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.

She was dating somebody when she came out as trans. They broke up and then she was dating somebody else, and then they’d been broken up for a week when she started hanging out with Steph. She’s never been a single woman, she’s only been a woman in the context of relationships. Those relationships have been acting as cushions, as safety nets, enabling her not to have to figure out who she is, what she needs from her life. Anything.

Nevada has stuff to say about relationships. Of course a lot of focus is internal; the relationship with oneself. This is the easiest to recognize in the book as it is a trans book and what is transitioning but a massive battle with our socially constructed self-image? It’s how we are able to overcome this internal battle that molds our approach to external relationships.

The kind of abstract puzzles that make us up are never easy to solve. For starters, our pieces are not jigsaw-shaped and placed on a table. They’re inside us, invisible to others and only conveyed through the limitations of language and symbols. Another challenge is that there’s no edge pieces and no picture to work towards. Only our emotions guide us, and well, we all know how reliable emotions can be. On top of all that, sometimes we don’t even have all the pieces we need. Whether they’re buried by trauma or obscured by external social and culture forces, we can be missing the crucial links needed to put everything together.

So we’re all kinda lost and feeling incomplete and looking for answers; looking for our missing piece. Like that Shel Silverstein book. Except with more self-destructive behaviors and instead of trying to looking on the sidewalk, we sometimes try to find it in relationships. When we’re missing major pieces, it’s easy to look at relationships as the missing piece. When we do this, we become entangled in someone else’s incomplete puzzle just as they risk becoming entangled in ours.

This isn’t to say that all relationships are like this or that seeing yourself in a partner leads to stunted growth. It’s more that if you’re using the relationship as a tool instead of involving yourself in a shared experience, that’s when the problems begins to arise.

Maria began her transition in a relationship. When that ended, she jumped from relationship to relationship, always following her need to find a new person to find herself in. Every relationship was a means to an end, a relationship for the sake of having a relationship, and thus doomed from the outset. Maria was looking at her whole in another fractured person.

This isn’t just for her romantic or sexual relationships because she had a tendency to use everyone in her lives. Which is something Piranha called her out on. Maria’s not intentionally doing this of course. It's not like Maria is an unempathetic manipulator. She’s just broken and seeking wholeness and using the methods that we’re taught by society.

After reaching her epiphany after her adventure of self-discovery and grand theft auto, she does begin to find personal growth and try to use her wealth of experience to change the life of a poor little egg stuck in some shithole in Nevada. And James found his mirror, seeking the reflection that would make him whole. He was more than happy to let this “hot, weird dyke trans girl delivered by Divine Providence” become his missing piece. To complete him and solve him in the way that he could not.

Until he freaked out, relapsed, stole $200 of heroin, and ditched Maria to return to Nicole and use her to perform the masculinity he thought was meant to define him.

And now to tie this back to my own experiences, I’m going to have to do something I’ve been dreading. I hated James the first time I read the book. I was Maria! I was the quirky lovable trans girl that figured it out and James… I get that he’s figuring it out but I was never a loser like that. Sure I stumbled a bit on my journey but… okay I give up. I have to be honest with myself and that means I have to confess this. Here it goes.

Before I knew what HRT was, before I admitted to myself I wanted makeup and femme clothes, before I even realized that I liked to use gender neutral nicknames because I hated my deadname, before I even fully understood what trans was outside of harmful stereotypes, I was James.

Okay, not exactly James. No one is a carbon copy. I wasn’t a stoner in some nowhere town in Nevada, I’ve never worked at a Walmart, and I was not the target of nasty rumors about having a bed made of boogers. That I’m aware of. I wouldn’t have stolen heroin; I was pretty straight edge back then and subliminated my dysphoria into making music, drawing, and rp chatrooms instead of drugs. Oh and don't forget the video games. Can't forget those.

But what about the rest? Ghost apartment with no apparent personality? Check. Apathetic outlook on my potential and future? Check. Difficulty connecting with others on any serious level? Check and maybe still like this. Pathetically “consuming” fetish "material" late at night before ashamedly crawling into bed? Um.

:susie-blush:

[REDACTED FOR TMI]

Anyway.

Like James, I had disinterest in relationships. I had one extremely short one in high school that didn’t go well and then I already gave up. I just sunk away into the warm comforting glow of the internet. Online friends are friends right? Who needs meatspace friends? Who needs to be in a relationship?

Well okay maybe disinterest isn’t right. It would be more accurate to say I was scared of being exposed when I didn’t even understand myself. How could I let someone into my internal landscape when I couldn’t navigate it myself?

As I said before, we’re often searching for those missing pieces in others. James didn’t say no to Nicole when she asked him out. Deep down he wanted to be seen, even if on the surface he believes he doesn’t. He wanted to Nicole to make him feel the way he was supposed, to not be so “weird” or feel like an outcast. This was a maladaptive relationship and set for failure but these are things better to recognized in hindsight.

And it was the same for me. Eventually I left my cave and did my best to paint over my James-ness because I was tired of being lonely and isolated. (Un?)Fortunately for me, the bar for “cishet” relationships is so very low. Feral and stunted as I was, existing outside of my own head for even just a bit was all that was needed to eventually have someone ask me out. I was scared but also touch-starved and maybe just maybe things could work out. The answer is no, it would not work out. (That particular relationship was quite damaging but that’s a story for another time.)

After that fell apart, I sorta entered my Maria era, at least in terms of relationships. I was tired of hiding, I wanted to be seen (even if I wasn’t fully aware of why or how), and wanted to be “normal” and fit in with everyone else. I didn’t return to the cave but started a dysfunctional cycle of entering new relationships with anyone that asked me out, feeling incomplete without one, and trying to find the answers in others instead of within. They’re interested in me, certainly they see something in me and so I can learn something about myself through them, right? (Answer is nearly all of them had they own gender stuff they were working through and on some level maybe doing the same thing I was doing. I wish it led to enlightenment but...)

