Manmoding

A work in progress

1.

C’mon.

You need to get up, Matt.

You have to go to class.

Don’t you have lecture in like half an hour?

He sighed. Looking up at her face, he saw someone who seemed like a completely different person from the young girl telling him her life story years ago as he fell for her through the emotional intimacy alone. Flashes of their early memories briefly hit his mind like the flashbacks of a relationship just starting out in one of those crumbling marriage films. Why the fuck was he even feeling nostalgic over anyone or anything from his high school days, much less the girl he loved and was currently in a relationship with?

He did need to go to class. He thought he started out this year on such a positive note as they celebrated moving in together with a home cooked pasta and a nice enough bottle of Pinot. What more could he want or need? His neighborhood was perfect, filled with “doing well” 30-something couples, all cis-het of course, and mainly white, with the occasional older wealthy gay man and his younger creative husband. He liked living in the neighborhood despite its sleepiness as it felt like a neighborhood for mature stable couples on a path to traditional success.

The biggest change this year was that he was going to start hormone replacement therapy after admitting to his girlfriend one night that he was actually a trans girl, the admission of this secret fueled from shots of the shitty whiskey his friend always kept in his barracks room. He still couldn’t accept changing his pronouns or changing his name to his actual name that he chose years ago finding an escape in role playing games, aways building out a female character named Natalie despite telling himself he would choose a male character on his next play-through. He dreamed of using that name even as a young closeted trans girl who didn’t even know what being trans was but so desperately needed transition as her mental state declined with each passing year of puberty.

If he couldn’t change his pronouns or his name, some of the first things that it seemed many other trans people did at the start of their transition to at least their loved ones, he could find some trans communities online to participate in. At first, he went to Reddit and found some different subreddits for trans people and trans women in particular. He found that none of them cared about passing to the point that he did though.

Passing for trans people means the ability to not get recognized as trans. There are more specific definitions but even the trans community struggles to find a more specific definition that everyone can agree on. He didn’t know what caused him to fear not passing to the degree that he did other than perhaps all of the “SJW cringe compilations” that he used to watch in high school, seeing visibly trans people harassed on video in-between clips of college students giving reasonable political takes to Ben Shapiro with the eloquence of a freshman sociology major. He knew no matter what though that he could not socially transition until he passed and with that meant keeping he/him and that dumb brutish name on his student profile.

So he looked for communities that would be more inline with what he believed being trans was. He found /lgbt/, the queer community board on 4chan populated mainly by depressed trans girls that all hate each other slightly less than themselves but return to the board each day like an addict in need of their fix. At first, going on the board felt like reading a different language. Passoid, youngshit, midshit, lateshit, hon, gigahon, twinkhon, all terms used to differentiate trans women based off how well they passed, whether they were closeted, and when they started HRT, as some women believed that the only way to truly pass was to start HRT before puberty, a fatalistic notion that he sometimes agreed with during his worst moments of dysphoria. Of course, besides the much more strict definitions of passing, the board expected those that didn’t meet their harsh standards to forever repress or be cast some variation of a hon, a slur for non-passing trans women trying to make themselves happy by socially transitioning regardless of whether they fit within cisgender norms or some other Bard shit like that.

As he learned this new language, he found out that his strategy, the strategy of taking HRT and waiting until he passed, potentially even if that meant needing facial feminization surgery, was similar to that of the boymoder or manmoder, the former term distinguishing those who could pass but hadn’t socially transitioned yet and the latter term those who were doomed to repress for the forceable future or accept their fate as a hon. Looking at his Neanderthal brow ridge and gigantic long masculine nose, he knew that he was clearly a manmoder and resolved to take his HRT with no goal of passing and therefore transitioning in sight.

Okay, I’m up. I’ll go, I’ll go.

I mean it’s your money, well, your parents money.

He hated going to class. The idyllic Brooklyn neighborhood they lived in was perfect for LARPing as a stable couple on track to get a dog together but it also seemed just far enough from Manhattan to be an ordeal every time he commuted into the city. It took him almost 45 minutes to get to class usually if he took into account of the walk to and from the subway station. For many New Yorkers, of course, a 45 minute commute door-to-door is nothing but really he was just using it as an excuse to avoid talking about why he actually didn’t want to go. He hated the feeling of being this aged closeted tranny in a room full of young straight-out-of high school college students. The ones that were queer he assumed would treat him as an outsider encroaching on their community if he tried to talk to them and specifically the ones that were trans women he assumed passed, due to being youngshits or midshits, that is starting HRT before or at 18, and would see him like some monstrous ogre begging to be let into their space of genuine womanhood and youth. He, being 23, thought that every other student couldn’t relate to his vast life experience and that they assumed he was a career-delayed increasingly feminized weirdo.

