4trans
John was a sixteen year old boy who wanted to become a girl.
As a result, he spent a lot of time on trans message-boards, where people tried to game out how they’d look if they actually transitioned. If he did transition, he wanted to be pretty. He wanted to pass. He did not want to be stuck in some liminal state, where he was always ‘clocky’. He wanted to be a girl who was so feminine that nobody even suspected she was trans.
And John really suspected that wouldn’t happen for him, because he was already tall and just seemed very masculine. Some people had distinctively masculine facial features that, he knew, definitely prevented people from passing—those could be altered with surgery, maybe (but how to afford it?). Then there were also features that were ‘clocky’, like broad shoulders and narrow hips. And if you had these ‘clocky’ features then you always just seemed vaguely mannish, you couldn’t really be feminine. You might pass some of the time, but if people found out, they’d say, “Oh, that makes sense, because of her hands or her shoulders” or whatever they’d clocked.
He hated himself and his body so deeply. His room had a mirror on the closet door, and he spent hours looking at it, taking pictures. Then he would run them through various image programs and try to transform them, so he could picture himself as a girl.
And John’s family would not be supportive. They were Catholic, religious. And he just knew they wouldn’t be into this idea. Like, a guy at school was trans, which was a problem because it was a Catholic school, and the diocese said you couldn’t use pronouns. And John’s parents had wondered why this guy, at school, couldn’t wait until eighteen and do it all in college. And John had argued with his parents, saying where is safe to do transition if not in high school? And John’s mom had gotten kinda prissy, with pursed lips, saying, “It’s all new to me, sorry.”
And they wouldn’t be supportive. It wouldn’t be like some kids, where the parents sign up the kid at the clinic. It wouldn’t be like that with John. The whole idea just exhausted him, and it made him want to kill himself.
If he knew that in the end, he would pass and could have a happy, normal existence, then he would fight things out and do it. But if he was just going to be trapped in some in-between state, where he couldn’t get a job or safely use the bathroom, and…and he just didn’t have a good life, then fuck that.
When he asked these questions on some message-boards, he really got attacked. The girls would be like, “You have to want it. People give up their homes, their families—you have to want it. If you’re worried about your safe, middle-class life, then yeah, that is something that you risk when you transition.”
It would be such a big thing to transition. Like, if he told his friends he was trans—they wouldn’t see him in the same way anymore. Although…he doesn’t exactly know how they see him now. He’s nerdy. He likes to play video games. He doesn’t actually have that many close friends—not the way he’d like. He eats lunch with some people at school, but he never sees them on the weekends. He’s shy about messaging people. Like, you just send someone a message? Out of the blue? About what? He felt so invisible and unloved and just not exceptional at all really.
And then he imagined himself as a beautiful girl who actually had value, because of her looks. He knew lots of guys had fetishes for trans women—he’d sleep with someone who had a fetish, whatever. He’d do whatever someone wanted, so long as they wanted him. The idea of someone valuing his existence just seemed so bizarre, so out of his realm of experience, that it was reason enough to transition.
Maybe he wasn’t trans after all? Like maybe he was just a piece of shit who wanted to be special. It was definitely an idea he had considered. He spent so much time in school looking at these girls who were ethereal and beautiful, they glowed with an inner light, and they often had friends and always had somewhere to be. Even the worst girl’s life seemed better than his own.
But of course he didn’t imagine being the worst girl. He didn’t imagine being ugly, whatever that meant to him. And he hated that. Even in his own mind, he had internalized this voice that called him out for his own thoughts, for…for wanting to be pretty. For feeling like maybe it would be bad to be ugly and to be clocky.
He just felt this toxic feeling of hatred, mostly towards himself, but also in part for the other trans girls on these forums. Fuck these bitches. Like, seriously, whenever he wrote asking for help and wondering whether he might ever pass, he’d just be written off as some doomer. There was a subculture of trans people on 4chan who were really depressive about the idea of transition—they claimed it almost never worked out—and every girl on every other trans forum was so contemptuous of this ‘4tranner’ or ‘doomer’ subculture that it was impossible honestly express any doubts without getting dogpiled.
