Nevada Imogen Binnie Quotes

Eventually you can't help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

...nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what'll happen at work, I'd love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don't even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder.

It's fucking wild if you think about it, how well being totally checked out emotionally can look like normal American masculinity.

Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder.

James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they'd like to know: he ignores the shit out of her.

you can't be one of the people in a relationship if you're busily refusing to be a person.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it's obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

That’s what it’s like to be a trans woman: never being sure who knows you’re trans or what that knowledge would even mean to them. Being on unsure, weird social footing.

...she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized. If you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

Because shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone.

The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism become a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.

Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body.

Caring about Starbucks monopolizing coffee culture is for people who don’t have more pressing problems.

The problem is, how do you have some kind of emotional catharsis when you know you’re too old for it? The trick, of course, is rejecting the poisonous, normative idea that there is a Too Old For Catharsis. Or, really, a Too Old For Anything. But rejecting normative ideas about age is as hard as rejecting normative ideas about gender.

Coming out as trans was the first change she actually made to her own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against the grain because she felt like she'd die if she didn't.

So basically, I'm like, who the fuck are you Maria Griffiths? A fucking idiot, is who.

You're not allowed in the Special Moments aisle, Maria.

Maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear.

Good work last night, whiskey, too bad you can’t make sleep as restful as you make it deep.

The Internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad. Just over and over and over and over, with minor variations and the occasional cuss word.

It’s a problem, you grow up reading about punk and grunge and earnest dude rock in all the magazines andinternalizing the idea that artifice is totally bullshit, man, and we wear these clothes because they’re comfortable, not for any kind of fashion statement, and we’re just trying to communicate, not be cool, and then you transition and realize, oh shit, there is going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present my body and my actions. I am going to have to break the patterns of clothing and voice and hair I’ve had in place all my life if I’m ever going to be read the way I want to be read. Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het, and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Trans people are very often very funny. Jokes can be a defense mechanism, a trauma response; if you can make someone laugh before they remember that they hate people like you, you might get out of a 7-Eleven before they can hurt you.

She just knew that she felt weird – but literally every teenager feels weird. Who doesn't feel weird? All the music she listened to was about feeling weird. All the books she read were about feeling weird. So when she was seventeen it didn't seem strange to hang out with, like, a kid who was really into racism and another, a future truck stop mechanic, in a tent, with a ton of flannel and a bottle of Everclear or a dozen hits of acid. In a cow pasture. That was just, like, what you did. On one level you just went along with what was going on but on another you mythologized what a cool outlier you were and so you internalized a sense of your own weirdness as a badge of pride even as you emotionally dissociated yourself from it. Everybody cool is weird. This is how she mythologized her sense of being trans without understanding that she was trans.

It's like I got drunk all the time not because I'm a total addict but because it was a coping mechanism to deal with being unhappy

She’s also excited to be reading a book called Big Black Penis, which is about masculinity and black men. She holds it up high so everybody can read the title.

Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

The alleged ‘science’ of autogynephilia is about making up categories to understand why J Michael Bailey wants to bone some trans women but not others. It’s about framing trans women as men in order to understand deviant male sexuality, without ever looking at female sexuality.

I’m sorry, she always thinks, I learned to police myself pretty fiercely when I was a tiny little baby, internalizing social norms and trying to keep myself safe from them at the same time.

That stereotype about transsexuals being all wild and criminal and bold and outside the norm and, like, engendering in the townsfolk the courage to break free from the smothering constraints of conformity? That stereotype is about drag queens. Maria is transsexual and she is so meek she might disappear.

...your kinks aren't arbitrary things your brain comes up with. They're not coincidences from childhood that you fetishize. Or: they could be. But kinks are arrows giving you directions. If you're hot for being whipped, that probably says something about your relationship to guilt and punishment, or pain, or something... It's always complicated and emotionally volatile but there's also no reason to be ashamed of it.

...there are lesbian sex parties that happen in the city and how they will often have No Bio-Cock Policies, meaning, No Trans Women. Or, optimistically, Trans Women: Keep Your Pants On. Meanwhile trans guys are welcome to brandish whatever cocks they want. Kind of frustrating, kind of problematic... The term bio-cock has become shorthand for the fact that trans women aren't sexually welcome in any communities anywhere.

