The Longest Con
Whenever I’m too in love with somebody, I imagine him in prison—orange jumpsuit, laceless slippers, his days a humiliating routine of following other men’s orders. He’s been convicted of something cowardly, or neglectful. Not murder, but uttering and publishing, maybe, or accidental mail fraud. Something worse than failing to fall in love with me back,...
To Seize, To Grasp
The first one was not the worst one, although it brought the biggest shock: my infant daughter’s irises sought the edges of her eyelids, pried open by faulty synapses. Her arms bent into Ls, and her hands fisted at her face like a fetus. An alien staccato coursed through her limbs. What seized her was...
Eight Quarters
In his maximum-security prison, where I visit him for the first time, Kevin suggests that with our eight remaining quarters, perhaps we should try the photo booth. This is something he wrote about in his letter: how a photo would mean so much. I can’t keep the film copy, he wrote, but you could scan...
Bornstein’s Theory of Relativity
It was His Holiness, the XIV Dalai Lama, who put gender into a universal perspective for me. I attended a public teaching with him, last fall in New York. And now I’ve got me a whole new way to look at gender. The three-day teaching I attended bore the mesmerizing title, “Profound Wisdom and Vast...
Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb? Everybody.
The snow was falling as I climbed the long stairs. There, beneath the spectacular dome of America’s largest mausoleum, I found— nobody. No one except a single ranger from the U.S. Park Service, that is, whom I found quietly reading a novel. He looked up at me with an expression similar to that of the Knight in Indiana...
One Thing or the Other
They look at us as one thing or the other. We are eight transsexuals seated at a long table in the middle of a busy Outback Steakhouse carving up our steaks, a dinner group that gathers every Friday, the cast and location varying week to week. Get a group of transsexuals together and we stand...
Recesses
Some girls wrap a jump rope around my neck and drag me across the asphalt of the St. Bruno’s School parking lot. Jackie has been pinning me to the ground with the stones of her knees so she could kiss me… and now this. “They were trying to kiss me!” I tell the nun, as...
Mother’s Tongue
As the teenager stepped through the first set of automatic doors at Target, I was entering from the parking lot. For a few seconds we stood in the foyer area between the sets of double doors. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?” he asked, his lips quivering with joyful anticipation. In the mid 1990s, the sight of...
Seven Women Hold a Man’s Brain in Their Hands
In poetry class a student writes: “The heart is symmetrical.” “No it isn’t,” I say, too harshly. I know what she means, a few days past Valentine’s, but I’m trying to demonstrate how to be more careful with one’s words, or perhaps how to be more careful with one’s heart. I vow to set her...
Genderfuck
In the fifth grade, all the teachers divide you boy from girl and take you into separate classrooms. With the girls, you learn about periods and cramps and tampons, and everyone giggles. Afterwards, you all rejoin the boys, who are holding complimentary sticks of deodorant and laughing among themselves. You wonder what they learned, and...
Heathen, Slave, Woman
There was a time I hoped my prayers would travel from the Hebrew Academy’s makeshift synagogue in a Hartford basement to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. First, though, I wanted them to move just a few feet, out of the dingy cramped section where the girls sat and into the bright, sacred space I could glimpse...
Mea Culpa
I laughed at gay people. I did. I snickered at their crewcuts and sashay and flagrancy. I snickered at the way they bristled about their rights. I did. I accused them of inventing disco. I laughed at their thing for feathers and glitter and fragrance and form-fitting uniforms. I grinned at the epic extravagance of...
When You Knock on the Door at the Suburban Inn
You don’t want any surprises. Say, “Housekeeping!” Say it again. Louder. A man with a watermelon belly opens the door, and another sitting on the bed says, “Hello, little lady.” He stares at the box TV. A toilet flushes, and a third comes out of the bathroom, pulling up his zipper. “Want some help?” the...
Milk for Free
Item: “Did anybody touch you down there?” Down there, I understood, referred to the mystery below my waist, between my legs. A place where my mother said no one should ever, ever touch me. My mother asks me this question, nightly, as she undresses me for my bath, until I learn to bathe myself. What...
Transgender Day of Remembrance: A Found Essay
Compiled and arranged from the “Remarks” section of Transphobia vs. Transrespect research project (2014) “Trans Murder Monitoring results: TMM TDOR 2014 Update.” Brunete was beaten to death with a stick. The victim was shot by two men on a motorcycle in front of a motel. The victim was shot in the head. The suspected murderer...
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