She gives him a look like he’s just stepped off a spaceship. “Oh,” she says finally, “I get it. You were giving me that compliment as a guy. You’re used to women acknowledging compliments like you’re a guy.”
It’s true. His compliments tend to have, at a minimum, the effect of being noticed.
She performs a gruesome parody of batting her lashes and clutching her heart. “My stars! Lil ol’ me?”
“All right, Reese.”
“You’re lucky I even agreed to come here. You’re not getting a boy-crazy teenager on top of it.”
“I can see that.”
They had first met at a picnic here. A trans lady picnic. He still had his apartment near the north side of Prospect Park. The one they had lived in together. Over time his memories with Reese in the park had been replaced by new ones. The places where he jogged, where he read by the pond, or watched birds—hoping for one of the red-tailed hawks that nested there, often settling for an escaped songbird, or, if hard-pressed, a swan. But seeing Reese reframes everything, conjures up the past.
He can’t quite figure out if she suggested meeting him here as a tactical move. Something to throw off his confidence. He can feel the lack of their prior intimacy—though whether or not that absent closeness is forever gone or like a child playing hide-and-go-seek, he’s not quite sure.
The rusty hinge of a grackle sounds from the trees overhead. He’s about to apologize, to say that he made a mistake and go home, when she offers him the ice cream sandwich. For the first time all afternoon, she lowers her guard, with something like a smile. “Look,” she says. “I played along a little. I waited with those other women and let you buy me ice cream like we were just another hetero couple out on our hetero Sunday date with the boringly hetero idea to go to the park. Now have some ice cream, I don’t want to eat all of it.”
He takes a bite, and she pulls it back.
“One thing I’ll tell you, though,” she says. “You move differently than before.”
“Move differently?”
“Yeah, you were always graceful, but you used to be so careful to swing your hips. You were a languid boy, who learned to move like a woman, who then learned to move like a boy again, but without wiping your hard drive each time. You’ve got all these glitches in the way you move. I was watching you in the ice cream line—you slither.”
“Wow, Reese, just wow.”
“No! It’s charismatic. Remember how Johnny Depp pretended to be a drunk Keith Richards pretending to be a fey pirate? You can’t help but be a little drawn in, like: What’s going on with that one?” She smiles at him and takes a lick of ice cream, mock innocent.
“I forget what it’s like being around trans women,” he admits. “That for once, I’m not the only one constantly analyzing the gender dynamics of every situation to play my role.”
“Welcome back,” she says, seeming considerably cheered. “You must have also forgotten that I taught you everything you know.”
“Please. The student surpassed the master long ago.”
“Girl, you wish.”
It’s like coming home, that quick “girl.” Something warmer and sweeter than the spring sun heating his neck and the ice cream lingering on his tongue. It’s scary-seductive, emphasis on scary. Start looking for that kind of comfort and he’s bound to make a fool of himself.
* * *
—
The temptation to beg for inclusion pulled at him every time he spotted a trans woman on the street, on the train. A stab of need for recognition by her. Most apostates must feel similar, whether Amish, Muslim, ex-gay, whatever.
Back when he lived as a trans woman, hardly anyone spoke about detransition. It was treated as the purview of conversion therapists and tabloid headlines: He Was a Man, Then a Woman, Then Back to a Man! The topic of detransition was boring—the reasons for it were never complex: Life as a trans woman was difficult and so people gave up. Even worse, to discuss the possibility of detransition gave hope to the lunacy of bigots who wished that trans women would simply detransition (i.e., cease to exist in any kind of visible, and hence meaningful, way).
He went two years as a woman before he met a truly detransitioned person. Amy was at a queer dance party with Reese and six other trans women. Defensively, they’d claimed a small corner of the room—a section then promptly quarantined for disinterest by the gays and trans mascs and cis women. So once again, the conversation among the trans women was the same as it always was at queer dance parties: figuring out new ways to complain how “We look fucking hot. Why is everyone ignoring us?” It was a topic that, as the drinks lowered inhibitions and standards, gave way to pairing off and hooking up with each other. Except at that particular dance, halfway through the monologues about being ignored, Amy couldn’t help but notice that they actually weren’t being ignored.
A plump man in his early thirties with a week-old beard had leaned in, and was laughing and shaking his head knowingly. Amy waited for someone to say, “Fuck off, chaser.” But no one made eye contact with him. Instead, they made space for him with an air of resigned indulgence. It was as if he were an apparition whom they all could see but no one wanted to acknowledge—not because the haunting frightened them, but because the ghost had a tendency to interpret any attention paid to him as an invitation to once again repeat the embarrassing story of how he’d died practicing auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Two obviously straight girls who had clearly dressed up in fishnets for the queer party and were about a decade or so younger than the man, brought him a drink. Yaz, one of the trans women, let her interest flick briefly toward them, but pulled it away when she saw to whom they delivered the drink: an untouchable so pitiable and contagious that even the giddy proximate cleavage of overeager twenty-year-olds had been marked verboten.
Finally Amy pulled Reese aside. “Who is that dude?”
Reese waved her hand. “Ugh.”
“No, tell me. Who?”
“I guess he calls himself William now. He detransitioned but still shows up to hang out with trans women occasionally.”
“Really?” Amy couldn’t hide her curiosity.
“Yeah. I guess he still shows up to group therapy and stuff. He’s…” Reese couldn’t find the word. “It’s just sad.”
When William went outside, Amy slunk away to follow him a few moments later. She found him half a block away, smoking a cigarette. “You’re William?” she asked.
William was quite drunk. Too drunk to speak in grammatical sentences. But his face lit up at her attention in a way that hurt Amy to examine directly. She watched his cigarette instead of his face. Tried not to notice the soft and pupal quality to his body. Here’s what Amy got from the conversation: He’d lived as a trans woman for seven years. But it was too hard. Too hard. He didn’t pass. He wanted to die. He was still a trans woman. Everybody saw it, no matter what he did, but since he wouldn’t say so, they couldn’t either. He had a good job now. Medical supply distribution. He lived on Staten Island with those two young girls. He drove them to the party tonight and helped them get dressed. He didn’t touch them, don’t worry. He just liked being one of the girls. The cigarette looped in his hands, inscribing arcs of red in the night as he talked. Amy focused on the tip as if it were writing secret messages just for her. The more he spoke, the more Amy understood the polite, unsettling disdain the other trans women had shown him. She wanted to be anywhere but standing there listening to him. Pity teetered on the precipice of disgust.