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.

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.

Funerals remind Reese not to kill herself

How many times will a family member deadname or misgender the deceased from the pulpit, unabashed about it in his grief, peering out at this sea of weirdos who showed up unexpectedly to what he considered a family event? Did their son—er, daughter—really have all these friends? Which nice white cis person will remind the assembled mourners—a high percentage of whom are trans women themselves—that everyone must do more to save trans women of color, who are being murdered (murdered!), although this particular highly attended funeral is, of course, a suicide, because that’s how the white girls die prematurely.

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. What no one wants to admit about funerals, because you’re supposed to be crushed by the melancholy of being a trans girl among the prematurely dead trans girls, is that funerals for dead trans girls number among the notable social events of a season.