I am nineteen again and in the back room of a local pasta restaurant in the Bay Area, where I lived at the time.
The local trans support group I was a part of had just walked into a late night meeting, and the chaser who worked there exclaimed: “Welcome!” The older girls warned me not to flirt with him, after he left to fetch our drinks. They mentioned something about a string of girls who’d been burned, not by the pasta, of course, but all those promises of free meals.
It was unfamiliar territory for me still, having wandered weeks prior into a room of strangers after a trans girl clocked me while I bagged her groceries. She wore her long, full hair half up half down, strands of it caught in the strap of her bra. While I bagged, Kitty — as I will refer to her from here on out — slammed a massive purse on the register and clicked her acrylics while she wrote down an address on an old receipt. She said it would be “life changing stuff,” so there I sat through the first few meetings, silent as a churchmouse in a vintage fur trench coat and transparent Pleasers, which I thought was sensible attire for a basement gathering. My eyebrows were uneven, and my five o’clock shadow has turned into a twelve o’clock razor bump. After a few attempts to get me to speak during the roundtable discussions, the oldest of the girls, who bragged to me in the hall she lived through Compton’s Cafeteria riot, invited me across the street to dinner.
I later found out it was known among my soon to be sisters that she was, in fact, lying.
Seated there, my silent act wore thin on my unfamiliar company. They went on the offensive. One of them, who would slip into a wig and heels after her office job, turned from across the table and stared cold daggers into me. Her gaze was sharp enough that I sat up straight, one hand nervously grasped around my Sprite. She pursed her Mac satin finish pout and spoke, after an eternity. She said, as I remember it, something like this: “You’d make such a pretty girl if you’d commit. Some of us aren’t so lucky.” Time has rubbed at the memory, but I can still feel my head nod solemnly in response. I offered my name, and remember thinking the shade on her lips was Film Noir, which I’d already stolen from the mall. It wasn’t my color.
She left shortly after, and Kitty whispered derisively that our sharp-tongued prophet had to get home to her wife.
That woman came to only a few more meetings from what I remember, but I drank a lot in those days, before I knew even nineteen was a perfect age to be an alcoholic. Kitty, my self-appointed mother and guardian angel, speculated on her absence while we smoked her Marlboros in the car. Some of the girls would come and go with the seasons, spooked or locked up or caught by family or friends, she told me, while others had moved out of the Bay, and a lucky few still had found men who didn’t want them around the girls like that. The men “out here” wanted to fuck us girls, but they didn’t want to be with us girls, she said. I thought about it later, while one such man spread me out on the floor of my studio apartment.
My experiences in those meetings were instructive, if challenging. I believe I was, at least visibly, the youngest prospect in both age and transition to enter the doors in the year I frequented them. Most others in attendance were somewhere between mid-thirty and sixty. We lived in a denser part of a city more diverse than even San Francisco, which cast a long shadow over all in attendance. There were hustlers like Kitty and corporate office workers like the married woman in her white button up and pencil skirt and nude SheerTex hosiery. The estradiol I acquired illegally slowly pooled into tits under the Calvin Klein cotton bralette I’d stolen from Nordstrom. We frequented the pasta spot on occasion, where I was grilled about what sort of surgery I’d want and if there were any men I knew with money. Sometimes Kitty and I would hit the Fresh Choice buffet instead, where we’d clear the salad bar of croutons and caesar dressing. It was her favorite place to dine and dash, as you could come in through the back entrance and fill your purse before anyone of importance noticed. Once, when we got lucky, I snatched us a soft serve cone.
Lessons stacked on lessons, and the rituals my friends passed onto others often felt stifling. In a world not yet acutely aware of our existence, they instilled in me an intimate sense of community; my actions reflected on them, as did my appearance, and the kind of woman I’d grow up to be. Youthful naivete made me initially reject what I’d learned, like the local gossip about various doctors, or the sorts of jobs that were available to me. I was a product of the internet and at times found it hard to bridge the chasm between the wisdom they so generously imparted and the messaging I was exposed to online. The girls put me on hormones immediately while the world around me demanded I wait. Likewise, they forbid me from waffling between appearances for no real reason other than anxiety, while the internet trolls in my Tumblr anonymous messages explained to me it was actually worse to take hormones and look like a girl, which I wanted. They claimed I’d be better inside, and off hormones until I could “afford” to be a girl.
There those faceless voices all huddled just out of my reach, safe from the perils of a life spent visibly trans, beckoning girls old and new to the rocky cliff sides like the sirens of ancient mythology.
The world changed for trans people in the mid-decade; it was slow, and then it happened in an instant. This is generally true, depending on who you talked to. The now infamous “Call Me Caitlyn” cover in Vanity Fair had just blown apart trans women’s cultural niche the morning of our meeting. At the time, it was celebrated by everyone but the women who raised me. It wasn’t progress, the oldest once said, because everything was “a pendulum.” Eventually those people “who run this shit” would wisen up to the fact their taxpayer dollars had bought her a pristine new vagina and enormous breasts. Around that time, Kitty completed transition, as she’d like to say. Her surgeon was a creep, and the aforementioned rumors claimed they would hook up with their vaginoplasty patients. Rumors nonetheless, and she was anxious about the aftercare, so I’d come over to help her change her bandages, or drive her around, or idle absentmindedly before her trade would come through.
