Way back, when I’d first googled all this stuff—how do I know if I’m really trans? and should I transition? and transition regrets—much of what I found was deliberate misinformation. It was planted by TERFs—trans-exclusionary radical feminists, an offshoot of feminism that wasn’t actually feminism anymore, but a hate group. “XX = woman,” they said, apparently having flunked Human Physiology 101. Two X chromosomes made you a woman no more than a vagina or breasts did. TERFs saw everything through a lens of hate and ignorance: they called trans men traitors to womanhood, and trans women rapists in dresses. It was a caricature of feminism, a veneer for misandry. It took months for me to sift through their bullshit and understand that vulnerable trans folks were prime prey for any nut with a chip on their shoulder.
Sometimes, I thought, Ingrid flirted with the fringes of TERFism. Her most vitriolic essays suggested that gender was socially constructed. That the differences between men and women were invented and performed, like roles in a play. Dress equals submission, pants equal dominance. An age-old system of social hierarchy that we’d confused for biological truth. All that made us different, she said, was what was between our legs, not our ears. “Masculinity” and “femininity” were made up.
Except that didn’t explain people like me. People so miserable in our birth bodies that we must either change or destroy them.
If masculinity was made up, why did it feel so right to me? Why did femininity feel so wrong? Why did I feel an overpowering need to alter this body from the inside out, not just my name and clothes and hair, my superficial expressions?
Why did starting testosterone feel like waking up from a deep, two-decades-long sleep?
It’s all in your head, Ingrid had said. Patriarchy taught you to hate femaleness. That’s what causes your gender dysphoria.
Resentfully, I thought, I don’t hate femaleness. I hate that it was forced on me.
But things were changing now. Whatever the origins of dysphoria, transgender rights won legal recognition. Trans people gained public visibility. Maybe I could use my voice to reach trans kids struggling with their identities, too. Shelter them from predators and liars. Show them what a self-made man looked like.
My phone rang, shrieking from the other side of the gym. I’d set it to priority. Only Ingrid.
And Ingrid never called.
When I answered she said, flatly, “Come home now.”
“What’s up?”
“Just come home. We need to talk.”
“Inge.” I cupped the phone closer. “What happened? Are Mina and—”
“They’re fine.”
The coldness in her voice unsettled me. What could be so wrong, so awful she couldn’t say it over radio waves?
What else but the one thing I’d been dreading and seeing everywhere?
“On my way.”
In the car Armin didn’t speak, but our silence was brotherly, close. Sometimes I worried I’d grown to loathe men, like Ingrid. That I’d exiled myself into a gender I couldn’t stand. We were the ones who did most of the hurting, the destroying. Men wrecked the world and women picked up the pieces. Armin was guilty, too. He’d hurt Laney and Blythe and Ellis. Hurt us all by extension. But beneath the baggage of gender he was simply human, like me. We fucked up. We tried to be better.
Progress wouldn’t exist if we never fucked up.
At my apartment building, the windows were dark but the curtain twitched and fluttered like a ghost. Inge met me in the front hall.
“What’s going on?” I said.
She shut the door and locked it. Knob, dead bolt, burglar lock.
“Ingrid?”
She gave me a stark blank look, unreadable. Then she took my hand.
“Let’s sit,” she said.
I let her lead me to the sofa. No lights. In the shadows her paleness was ethereal, almost glow-in-the-dark. All I saw was the shine of her eyes.
“You are creeping me the fuck out, Inge.”
“Where’s your gun?”
My spine hardened. “Why?”
“Just tell me where it is.”
“Not in the apartment.”
“Good.” Her thumb moved over my knuckles. “You said if this ever happened, I should make sure you didn’t have access to a gun.”
Now I knew, for certain, what this was about.
I began to stand.
Ingrid tugged me back. Surprisingly strong, but I was stronger.
We rose together, entangled. She was taller than me, thinner, that lanky, boyish build I’d so envied. In high school, in the weird hours after midnight when she lay on the floor of my bedroom in her underwear and a faded tee, the graphic fragmented, indecipherable, my hand floated toward her as if someone else controlled it, traced the straight lines of her hips. I’d kill to be you, I had said. She’d rolled onto her back and stared up at me. Why can’t you see how pretty you are? she said, and a wildness in me reared. I pinned her wrists to the floor, knees astride her waist. I don’t want to be a fucking pretty girl. I want to be myself.
Ingrid lifted her chin, gave me that expressionless stare she was so good at. Empty beauty, untouchable.
“Let me go,” I grated.
“No. I know what you’re going to do.”
“So let me do it.”
“If you kill him, you’ll go to jail, you idiot.”
“I don’t care.”
“You do fucking care.” She wrenched my arms, hard. “They’ll put you in a men’s prison. Do you realize that? You’ll be everybody’s bitch. Don’t be stupid.”
My muscles tensed, firm as stone, but I refused to use my strength to overpower her. “Let go of me, Ingrid.”
“Not till you promise you won’t go after him.”