chapter one
It was 2018. I felt the horror of walking into a coffee shop, trying not to look at a beautiful woman without accidentally unhinging my jaw to swallow her soul.
Human longing is strictly triangular, so you see someone want a thing, you want the thing, and eventually, everyone is just copying everyone else’s homework. They failed to account for the pre-trans experience. I looked at a girl across a sticky pub table and felt a total failure of standard subject-object relations. I wanted to kiss her. I also desperately needed to siphon her entire gender through a bendy straw. I was a vampire masquerading as a dude.
Pre-transition closeted attraction is like a glitch. You are piloting a fleshy, clumsy boy-mech built by a hostile manufacturer, and your sensors are fried. It’s like the pharmacopornographic era, the reality that our bodies are hyper-regulated factories, and heavily policed. My factory was producing the wrong toxic sludge, and my operating system was a nightmare. I tried to survive by standing close to cisgender women, hoping ambient estrogen would just seep into my chassis via osmosis. I thought sheer proximity to womanhood might cure the void sitting behind my ribs.
I felt this guilt in my soul too. Religious sin has fucking nothing on the shame of looking into a girlfriend's eyes and realizing you are trying to steal her essence. You are an ontological parasite. You wait for her to leave the apartment. You put on her clothes. You smell her perfume and pray to a dead, indifferent god that the floral scent will permanently alter your DNA. Every romantic gesture felt like premeditated espionage.
I gotta stop and address the sheer, unadulterated brain-damage of cisgender heterosexual dating rituals for me. I sat through these encounters feeling like a sleep-deprived Soviet spy. Two people sitting across from each other to perform a rigid hostage negotiation. The man pays the bill to assert financial dominance. The woman laughs at an unfunny joke to signal compliance. The car door is opened. The jacket is offered. The entire choreography serves as an instruction manual for assembling a bomb out of wet cardboard. I sweated through my deodorant during these dates, terrified the girl would notice the zippers on my human suit were malfunctioning. I performed the designated masculine inputs and waited for the romance to output, completely alienated from the actual human sitting three feet away from me.
Academic theory usually treats trans desire as a neat little footnote about gender transgression. The reality is that you cannot fully love someone when you are structurally composed of a vacuum.
A vacuum obliterates whatever gets close to it. I looked at women and felt an unbearable gravity. The desire to hold a girl crashed directly into the existential panic of needing her physical form for my own survival. I resented the women I dated for possessing the blueprint of my missing skeleton. I turned them into unwitting donors for my phantom limb. True love requires two solid objects. I was just a hungry ghost haunting the local dive bar, terrified of the day my disguise would finally rot right off my bones.
chapter two
I slide a 23-gauge needle into my outer thigh every Tuesday and rewrite myself. This is my act of personal revisionism. The major religions insist the human body is an unalterable temple designed by a flawless architect. I view the body as an open-source hardware project. God, in whatever iteration you care to conceptualize them, made a glaring error in my endocrine system. I am simply debugging the code.
Ingesting estrogen is an event. I take raw, synthetic chemistry and convert it into the kinetic energy of staying alive. The tectonic plates of my face move. The fat redistributes. I fired the terrified male pilot, ripped the wiring out of the console, and took manual control of the ship.
I am doing this as I type this, in the year 2026 which has been a goddamn hellhole so far. I am wiping down my skin with an prep pad while aware that ghouls in cheap suits on Sky News try to convince the masses to erase me. The state is fundamentally obsessed with our meat. Silvia Federici laid out the schematics for this centuries ago in her work on the enclosure of the female body. The historical transition to capitalism required the policing of human reproduction. Capital needs easily categorized, predictable reproductive units to churn out compliant laborers.
When you transition, you uncouple the physical and social reality of womanhood from the biological mandate of the state's factory line. My bodily autonomy is an insult to their patriarchal assembly line. We are walking, breathing sabotage.
Their empathy is the same as a toaster; just a buzzing, rusted-out heating coil giving off the smell of burning plastic. They live in a dead world constructed out of fear, repressed urges, and bad real estate investments. They cannot fathom the reality of keeping yourself and your friends alive against impossible odds. We are bleeding out, we are crowdsourcing survival funds and laughing hysterically in fluorescent-lit waiting rooms. These politicians sit in beige offices and draft bills about our genitals because they are fundamentally terrified of their own rotting mortality.
Transitioning under fascism demands a reconceptualization of what survival actually means. The standard liberal defense of trans rights relies on a pathetic, pleading assimilation. They beg the state to recognize us as harmless, regular taxpayers who just want to fit into the suburbs. I reject the premise.
The state is correct to be afraid of us.
When a trans woman hacks and rebuilds her physical form, she proves the state's most foundational lie- the immutability of assigned biological destiny- is a fiction. We expose the fragility of their entire gendered economy.
Hormonal transition operates as a weaponized mutation. The act of becoming a woman in a political climate trying to grind you into dust requires you to become a completely new kind of organism. We terraform our own flesh, we outgrow their meager categories, we strip their machinery for parts, and we build something for ourselves.
chapter three
The air in my bedroom is thick with the smell of cheap coffee. Outside, the 2026 news cycle is running a 24hr cycle of legislative violence. Inside, my friend is asleep with her mouth slightly open, hogging the duvet. I am sitting at the edge of the mattress, drinking the lukewarm coffee and experiencing the shock of possessing a solid form.
We must think of other human beings as complete, unquantifiable beings instead of useful objects. You cannot have an "I and Thou" encounter when you are secretly using your partner as a blueprint to construct your own missing gender. You just get two fragmented beings crashing into each other in the dark. I finally escaped the mirror. The phantom limb is gone, I look at the woman sleeping next to me and the panic is silent. I don't want to steal her skeleton. I just want to make her breakfast.
I had to become the girl to stop haunting the girls I loved.
hooks insisted love is an intentional political action that defies the dominant culture of domination and fear. We have to update that for the current timeline. Trans love in a fascist state operates as a closed-circuit power grid. We create a atmosphere to keep the external pressure from liquefying our organs. The mundane act of existing together in a messy room, like paying the electric bill, clipping our fingernails, watching absolute garbage television- is a spatial occupation. We are holding territory.
We sit on the bathroom counter on a Friday night, knocking knees, sharing the exact same tube of NYX eyeliner. I zip up her dress. She hands me a borrowed sweater. The cisgender gaze reads this as frivolous vanity. They are wrong, this is mutual care. We are armouring each other before we walk out the front door into a hostile biome. I am checking the seals on her hazmat suit. I am taking the chemistry we talked about and applying it directly to her eyelids. We share clothes because our bodies belong to a collective resistance against a state that wants us naked and dead.
The people trying to destroy us are fundamentally obsessed with a static, dead past. They want to trap human history and keep it from progressing. They will fail. The fascists drafting bathroom bills and hoarding capital are already rotting from the inside out. Their worldview requires constant, exhausting maintenance of artificial borders.
We just require each other.
Trans joy functions completely outside the jurisdiction of the state. I look at my friend waking up, rubbing her eyes, completely unaware of the absolute miracle of her own existence, and I know exactly how this horror movie ends. Long after the politicians are dead and their hateful little monuments crumble into gray dust and their legislative records are eaten by silverfish, we will still be here. The future belongs to the women who ripped God’s drafts out of the trash and wrote a better ending. We survived the vacuum, we built our own bodies, and our sheer capacity to love each other will outlast their entire fucking world.
I love us.