Torrey Peters Quotes

Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.

She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as.

She's the type to turn hardship into hardness, like a shield for people she loves.

I got to a point where I thought I didn't need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of self.

IF YOU ARE a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals.

The past is past to everyone but ghosts.

We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma.

Sometimes the wonder over the object of a crush is indistinguishable from the simple relief that you are still able to leap into one at all.

motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.

All my white girlfriends just automatically assume that reproductive rights are about the right to not have children, as if the right and naturalness of motherhood is presumptive. But for lots of other women in this country, the opposite is true. Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘anchor babies.’ All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate.

Yes.” Reese nods. “I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.

That's who is now, he reminds himself, someone who makes decisions, who doesn't let life just act upon him. Wasn't that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles, that delay is just form of hiding from reality. That you just figure what you what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don't know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want. So do something.

She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.

Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.

Jealousy is like a hangover: When you are in the midst of it you want to die, you are poisoned, useless. Nothing stretches before you but an expanse of ashes and regret; yet despite the intensity of your suffering, no one feels sorry for you, no one cosigns your fury. No sympathy for you! Look how wantonly you indulged! Of course it hurts, but your suffering is nothing unique, everyone has suffered like that, so get ahold of yourself, show some backbone and discretion, for god’s sake. Don’t go making any major decisions. Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary.

She’s suggested, in the way that naive cis people do, with a hint of self-congratulation at their own broad-mindedness, that it seems like trans people are starting to be everywhere, that maybe gender doesn’t matter that much. In his reply, he can’t help but let loose an old defensiveness on this topic. “I think it’s the opposite,” he says too sharply. “The whole reason transsexuals transition is because gender matters so incredibly much.

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.

All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism.

So you got sick of being trans?" "I got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn't need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don't need to do trans.

The moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.

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 in 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.

Why does she deserve to be so angry? What has she truly lost? Quietly, to herself, she answers her own question: I have lost a child. The statement jolts her. She hears in her own voice a latch sliding into place. She says it again, phrased slightly differently, I have lost my child. Is it grief she feels? Is grief even a feeling to which she is entitled?

The women we love are sacred and we will defend them.

She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude.

To have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she had sway over one's precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism's arbitrary mechanics doesn't satisfy - the heart demands a human explanation.

Both Iris and Reese had a sense of themselves as trans elders; despite only being in their late twenties, they were, in trans age, much older than even that trio of just-out forty-somethings sitting together on a checkered blanket.

Wasn't that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles that delay is a form of hiding from reality. That you just figure out what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don't know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want.

Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women conform their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them—the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman. The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm.

I read that of our senses, only taste and smell pass directly to the hippocampus, where memory gets stored. Sights, sounds and touches get converted into thoughts and symbols before they continue on to the memory in the hippocampus. But smell connects directly to memory.

Reese is a veteran of the horrific social gore that results when individuals fight personal battles with unnecessarily political weaponry on a queer battlefield mined with hypersensitive explosives. As a Veteran, she usually steers clear of such tactics, an adherent of the Geneva Conventions. Unless of course, in a moment of hurt or outrage or vengeance, her bloodlust gets the best of her and she goes looking for maximum gore.

Children make studies of their parents, decipher them, propose theories about their behavior, turn them this way and that, examining every flaw, and continue to do so long after the parents themselves are gone. In stories, at the therapist's office, at holidays--the story of the parent never ends.

If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you. – 1 Peter 4:14

Amazingly, Amy had the sense that she had done a good job, that she was a good lover. Wherever she had gone, Delia hadn't noticed. And maybe that was how you have sex.

I don't think she appreciates queerness as much as she came to feel ambivalent about heterosexuality. I know those two aren't the same thing.

Feel free to peruse the Tumblr-Twitter industrial complex

the anxiety of those wellness-obsessed women who are just a little too beholden to middle-class propriety to permit themselves to take up crystals and anti-vaxxing screeds.

