I’m waiting at a straight bar for this really cute trans guy I have a crush on to show up for a drink. He noted, teasingly, that I was a “fancy bitch,” and so picked a craft cocktail bar that billed itself as a “whiskey and bitters emporium.” Unfortunately, the only mixed drink I tolerate is pineapple juice and spicy tequila. The bartender, a dimpled woman with envious curls, eyed me with curiosity when I ordered it, and then said “on the house” when I began to rummage through my purse for a loose ten. I knew why the drink was free, but just in case I didn’t, the bartender said that she’d seen me around and I was a really interesting person. I thought my crush would understand my irritation at this: like, please, I already know I’m trans, just let me forget it for a second while I try to be a girl on a date with a boy. But when he arrived, he didn’t get it. A free drink was a free drink, and she didn’t give him one.
Now he wants to know why all the trans girls in Seattle are so angry, act so traumatized. “It’s not like you’re a bunch of child soldiers. Your parents weren’t killed in front of you.” He asserts that even when something nice happens, like a free drink, trans girls get triggered. Like everything is a wound, everything is trauma. He starts talking about this trans girl he met a few months ago; how all she did was bitch about AFABS and encourage cis scum to die. He wanted to be her friend, but she called trans guys Aidens, and did things like pick up all her meals drive-through, because she was convinced people inside would stare at her or misgender her. He describes the house this girl lives in—a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking each other to biblical levels of drama over the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3, all the while telling each other how shitty the world was away from each other, until they so confused micro-aggressions for deep violence that they walked around with knives in their boots and canisters of mace dangling from their purses—and I exhale with frustration when I realize exactly which girl he’s talking about.
Two feelings rise. I don’t want to be categorized with Lexi. I want to be appealing to my crush. So I tell him I’m not like that. I’m not angry all the time, much less armed. But internally, I’m thinking, of course trans girls all love and fuck each other. Who else will? When I first learned the term brick for those square never-will-be-passable trans women, it was auxiliary to an explanation for another term, masonry: as in brick-on-brick love— only bricks get stuck to other bricks.
Except what do you do with the meanness of the word masonry itself—it was other trans women, the only ones that bricks could supposedly trust, who came up with that hilariously cruel slang. Brick-on-brick betrayal. But we have to understand each other well to be so cruel.
Most of the cruelty I’ve experienced has been inadvertant, the kind that comes from getting trampled so often that inevitablely someone steps somewhere sensitive. My first boyfriend after Sidney was a married man who fell in love with me accidentally. He could not see past his own bafflement at his attraction to see me well enough for anything like intentional cruelty. We met in hotels or he came to my studio apartment after work, and his cruelty, like his love, came accidentally. Once, he took me for a weekend in a fancy hotel in Portland—the Nines—where the Los Angeles Lakers were staying. When I came out of the shower, buoyed on a carpet of steam spilling into a hotel room designed in a modern style—no door, only a frosted glass divider between tiled bathroom and lush bedroom—I stood naked with my back to him, combing my hair and heard him murmur, “You’re so beautiful, I feel sick.” I looked at myself, then his reflection in the mirror and saw it was true. I was beautiful and it hurt him. I doubt he ever complimented his wife that way. His wife did not possess the kind of beauty that triggered a desire that made him disgusted with himself. My kind of beauty does not trace a path to stable relationships, a dining room set from Crate and Barrel, a Thanksgiving turkey with his folks. He had no conception of what to do with my beauty other than choke on it.
My friends who date women have it just as bad. Once in a queer bar, I heard a cute woman in a leather motorcycle jacket joke about her gold star status—she’d never once touched a penis. My friend Zoe had been drinking G & Ts for an hour before that, working up the nerve to ask this woman out. I found Zoe fifteen minutes later, outside the bar, soaked from hiding in someone’s dew-covered hedge on 15th, where she had cried softly in frustration.
“Yeah, that’s transphobia,” my crush agrees, “but not trauma.” He glances at my now finished drink, and I take it as a rebuke. Go pay for the next one of those. The more I try to explain, to list the tiny grievances that added up to an intolerable day in my life, the more I sound unhinged. A man hissed at me on the bus. A bunch of teenagers loudly discussed whether I was really a guy. A girl I only knew on the Internet left a suicide note. The cashier at Whole Foods smirkingly called me “bro.” The TV at the nail salon, playing soundlessly, featured some nonsensical ghoul that I realized, with a shock, was someone’s idea of a trans woman, someone’s idea of me. The guy at the local corner store revealed that he knew where I lived and shrugged when I asked how: everyone around here knows about you. And now, I get irritated at one thing: a free drink, and I sound crazy complaining about that, right? Some total loony acting traumatized ‘cause a bartender tried to be kind.
My crush sighs and pulls out an ace. He knows people that have actually been raped, have actually been beaten—hell, half of the trans dudes he knows have been, and they aren’t paralyzed with anger, convinced they’re constantly persecuted. We’re talking real Trauma, not someone whispering about them on the bus, much less the burden of free drinks. To which I know I can probably come up with some of my own friends’ real Trauma, but I’m too affronted, so I just shriek: THE WHOLE WORLD MONITORS AND MOCKS MY EVERY WAKING MOMENT!
Needless to say, he and I do not hook up. He leaves me to my free drinks and my tinfoil rage hat.
When he’s gone, I miss Lexi for the first time.
