Maria has her first inkling that even though she’s worked out a cosmology in which a bunch of interconnected puzzle pieces of understanding about oppression and misogyny and transphobia and transphobic faux feminism and all the other things that make up the picture of why everybody always thinks trans women are crazy and stupid—she realizes that even though she’s built that up for herself, she might not be able to put all the pieces together for someone else.

When my egg first cracked in 2016, I felt at ease for the first time in… well, my entire life? After a lifetime of confusion and trying to solve the puzzle of myself, I had finally placed the last piece and saw the image for what it was. It was me. Really, actually me. Not the person I felt I had to be to live up to external expectations but the one that meets my own.

I was stoked to learn everything I could about being trans and queer so I steeled my courage and went to queer meetups and made myself known in the community. Just kidding, I searched a bunch of trans resources online and buried myself in them during dead time at work because I am a fucking :nerd:

I found book recommendations and immediately downloaded purchased them. Devoured them one-by-one in record time. Whipping Girl. Stone Butch Blues. How Sex Changed. Queer Phenomenology (I was coming off a philosophy kick). And of course Nevada.

The first time I read Nevada, my expectations were simple. I had just read a bunch of heavy books and I needed something easier to digest. I wanted something relatable; a window into the world I was so keen on climbing into. SBB is a good book but it can be bleak and I wanted to read a trans novel that wasn’t focused on the (direct) systemic violence enacted on trans people.

And, coming as no surprise to anyone, I connected.

Before I started HRT, before I bought makeup and femme clothes, before I thought of a name that fit me, before I even told anyone that I was trans, I realized I was Maria.

Okay, not exactly Maria. No one is a carbon copy. Then and now, I’m not poser crust punk in NYC, I’ve never worked at a bookstore, and I did not fuck Kieran. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a small, rural town where there’s nothing to do but heroin in the corn fields. I used to ride a bike a lot but that was more out of necessity than something I wanted for myself.

But her 3 stereotypes for trans women? Dead on. Unrepentant internet fiend? Check. Make myself as small as possible to counteract unwanted male privilege and be so meek that I might disappear? Check. Dug a well in my home where I can hold cis women captive to skin at my leisure? Fucking check.

Like Maria, I had a blog on Livejournal where I posted anything and everything with no thought or filter. I didn’t think I had wrote any trans stuff but when I went back to look over it, there was some indirect clues now that I knew what to look for.

For example I don’t think I’ve every used a male pfp in my life. And I never had anything positive to say about male experiences. And I mostly talked to women because I just couldn't identify with men.

Of course I still hid under that layer of that ironic edgy shit that all lost trans girls seem to adopt when they haven’t figured it out yet.

And like Maria, I hid away in books (and video games) as a child too. It was far less complex than trying to be a girl that doesn’t know she’s a girl pretending to be a boy when she doesn’t know what being a boy is supposed to feel like and she's always getting the acting wrong and getting mocked and humiliated for it.

When I figured it out, I wasn’t scared of being trans. That made perfect sense. But the stigma? That’s terrifying. It was, as Maria noted, that cultural oppression, the patriarchal aggression, that came from all angles to put us in that prison they built.

Like I’m not going to pretend things are perfect now. They’re so far from it. But the representation is much better than it used to be. Positive representation was so rare that I didn’t see anything trans-positive until I was in college. An entire childhood passed by where I was told I was wrong and I had to bend myself into impossible shapes to appease a society that doesn’t care about the pain I suffered doing so. But the pain promised for not conforming was promised to be so much worse. By the time I finally saw good representation, the worms burrowed so deep that I couldn’t even register it for myself. It took years before I was dewormed and healing.

There was so many things that resonated with Maria’s experience that this book was absolutely played a part in shaping the expectations for my transition. Which I mean, yeah of course, that’s why it’s considered a trans classic. And so returning to this book after 8 years I thought “Okay I’ll relive this, I’ll check off what matched, I’ll jot down what was different for me, and tada easy new comment for the mega”. But it didn’t quite happen like that. I mean, yes I resonated with the same points again. I found new appreciation for things she talked about regarding about how she was treated as a trans woman now that I have had the same treatment. I understand her fears all the much better. And every time she mentioned not taking her shot yet, I died a little inside, knowing the wretched feeling of being low on necessary hormones.

But this wasn’t what was grabbing my focus because I’m not about to start the journey, I’ve been doing it for 8 years (well on and off involuntarily at the start and middle). My understanding of gender as a concept has evolved, and my understanding of my own gender has evolved too. So in a way this time I could be free of expectations and find new meaning in the story, not just pick out what I wanted it to be.

Or maybe I’ll just be picking out what I wanted to see this time in my current mindset. Who knows.