After all, isn't that the Gatsby glory of the New York dream: telling the grandest story about yourself that you could hope to have others believe in the distant hope that you'll believe it yourself?

Let's come out and admit it: Everyone acts like moms are real women and real women become moms. Women who never have kids get treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love.

Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn't mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body.

Be paralyzed whenever you want to write anything. You were so wrong for so many years, so incredibly good at lying to yourself, and given that, how could you possibly think you’ll ever put a pen to paper and say something true?

And this, Reese reflects, is the other reason to be a mother—in whatever fashion motherhood comes your way—so when you're old and alone and feeling sorry for yourself, your daughter will roll her eyes at your theatrics and bring you in from the cold.

They are together, and miles from each other, their thoughts turning to themselves, then turning to the baby, each in her own way contemplating how her tenuous rendition of womanhood has become dependent upon the existence of this little person, who is not yet, and yet may not be.

Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn't know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn't be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere.

It is at this point that we often make a mistake. We tell people, "Believe, believe, believe," but do not show them how, do not give them anything definite to believe. The biblical way and the intelligent way is, when you tell a man to believe, to give him something to believe. Give him, for example, Isaiah 53:6, and thus hold up Christ crucified; or, give him 1 Peter 2:24. Here he has something for his faith to rest upon. Faith must have a foundation. Faith cannot float in thin air. It is pitiable to see men told to believe, to believe, to believe- and then give nothing for their faith to rest upon.

As a child, I needed so badly. When someone could meet that need, it was beautiful. It was the proper place for mothering. Now I need that proper place for myself. My sense of hope, my sense of a future, they are both reliant on having a child. I want to see what I cherish live on. Does that make it clear why I want to be a mom? Is that acceptable?

Reese used to say that she was only interested in people who’d had a major failure in life. She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.

Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn't fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn't deserve such a good dog. She'd thought she'd have that dog forever - when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last... When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and her body were one and the same. Every sensation simply belonged to her, unmediated. It was supposed to be good. Sometimes it was. She didn't have to guess what was going on from her dog's behavior. But without a dog to hurt for her, on her behalf, her life as a woman arrived with pain; pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so was without end. As Jon bats, Ames tries to listen to his body. He has not thought about his dog in a long time. Does he still have a dog? In his detransition, he supposed he'd get his dog back, but he didn't. He has simply lost the vibrancy of both pain and pleasure. The world has receded to a tolerable distance, the colors unsaturated, while the dog stayed dead.

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 women 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.

Meet actual famous trans writer. Feel indicted when famous trans writer says that they think all trans people want to be celebrities. That the drive to celebrity is an endemic problem that fractures trans communities. That we are all so alone for so long, the only way to survive is to nurture a private sense of specialness and uniqueness—all the while fearing that this sense of specialness is our only lifejacket as we swim in a culture where tokenization tells us that we must be the only one, the fiercest, most brutal one, the special one.

Amy remembered how one of them patiently explained that the term "autogynephilia" only works if you don't think trans women are women. If you do, then you immediately see that the majority of women, cis or trans, are all autogynephiles, and that most men would be autoandrophiles – it's not something special about trans women. Of course women are turned on by being women and men turned on by being men! Watch any porn and the sexuality of everyone in it is actually about their own auto-andro/gyne-philia. Listen to them talk. It's about validating their own gender. [...] And alone on their laptops somewhere: the viewers, turned on to identify with people identifying with their gender.

Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives - and that's if they were lucky enough to be white. They left behind only scattered exhausted voices to tell the angry lost young when and how the pain might end - to tell us what will be lost when we lash out with our considerable strength, or use the fragile shards of what remain of our social networks to ostracize, punish, and retaliate against those who behave in a traumatized manner. "And so we become what we have seen. How could we know not to? Have you seen many orphaned juvenile elephants behaving otherwise?

Sex at the edge of abuse is banal.

The least Reese could do was to be honest, to not pretend like she didn’t understand the chaos that separated what can be wanted and what can be said.

