make sure to include Twitter links in recap

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / nevada_annotations.md

[Steph is Maria's cis girlfriend.]

> She acts like she's into it. She's thrashing, hands at Steph's wrists, pulling. Not that hard, although <u>Steph is probably stronger than Maria</u>, so it's not like Maria could 

less probable than Imogen Binnie would like us to believe

> Then it's Maria's turn. She already knows she's going to fake it. Maria's relationship to her body, it's a mess, she can barely get it together to be naked in front of anybody, much less get off with someone in the room. You'd think it would be impossible to fake it, with junk like Maria's got, but you can. Maria knows some stuff about faking it. One time somebody told her that when she came in their motuh, they could tell she'd come because when that pre-<u>come</u> stuff turned into regular come, it got saltier.

I thought the noun was [spelled differently](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cum#Etymology_2)

> People tend to assume that trans women are either drag queens and loads of trashy fun, or else sad, pathetic and deluded pervy straight men, at least, until they save up their money and get their Sex Change Operations, at which point they become just like every other woman. Or something? But Maria is like, Dude, hi. <u>Nobody ever reads me as trans any more.</u> Old straight men hit on me when I'm at work and in all these years of transitioning I haven't even been able to save up for a decent pair of boots.

that you know of (& James will, in Part 2)

> But when she started working there, she was like, Hello, I'm a dude and my name is the same as the one that's on my birth certificate. Then when she had been working there a year or two, she had this kind of intense and scary realization that for a really long time, as boring and clichéd as this is, but for as long as she could remember she had felt all fucked up.
>
> So she wrote about it. She laid it out and connected all these dots: the sometimes I want to wear dresses dot, the <u>I am addicted to masturbation dot</u>, the I feel like I have been punched in the stomach when I see an un-self-conscious pretty girl dot, the I cried a lot when I was little and don't think I've cried at all since puberty dot. Lots of other dots. A constellation of dots. The oh man do I get more fucked up than I mean to, every time I start drinking dot. The I might hate sex dot. So she figured out that she was trans, told people she was changing her name, got on hormones, it was very difficult and rewarding and painful.

really

> There's this whole thing now where <u>rich</u> young white people like Maria colonize Brooklyn history because in these messed-up, post-modern times everybody is desperate for something real

is this code for class? Maria works in a bookstore

> She doesn't hate trans guys who are working on the fact that they've acquired male privilege outside the queer community, but also in a weird way inside the queer community, especially in the way that their presence tends to eclipse or eliminate or invalidate that of trans women, so they're working on it and starting conversations about it and <u>being accountable to trans women</u>.

/r/GenderCritical would "love" this book

[Steph has disclosed that she cheated with Kieran, a trans man.]

> She probably doesn't even hate Steph. Like, as a couple they are fucked, and obviously Maria sucks at changing things her life that she really needs to change. Such as: she totally needs to break up with Steph. But for real though, Steph rules. She and Keiran, y'know, that sort of thing just happens sometimes, especially in a queer relationship, right? And it's not like Maria never fucked Kieran while she was with Steph.

what

<u>what</u>

> Maria's been <u>mentally outlining a zine</u> about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.

ARTISTS SHIP

> He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn't come. Maybe he did.

what does this entail, exactly

> Turns out Piranha texted Maria last night, too. Fuck. Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She's a good friend. But last night she was like, <u>Dude</u>, where are you? Maria texts back: Sorry <u>dude</u>. Hang out soon?

interesting choice of address

> Maria used to have a pretty strong body, back when she was an energetic little college kid who looked like a dude and <u>journaled obsessively about gender in top secret notebooks all day every day</u>.

!!! [I did this, too.]

> She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It's fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg's and <u>write for two and a half hours</u>. As the sun is coming up, no less.

<a href="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg"><img src="/images/nevada_annotation-moleskine-ethic.jpg" width="240" style="float: right; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>

maybe I shouldn't doubt her work ethic

> She has another sip and opens her notebook, <u>one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers</u> Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.