Her apartment overlooked a garden, and I’d watch the passerby scurry about like bugs while she complained about the size of her new dilator.
Sometime that fall, a girl we knew disconnected her phone and disappeared from our lives. She lived downtown in an apartment paid for by a man we weren’t allowed to meet, because he was loaded, and supposedly had a bad temper. I once heard a few girls whisper about it after a meeting as the air outside turned sharp, like a knife; some said she’d run away from him, others said she’d run away with him. I don’t remember if anyone put a poster up, but there were always posters going up in those days. In the car with our cigarettes, Kitty casually reminded me: “That’s just how it is sometimes.” As I drove, I gripped the wheel tighter, and the acrid smoke tethered me back to earth. More girls passed in and out of the meetings as my attendance grew sporadic. The most consistent of the attendees were those who were as old as the building itself. I’ve read on the internet all the elders were dead, but I know where they are. I’d seen them with my own eyes, and were I to go back now, I’d think they’d be there as I remembered, staring at the nipple piercing that would poke through my retail uniform when I hadn’t found the time to change.
I graduated from community college that spring, and transferred to San Francisco State University. Kitty and mine’s relationship grew strained; she felt like I’d up and left her after surgery, when she needed help. I felt held back by someone I then felt I barely knew, selfish and immature in a world I had not yet been tempered by. Naive enough to think I was anything but another girl who’d slipped through the cracks of the underworld we lived in. My name changed shortly after, and she’d never even told me her real name, for reasons I’d mull over the rest of my life. After I moved, we stopped speaking, then lost touch entirely. There are no photos of us together, but I wear my hair just like her sometimes, and most summers live in a white tank top and coochie-cutters with the oversized sneakers, just like I remember her.
My first pitch my senior year of college was a short story inspired by the things I’d lived through in the year prior. It got published soon after by an outlet that doesn’t exist anymore. I graduated, and my writing career took off on shaky legs. Those days in the meetings felt gradually more distant as all sorts of new voices came into orbit around me. I was not the only trans writer I knew, by any means, but I was often the first to be hired places, like the staff writing job I took at a now defunct feminist website. Considering the site’s editorial inclinations, I was never directly pressured to write anything I was uncomfortable with, but I often felt diminished by readers and the culture of late decade digital news media into the role of a long suffering transsexual. I wrote about my experiences with rape, and violence, and manipulative doctors. It felt, to many trans writers at the time, that budgets were always just big enough to accommodate near boundless stories about the worst things any of us had ever experienced, or thought about ourselves. The industry more broadly saw this “op-ed” culture slowly erode traditional women’s media, but for trans writers like myself, it was the only sort of culture any of us had ever worked under.
Through this extractive emotional mining process, a set of tenets were established for the newly transitioned on social media and abroad. They were inscribed on stones weathered by the violent winds of change across this country: always hate the way you look, no matter what, because your body is wrong and a prison for you alone. To be a trans person is to suffer, and know an unending pain which will most likely kill you someday. Dysphoria is forever, and hormones will not cure you, just alleviate the hatred you feel for yourself. Hormones, likewise, were for the privileged few, and should you take them, you will be irrevocably changed forever, after which you might continue to hate yourself.
Whether anyone actually believed these things is a mystery I choose not to linger on for very long. Sometimes, it felt as if the very nature of transsexuality had been co-opted by people who hated themselves, or the world I’d come to love so dearly. That’s a cynical take on something I lived through, but it’s hard to emerge from an industry that valued being the only person to ever suffer in a 1500 word essay they were paid $300 for and think very highly of it, or those who welded themselves so completely to the great wheel that ground everyone else to dust.
I got out from under one cycle, and married myself to another. In recent years, I’ve gone on to birth my own sorts of children, who come to me with fantasies they’ve been taught; sublingual estrogen can’t kill you, if you can’t pay for surgery don’t transition, every girl should have a starchy black a-line skirt. They ask me if the dysphoria ever goes away, or why I still do electrolysis, 10 years in. They wonder if subcutaneous shots are less effective at developing breasts than going intramuscular, or if the pinprick of blood at the injection site means they’re going to die. Still, these are routine questions in the tranny factory, where I sometimes find myself dissociating. I don’t smoke Marlboros anymore, so I tether myself back to earth with the reminder that, after such a long decade, I love myself. I look in the mirror and I see a woman, not a man, or someone who used to “be one,” as the girls so often say. Hormones worked, and cured me of just about every bad thought I’ve ever had about myself. Flippant probably, but I never thought I was a boy, and I didn’t like the person who had to live half inside that body.
The least hormones could have done, and did, was make me somebody else. There was no guarantee, of course, and if those girls had never reached so firm a hand out from across the pasta laden table, I’m not sure I would have ever met her, or liked her very much. Perhaps I’d still have ended up the same: a bitch, if a bit stupider.
Though we were transients to each other, they’re still with me, and in the new girls I bring up from the ennui of youthful self importance — even against my will. We all come and go as the pendulum they summoned before me swings back, and forth, and back, and forth. That’s just how it is sometimes.