Detransition, Baby

And now she was gone, but the imprint of her hands remained, so that he could never forget her.

The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

“So you detransitioned into a mansplainer, huh?”

“I want to drive men crazy,” Iris said in her customary arch manner. “I want men to suffer. I want a man to love me so much he murders me. I want to die because I’m loved too much for him to tolerate my existence.”

Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone.

She decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while willfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other’s genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realize that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they’d be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? It’s not that Reese thinks her desire to dress up reflects some authentic self. It’s just that, unlike bros, she’s willing to call dress-up time what it is.

Maybe, gender aside, he’ll be a good dad.

Masculinity had always been what allowed Amy not to feel

Radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists have teamed up to insist that trans women are all pedophiles, that such predators can’t be trusted around children or in women’s spaces. Every year, the list of murdered trans women, most of color, grows longer. Among those cases, the number of victims who were misgendered in their own obituaries is greater than the number of victims whose murderer has been identified.