But maybe it couldn’t have been any other way? Don’t HIV and gentrification always go together? How else do you forget a plague? Isn’t HIV exactly the symbol of an indigestible queerness that even the most assimilated queers haven’t figured out how to break down? No, those wounds have never healed, they have only been built over and moved past—only been gentrified.

So often when she had sex, she allocated the majority of her mental capacity to managing her own impression of herself as she fucked, with a secondary concern being her partner’s impression of her. This allocation left little mental energy for actually desiring her partner, much less vocalizing or displaying that desire. Which, she knew, did not make her a good lover. It made her a bad lover, and this was, in fact, her impression of her own sexual prowess: disappointing, tepid, with occasional flashes of mediocrity.

When a woman reaches a certain point in her thirties, she looks around and finds a good dining set with which to settle down.

In her twenties, she watched straight people progress in their careers or get married or discuss employer-matched 401(k)s. She had once confided to her fashion designer friend, a young gay man, of her sinking feeling that she had fallen behind. In response he bought her a book on the concept of queer temporality. The book was deadly boring.

Reese is a veteran of the horrific social fore that results when individuals fight personal battles with unnecessarily political weaponry on a queer battlefield mined with hypersensitive explosives. As a Veteran, she usually steers clear of such tactics, an adherent of the Geneva Conventions. Unless of course, in a moment of hurt or outrage or vengeance, her bloodlust gets the best of her and she goes looking for maximum gore.

This millennial generation of elephants is an orphan generation. In the last few decades, humans have murdered, mutilated, or displaced an entire generation of older elephants who might have bestowed upon this generation the familial, societal, and emotional skills required to handle one’s individual fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone, through which courses intolerable memories of pain, trauma, and grief.

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.

And this, Reese reflects, is the other reason to be a mother—in whatever fashion motherhood comes your way—so when you’re old and alone and feeling sorry for yourself, your daughter will roll her eyes at your theatrics and bring you in from the cold.

So anyway, speaking of trans,” Reese decides to say to Katrina. “Does your work send you to lots of queer events like this, or is this your first time being out with one and a half trans women?

Yes and no. Some days I still love you and some days I don’t.” Reese waited, sensing there was more. So he let her have as much of the truth as he could bear. “But the days I don’t love you…I have to work hard to make those days happen. The days I do require nothing of me.

The moment elongates like pulled taffy.

Isn't that the most motherly thing of all? To hope your daughter has the chances that you never gave yourself—or that you were never given?

It was the same tone of uninformed concern that older cis people used with Reese when they discovered she was a transsexual: Oh dear, your life must really not be okay. The response always surprised them: I chose this. I want it. It makes me feel right.

You know what, Amy? I think the best way to get back at you is to say yes to this offer, and then watch you struggle to figure it all out from a front-row seat. So fuck you, my love. Yes, I will consider it.

Nothing else matters. Wim Hof was right. He discovered, in our backyard ponds and on banal coasts, the lair of a terrible god, a place beyond self-pity, beyond grief.

Jealousy is like a hangover. When you are in the midst of it you want to die, you are poisoned, useless. Nothing stretches before you but an expanse of ashes and regret; yet despite the intensity of your suffering, no one feels sorry for you, no one cosigns your fury. No sympathy for you! Look how wantonly you indulged! Of course it hurts, but your suffering is nothing unique, everyone has suffered like that, so get ahold of yourself, show some backbone and discretion, for god's sake. Don't go making any major decisions. Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary.

I don't think she appreciates queerness so much as she came to feel ambivalent about heterosexuality. I know those two aren't the same thing.

Many people think a trans woman's deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.

The wanting of children seems to be an accepted universal fact for women everywhere. Not to play the trans exception card, but I'm sorry, it's not the same for transsexuals. It's not considered natural when I say that my biological clock is ticking, because I'm not granted a biological clock in the first place. I ache when I see other moms with kids. I'm so jealous. It's a jealousy of my body, like hunger. I want children near me. I want that same validation that other moms have. That feeling of womanhood placed in a family. That validation is fine for cis women, but it gets treated as perverted for me. Like, the only reason 'a man in a dress' would want to be near kids is not a good one. Let's come out and admit it: Everyone acts like moms are real women and real women become moms. Women who never have kids get treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love.

