Tiny Video of a Happy Trans
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“DO YOU KNOW how drunk I’m going to have to get to run this dishwasher?” I asked a friend when I received my tiny dishwasher.
The appliance had arrived courtesy of Amazon, which I currently patronize with wanton abandon, however famously ethically opposed I may be. Being alive is hard. And I don’t have a car, let alone the energy, to go get cat food.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
“Help is ON the way,” a man I used to walk past on my way to and from college classes chanted—incanted—over and over, all day long. When my tiny dishwasher arrived 25 years later, help had finally come.
“I didn’t know you had that!” my friend Ryan said recently, walking into my RV and seeing it on my tiny counter, dishwater splish-splashing around behind its clear front window.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, walking over to it, resting my hands on its energy- and water-efficient body, just 18 inches tall. “This is my new boyfriend. Actually, this is my bar for future boyfriends. From now on, they have to be at least as helpful as this dishwasher.”
WHEN I WAS growing up, we had (regular-size) dishwashers in the houses we lived in. When I was in middle school, one night that our parents left us with a babysitter, my siblings watched a movie we weren’t allowed to see. I pointedly turned away. I went to the kitchen, where I washed all the dishes, choosing, despite our dishwasher, to wash each one by hand.
I tried to prove, as often and in as many ways as possible, that I was good. As a reward, my father took me to a Cleveland Cavs game against Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls—where he indeed told me, in the hard, narrow seats of Richfield Coliseum, how good I was.
As an adult, some of the 20-plus places I’ve rented have had dishwashers. In the second place that my second husband and I shared, I did our dishes—not “the” dishes, per a language hell-bent on exempting men from accountability—almost every day that I was home from reporting. As I stood at the sink, loading the dishwasher-safe ones and hand-washing the others, my husband would sit on the couch, playing a shooter game online with a friend overseas, and I, breadwinner, seethed with white-hot rage, listening to him scream, putain, putain, putain, the French equivalent of “fuck,” which actually translates to “whore.”
I never told him to come and clean the fucking kitchen, because I believed that I had to do more—or most—of the work in every relationship. That I deserved to because of events in my childhood. That said, it might not be totally unrelated that, after five years of living together, the first rental Nico and I shared that didn’t have a dishwasher is the one from which I finally threw him out.
Gabriel Mac
FOR A FEW months after my divorce, I reveled in the experience of cooking and cleaning solely for myself. Then, I started transitioning.
In his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You, Daniel Lavery writes about the mountain of dirty dishes that grew as he approached his transition. Eight years into mine, I still can’t bear the responsibilities of hand-washing all my dishes and being trans at the same time.
I remember distinctly, palpably, the satisfying click of closing a fully loaded dishwasher in the first two places I rented after I came out. Those days, spent educating doctors or arguing with my insurance, or educating and arguing with my cis friends—or rather, having them argue at me, suddenly, about my gender or general existence—I was buoyed by hope, crushed by dysphoria, and daunted by the chasm between the two. When I loaded the dishes, first of some new, ingrate roommates, then of yet another ingrate boyfriend, the mechanic whir of those dishwashers starting up preceded a wave not just of their internal cleansing waters but of relief, in my whole body, that I had one less goddamn feat in this world to accomplish.
Then I moved into another rental, solo. And had to do dishes entirely by hand again. And a tiny piece of my soul died.
It was brought back to life, four years later, by Tiny Dishwasher.
“I THINK ABOUT your dishwasher,” says my friend Chris with some frequency, “every single day.” He is queer and does not have one.
When I moved into my RV, I assumed I’d have to hand-wash all my dishes for the rest of my life. Too exhausted by newfound homelessness and…everything else to deal with dishes, I started eating uncharacteristic amounts of canned and packaged food, and takeout I couldn’t afford. But then, lo, earlier this year, I walked into the studio apartment of a friend, and what did I see upon his tiny kitchen counter but a tiny dishwasher.
What other possibilities are out there, unknown, on this potentially easier and more joyful planet? It took me five months after learning tiny dishwashers existed to order my own, because I still/always have to ease into having nice things. They’re the emotional version of the time a contestant on a show where people try to survive the Alaskan wilderness, Outlast, finally caught fish after barely eating for weeks. She had a hearty dinner—and then had to be medically evacuated because it seemed like her intestines might rip open.
Gabriel Mac
Before running Tiny Dishwasher for the first time, I did have a cocktail or two. It could’ve been three; I didn’t take notes. And it did soften the shock of something so good, so supportive. Now, I run it almost daily. I pack it full, even overfull. It does a surprisingly good job, and its gentle whoosh soothes me, both when I’m awake and in my sleep.
“That sound,” I told Ryan, “is the sound of me not doing dishes.”
It’s the sound of me taking a well-deserved break. It’s the sound of me doing more cooking for myself lately, because I don’t have to hand-wash all the fucking dishes afterward. It’s the sound of my having extra time and energy; of survival being less hard and more delightful, which starting Tiny Dishwasher is every time.
I TOOK A video that first time I turned it on. I did it solely for my own amusement, but I’m sharing it, courtesy of the YouTube channel I made to share the movie Seth and I made about how to empty RV poo. I’ve spent desperate hours searching for media that shows a trans person doing anything but transitioning, because that’s not what—not nearly all—that we are, which is people. And people do all sorts of things. Well. Here’s a trans person turning on a tiny dishwasher.
Gabriel Mac
It’s just me and you, say the lyrics of the song in the background, “Black Latex (Oliver & Surrender! Remix),” which I was listening to by sheer cosmic chance—right before it’s interrupted by my unfiltered elation.
You do not have to be good, begins Mary Oliver’s most famous poem, “Wild Geese.” You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let someone else do your fucking dishes.
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