When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever.

Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.

Whatever. It was a Very Special Episode.

Sometimes it seems like being trans is the only bad thing that has ever really happened to Maria. Like she’s got a turtle shell to keep anything bad from ever happening to her, and with that shell there she can’t move. Probably what Maria needs more than anything is for something pretty bad but not catastrophic to happen to her. Maybe this breakup can be that thing, but probably not. It sounds like Maria’s already spinning it into an opportunity for self-mythologizing instead of for learning or growth or whatever. Which Maria will go on to talk about when she meets her own next girlfriend. Here is what I’ve figured out about myself, here is how emotionally honest I can be, here is how vulnerable I am. With cussing.

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they're at least as boring as everyone else.

There is this dumb thing where trans women feel like we all have to prove that we’re totally trans as fuck and there’s no doubt in our minds that we’re Really, Truly Trans. It comes from the fact that you have to prove that you’re trans to psychologists and doctors: the burden is entirely on your own shoulders to prove that you’re Really Trans in order to get any treatment at all. Meaning hormones.

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. And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade.

Like, okay. Do you know any straight, male-assigned men who kind of get it? Like, they try to be feminist, but they acknowledge that it is a complicated, maybe impossible thing for a man to be a feminist, so they're respectful of women, and give space, stand back, whatever. And it would be totally great except that it leads to them never doing anything? Like they just stand back, and, say there are some books that need to be shelved, the windows are all dirty, there are boxes that need to go outside, and some kid threw up somewhere. You will start, say, carrying the boxes outside, and then when that's done, you start mopping up the puke, and he is just standing there, so you're like, What the fuck! Are you going to move these books or clean a window? And they're like, Oh, okay, totally, in this very enlightened way that gives you space to fucking do everything, except they need you to show them how to clean a window, because they don't want to do it wrong? That kind of guy. I will admit: it's more complicated than that, right, I shouldn't be mean. Straight dudes have it kind of rough if they don't want to shake out their male privilege all over the place. But really? You don't know how to make a bed? You don't know how to fucking cook the onions and garlic before you throw in all the other vegetables?

It’s an annoying, predictable cliché, but Maria always sympathizes with the monster. If you had a conversation with her about it, though, and you implied that there were very obvious reasons, she would flip out on you. This is not the type of insight in which she is interested.

So it's actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn't like the hero until he's been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it's just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he's doing. It's a tough spot to be in, but also this is coming from an angry dyke who's also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kinda of misogyny.

When you’ve learned to dissociate defensively around cis people, and you spend all of your time among them, and when they frequently make it clear that you are right not to feel safe around them, you can forget that it is even possible to let your guard down. That you don’t necessarily have to be alone to feel safe. That it is even possible to feel safe.

She'll be honest regardless of whether anybody gets hurt, which is hard when you've spent your whole life like, I don't care if I get hurt, if this repression hurts me, I just can't transition and hurt my mom that way, or I can't upset my father's standing in our quiet little community that way. It is second nature, or maybe just her nature, for Maria to put other people ahead of herself.

Maria has a specific job, but it’s boring, and anyway, she doesn’t really do it. Once you’ve been at a job for a minute, you figure out what you’re doing; once you’ve been there for a few minutes, you master it and can do the minimum necessary without really thinking about it; this is the first time she’s been at a job for this long, and she’s finding out that she’s pushing at the bare minimum, trying to find out where, exactly, lazy ends and We’re writing you up begins.

There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be. But this sort of thing gets her all melodramatic and choked up specifically because of how fucked up she was convinced she was when she was little. She didn’t know she was trans, she couldn’t put into words that she was a little girl, but she did know that something was horribly wrong and she blamed herself for it. Other kids could stomp around and punch eachother and sleep at night, but she was this self-conscious mess who liked books a lot because sometimes people in books seemed as bewildered by the world and themselves as she was. She was never a little kid who could get a puppy and be happy about it. If you’d given her a puppy, she would immediately have started worrying about what if she trained it wrong, what if it ran away. She would already be sad that it would die.

