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He’s pretty into it: for Maria, being trans is like, Here is this shitty thing I have to deal with, but for Kieran it’s like, Fuck yeah! Being trans, all right! Trans guys seem to have this relationship to being trans a lot more often than trans women. It’s understandable. Sometimes trans guys come out of radical activist dyke communities where having a punk rock gender is kind of like, chic, or whatever. Whereas for trans women, this tends not to be the case. When they come out trans women tend not to have the analysis that comes from having existed in a queer community where people talk about gender; the mistake some people make is assuming that this means trans women never put together an analysis.
    There’s also a thing about cultural norms about masculinity and femininity that everybody internalizes, and the kind of light that throws on the different directions of transitioning, but whatever. Who cares. It’s hard to explain. Maria’s been mentally outlining a zine about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.
    So Kieran started working at the bookstore, read Maria as trans, and decided to be her friend. It was great because Steph knows queers but gets anxious, and Maria doesn’t talk at parties so neither of them has ever been particularly enmeshed in a queer community, but Kieran was. That fucker knows everybody. You’ll be like, Oh, Judith Butler’s written a new book, and he’ll be like, I threw her over a table and fucked her at brunch once.
    You’re like, Really?
    And he says, No, but I did have her come read at my school when I was in college.
    So they became friends, they ate lunch together, it was a new relationship, even though it wasn’t supposed to be a make-out relationship. They talked about stuff, he explained stuff to her—he loves to explain stuff—and she was like, oh my god, here is a person who knows the real smart truth about transitioning! Gender truly is a construct!
    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.
    They fucked in a Burritoville bathroom.
    He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn’t come. Maybe he did. There were greasy patches on the mirror and since the bathroom was so small she pressed her face against it while he kind of fucked her, and then when they left there was grease all over her cheek. It was hard to wash off. She was like, cool, punk rock, degradation, kinky sex, how queer and great. That was her sleaziest moment. It seemed like, from then on, she’d be a building a body of work about the interesting sex she’d had, but those stories never really materialized. That time at Burritoville, that was pretty much it.
    She’s thinking, I think I just don’t get sex, while she shoulders her bike and starts climbing stairs. Maybe one day, when my seven hundred dollars of savings become twenty thousand and I can afford bottom surgery, I’ll be able to get past the inevitable shutoff point and actually enjoy it. Can’t wait.
    She opens the door and the cat isn’t in the kitchen, which means she is probably in the bedroom with Steph. Kieran probably isn’t here. The cat hates everyone except Maria and Steph.
    The cat appears and rubs her little black head on Maria’s leg. Hi cat, she says.
    She opens the fridge, which is empty, prolonging her own anxiety in a really familiar way. Like, if Kieran were in Maria’s bed with her girlfriend, not that Maria owns Steph’s sexuality or anything, but it would be pretty stupid for her to be in the kitchen in a scarf, one glove on and one glove off, thinking about a middle-of-the-night stir-fry, while he was in there spooning