An Incomplete List of Things I Love About My Trans Life

- MY HOUSE SMELLS so good.
“It smells like you,” people say when I hand them something that’s been in my house.
“What does that smell like?” I ask, and they say, “Like your house.“ Like my abode and I, we’re one, symbiotic pair.
“Earthy,” my friend Sky once described its/my/our scent.
- All of my friends know exactly who I am. They know that I am as afraid as I am fabulous. They know that my exhilaration at being alive is counterbalanced by how impossible I find life. They know that I’ve accidentally peed on some things, and that I’ve intentionally tried to pee on others (read: humans). They know that I burst into tears in the Wal-Mart dairy section the day after the inauguration.
They know—whether or not I explicitly told them—that for the rest of that night, I took spectacular care of myself. They know that when they really did start taking our passports, I was supporting myself with trees or blankets or perfectly blended cocktails.


- I love my cat. I resisted being a person who could be into a pet—much less a cat!—to the extent that I am into this cat. Why is there more cultural integrity around being a dog person than being a cat lady? (hint: patriarchy. It doesn’t want you to know that having a boyfriend is more laborious than having a cat. As I write this, I’m dog-sitting, and dogs—like boyfriends—are so much more fucking work than cats). Even before Thomas was my cat, my friend Cody told me that he smelled like me. Like an incense I hadn’t yet lit, or had always been lighting.
In late December, I laid my weary bones against old-growth redwoods in my favorite Northern California park and let the wisdom of my body tell me what I most wanted to do with the upcoming year. One of those things was: Lie around with my cat. A few nights ago, I woke to find him standing over me in the dark, staring at me, one foot pressed precisely against my left collar bone, like the best psychopath I’ve ever known.
- I love—I LOVE. I love love, love love love, lovelovelovelovelove looooooooooove, my dick.
In December, Thomas Penis Esquire the Third—as he’s totally reasonably named—turned four 🎉. Shortly before that, I told Cody that TPE3 was still, after four years, the best thing about being alive. That she (TPE3 does not give a fuck about or for “genders”) makes aliveness possible. There is no comfort on this earth like the comfort of her weight and warmth on my body, between my thighs when I walk or stand—or against one of my hips as I turn to my side in bed, the slip of his slow-motion follow, sliding, finally landing to the left or right of me on the sheets.
“Half a pound of man-meat!?” a friend of mine exclaimed when I told her I’d dropped my dick onto a kitchen scale when TPE3 was a month old, when I was only just well enough to walk around. She said about this heft—appropriately, as it was the biggest deal, helping soothe the unsoothable agony of four decades I’d somehow managed to live without it—“DAMN.”
- I love my work. I love this moment, right now, in which I’m writing it, making it, moving it through me in a way that feels as inherent to my being as breathing, whatever pay cuts I took to say what I want and need to say.
I love that it feels like joy and actualization. As an old-school magazine writer, I knew many writers who wrote for money or glory and I did, too. But I also always loved the process of writing. I do still. Do more.
I love that I write without the censorship of others’ fear. Of me. Of themselves. Of evolution—which is, above all, the proposition of transness.

