The transgender killer

Arwen was a sociopath who’d transitioned purely to conceal her violent male essence beneath thick foundation and false eyelashes.

Yes, when she was fourteen years old, she’d been a greasy-haired boy with a dead, lifeless stare. Andrew (her birth name) would often shoplift alcohol and then appear drunk in class. His teachers knew he was intoxicated—he often slurred his words and fell over—but they were too terrified to discipline him. This was a few months after the Sandy Hook massacre, so there were many discussions in the teacher’s lounge about Andrew potentially shooting up the school.

His teachers were correct to be afraid. He was often haunted by thoughts of murder. He was filled with this desire to hurt and destroy people, especially anyone who seemed happy. He hated everyone, with a wild, omnipresent hatred. But he hated pretty girls the most, so perhaps (he figured) that meant he was trans.

After a lot of thought, he concluded that he was either a murderous sociopath or he was a transgender girl. One of these offered the possibility of a normal life, so he decided to transition.

His family was not at all supportive.

What happened was so wild—his dad reappeared, out of nowhere.

This absent father who’d been gone for five years, came back just to push Andrew to the floor of the bathroom and shave the boy’s head. And this man didn’t go away. He settled down with Andrew’s mom—they fell back in love and started having sex again, just to make Andrew stop insisting he was a girl. Andrew’s school turned on him too. While he was a boy, he was mostly left alone, but the moment he started dressing in girl’s clothes, he was fair game, and he got beaten up most days, until he finally ran away.

Arwen (her new name) moved to the city to live with her great-aunt, the only nice person in her family. She attended a new school. She still got drunk every day, and she often had encounters with the police and with strange men, but thankfully her murderous desires were less intense.

She’d hoped that transitioning might feel natural, but, unfortunately, she never lost that sense of herself as essentially alien, somebody just wearing a mask. Transitioning was merely a way of changing the mask. When she was a teenage boy, people had correctly assessed her as a dangerous person, and this was really inconvenient. Now, as a trans person, people still feared her, but they feared her a lot less, and their reaction was honestly much easier to manage.

Then at some point she began to pass. Nobody could tell she was trans. And now people treated her as just a woman. Someone who was basically harmless. This was the best of all! She had succeeded! What a relief to move through the world without the burden of other peoples’ suspicion.

She got a job taking care of children, and she was frightened by how much she enjoyed this occupation. She worked as an assistant at a preschool, and to the kids she was just another adult. She invented all kinds of little games for them, and of course she had favorites—they were usually the strange kids, the outcasts—who swarmed to her, wanting to present a handful of rolly-polly bugs or to display their little Lego forts.

There was one boy who had a very blank affect. He never smiled, and he had no friends. Every day he played his own private little games. The staff at this school whispered that the boy ought to be ‘evaluated’ and everyone wondered if they should talk to the parents.

There were many kids at this school who needed to be ‘evaluated’. It was a worry at this school. Some kids were a problem, and they were bad, and because it was a private school, they had the ability to expel these kids if they needed to (though they didn’t call it ‘expulsion’). The staff at this school often discussed the ways that the bad kids ruined things for other kids, and how the school needed to find ways of guiding these bad kids somewhere else.

It made Arwen so sad, to think that there was something wrong with this little boy, who just liked to play by himself in the sand. There was nothing wrong with him, she thought. This little boy was good. And if society didn’t see that, then it was society itself which was bad.

Her ideal society was based on some mental image of hunter-gatherer times. And in this ancient village, they didn’t have the ability to ‘fix’ people. Instead, they just allowed people to exist.

And in this village, the men needed to hunt and count coup and kidnap women from neighboring tribes, but the little boy didn’t quite understand that. There was no point in fighting him or interacting with him at all, because there was something very alien in this little boy’s eyes, something unreachable.

So in this village, the men just left this little boy alone. And there was a woman in the village, who had a bit more wisdom than the rest, and she taught the boy to gather the right nuts and berries. She carefully taught him various tasks—normally considered women’s work—and he took to them with a frightening assiduity. And slowly, this little boy began to speak, because now there was something he cared about (plants). He went through the forest, collecting and taxonomizing thousands of plants and bringing them to her. And there were other people in the village who had bits and pieces of plant-knowledge, and they learned how to communicate with him.

Someday this boy would grow up and take a wife and do all the things that people were supposed to do. The little boy would never even conceived of himself as being different—he would be a valued man in the community, because he would only ever speak when he thought it was truly important, and people would respect this. Someday he would surpass (in social standing) many of the young braves he’d grown up with. Their powers would wane, while the odd little boy’s wisdom would only grow.

In the teacher’s lounge of this private school, Arwen spoke up for the little plant-loving boy, saying he wasn’t disruptive, and they should wait and see. And then she thought of her own life, and how, in her life, maybe there were people who spoke up for her—people who knew she wasn’t truly bad. Wise people like her great-aunt, who didn’t understand her journey, but knew to leave her alone.

When she tried to explain this insight to her roommate, Narcissa, the roommate said, “It is so criminal the way we pathologize these kids.”

“Yeah,” Arwen said. “Like…when I was fourteen I would break into peoples’ houses.”

“Okay…” Narcissa said.

“And I’d raid their cabinets to see if they had prescriptions.”

Now Narcissa didn’t speak, but Arwen was used to this kind of silence. She remembered it, from her childhood.

“And one time,” Arwen continued, “A kid’s mom got diagnosed with cancer. So I knew she’d have pain meds, and I cleaned her out. The kid got in trouble, because his parents thought he was selling the drugs.”

While she said this story, a bit of her old affect came out, that unblinking stare. And she could feel Narcissa—who had her own trauma—get uncomfortable and begin to creep away, to back against the wall.