When she watched the girls she knew, a burning jealousy would stab through her. Little things. How they plucked their eyebrows. How they put their hands on each other's arms. Jealous. Jealous. Jealous. So it was easy for her to call other girls bitches. To dismiss their concerns, which cruelly could never apply to her. To charm the boys with jokes about the ridiculousness of girls, of femininity in general.

If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood.

This was a budding man, after all: powerful, dangerous.

Maybe this is so awkward and hard and without obvious precedent, because we're trying to imagine our own solution. To reinvent something for ourselves, whatever kind of—' he pauses and looks down at his own feet, the boots and jeans he wears. 'Whatever kind of women we are.

Don’t even acknowledge it—it’ll fuck up everything you know about the world.

Het was een sterke speech, waarin ze een citaat van James Baldwin moeiteloos wist te verbinden met een van haar eigen songteksten op een cd die binnenkort uit zou komen - een staaltje zelfmythologisering van de ware professional.

He still misses her in a way that talking about her, thinking about her, remains dangerous to indulge in - as an alcoholic can't think too much about how much she'd really like just one drink.

The days I don't love you... I have to work hard to make those days happen.

She enjoyed his take on stoic masculinity—the tragic man who loves a woman enough that the loss of her makes submersion in a frozen pond appealing by comparison. Would that all difficult women be loved so deeply.

After all, isn’t that the Gatsby glory of the New York dream; telling the grandest story about yourself that you could hope to have others believe in the distant hope that you’ll believe it yourself?

Step 10: Go on hormones. But do not, under any circumstances, think about becoming a lady. Instead, imagine yourself as a cool and mysterious David Bowie type character. Plan outfits and practice talking as though you have done a lot of acid, so you will be ready for when hormones bestow upon you this new look.

She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure. A mistake many of the transsexuals she knew made. Such thinking was static. You had to hope for something in the first place in order to have those hopes dashed.

victory.His name was Stanley, and he was a rich man in his late thirties who didn’t like dogs. That he didn’t like dogs was one of the things Reese decided was important about his character.

Having purified your souls in the obedience of the truth, by the Spirit, in unfeigned brotherly love, love one another with a pure heart fervently, being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which lives and abides for ever. (1 Peter 1:22-23)

It's scary-seductive, emphasis on scary. Start looking for that kind of comfort and he's bound to make a fool of himself.

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.

Mary Anne was full-figured and gorgeous and probably would have been popular had she not loved horses so much.

Pour le commun des mortelles trans, la route était barrée dès le début. Pas de taf, pas de mariage, pas de bébé, et, si une femme trans pouvait être une muse, personne ne voulait d'une œuvre où elle s'exprime elle-même. C'est ainsi que, par défaut, les femmes trans dérivèrent dans une sorte de no-futurisme là où d'autres queers célèbrent l'ironie, la joie et la mort dans lesquelles iels se précipitent. Cette dérive vers le nihilisme paraissait bien plus glamour quand le corps devenu cadavre était un choix sauvage et volontaire plutôt qu'une probabilité statistique

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 spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and. center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them - the unspoken subtext of it being 'because I am a woman'.

religion

Right, so I thought I'd come over and confess what I did, and you" - she indicates Reese with a little thrust of her chin - "would tell me what to do." The word "confess startles Reese. "I'm not a priest, Katrina! I'm not going to tell you to recite, like, ten Hail Transgender Marys and absolve you of your sins.

Hysterectomies are widely available, but even women who don’t want children aren’t exactly lining up to get them.

In matters of the heart, Reese had one firm maxim: You don’t get to choose who you fuck, you get to choose from among those who want to fuck you.