- “I don’t have any money,” I said to my best friend from high school recently, talking on the phone about the shape of our lives. “But I have so much integrity.” He couldn’t see me, but as I spoke the latter phrase, I brought my fingers together in front of my face and moved my hand down the centerline of my body: Alignment. A purity rooted in self-hood, if not in social—or financial—currency.
That week, I was parked in the driveway of a family that is nuclear in the normie sense but that supports a trans teenager in the should-be-but-isn’t-normal sense. The weekend before, I was welcomed to their movie night, where they congregated and touched each other nonviolently, sitting close and comfortable without predation or manipulation: with genuine affection.
The father in this family, my age but following another life path, greeted me a few nights later as I walked into their house, a beautiful warm-wood structure further filled with beauty and warmth by its inhabitants. “Heyyy,” he said softly, with affectionate appreciation for my presence. When I got back to my own house, not at all wooden but warm and also a car, I burst into tears about how kind the world can be.
The previous Wednesday—Whole Homeostasis Wednesday!—I took a nap and had a sex nightmare, urgent, fevered, about mounting an abusive ex-boyfriend both as giver and receiver, flying across the country to rekindle a poisonous, adrenaline-fueled fuck-fest of varied positions: me on top, bottoming; him on bottom, bottoming.
I tossed and bucked in my sleep, waking up and passing back out amidst the visions. Climbing onto his erection as he sat in a chair. Fucking him after—“for real,” I said as I bent him over, my nails against his ribs while I entered him with a flesh-and-blood hard-on, different than the strap-on (however equally real for people who identify with their non-flesh dicks) with which I penetrated him in the aughts. In the dream, I saw us walking down the street, arm-in-arm afterward, happily going to a bar like we used to when we pretended that he didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me that I was awful, awful.
Just like my daddy.
I woke up in a panic that I needed to buy a plane ticket. That I needed to get on this, get on him—get back to a world that, or at least a man who, broke me down until I felt like a shit-stain again. Like shit smeared across my first rapist’s dick, a rapist a father a pedophile. Another charmer. One who couldn’t be bothered to use lube for his baby. Shit swept unceremoniously off with a degrading palm, then stuffed unceremoniously into my mouth.
- I love the death rattle of my addiction to unkindness. I love the addiction because it’s kept me away from kindness that would have ripped my hardened insides to shreds, spilling all the horrors I’d carefully contained until I was ready, ready. I love my unfettered rage at learning that my ex-boyfriend is thriving on a persona built off denying our past, though I’ve explicitly asked him to acknowledge it multiple times, and I love my continual disappointment that my father, a rapist a pedophile a trafficker—a coprophiliac—is still alive. I love that I’m poor enough to call out names: that I have few enough seizable assets, for the first time in my life, to not be ruled by fear that anyone could take anything away from me.
Maybe that’s what real freedom is.

- I love the scent on my skin right now. It doesn’t belong to me or to my house—it’s the scent of a different trans fag. Tonight, I had dinner at his apartment, a magnificently cozy studio paid for with disability and a housing voucher that I’m parked outside, on a quiet side street where stars shine hard against the dark sky. He made lemon-basil pasta; I brought old-vine red zinfandel. After we ate, we settled onto his bed, furnished with the place and dressed in the sweetest sheets I’ve ever seen, dark taupe etched with delicate white flowers. We watched a great movie that no one has heard of despite an all-star cast—because, I can only imagine, no one wants to think about the eternal oppression of queers. It was released before a trans-exterminationist was elected to the presidency of the United States, when it was still hard out here for us but when we were, at least, “represented” by a president who talked about us like we were human beings.
I came out during the last time this trans-exterminationist was president, though he wasn’t so against my existence then. I cried so hard when, after defeating him the first time, President Biden merely mentioned trans people in his acceptance speech.
Like we were people.

This other trans fag is coming out while this whole horrorshow is coming into government. He’s wrapping his warm human arms around my warm human body as we say goodnight, and I’m wrapping mine around his, a momentary, perfect constellation of truth. Of appreciation. Of resilience after incest for us both, after the erasure of our identities and our people throughout history. We watch a tragic film about conventionally hot, able-bodied cis white gays who have not been developmentally raped, and their story is still so fucking tragic.
And still, I think: They have no fucking idea.
Here we are, we trans, genderqueer fags, still. Here we are, the vanguard of equilibrium and expansion after millennia of existence and centuries of oppression. We’ve always been, and we always will be. I am so proud to be a soul that’s advanced enough to have incarnated into this impossible fucking embodiment, embracing others like me, safe enough to be invited into their beds for nonsexual as well as sexual communing.

It’s not everyone who will get to feel trans-on-trans touch. Or love. Or sex. According to the stats, we’re one of the most vanishingly thin populations on this earth. To get two of us together, that’s a feat. It’s true that I’ll never know what it feels like to be a cis person, however long I played one in real life, but I do know what it is to be a real, trans, real trans person, moving like a miracle through this world. Moving alongside and inside other trans people who are wild and brave enough to be. And when I embraced one of these—one of us—tonight, I felt my cunt soften. Soften further, relaxed as it already was under the weight of my cock.
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