Fuck all of these bitches. God, he hated them. He was a human being. He just wanted to be loved and…and to be reassured that it would be okay. And whenever he managed to get up the courage to write something, then somehow it didn’t meet some obscure code for how you were supposed to write about being trans, and…and he just got punished, dismissed as a bad person, a problem, who needed to be beaten until he was afraid to express the bad thoughts anymore.
But he knew one thing. If he ever did transition, he would tell it like it was. He wouldn’t just pretend like everything was easy and you never had doubts and…and…he just wouldn’t be such a horrible bitch to young trans people. That’s what he knew! If he transitioned, he’d be different.
Years later, in college, he went to an informed-consent clinic: a gender clinic that’ll give you estrogen even if you’re not female-presenting and don’t have a psychologist’s referral. The moment he started taking estrogen, he realized yes I am definitely trans (a common occurrence for trans people, where the moment they take hormones, there is a sense of rightness that obviates all doubts).
He changed his name and his pronouns.
And what she realized (I’ll start using different pronouns for her now) was that transitioning didn’t alter your essential self. She never had the option of being some idealized man who was tough and confident, just like she never had the option of being perky and beautiful or whatever she’d really wanted to be, when she imagined being a girl. You took estrogen and you took new pronouns, but you were still yourself, which was quite deflating.
Oddly enough, even as she was having this realization, she did actually change quite a bit. She got a lot more confident and outgoing. She learned how to text people if she wanted to be friends with them, learned how to work hard in school and get good grades and pursue professional opportunities.
She did not think she passed, but it was hard to tell. There was an intermediate stage of transitioning, when people definitely saw you as a woman-like person and gendered you appropriately, and then you just didn’t know if they perceived you as being trans or not. A lot of people claimed it didn’t matter, because anyway men and women were supposed to be equal—it didn’t even matter if you were a woman, so why should it matter if you were a trans woman? That’s why, in practice, her transness didn’t come up that often.
But that didn’t mean she passed. She thought most people could probably tell she was trans.
It was really hard to date. It was so hard. God, romantic rejection was a horrible experience. To be rejected from a job or from school, it was nothing compared to your whole person being rejected. And romantic rejection was so ritualized, like you just had to subject yourself to it again and again. And she’d never really dated in high school or in college, so she had no foundation to compare, no baseline experience of anyone liking her.
She would never treat anyone the way she got treated. Some of it was definitely because she was trans—she had the very common experience of men matching with her based on her pictures, and then immediately unmatching when they took a closer look at her profile and saw that she was trans.
But when she complained to cisgendered friends about this, they said it was hard for everyone. Nobody found dating to be easy. Whatever. The point was, she told herself that she was better than the men (and some women) who toyed with her feelings. That she would never treat another person the way she was treated.
When she was around thirty, she finally found someone off a dating app. And with this person, Navin, it was immediately different, because this person was a good, genuine person.
That’s all it took. If you just seemed like a human being, you were already so different from everyone else. And that human-ness was the quality that Simone (her new name) had always possessed. And a lot of people had hated her precisely because of her humanity. They wouldn’t say it, but they were repulsed by her aliveness, her authenticity. They had wanted something different instead, something plastic and manicured.
Simone had gone through life wondering, “Are people really so horrible?” Like when she saw who people dated, and…then how they treated the people they dated, it was really very revealing. Most of her single friends would never date a trans person, for instance—some of them even said it. So fuck them. If they were lonely, they deserved it (but of course she couldn’t say that, because they were just expressing a valid preference).
Anyway, with Navin she felt proper love feelings. Just like in the books! What a relief to experience it after all these years. To know it was possible for her. Like, it’s so simple, you just meet the best person in the world. And, because they are the best, they recognize that you too are the best! They recognize the excellence in you that you recognize in them.
And other people, who didn’t recognize that excellence, well yes it was a matter of personal preference on their part, but fundamentally those people were no good. They were not as good as the person you actually met--the best person you’ve ever met in your whole life, like meeting a celebrity, like if you met Ryan Gosling, imagine you met someone like that who is just really exceptional. And now imagine that exceptional person recognizes something in you, and they say, “You’re the same as me.” In fact, they’re even surprised that you want them, because to them you’re the Ryan Gosling!
And that’s what love was like.