Since nobody really wants to be a trans woman, i.e. nobody wakes up and goes whoa, maybe my life would be better if I transitioned, alienating most of my friends and my family, I wonder what’ll happen at work, I’d love to spend all my money on hormones and surgeries, buying a new wardrobe that I don’t even understand right now, probably become unlovable and then ending my short life in a bloody murder. In fact, if there’s one thing a lifetime of Stockholm syndrome with hegemony gives you, it’s a thorough understanding of cultural tropes about trans women.

Rocknroll and high school are kind of the same thing,

Coming out as trans was the first change she actually made to her own life that felt like it was leaving the map that was laid out for her at birth, and she only went against the grain because she felt like shed died if she didn't.

Maria knows people who transitoned years before she did, even a couple people who started transitioning like a decade before she did. They're not fuckups. But they're not, like, buddhas, either. She's thought of them as buddhas, in her life, and then been disappointed when they've explained that their enlightenment consists of the same platitudes that every enlightenment consists of: Fuck what people think, and I dunno man, and There is no center at the center of things. It's like, cool, but then how do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you? (185-186)

The internet at that time was this big, exciting place where you could anonymously spill your guts about gender and discomfort and heteronormativity and how weird male privilege felt and lots of other things, except back then she didn’t really have language for it so she just went like: everything sucks and I am totally sad.

It means you need to take a lot of breaks, leave the store a lot, you know? Maria goes on her first walk at 9:45. She’s like, maybe pizza for breakfast?

She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support.

meant,

whatever.

it’s actually way easier just to humor these men who grew up watching movies where the girl doesn’t like the hero until he’s been persistent enough to make her like him. This is the grease that keeps the gears of the heteronormativity machine spinning, obviously, but it’s just easier to slip out of an awkward situation with an awkward guy than it is to call out the misogyny inherent in what he’s doing. It’s a tough spot to be in, but also, this is coming from an angry dyke who’s also trans and who, at one point, had society try to use her as a vessel for that kind of misogyny.

Steph cried and for a minute Maria felt like she might not and she felt heartless and mean down to the bottom of her lungs, but then she cried too. Just a little. They hugged and Maria said something about figuring out logistics tomorrow but that she had to go get drunk right now. Steph laughed, which made Maria feel like probably one day they’d be friends. Dykes.

When critics do not find what they expect, they cannot imagine that the fault may lie in their expectations.

How do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you?

What kind of twenty-year-old guy has a lot of trouble coming unless his girlfriend is sucking his dick so he can think about the evil ice sorceress turning Brave Samson into a demure maiden?

The problem is that, when they say 'real people', what they mean is people who aren't burdened with ironic senses of humor, college educations that help them put up an analytical barrier between themselves and the actual world, and the pressure of living with the reality that they all grew up middle class, chose a broke-ass bohemian life and now have to deal with the fact that they can't afford the comforts they grew up with. So they're colonizing those normal people's neighborhoods, colonizing their experiences. It's pretty gross.

dramatic

Maria was supposed to be back at work fifteen minutes ago, but whatever. She can do whatever the fuck she wants, apparently, and nothing truly bad will ever happen.

There are these Precious Moments figurines, they’re like porcelain, little kids with giant eyes handing each other a heart that says LOVE on it, or rolling around with a puppy? Maria stumbles into a whole aisle of them. Tears start welling up in her eyes, again, which is totally not tough and totally not punk but which also you totally can’t lie about. Like, they’re depictions of this idealized childhood innocence, right? This idea that little kids have the potential for sadness in their giant eyes, but really they just know these pure emotions: love, happiness, whatever. It’s totally hokey and stupid and obviously a construction. Real little kids are as dirty, impure, and complicated as the adults they’re going to grow up and be.

Breakfast pizza is irresponsible to her belly, and she can’t afford to get a bagel for breakfast and then also pizza plus coffee and then, later, lunch, but also, whatever.

She pretty much went in exactly the wrong direction, which is more due to the way she rides her bike than her emotional state. She tends to just point in a direction and trust that she’ll get there; it almost always works. Who knows how she got so turned around, but whatever.

gender is stupid and annoying and I don’t want to talk about it any more ever.