So he had to get up. It took two alarms but eventually he did.

Did I grab coffee.

He sighed under his breath, closing the door to his apartment building, while watching two squirrels fight over some trash on the sidewalk.

Fuck.

He did not grab his coffee.

He started his walk to the subway station. The reason they decided to move into their apartment over some of the other more modern or renovated places was because he wanted the shortest possible commute for himself, with his girlfriend willing to sacrifice a dishwasher and even sealed cracks between the floor and the wall for him. Walking onto the busier avenue from his quiet side street, he wondered if it was worth it to grab a coffee from one of the bodegas before getting on the train.

No. You’re kind of a prissy bitch about coffee.

He remembered growing up how he used to constantly go to the nicer cafes and coffee shops in the Bay Area, a mecca for coffee culture and one of the centers of the 3rd or 4th or whatever wave coffee was on when he was 18. At first, he went to these cafes with his friends and then eventually just by himself after they all went to college and he stuck around due to falling apart his senior year and failing almost all of his classes because of a poorly timed suicidal breakdown. To make things worse, the dissolution of one relationship with a Tumblr depressed girl with a diagnosed and poorly medicated anxiety disorder and the start of a second relationship with said ex’s best friend who was even more of a mental wreck than the both of them was like adding kerosine covered eucalyptus logs to a roaring fire.

He thought about that period of his life a lot, the passage of time from a younger high school teen with no responsibilities and endless possibilities for hanging out with friends to an older teen, who watched his friends leave while starting a mundane routine of boring classes at a college with no social life not meant for those coming from his rich suburban enclave of a hometown within the city he pretended to call his hometown to everyone in New York. At the time, the dysphoria hadn’t gone away but the fucked up relationships and wannabe teen show drama were gone and replaced with a crushing mundane loneliness, the type of loneliness seen in those movies about depressed salarymen in Japan set to sad jazz on filmbro Letterbox lists. He related to those salarymen, who seemingly appeared to have given up on life like him but kept going through the motions everyday out of some guilt they carried or just the instinct of having to keep themselves alive.

Getting off the subway at West 4th, he decided that he did not feel like going to class today.

It’s Art History. Who gives a fuck?

It’s one of those dumb classes you have to take but you don’t actually need to go to lecture.

I’ll get a coffee.

He crossed 6th Ave and entered what he considered the richer part of West Village, where couples in the most luxurious athleisure could walk their runt dogs without worry of contaminating their delicate paws with the filth of the rest of Manhattan. Plus, for some reason, Magnolia Bakery was nostalgic to him, somehow, despite the fact that he didn’t grow up in this city and the bakery itself offering fairly mid cupcakes. After Googling the best coffee shops in the neighborhood, he found one that seemed pretentious enough to his standard, as if he had any idea of what that standard was other than clean minimal interiors and a male barista with a manbun dressed to the nines in a Fleet Foxes t-shirt. That was real coffee culture, or something. After walking up Bleecker Street to the cafe, he greeted the nonbinary person or girl with short blue hair at the counter and ordered a cappuccino instead of a latte, a choice he made after realizing the cappuccino was apparently the more respected drink for true coffee people.

Waiting for his drink, he felt guilty about missing class but more importantly about lying to his girlfriend. He had started to do it more as the dysphoria got worse or maybe that was just his excuse for being a shitty person and shitty partner — sorry — boyfriend. He thought if he just lied about being motivated and filled with something other than numbing dread that he was helping her and contributing to their relationship. Of course, he wasn’t better in spite of the lies. At home, he spent hours on the couch glued to his laptop screen browsing 4chan and Reddit, hiding it from her like it was some disgusting fetish porn. He would make plans about his career options or talk about starting healthy habits like going to the gym again but his inability to do anything but rot on that couch stopped him from not just being healthy but even being present in this extremely expensive city every person in their early 20s dreams of moving to while they’re young and filled with frenetic energy that needs a purpose or project, or even just the right party.

Cappuccino for Matt.

Ugh.