And since I’m demisexual but didn’t know what that was yet, this created an additional harmful dynamic where I was entering relationships with people who were attracted to me but I was not really attracted to them, just subsuming myself into whatever personality traits they had all just so I could feel a sense of normalcy. Sex kinda sucked because there was a hormonal drive so stuff did happen sometimes I was also not very interested in initiating so they always felt like I "didn't find them sexually attractive" which I guess also something James dealt with.

Between demisexuality and my impenetrable emotional walls I was never able to really connect in a way that build a healthy, worthwhile relationship. Then I would eventually catch feelings after building some emotional intimacy but by then the damage had already been done, I was too emotionally unavailable for too long, and the relationship had ended. Which sucks because once that switch has been flipped for me the feels are intense and now I had to sit with them alone. Those feelings of rejection made me lonely and desperate for another relationship and so I was caught in a cycle.

It's no surprise that finally confronting my inner conflicts and making steps to understand and work with myself coincided with an ability to establish healthier, lasting relationships. Did I mention therapy is cool and good?

I guess it’s kind of scary, she says. I guess watching your girlfriend become someone else, more of a grownup, but still stay herself, while meanwhile you’re still working the same job you always have, at the same level of broke with the same people who knew you years ago and knew you when you transitioned. When you see the same people every day that you’ve seen since before you transitioned and you already went through this massive social and physical change, and you’re afraid to really even consider changing or evolving in any way, because you kind of had to have all this bravado, to act like you really believed in yourself in order to transition.

When I started writing this, I intended to just do a quick “she just like me frfr” post, maybe comment on the gender stuff that I relate with now. After my re-read, what I related to most was not really the gender stuff. I had already got everything I could out of that. What did jump out is how Maria and James are continually stuck in their lives, lost on how to move forward. This is something I struggled with before and after starting my transition and even now.

The first time I read this book, I did it right after I made one of the most important breakthroughs of my life. I felt like I figured it out. I was on my way to happily ever after. And in that mindset, I missed the most important (and oft repeated) message of the book:

It’s never done.

When we finally finish our internal puzzle we’ve been wrestling with, we can fall into a kind of complacency. “I did it, I figured out who I’m supposed to be, the struggle is over”. And in this static state, the defense mechanisms that once protect us from harm now sabotage our mental health, stunting any further capacity for growth. And this happens so gradually that it can be difficult to detect the problem. It becomes normalized. Once again we are trapped in a cycle.

There is no inherent set “solved image” to the puzzle, but that doesn’t mean we don’t try to create one anyway. This is our expectation. Rarely does reality meet us here. And so we try to find new ways to achieve our expectation, and one source is looking in others. Of course it's not there. Our puzzle is in flux, our pieces are in flux. Just like everyone else.

People are complex. We are not just one puzzle to be completed and find fulfillment forever. Our puzzles are comprised of infinite pieces and we can build outwards forever as long as we are aware we can do so. And realizing this also means that it’s easier, not harder, to move forward, because now we are free to build ourselves up non-linearly and in increments. Just like creating any work of art.

At first, I wanted present femme. As femme as I could manage, as much an act of rebellion against masculinity as any inherent desire. I watched all the tuts I could on hair, skin, makeup, fashion. This was my true gender and I wanted to get it right this time. I struggled at first (I mean, of course I did, I was trying to catch up with a cis woman’s years of experience in a span of months). But I eventually got the hang of it and it was great! Until it wasn’t. Being femme is work. Being femme is pain. And after some time it felt like more work and pain than I was getting back in satisfaction.

That’s a normal thing to happen to women. If I had started this earlier in life I wonder if I would’ve felt more euphoria and less exasperation? But I was starting to become dissatisfied socially too. I had left one rigid social role behind, one with asinine codes of conduct and toxic rules. Now I’m in a new role, a paradigm with its own bullshit codes and rules, feeling just as trapped and I’m hating this too. It feels even worse because this is something I chose, and if I don’t like this either, then am I wrong about everything?

This is where self-doubt set in. This is what I wanted. I was so sure. Shouldn’t I be enjoying this? Okay, yeah, the answer could be as simple as GNC or :flag-non-binary-pride: and yeah I likely am non-biney but at the time it didn’t feel that easy. After I fought so hard to go against everything that was expected of me and do this really daring thing and upend everything in my life to chase it, I only felt disappointed that I didn’t put all the pieces together after all. I also wanted to avoid using non-binary as a stopgap like I’ve seen so many complaints about so that prevented me from exploring it.

But maybe I was using trans woman as a stopgap to non-binary :thonk-trans: Should I have read more theory? :nerd:

Anyway as strongly as I felt about being a woman before my transition, my reality was falling short of the expectations I had set for myself and I was only able to move past it by adopting new ones and creating a new “solved image” that fit with was now. And now I know that if I ever feel this way again, I can always just make another goal. I can make infinite goals and I never need to let myself be defined by any single one. And fuck it, I’ll make a new gender while I’m at it! I’ll make a new gender for EVERYONE THAT WANTS ONE

Weirdly, the less emphasis I put on putting on the femme, the more interested I was in doing it. Maybe I was just forcing it too much? Or maybe I really am just fully in-between, a pendulum rocking from one end to the other. Vers, switch, demisexual, why not gender too?

And finally, I’ve run out of things to say. My post is finally done. If you made it this far, why did you waste your time reading this slop?? thanks for reading and I hope you got something out of it.