Цитаты из книги Detransition, Baby

There are so many reasons, but most of them are so simple, so embodied, that they feel inadequate to the question: She likes to hold children. To smell a baby’s hair. To soothe a crying infant and feel his little frame let go of rigid fear to settle in her arms, the weight go slack and calm so that for a moment she both gives and receives a rare peace. To rock a baby and communicate with your body: You’re safe. When she worked at the daycare she liked the thoughtless way a child would reach to take her hand. She liked watching kids puzzle out something new, their wonder, their awe and excitement, which was, when she let it be, contagious. She liked their sudden acts of altruism. She recalled this one kid at the daycare, maybe four years old, who built a tower out of blocks then tugged on her sleeve with the offer, “Do you want to kick it down?” He understood that the knockdown was the best part of building and he wanted to give it to her. Who else could give you something so pure but a child?

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.

Of course, her first trans daughter—Ames—had also been her lesbian lover. Amy. A daughter whom Reese had raised to love Reese well as a wife, with all the strange dynamics in power that entails, the dynamics that are so confusingly sexy and painful and satisfying and awkward that the rest of society has an incest taboo to avoid them. When her daughter/lover detransitioned into her son, he weirdly put her through all the stages of anger, rage, and betrayal that Reese hadheard from countless other parents when their daughters transitioned for the first time.

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.

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.

But torture is temporary too, and torture nonetheless breaks its victims. The poor guys on the lowered end of a CIA waterboard wouldn’t confess if it were possible to tell themselves that, actually, this drowning is merely temporary.

“There’s that Reagan-era sayingvthat weed is a gateway to hard drugs like heroin. I feel that way about a vagina. It’s a gateway drug. I used to want surgery; but I’m pretty sure that would just have been the gateway to wanting a uterus. And if I had a uterus, that would be the gateway to wanting a baby in it. I hear how that sounds. You add it all together and it sounds like my deepest desire is to go shopping for some other woman’s organs. I don’t lie to myself about my situation. If I want a baby, I have to take one from some other woman. Can you imagine how that feels for me? I gave everything for my womanhood and here I’m talking about taking things from women. I’m bitter bitter bitter about being in that place.”

In addition to Reese’s generalized one-size-fits-all-trans-women opinions on plastic surgery, she had her own particular self-serving reason to insist that Amy get a nose job. The day would come that Reese could enroll on Amy’s insurance. With a precedent set by insurance already having covered one employee’s gender-affirming surgery, the path for a second widened. Reese would need it widened too, because she wanted more than just a nose job; she wanted her long-awaited vagina and, yes, her brow reconstructed as well. 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. She would happily cheer on any other woman who flaunted her orbital ridge in the name of challenging cis-normative beauty standards, but she would have the first available misogynist dick of a surgeon burr her skull Barbie smooth. As long as she tortured herself with a traitorously retrograde sense of what made a woman beautiful in her heart of hearts, she would assuage herself with cis-passibility in her face of faces.

“Reese doesn’t tell you what’s true,” Ricky concluded. “She tells you what you most need to hear. Stuff that you’d told yourself no one would ever understand about you—she figures it out and tells you. Tells you that the thing about you that you most want to be is exactly what she loves about you. It’s fucking intoxicating. It’s like drinking validation from some psychoactively seductive source. She loves being that source. She loves being the thing you need so bad. She means it all too, but only for the moment she’s directing her charm at you. Like the love and joy you feel on Molly or something, it’s real while you feel it, but only for that long.”

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.