“I should’ve been locked up,” Arwen said. “There was nothing you could do with me. Imagine living with someone like that? I literally just wasn’t thinking—I didn’t imagine even a minute into the future. I was like an animal. And there’s so many people like that. I don’t know that it’s about neurotypical or whatever. There’s just people who didn’t get the memo that we’re not supposed to do whatever we want, whenever we feel like it, even though that’s the most natural thing to do! I would say it’s more absurd that most people are willing to hold back, for whatever reason, from being cruel and selfish and bad.”

“But you were dealing with dysphoria.”

“Maybe,” Arwen said. “What’s true is that when you’re like me, you can transition. Regular guys can’t do that. It’s not really an option for them. But for me, it was an option, and I took it.”

“That’s a myth,” Narcissa said. “That’s the kind of thing right-wingers say about us.”

“It’s not a myth,” Arwen said. “I wish it was a myth. I wish there was a myth of this guy, this potential Sandy Hook killer guy, who transitions and becomes a woman, and he’s transformed, and then he’s safe and doesn’t kill anyone.”

“Because he was trans.”

“No,” Arwen said. “Because it’s a way of neutering him. Like, if Ted Bundy had chopped off his balls, he wouldn’t have killed those women. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been on estrogen, he wouldn’t have killed anyone. It’s true some trans people kill, but transitioning doesn’t make us more likely to kill. I doubt that if I’d stayed in my hometown, as a boy, somehow everyone would’ve been safer. I’d have shot up the school for sure.”

“Yeah…” Narcissa said. “I don’t know.”

After that night, rumors swirled through their community about Arwen. She heard, through the grapevine, that Narcissa was ‘uncomfortable’ with her. But Arwen didn’t care—she was ready to be done with that community. Narcissa left, and Arwen found a new roommate—an older gay guy, who worked as a hairdresser. His business was suffering some reversals, and he’d needed to leave his old place. He took lots of drugs, partied a lot—sometimes Arwen joined. She knew how to handle herself. She could stay up all night and come to work, easily. They didn’t drug test at her job.

Working at a school was horrible, because if they could tell that you loved the kids, then they would hold it against you, forcing you to cover other peoples’ sick days or to work late or to supervise a summer camp, and you’d do it…for the kids.

She thought a few times about leaving to become a nanny, but the idea of working with just one kid kinda make her skin crawl. Talk about sick—that was sick. To spend day after day with some kid who loved you, and it wasn’t even your kid, and then after a few years you walked away and never spoke to that kid again? That was sick. She knew one former nanny who said she still dreamed about the kid she used to care for. The job had colonized her dream life! That was sick. That was wrong. Arwen would never do that kind of job.

She’d love kids of her own, but it would never happen. People said, “Oh there’s adoption or surrogates.” But that would never happen, not for her.

And now in her community there was so much fear, people worried that someday the government would come, throw people in camps. And lots of people kept trying to advocate for themselves and to make arguments about how trans people were actually normal. But to Arwen this just didn’t make sense, because she was bad. The government should eradicate her. So for her, personally, this government campaign was perfectly logical.

Once, Arwen had told her story to a therapist, and the woman had said, “Why do you think that you changed?”

“I didn’t change,” Arwen said.

“But now you seem to move through the world with a lot less friction,” the therapist said. “You’re in less distress…you’re much more resilient than many of my clients, who’re often floored by circumstances not nearly as dire as what you’ve endured.”

“I just realized my life would be easier if I could hide who I was,” Arwen said.

“But it sounds like transitioning didn’t make your life easier. Not immediately. You lost your home…your family.”

“The only reason they didn’t kick me out sooner is that they were afraid of me,” Arwen said. “When they stopped being afraid, I knew it was working.”

“But it sounds like you were not particularly violent. And you’ve met plenty of men who’ve done much more violence than you did.”

“Good violence,” Arwen said. “The kind they were supposed to do, to keep people like me in line, and to drive us out if they needed to. I wish they’d beaten me to death. They could’ve gotten together and destroyed me, and then told tales about it, and that myth—how we stopped a potential killer—would’ve made them stronger. In fact, I bet they think about me sometimes, and they’re happy that they drove me out.”

“You really think that?”

“I know it,” Arwen said. “If you’d known what I was like back then, there’d be no doubt. I was a vile shade. The kind of person who inspires stories about changelings and vampires and werewolves and witches—the kind of person where you convince yourself there is something inherently other about them, so you can justify getting rid of them.”

“But you’re not like that anymore?”

“I hope.”

---

All Us Saints

A few months ago, I read Katherine Packert Burke’s All Us Saints. This book is about a family where the older brother, decades ago, murdered the sister’s friends during a sleepover. Later, the other siblings realize the older brother had some gender-dysphoric thoughts and behaviors, and they wonder if maybe he was a repressed transsexual. Then for some reason, every year on the anniversary of these murders, the whole family meets up at the murder house.

The first and third sections of this book are bottle-episodes about two of these family gatherings. It’s feels contrived and overly-dramatic, like a bad play. It’s just a ludicrous premise—why wouldn’t they sell this cursed house and never go back there? Because of that ludicrousness, there’s an aura of unreality that hangs around all the family sections and makes them hard to take seriously.

But this doesn’t matter, because the book has a genius middle section called “Intermission: The Monster Speaks”, where the killer brother is able to narrate his childhood story for himself. This section is about thirty pages long, and it is so good—it really crackles with life.

Anyway, the book had a very nuanced take on whether this killer brother was actually trans, but Burke didn’t allow herself to develop the thesis fully. So I wrote this story in response. What if instead of murdering people, that killer brother (or someone like him) had actually transitioned!