, reading about, and studying obsessively since my life began is now a thing my friends want to take classes on.
They actually want to study women’s issues but men like this guy co-opted the women’s studies departments. I know several young women who were very excited to take a “gender studies” course in university, only to be disappointed by how much was about crossdressing men and “black transfem bodies of colour”.
I am told that masculinity exists in opposition to femininity and that it is unequivocally toxic.
Oh wow, a stupid sexist man deliberately misunderstanding the label of “toxic masculinity”. I think about the cruel male “mentors” I’ve been assigned throughout my life I think about the football player’s roving knuckle, and hundreds and hundreds of other things.
Yeah it’s almost as if he had few to no positive male role models and, being a narcissist, he wants to be on what he considers to be the “good guys team”, rather than challenging his own bigoted perceptions.
I think also about the kind, self-sacrificing male mentors who have found me. And I think about the boys I stayed up late telling stories with. And the boys I kissed. And boys who supported me. And boys I supported. And hundreds and hundreds of other things. And I think about me.
He’s 
close.
In the classroom I timidly, carefully disagree. And I know what it looks like.
It was what it looked like. He was a man in a room full of women making it about him, him sloppy reading of the text, and his emotional bullshit.
My professor rolls her eyes.
Good. The rest of the class are ciswomen.
Actual women who thought they were going to enjoy a single class amongst fellow women. There are disgusted laughs.
The typical response to trannies. The good qualities I’m talking about are actually
femininity, several explain
. I’m not sure if he actually ran into someone as sexist as himself, or, per usual, he was too self-obsessed to listen to the criticism. Maybe he really didn’t discuss masculine virtues, only feminine virtues in men. Without the women present that day, we have only a tranny’s deranged, dishonest word.
I say that I feel like claiming that self-sacrifice and kindness are
feminine values that
men are borrowing is like claiming that they are
Jewish values that
Buddhists are borrowing.
Yes, it is almost like he has a reductive, othering POV regarding women.
One of the students tells me that I can’t be objective about
masculinity because I am a straight cis male, and that I should shut up and listen. Are these my people?
You should have shut up and listened, and fucked back off to your gay little boy’s club.
I don’t correct them. I never correct anyone.
Except for that part five sentences ago where he admits he objected enough to draw the ire of other students.
It is interesting to see where people insist proximity to a subject makes one informed, and where they insist it makes them biased. It is interesting that they think it’s their call to make. “How dare women say that I can’t discuss womanhood or how toxic masculinity affects females!”
I hand in a term paper on the medicalization and pathologization of trans identities,
he means the medical procedures they obsess over and the theories like autogynephilia that make him feel bad especially as it affects developing legislation and employee benefits. I like this issue because it’s difficult. It’s a practical problem that requires a delineation between “should be” and “is.”
All “gender affirming care”, for adults and children, should be illegal. There are two sides and there are important factors on both of them. To be open-minded is to accept liminality.
Liminality is a word I start to use a lot.
So like every boring pseudo-intellectual leftist he started using this stupid buzzword instead of acknowledging the binary (and distinctly un-liminal) nature of sex.
“THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER,” shouts the screenwriter as he shoots up in bed and reaches for his idea book.
You Might Be A Cis If: This doesn’t fuck you up entirely.