❤ ✶ Moleskine ★ ☆

> She doesn't actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles.

I take back what I said about work ethic

> Maria was <u>this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes</u> she'd met when she'd been telling everyone [she was a] straight dude too

[Underlined without comment.]

> In one of <u>Michelle Tea's</u> books (maybe The Chelsea Whistle?) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it's like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria's like, I'll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it.

who has a blurb on the back cover of this book—<u>quid pro quo</u>?

> She buys a small coffee and gives the girl her driver's license to get a computer. It's weird but <u>nobody has ever once given Maria</u> shit for the gender on her license, not in the <u>five years</u> or whatever that she's been presenting F but still an M in the eyes of the law.

that is surprising—is this detail autobiographical?

> No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the Internet, but so if everybody, so it's not very interesting.

so true

> She doesn't post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they're trans look up to her. It's kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren't for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.

it's even worse for gender-dysphoric males who don't buy the "trans" framing

> Her name is Julia Serano and like most figureheads, she's very smart and sweet and right-on and <u>almost entirely unproblematic</u>, but her acolytes totally get obnoxious, taking her writings as doctrine.

high praise

> I know, Maria says. I just ... I've been thinking about trans stuff, like, all the time, and I don't feel like I can talk to anybody about it, because <u>I totally fucking hate everybody else who's trans</u>, and I don't want to deal with it.

I know the feeling

> But she's on the couch, in her work clothes, with a bottle of organic red wine because she knows that <u>estradiol and non-</u><span class="extra-underline">organic</span><u> red wine don't mix</u>

somehow I doubt this

> Maria reads so much that <u>she assumes that one day she'll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two</u>

unfortunately, it doesn't work like that ("assume a novel")

> <u>Rain rules</u>. She's all ebullient, and weirdly <u>can't wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again</u>.

I remember those days

> On top of which, <u>you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned?</u>

better than me

> On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It's not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there.

yes

> She gets a three-dollar drip coffee and gives the barista her license. She doesn't look at it, but she's <u>got dyke hair so she probably wouldn't care if she saw the M</u>.

TERFs are a minority of dykes

> She's been trying to get into it but she can't focus. It's a <u>story about a girl in New York</u> who's a knight, and she's friends with a dog, or something. <u>It's weird. She feels like you could just flip to a page and start reading. There's no plot.</u>

yeah, <u>those</u> books, right

[Steph is reminiscing about her relationship with Maria.]

> But it turns out that <u>using your partner basically as a sex toy to get yourself off</u>—suspending disbelief and convincing yourself that she's hot for you, that she's into it—is even lonelier than never getting off.

<u>usually</u> it's the trans woman in the relationship doing this—author projection??

> <u>Who knows what Maria is hot for, what kind of kinks she has</u>. <u>Maria herself probably doesn't know</u>.

yes, who knows??

> No matter how clear Steph has been about <u>the fact that no kink could possibly be too shameful to admit</u>, even something horrifying you'd never actually want to do in real life, Maria won't fess up to anything.

well, I can think of <u>one</u> ...

> One time Steph observed that Maria tends not to be very performy, and <u>when she is performy, it's almost always for herself</u>, not for anyone else.

★ ♡ [[I'm like this](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/#narrative-optimization), too.]

[A description of James H.'s girlfriend, Nicole.]

> When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to chruch when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
>
> She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn't want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn't work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off, but no luck. At the last second they'd turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt. 

a novel about Nicole would be better than this one, but Imogen Binnie couldn't write it

> It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. <u>Hair to his shoulders</u>, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed.

check

[Part 2, Chapter 5 describes James's autogynephilia.]

this chapter is <u>so real</u>

> <u>It's not like James is proud</u> of the porn that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He's tried. He's still trying. He tries most nights.

try being proud?

> One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. <u>It's stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific</u>, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn't science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.