He hated hearing that name with its monosyllabic distinctly masculine tone. He might as well have been named Chad or Brock. His name was acidic, like a poison he willingly gave himself in every social interaction out of the fear that using his actual name would give him a brief happiness before a crushing anxiety overwhelmed him, as everyone would know he’s a disgusting fucking tranny.

Think of the 4chan hon comics. Yeah. That’s you if call yourself anything but Matt.

Sipping his cappuccino, he thought about staying in the cafe and maybe working on school or even some creative project for a bit to make the commute seem worth it.

I’ll go for a walk instead.

Heading towards the water, he wondered how she would spend her day. After graduating university in the middle of a pandemic with a not so particularly versatile degree, she had struggled to find what she wanted to do, with her monthly allowance from her parents not motivating her to get out and look for a job like everyone else. He wanted to help her and tried to give her advice but his advice came from his own perception of what he wanted from life and locking oneself away at a computer for hours to be able to order fancy coffee and pastries wasn’t the life that she wanted. After a certain point, he stopped giving her advice just as she would stop trying to get him to go to class.

You accept these things about your partner and it just goes on.

He crossed the busy street that really was just a highway without barriers and began walking along the river. Looking in, he thought about some girl who drowned herself in the river or the ocean from one of those books they had to read in high school that he probably thought was girly shit and void of substance compared to watching True Detective or some other gritty show about a depressed isolated male protagonist who’s lost everything and alternates between drifting off and dissociating while smoking a cigarette and being really anxiously angry.

What book was that? Wuthering Heights? The one with the women and the straight twink and they’re all wearing cottagecore?

He couldn’t remember. It’s not like he remembered much of high school anyway. Sitting down at a bench, he looked out at the grey water and wondered what being trans really meant if he just was going to be taking HRT and lying to everyone else every day. Was being trans also participating in “the discourse” on 4chan? In a way, it was the one place where he could be a girl, even it meant giving himself the correct label and adapting his prose to the community’s toxic dialect of queer English. The most terminally online of trans women participated in the discourse on several different sites in various online communities, carrying on the same conversations with sometimes even the same people without knowing it. Nothing ever really helpful came from the discourse but it allowed him to at least feel like he was connected to being trans beyond his isolating crippling dysphoria and some pills he had on his shelf. He stopped thinking about these thoughts when he realized it was starting to actually affect him. He didn’t exactly want to have a breakdown or what he would later realize is called a panic attack and is very much a real thing. Crying his eyes out in the fetal position on this park bench in front of whoever has these jobs where you can jog at 10am on a Monday seemed appealing in some ways but eventually he snapped back to the comfort of dissociation.

Taking the subway back home, he prepared himself to lie to her. He could do it off the cuff and pretty well too but he liked the preparation for lies to her specifically. He knew that she would probe a bit just to see how well he lied so he came up with a believable narrative about going to lecture. He thought of an imaginary gripe or two to have about something or someone as well as a short quip or side story to fatten the main narrative. Sometimes he wondered if this sophistication of lying meant that he was autistic or had some sort of personality disorder beyond your usual medication resistant clinical depression. When he was 18, after he told his parents that he kind of wanted to kill himself, they sent him to a psychiatrist to try out every antidepressant on the market before realizing that none of them really helped. Instead of trying what sounded like a politically correct way to say electroshock therapy next, they threw him in an outpatient cognitive behavioral therapy group program and he convinced them by the end of it that he was better, blocking the therapist who he had sent a drunk email to confessing that he was trans right after finishing the program. At the time, his parents didn’t suspect that he was trans and didn’t exactly have the emotional bandwidth to figure it out themselves so everyone accepted the outcome and life went on.

Getting out of the subway station, he debated picking up a bottle of wine. He was pretty bad about getting groceries because that was like eight blocks away but the wine store was at the intersection of his side street and the avenue. He didn’t need the wine but he felt like it was a nice thing he could do for her. Plus, when they drank together, he felt two to three glasses allowed them to open up just enough to feel that spark that they had when they first met. Anything more than that and she would become honest enough to tell him all of his faults and how she wasn’t really happy in the relationship. Yeah, he was failing her. He knew that of course but a bottle of wine and maybe some ice cream or bread and cheese at least was something even if it was worth less than doing chores around the house let alone being present and honest with her.

