Adopt a Trans
I HAVE $15.91.
One time, when I wrote about declaring bankruptcy, I had $271. That felt like a pretty good amount, then, given that I make $600 a month. But it’s a dire sum of liquid capital.
All this week, I’ve felt how much worse it is to have just $15.91.
I’m doing practices around it. Where’s the problem in the room, yoga teachers and mindfulness coaches might ask. Right now, I’m sitting in my RV, and my finances aren’t materially affecting how physically comfortable or safe I am, or Sasha is. (She’s safer in here than anywhere: Young coyotes have been circling the property, learning to hunt.) I’ve been telling myself that Buddha didn’t have any stuff, and that if I were evolved enough, I’d trust that whenever I need another dollar—or $100, because nothing costs a dollar—it will come my way, like my-boyfriend who’d been homeless longer did.
Gabriel Mac
I utilize mental health practices all day, every single day, anyway. But no matter how hard I work them, I cannot feel secure inside this level of poverty. Every time I wash my hands in the bathroom, I look at the dwindling bar of soap and think, with increasing panic:
I can’t afford to replace this.
“If you’re lying on the street, begging for rupees for a chai,” said the inimitable Dr. Reed during a recent session, “when someone gives you rupees for the chai, your situation is still bad.”
My situation is the one I was always afraid would happen if I came out.
Gabriel Mac
WHEN I WAS growing up, there were no trans people making a living on TV. Even now, I dare you to name one. Recently, I watched all three seasons of All Rise, an incredibly woke show featuring a Black, female judge, lawyers who are POC, rich and powerful lesbians, and discussions about how policing is rooted in slavery. And, in 53 episodes, there was one nonbinary character.
They were homeless.
And an arsonist.
When I was growing up, no one gathered statistics on trans poverty; everybody was pretending that trans people didn’t exist at all. There are some numbers now, even though we’ve been re-erased from the census. And in the United States, the percentage of trans men who live in poverty is 33.7. Cis women have long earned 80-some cents on the dollar to cis men; trans men make 70 cents for every dollar earned by all cis people combined.
After gathering those statistics, I had to stop writing, go get drunk, and then sit on my knees on my floor for a while and. Just. SCREAM.
Poverty rates are, of course, higher for Black and Latinx trans people.
Technically, I live in “extreme poverty”—I make less than $10,000 a year. I’ve internalized my capitalist indoctrination: I can’t believe I let this happen.
I need to do more / obviously I’m not doing enough / I should be a different person. Like a person who can work at a bank.
I’ve wished that truthful writing wasn’t who I am. It’s painful to acknowledge that starting it this late hasn’t been enough; it’s painful to admit to myself that I am ashamed. It throbs its way around my intestines, a deep, thudding kind of ache. In therapy, I start crying that I am a bad role model, a bad example of trans—my friends who aren’t living as authentically as I am, which my friend Riviera says I do harder than anyone she knows, what does it say to them that I devoted my life to becoming myself, and now can’t buy soap? I am a harmful cliché and stereotype. I am queer fears, realized. I am walking reasons to stay in the closet, a depleting job, a terrible marriage. Having $15.91 is crushing enough to make me feel back to a moment when I was all of those things, tamping down suicidality at least most of the time with a work addiction, and think:
That was better than this.
Sure. If you don’t count the roiling self-hatred necessary to keep myself in the closet, along with the way I overworked myself, both as distraction and to keep buying my deadbeat husband Nike gear while he complained that I didn’t get wet fast enough.
Broke, they call it, not having any money. That’s what it feels like. For the last four years, I’ve been scrabbling together financial subsistence. It’s broken my heart, over and over, that pouring myself into The Whenever never came to sustain me monetarily. I’ve been devastated that when it comes to making a living in the first job I ever had as myself, after leaving an anti-trans industry that was harming me and harms trans people still, I failed.
RIVIERA IS FINANCIALLY successful. She helps people grow their business. Recently, she spontaneously started making suggestions for how I can build a more engaged audience. Start hosting live readings in a Zoom that people can attend, she said. Consistently, she said.
NO, I yelled, internally. Tantrum-y. I don’t want to have to do things like some other writers do! What I’m already doing should be enough! I am already working SO HARD!
Run a campaign for help paying for your RV insurance, she said, because even one of my doctors has given me money several times to cover my bills. It just depends how vulnerable you’re ready to get.
Dear reader: I am indeed working so fucking hard. I’m sure you are, too, at a million things. I have a wound from never being made whole after a decade of incest, and it creates a kind of survivor’s entitlement. I should not have to pull myself together after super-gross flashbacks to go to work. I should have been paid out millions of dollars from the American Incest Superfund, which does not exist. When I fought my home state of Ohio all the way to court for a payment from their Victim Compensation Fund, I received the maximum recompense: $50,000. Much of it paid off credit card debt I’d already racked up trying to survive after spending more than twice that on sex-abuse therapy.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
It’s not fair. Life’s not fair, obviously.
I cannot always pull myself together to work after flashbacks. But, I recognized recently, I can now work a little more. The first couple years of running this site, I was regularly homeless, and tremendous resource went to my most basic viability. (I should not HAVE to work more—I was just homelesss!!) Now, I’m stably situated on a homestead, from which Stevie said they won’t eject me even if I fuck up milking the goats for them when they go out of town.
So, dear reader. I have two questions. One: Would you like to come to a reading/Q&A/group hang online, and if so, how do Second Sundays of the month sound, say 5 Pacific/8 Eastern? You can reply to me by replying directly to this email. I’m going to make attendance a perk of paid subscribers, because of all the aforementioned poverty business—and because it’s worthwhile to my sense of worth to make my professional presence not free.
Two: If you aren’t a paid subscriber, could you be? My read rate is super high, which I love; it warms my gay heart, thank you. But my proportion of paid subscribers is 13 percent. I am so, so, so so grateful to my paid subscribers. The difference between making $0 and $600 in a month is huge, and you are that difference. I’m grateful to my unpaid subscribers, too, and understand that they have all sorts of reasons for free membership. And, if all of my subscribers subscribed at the Emergency Poverty Plea level I just added to the memberships—just 16.6 cents a day—I’d transcend the poverty line of earning $1,330 a month.
I’ve had this goal for years. Riviera recommended I try something new because what I’m doing clearly isn’t working. I even tried, recently, to sell a couple of stories to magazines from my old life, despite how much damage they always caused me in the production process after I came out. For whatever reason (the universe steering me away, probs) even my fancy agent couldn’t place one about my erectile device, despite its being so inherently click-baity. Though I’ve repeatedly sworn off the industry, I’m desperate, and that paycheck would have given me so much breathing room from suffocating poverty. Plus my work would have reached a huge audience like it used to, hopefully growing this one.
I’m recommitting my energy to the audience I have 🫶🏻. Consider this a conceptual rebrand as well: Your paid subscription or donation sponsors one impoverished trans human being. The newsletters I send, they’re like the card some sick kid writes you from a charity you support. Thanks for the note, little Billy!, you think. You enjoyed reading it. Maybe it nourished you or taught you something. But mostly, you’re glad he’s still alive.
🖤
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