She was relieved she’d gotten bottom surgery. She’d certainly considered not doing it, because she was worried about the risks. But it was nice to take her penis off the table. Because, you know…Navin was kind of a normal guy. Yes, he was extremely accomplished at his job (in the tech field, where Simone worked too), but really he wasn’t that different from her. He probably had some fantasies, just like she did. After all, when she, Simone, was masturbating, she certainly thought about really weird scenarios. She didn’t want to do those scenarios with Navin, because she was tired of scenarios, tired of any relationship that wasn’t normal.
Still…she loved him, and she would’ve been happy to fulfill his fantasies if he wanted (within reason)! But if she’d had a penis then certain potential fantasies that he might’ve had (like being penetrated by her) would’ve been difficult for her not just physiologically, but psychologically. So it was best to take that off the table.
Simone didn’t mind if he fetishized trans women (though there was no evidence he did), but she was glad that they couldn’t do anything in bed that would interrupt her (perhaps illusory) belief that to Navin she was just a woman.
Because, honestly, it made no sense that he was with her. She had interrogated him a few times about whether her gender was something he thought about, and he claimed it was a total non-issue! He was bisexual, and when they’d matched, he thought her transness was interesting, but not a factor in whether they dated.
This was insane to her, because she thought that Navin was so attractive and could certainly be with a cute cisgendered woman if he’d wanted to.
“No,” he said. “I am definitely very rejectable.”
“I just feel like…many cisgendered women would want to be with you. You know…objectively. Like someone you work with must have a crush on you…”
“You don’t think someone you work with has a crush on you?” he said.
“No,” she said.
“Well then we’re the same,” he said. “Like, it’s the same situation. I was single too. I had bad luck too.”
“But you’re so much better than me.”
Anyway, I, as the author, could try and spin out this scenario endlessly, describing each of these people in more detail, to see whether or not it was true that Navin really didn’t have any other options. I’m tempted to do this, because I (as the author) feel like it is extremely unusual for a cisgendered man in his thirties to be in a monogamous relationship with a trans woman. Personally, I feel like there must be something else going on! Not to mention, as a sidenote, if you’re a cis man who is willing to be monogamously partnered to a trans woman, then you could be with a woman who is so hot! Like, easily a ten out of ten! If you’re a cis guy who’s willing to bring a trans girl home to your parents, you could be with the hottest woman anyone has ever seen. And Simone really wasn’t hot like that, so why was Navin with her, when he could probably do better.
Simone was paranoid that Navin wouldn’t want to be exclusive. She was very against open relationships. She was trans, she had obviously gone on dates with a few men who were doing some open thing. But she hated it. Not for her. She was clear about that with Navin, and he felt the same! He was like, “Dating is horrible. Why would I want to keep being on some dating app, sending messages, getting rejected, when I already have a girlfriend? No. Monogamy is the best.”
Anyway, having a boyfriend honestly made Simone very exceptional. It was so chic, having a boyfriend, Other trans people suddenly loved her. She worked in tech, so there were a fair number of trans people at her office. They mostly hadn’t wanted to know her before. Now they felt so insecure, because she had a boyfriend, and they probably told each other than Navin was trans himself and would transition eventually and that’s why he was with her, just to imagine what it would be like.
Simone honestly would have no problem if he transitioned himself—she’d love him no matter what he looked like—but she would hate if he wanted to open their relationship later.
“I would hate that,” Simone said. “Like…I don’t know. I would hate it. That would feel so horrible, oh my god. And I’d probably let you talk me into it, just to avoid losing you.”
“N—no,” he said.
“Like, let’s imagine we are married,” Simone said. “And…you suddenly realize a lot of other women would sleep with you. Honestly, lots of men would sleep with me too. But I don’t want that.”
“Lots of men would sleep with you?” Navin said.
“So many!”
“And…you would do that?” he said. “When you were single?”
“Like, if they were good,” Simone said. “If they were nice. Which some of them were. It was nice to feel wanted. But I don’t know…it was usually a bad experience, in the end. You didn’t have anyone like that in your life? A hookup?”
“No…” Navin said. “Like…I don’t know actually. I don’t think so.”
“It’s just not a good experience when you’re sleeping with someone, and you have a lot of fun, and they’re single, and they’re looking for someone to be with, but for some reason it’s not you. Eventually, you’re like, ‘Why not me? What is the actual reason?’”
