Work Text:
There are three rules to being a man, the type that is cruel and bold and deserves to live.
Don’t cry. Stay in control. Toughen up. And one final, unsaid rule: don’t fuck up.
I aim my intention the way I aim my guns, and I am my intention the way I am my guns—violence, an act of gender, an act of affirmation centered around what I cannot escape. My wardrobe is muted and smells of fish. I hide my left shoulder, grazed by a bullet in camp, hot white-pink meteor blaze now surrounded by shiny shooting stars all around, some still raw and red and angry. This, too, is gender.
Standing in the shower is a chore, still ice-cold drenching and two-minute from the habits of the military. My hair is getting long, which it has been for the past five months, and it’s still foreign, tainted with the flavor of my martial upbringing. I’ll need to cut it eventually, back to short and efficient though the scratchiness brings with it the discomfort of well-worn sandpaper and steel wool as carpet.
I have a scar across the back of my left ring finger, some sort of binding, a wedding band of irony. I was maybe nine years old, hands flying up to my face as a ceramic mug shattered across the floor and the counter, eggshell-white and the color of my veined scleras. One of the shards caught my hand and left a little gash, just deep enough to scar but not enough to stitch. The slightly jagged line is clear on the tanned backs of my hands, like the marbling of tile. When I look at it for too long the voice in my head becomes my father’s.
Thursday I head to work. It is not any special day, not any special week, just a day in which a new passenger arrives in the corner of my eye, and I see her sitting on the other side, hand braced on steel pole, bracelets jingling in time to the rattle of the tracks. Her eyeliner is slightly uneven, her hair not quite pinned properly in place, her teeth uneven in all the places mine are, which I only notice because she smiles as she chats on the phone, scarred back of her ring finger curled around the case of her phone. Mason, Mason, her mouth seems to sound out, and by the train slides into the next stop she’s gone.
I can’t stop thinking about her, clinking beads draped around her wrist, bra strap peeking from wide-necked shirt, dangling jeweled earrings, little Z-shaped pin on the flap of her black-and-gold purse. It’s sexual and sensual in the way having a body is, a body that one owns and evolves within. My machine-smooth hands, grasping fish and paring knife, my well-oiled gutting, slip for a brief moment. My attention lapses. The index-side face of my palm bursts. I think red suits me just the same as nearly everything else does. My vision swims, mouth swollen with gore and salt, the sight enough to choke on though it’s not one I’m a stranger to.
I’m told to go home.
I wish cutting that blue-gray vein in the side of my hand, trailing from index finger to thumb, would've killed me, heart lacking blood to pump. I think about her on the way to the hospital, wonder if she bears the same gash in the space between fingers, hate her for the ring-finger scar that we share.
I get six stitches. It costs my dignity, next week’s groceries, and the taste of blood as my teeth clamp and catch my tongue. They have to stay on for two weeks, I am assured, and don’t mind the blood that oozes unless it lasts several days. I am violence and hatred. Fish swirl and bubble in my chest when I think about it, something painful and discontent. I pick at my scabs almost absently.
Don’t cry. Stay in control. Toughen up. Don’t fuck up.
At home I sit at my laptop and type into the search bar: i don’t deserve to be a girl. I erase the tab immediately, can’t even get myself to hold it in my vision for more than a second. I’m an ungrateful gay bitch who doesn’t deserve being a guy, let alone a girl. Despite this I open a new tab again: how to look like a girl
The space between my ribs tightens. When I press enter, something shatters within, a delicate cracking of eggshells.
Clothes. Makeup. Hair. My eyes are affixed, bright white glow numbing the sting lingering in my hand and pulsing behind my eyes, a subtle ache pulsing like a living growth. I don’t look away for another hour. I imagine my shoulder bleeding.
The next morning I shave cleaner than I ever have, the shitty red razor bumps a low price to pay for the best-worst thing I’ve felt in my entire life. I dig out tweezers and my half-dull eyebrow razor next, the white-and-blue plastic almost offensive to look at. I can barely recognize myself in the mirror, refuse to, because that can’t possibly be what I look like—a cruel imitation of that girl on the train. I should kill myself.
I change my earrings from the black studs I always wear to some gold hoops I’ve only had on once—nobody will notice, nobody will say anything—and head to work as always. I pretend not to be looking for that girl on the train. Nobody comes. I wonder if I imagined her.
My work is slower today, and I’ve just been put to the side, just weighing and serving and whatnot, but I can’t afford to stay home. I can’t stand to stay home. What if I go back to the computer again and spend another hour staring at internet stories of men becoming women? What if I sit in the shower and drown?
I have a bathrobe stuffed into the back of my closet somewhere, which I’d gotten somewhere but never really worn, tired of wearing and tired of washing. At home I get into the robe, dust streaks on the edges, but it’s really all I’ve been thinking about for the past four hours so of course I wear it. I wonder briefly if I’ll make it on time to my three p.m. class today.
Sitting in front of my slightly-too-short full-length mirror, I breathe shallowly. The robe almost looks like a dress if I stare right, so I stare right, and the back of my head feels light and swirling, little fish in a pond. I imagine my shaved legs under a skirt. Maybe I could be beautiful.
Before I know it tears are sliding down my face and neck and into the collar of the robe, salt lining the insides of my mouth, and I’ve just broken rule one, and there’s something definitely wrong with me. I think about you, Mason, you starting testosterone, your voice slowly changing now, the way you smile more when you’re wearing tall shoes and dark jeans and cutting your hair short. But then again, you smiled before, too. I’ve never been good. Fuck all that you deserve, Mason, because it’s something I’ll never earn, something I’ll never prove.
But I could never hate you.
I call you then, skin still damp and salty, eyes heavy, sitting on the floor in front of my mirror and trying to look away. You pick up too quickly. I’m breathing into the microphone and steeling myself.
“Mason, how did you realize you were ... a guy?” I ask.
I can almost hear you thinking, see what you might be doing, maybe with limbs slung across edges of bed or legs propped up against wall behind desk. You answer: “I guess it didn’t come that quickly. Sometimes it even feels unfamiliar to me, even though I’ve thought about it for a while. It just added up eventually, a little unhappiness here and there, something reminding me that everything might just be better if I could escape the label of being a girl.”
“Were there times you ever thought that you’re only trans because of what everybody else was telling you?” I don’t want to breathe. I pray you don’t ask about me. “How can you know it’s real?”
You pause. “Well, sure, maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to transition if I were in a different society, a different situation, but I’m not. I’m not in that alternate world where I’m happy with being a girl as the way I present. Just because I would want to be a girl in a different world doesn’t mean I’m not valid as a guy in this one, you know?”
And I don’t say much else of importance. I make it to my three p.m. class and shop for skirts in the back row, pretending not to want though I think I really do. My father’s voice screams from the ache in my stitches. I’ve got eleven more days until they’ll be taken out. Maybe my long hair isn’t too bad; the way it hangs over my ears seems to muffle the angry cries that carry in the flow of my blood. You text me: hey do you want to see some of my old clothes i have a bunch i found shoved in my wardrobe lol and for a moment fear fills me to my throat and squeezes, choking, but instead it just turns to something bubbling and anticipatory and carbonated, fizz burning in a way I can only describe as satisfying. I choose add to cart in my online shopping and pretend I don’t feel like a fraud.
Soon but not soon enough, I stare into the mirror, long skirt on, and smile the widest I have maybe in my entire life. She’s happy. She’s maybe even beautiful.