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...
Sex Objects
The skirt was a Home Economics class project. The hem ended up uneven, the waistband was a joke, and the pattern of green and black checks stretched into fun house mirror waves over my hips. It was too tight. But I liked that. I liked the press along my belly. I liked how I had...
In the Company of Others
They drag us raped girls up here in front of the freshman class, we have been taught to regurgitate our stories and so we do that now, our penetration, I said no, but, he kept going, spilling out of our mouths and onto the stage. It is their fourth day of college orientation. One year...
Writing Trans Characters
When I was in my early twenties in the early part of the aughts, I gravitated towards anything with a transgender character. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the bizarre zombie flick and Guitar Wolf vehicle Wild Zero, The Kink’s “Lola,” Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild...
A Balancing Act
As a memoirist, I often write about my family. I don’t worry too much about offending the people I write about for one simple reason– they’re dead. When you die, you lose the chance to object to what people say about you. I don’t know if I even could write as candidly as I do...
Liner Notes for the Debut Album From the Band We Never Formed
For M, J, C, and S. Track 1 There was that time we almost died, which is to say every day because that’s how life works, but in particular this is about the night we took the back way and then the dark shortcut around the back way, and the road went downhill and farther...
Lessons of the Body
Algebra 101 There’s X and there’s Y, those star-crossed variables, exuberant arms yessing the heavens in their crazy equation in front of U and every 1 causing I, upright and uptight, to whisper to fat, unpopular O: That X, she’ll spread her legs for any 1. Sure enough, I has X’s number: Y goes into...
Go, Jim Dandy
Sandy carried a vial of patchouli oil wherever she went. We walked everywhere in our Converse high-tops. She was almost always restless; I was almost always bored. In October we hitchhiked 175 miles to find a stringy college boy I had a crush on. A carload of guys picked us up and asked if we...
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