<u>yes</u>

> If you're a straight guy who's into the idea of being turned into a girl there's not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably.

[TODO: cry emoji]

> Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and <u>he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan</u>. He's just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.

Jenny Boylan who married a woman & transitioned at 42? You might have more in common with her than you think!

> This is how James knows he's an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.

so real

> That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn't jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o'clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely even an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have <u>a fetish that you can't even do in real life</u>, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?

[Underlined without comment.]

> As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she's like, That kid is trans and <u>he</u> doesn't even know it yet.

★

> Because if he's being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn't processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.

★

> He was like, I do have the crdit card slip, maybe I could do some kind of hacker shit with it if I was a creep. And if he had the time and energy and focus to learn to do hacker shit. On some level he's been meaning to learn that stuff for a long time. So.

no one does anything in this novel

> The air conditioning in Steph's car isn't great, but it works. The whole car <u>feels like maybe a Platonic solid</u>

I'm not sure I get this metaphor

> That's the obvious reason that she flipped out and bought a bunch of drugs that to be honest she is too wimpy to even fuck around with, and then tried to disappear, and it's why she keeps charging her cell phone, <u>reading Steph and Piranha and Kieran's text</u> and thinking, yeah, tonight, I'll respond to that when I stop to eat I'll definitely let them know that I'm not dead. <u>But not doing it.</u>

I was less shitty than this during my psychotic break

> The central thing here is that Maria is really good at being trans.

<u>that's</u> the takeaway?!

> Yeah, Maria says, The problem with the Internet is that most of the trans women who manage to transition and still be dirtbags or punkers or weirdos or dykes or radicals or whatever stay way away from those people, too, and there's this narrative of 'deep stealth' that makes it seem like maybe we don't exist or we stop being trans but actually what happen is that we keep living our lives and being dirty weirdos we just—I should only speak for myself I guess, but I just got bored of talking about it.

HSTS resentment trope

> Okay sorry, Maria says, Let's not talk about capitalism or anarchism or anything except I do want to say that those things ended up being totally essential to my understanding of being trans and feminism and my location and the things that suck about being trans.

she's bluffing—Maria is not theory-driven

> James thinks, like, yeah and you're a heroin addict? And like, you were inevitably unhappy with your life because you're trans, right? Meaning, transition doesn't work. But what he says is, It took you a month to drive a couple thousand miles?

good catch on James's part—that's like ~65 miles per day

> I was like, Piranha, man, why the fuck aren't you fuckin rich, you are a genius, I said this kind of through tears, and she was like, Uh, Maria, I'm not rich because I'm trans and because I'm a woman. I was like, Oh yeah.

Martine Rothblatt has more fighting spirit than that

> He looks down and his body is all scrunched up, knees to his chest in the little passenger seat of this little car. He's pretty tall, which is <u>important for a lot of reasons</u>, but he's making himself tiny.

Maria said he wasn't tall (p. 177)

> But yeah, she says, Steph rules and is smart and good at what she's doing—she's definitely the kid who kept her principles. She works at fucking <u>Callen-Lorde</u> when she's not at work!

apparently, the New York analogue of Lyon-Martin

> Oh you just don't know? James says. Like nobody cheated on anybody and you didn't just stop having interests in common and you still liked all the same movies and you just looked up one day and you were like, Well see you, I think I'm gonna steal your fucking car and drive it thousands of miles to fucking Star City Nevada for no fucking reason?

brutal

> Here's the thing, Maria says. Nobody pays attention to J. Michael Bailey any more. He's just some dude who wrote a book about how trans women are perverts, which is an easy thing to get a press to publish. You'll never go broke selling regressive 'common sense.' But his body Kenneth Zucker is still a big deal. <u>He runs this clinic in Canada</u> and advocates like—

not anymore, thanks to the likes of you

I guess the <u>Archives of Sexual Behaviors</u> is still kind of a big deal

[James has stolen Maria's drugs and ditched her.]

... that's it??

That's the whole book?!

WTF