Ben Affleck vs. the Angry Tranny
OMG, YOU GUYS. Imagine my surprise and overwhelming desire to write you when I saw that on this week’s episode of Industry, someone asks someone to pee on them.
This feels like the lowest-key spoiler of all time but: She does it! It takes her just a second to “relax,” though the request is indeed framed explicitly as a matter of trust and vulnerability, and the requester has been framed—and is continued to be framed, explicitly—as untrustworthy.
Everybody’s urethra works differently, I guess.
Gabriel Mac
Gabriel Mac
Prior to this viewing, I’d already started a list on my little dry-erase board of Netflix recommendations to send out with a woke lens. It’s not that deep: They were America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowgirls Cheerleaders—which was directed by the same dude who brought you the compulsively watchable Cheer—and another Netflix docuseries, Popstar Academy: KATSEYE.
My woke lens for both boiled down to, essentially: Ew.
I have spent a lot of time—like, decades of time—feeling like the most important thing I can be is a likable/desirable (same diff) female, lamenting the loss of this possibility even long into my transition. Though I watched both of these docuseries in the last two months, and we’re coming up here on my seven-year anniversary (!!) of starting transitioning, I found both of them so…soothing.
Maybe that’s not what you’d expect. It’s not what I expected, partly because I hadn’t expected anything but the distraction and company of television on a couple of lonely and/or exhausted days. But watching the excruciatingly rigid gender conformity pushed on the all-female subjects, to the point of depersonalization, in both shows made me feel not only like that was a race I didn’t want to win but one I was super, super glad to not be running in. Even Time magazine, hardly the vanguard of gender annihilation, called America’s Sweethearts “surprisingly infuriating.”
Related, both to money (Industry is an HBO show about how gross/arbitrary/consuming investment banking is) and gender, I spent the second half of my Industry viewing curled in the squish, writhing and breathing deep into my belly. As much as I long wanted to be (or wanted to want to be, more accurately) a good-time gal, I’ve also always wanted to be rich. Achieving both of these things would solve all my problems, I always figured. Probably many of us were taught the same. No matter how woke I got, I couldn’t shake either of these ideas, literally up until the point this Sunday when, directing breath into my swirling hips, I let myself consciously recognize:
I want to be free.
That. That is what I most want to be.
The night before, I’d been to an anarchist reimagining of a county fair. Somewhere in the middle of roughly no place in Washington, a group of friends had made flyers and built handmade wooden rides and put out concessions on a property among cedar trees, and more than a hundred people had shown up. There were games. There was a highly satirical magic show. People brought babies. Bands played into the night, and trans people wandered around smoking. I did, too, among the unleashed dogs on the lawn, in a voluminous yellow dress.
“Your silhouette is perfect,” some random person said, rushing up to me after the sun went down. I’ve been all over this fucking world, both in a body that looked like this and in a body that looked extremely different. It’s a miracle that I can be anywhere, looking like anything, and not so much as startle when a stranger comes running up on me in the dark. They’d seen me from the side, eating a fried Oreo on a stick, with my nails glinting and my skirt hem reaching the ground. I thanked them, and we introduced ourselves.
I didn’t think a lot of this interaction at the time. But I have been to “real” county fairs. And state fairs, and church fairs—a lot of church fairs, in the concrete lots where we normally parked for Mass. And I’ve not been to one where I could have just stood unselfconsciously eating fried stick-food looking like what I look like. A few years ago, an ex-boyfriend and I—the first one on whom I tried to pee!—were in Des Moines for Rice’s memorial during Iowa’s state fair, and as a couple, we were the subjects of relentless looks downtown, even wearing pants.
I want to be free, I thought, lying here on Sunday night during Industry, moving, breathing. Groaning, a bit. Not free from Iowan side-eyes, but from the bullshit I keep trying to press on myself: to be things I was never meant to be. To pursue goals that don’t mean anything to me really—that drain me. I keep trying to pee on my boyfriends, but I’m the one I need to trust. I’m the one it’s most important for me to be vulnerable with.
I’d rather be a freak than an acceptable female—or male, for that matter. I’d rather be broke than out of alignment with my art or my truth. A lot of that sounds trite, kind of cliche, and maybe it is. But I think a lot of people can’t actually imagine themselves doing it. Imagine my tentative excitement, my careful elation, to realize I already am. That all that’s left is the embracing.
TONIGHT, I WAS working on a puzzle—like I do.
And honestly?
I.
Was.
Angry.
Like, so fucking angry.
I was angry at everyone in a way I get sometimes, where I wish everyone in the world was dead. Often this turns out to be rage directed at my rapists; tonight it was directed at god, for the amount of suffering I’ve endured in my life. Recently, I watched Escaping Twin Flames on Netflix, which at first I thought was boring but which ultimately I saw was just an allegory for the way all of us are living: A couple of cult leaders tell people who and what they should be. We’re supposed to be alarmed by this particular cult, but who among us isn’t doing that? Via religion or socialization, forced into one of two or three boxes of how lives and relationships should work?
For some reason, I started thinking about Ben Affleck while I was angrily puzzling. Specifically, I suddenly recalled the crappy film Deep Water, in which he plays an unconscionable douche, and I remembered that despite how shitty this movie was (you don’t have to take my word for it; I’d further venture that even if you watched it, you don’t remember what it was called) and how toxic his motives were, I couldn’t help but want him to get away with everything.
I find this happening constantly in the media I watch. No matter how terrible the cis white male protagonist is, and how much time and money and energy I’ve spent trying to deconstruct and decolonize that bias, I am on his team. I’m not proud to say it, but honestly if there were a trans white male protagonist who was even half as shitty as the cis ones I regularly root for, I’d probably hope he ended up in jail.
In Deep Water, Affleck’s character is so angry that he kills people for THE WORST reason. I haven’t killed any people for any reason, not even super good ones, but as I was working on my puzzle and letting all my anger surface, I judged myself for feeling it. For having it at all. I turned it toward myself, for making it happen (Why didn’t I start taking medication earlier!?!?) instead of righteously toward a world that oppressed and erased and attacked me my whole life and does still.
To be clear, I did watch the presidential debate beforehand—but turned it off before Trump said Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Even before that point, and with a couple of glasses of organic rosé in my system, I couldn’t take it anymore.
After I let myself feel angry, and then feel angry at myself for feeling angry—though I was for some reason (read: BRAINWASHING) not at all angry at Ben Affleck’s Deep Water character—I took Thomas for a walk. The Pacific Northwestern air has gotten colder, crisper, wetter the last couple of days, a quality that’s forever refreshing to my lungs. After that, I texted a couple of trans friends. Every single one I’ve talked to this week has felt like absolute shit for sometimes inexplicable and at other times totally explicable reasons.
It’s not their fault, is all that matters. It’s not my fault. Every time I feel bad, I feel like it’s my fault. It’s not just a trans thing. It’s an abuse-survivor thing. It’s probably a lots-of-other-types-of-people thing. Before the debate, I went to the grocery store to pick up dinner and the aforementioned wine, and when I passed in front of an older woman with my cart, I said, “Pardon me.”
She responded, of course, “No, it’s my fault.”
As an MFA graduate and fancy-magazine alum, I would generally argue that you need to work up to a conclusion in whatever you’re writing. The more seamlessly, the better. But all I want to say right now, however without elegant segue, is FUCK. OPPRESSION.
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