“That sounds horrible,” Navin said.
“And these people tell you some stupid, self-serving story about just not feeling a spark. Or whatever. And I used to believe in that story, because I had never felt what you and I have. But now I realize that I could’ve easily felt it for some of those guys. I could’ve felt it.”
“You think?”
“If they had loved me. If they had chosen me, then sure. Because then they would’ve been exceptional, and I would have recognized that. Like there was something missing in those guys, to make them want to use someone else like that. They had really been cheapened and coarsened somehow. It’s such common behavior. It’s so common. It’s just wrong. I can’t explain how it’s wrong, but it is so wrong. I don’t know…it’s such a comforting illusion, to let them tell you that the chemistry isn’t quite right. But with you and me, we always had it, right?”
“Yes, I knew you were different immediately.”
“Because I’m great. And you’re looking for someone great. That’s the problem, these guys didn’t want a great person—they wanted someone pretty.
“You’re pretty.”
“No…it was about looks. And me being trans didn’t help. But that’s all it was. When they eventually found someone, it was just someone prettier than me. They thought they could do better than me.”
“But we’ve all…huh I don’t know. We’ve all felt like…like the match wasn’t right somehow with someone we were dating?”
“Sure,” Simone said. “Maybe. In my mind, I really give everyone a chance. But with you I really wanted it to work. There was something extra.”
“A spark?” He said.
“Maybe.”
This whole conversation was post-coital, they’d just had sex for the second time that night, and now it was like 1 AM on a Sunday morning.
Being with Navin just felt really intoxicating, like you were drunk or on mushrooms. It was whatever profound experience you think you’re attempting when you take substances, that’s what being with Navin was like. He was really smart and engaged, but it really went beyond that. He was just good.
When she was a kid, she’d read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—two books she’d really liked. Those books were about really exceptional people, and, in the worldview of these books, exceptional people were drawn to each other, romantically. But in practice, being ‘drawn to each other’ didn’t seem to involve fidelity and marriage. Like, in The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand rescued Dominique Francon from this terrible marriage to a loathsome mediocrity named Peter Keating.
And, when they were married, Wynand treated her so much better than her first love interest, the architect Howard Roark, ever had! Wynand seemed to need her in a way that Roark really didn’t.
But somehow that was no good, in the worldview of these books. Like his need was bad, and he felt it was wrong to make a claim on her, just because he needed her affection, and eventually she left him for Roark, precisely because Roark didn’t need her.
Simone didn’t feel that way at all. You fell in love, you recognized that the other person was great. Then you got married. And you stayed together forever. That was the dream. Even if you were unhappy, you just stayed. She would never, ever leave him, no matter what. Like it was so hard to find Navin—this was definitely not ever going to happen again. So if she left, it would just be loneliness and isolation.
Anyway, right now at this moment she loved him. It did seem crazy! How could this possibly happen? It just seemed so unlikely. When she was a teenager, thinking about transitioning, she had always wanted, you know…some kind of bourgeois domestic life. Like…marriage. A mortgage. Kids. And with Navin, she could have all those things!
She would definitely have accepted something different. She would’ve dated a painter, somebody who didn’t have a job, but those kinds of guys didn’t want her! She’d been rejected by so many men with no job. They didn’t even give her a chance to like them. They discovered she was trans, and then they unmatched.
Women…weren’t that much better. They just did it differently. But okay, no that wasn’t fair. Women definitely did it differently and treated her better, but still…they didn’t want her. That’s why she was still single.
I know that I, as the author, am supposed to invest her with some superficial qualities to signal her immensely charming and attractive personality. Like…what? I could say she likes The Strokes. Or Kurasawa movies. Or volunteers at a soup kitchen. There’s a bunch of signals that movies use to indicate that someone has hidden depths. But…in truth, what made her lovable was that she was still alert to the world.
This alertness was something that all children possess, but which most adults have lost. That alertness by itself would be exceptional, but what made her unique was that she also saw the darkness in the world, and still didn’t turn away, lose herself in comfortable illusions. She was almost alone amongst human beings in that she was both clear-eyed and open-hearted.
Navin wasn’t quite like her. He hadn’t gone through the crucible, but he was a simple person who was very intellectually oriented, very driven by his work. Most of his soul existed inside these very complex technical problems (involving AI) that he dealt with every day, and this intellectual outlook made him a bit inhuman, but, because the essence of humanity is so monstrous, his inhuman quality actually made him softer and more reasonable than most men.
The problem was that Simone had been a man, so she understood what men were like.
“Navin,” she said. “There will come a time when you are fifty years old. And there’ll be someone who’s…thirty-five. And she is really very hot. Maybe she’s Indian” (Navin was Indian). “And…I don’t know. You’ll wonder. Like…if you leave me, it can happen again for you. But for me, it can’t happen again.”
“What’re are you talking about?” he said. “What is this talk? You’re bisexual--some hot they/them on your team. They just idolize you--You’re fifty, they’re thirty-two. You’re an icon to them. Why couldn’t that happen?”
“No…” she said. “No.”
“But why not?”
“It just doesn’t happen though…does it?” she said. “You know when I was a girl, thinking about transitioning, people would be like “There’s a good chance you’ll be sad, bitter, lonely and reviled. And that has to be okay.’”
“Why would that be okay?” he said. “That would be horrible. I don’t understand this online culture.”
“No, no it’s totally a thing,” she said. “Like…it’s a thing. I don’t know, where did you hang out online as a teenager?”
“Uhh…”
“You must’ve encountered some incel stuff about sexual market value, right? Like you’re not thirty years old, working in tech, hearing these ideas for the first time from me!”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I definitely had fantasies that if I made a lot of money, that all these girls would be sorry they’d ever ignored me! But then I did actually start making a fair amount of money, which probably most people in Silicon Valley can tell, but lots of women just didn’t seem to care. I dunno. I’d match with someone who made a lot less than me—like someone doing very entry-level Q&A—and they’d be so dismissive and ignore my messages. Somehow it didn’t matter. Like, I could give someone a pretty good life. You know…you and me could have children. It’s doable. I have looked into it.”
“Paying a surrogate?”
“It’s doable is all I am saying. The world needs children. The point is…I just feel like…I wanted, you know, something different from what most people wanted.”
“But there must’ve been some image in your mind of who you wanted, and it probably didn’t look like me.”
”I have no idea what I thought I wanted,” he said. “But when you and I talked, I just felt like…this is good. I don’t want anything besides this. What else would I want? It would be absurd to want something else.”
“That’s how I felt too,” she said. “And…and I just wonder what I’d tell myself at sixteen. And I guess I’d say, you’ll still be yourself. Which is something people definitely told me, but in a harsh, negative way. They’d say there’s no escaping from your life! But I personally would put it differently. I would say, ‘You’ll still be yourself, and you are good.’”
“That’s wonderful! What a simple message to—“
“But I understand why nobody said that to me as a kid, since it’s not something you can really say to a stranger online.”
“No?”
“Because most people are not good. Many trans people especially are not very good. They are hardened and cruel, and the truth is that their lives will be difficult, whether or not they transition, and they don’t actually deserve good things. But you can’t tell that to people either, because…because it’s not their fault. You know, these forums are full of a lot of people who are in a lot of pain. And in many cases they won’t survive that pain. What’s there to say? That’s the nature of existence. It’s horrible. Life is bad.”
“That is so dark!”
“Yes, I can say that now, because I’m happy,” she said. “Because I have you, and it lets me face the truth without getting upset.”
Although she had overcome her past, it had still left traces upon her. All these misfortunes lingered in her mind, gnawing at her psyche, shaping her worldview. For instance, she was very aware that if at sixteen she had started dressing as a girl, her parents probably would’ve sent her to some all-boys boarding school. Luckily for their relationship, she spared her parents that choice. But even now they still thought…well…they thought that she was disordered. They wished she was different. They weren’t proud of her.
Despite everything, she still believed in God and his love. She believed in Heaven. Surely it had to be real! She didn’t know if other people really believed in it or not. They claimed to believe, but then they didn’t act like they did. Anyway, her strongest belief was that if you killed yourself, then you went to Hell. If you rejected life on Earth, then you didn’t get a good life afterwards, because you had failed.
Simone believed that life on Earth was bad and that it was transient and…and kind of illusory, but it was still important somehow, and there was no real escape. You just endured. But of course that wasn’t something you could tell a sixteen-year-old.