Later, when the relationship finally puttered out, he found out that her stoic presence during this period was a lie. She was crying in the bathroom every night and assumed that he had the wherewithal to figure this out. Maybe he did notice but just blocked it out. A lot of his life he felt he was just missing from his memory. Maybe his actual memories were copied over with some blank tape of crushing mundanity like the boring tutorial sequence of a video game that never ends.

I got wine.

He attempted to sound a little cheerful and excited to be back.

Oh. Thank you.

He couldn’t see her from what could be called the foyer of his apartment and assumed her voice was coming from the tiny second bedroom they called the office. He put the bottle on the counter in the kitchen and entered the living room, setting his backpack down next to the couch and taking out his laptop so he could start his daily dose of Internet browsing. He liked using a laptop while she liked to use her phone for this and he thought that was weird.

Why wouldn’t you want the comfort of a full screen and the ability to type?

He realized not everyone has the same manic energy and desire to refresh two different social media sites while simultaneously doing research on gear for a hobby he would never get into. Maybe this was just another sign that he was malebrained as 4chan would say and not trutrans, referring to those who were truly transgender and weren’t suffering from, say, autogynephilia (AGP), which meant a male being sexually aroused by the image of himself as a female. 4chan accused a lot of trans girls of having AGP, especially if they expressed any joy over the thought of being trans instead of stewing in their crushing dysphoria. He told himself that he didn’t actually believe in the concept of AGP but he wasn’t immune to the board’s propaganda and that fear of being labeled as such snuck its way into his brain.

He wondered when was the last time they had sex.

Are we supposed to think about that?

He couldn’t tell if it was the physiological effects of estrogen or if he was using HRT as an excuse to not bring up his depression and dissociation, which made sex seem more boring than it already was for someone who entered a long term relationship without considering things like sexual chemistry or whether they actually wanted to even date each other instead of just being close friends. He did that a lot. He would use something that seemed less uncomfortable to talk, or even think about, as an excuse to avoid getting into something else a bit heavier.

I mean we had sex after getting drunk that one night? That was like… a month ago?

It was three months ago but it didn’t matter. When he did have sex, he felt like he was playing a performance with her. Sure, it was performative physically as a trans woman with severe dysphoria who couldn’t see himself as a woman in the mirror much less a woman in bed but also performative emotionally too. He thought his dysphoria was the cause of that lack of emotional connection but he wondered if that was just an excuse for something deeper and fundamentally wrong with the relationship at its core.

2.

The relationship happened by chance but at the time it felt like fate brought them together in a way that could be adapted into a screenplay for some gritty high school drama. They met in high school after he started to become friends with some of the girls she ate lunch with sometimes. One day, after school ended, he didn’t want to go home yet more than usual. He decided to go to a cafe with one of the Tumblr theater girls he met through his stoner friend group of guys who all wanted to be in an indie rock band. Probably wanting some company as to not make it feel like a date, the Tumblr girl invited another girl who he hadn’t met, or at least hadn’t met and remembered.

The crusty and sometimes genuinely gross cafe they went to frequently felt like an escape from their suburban cultural repression where they could talk about music, fashion, and whatever other subjects artsy teenagers with too much free time reach for after smoking an 1/8 for a couple hours.

These girls though had some trauma that went deeper than the typical anxiety and depression everyone else had in their town. After meeting up at the cafe and everyone getting to know each other beyond their lunch break-selves, they decided to walk into a nearby park with a hillside that offered one of the better views of the city. It, at the very least, would be a good place to listen to indie folk and dive a bit deeper into each other neuroses, a necessary ritual for a certain flavor of young depressed queer people when meeting each other.

The girl he met before and remembered gave her story first. He was more high than he realized at the time and forgot most of it by the next day but he feigned supportive and affirming responses that felt genuine enough for the emotional development of a teen boy. The new girl then, a bit more eloquently, began her story about the horrific trauma inflicted upon her despite having taken a few more benzo’s than a 90lb girl should ingest before meeting up with them. He paid attention a bit more when it came to her story. He couldn’t tell if it was because he was more attracted to her or if it was because her story was just told better but his responses at least felt less like he was playing a character for her. After sitting at the top of this park and looking out at the Bay with their fake city of origin in the foreground and the slighter gayer more walkable city in the background, he decided to make up an excuse to start heading down the hill.

After a couple of surreal conversations that only teenage stoners can come up with, they split ways to head home, but not before the new girl gave him her number. He didn’t think much of getting her number at the time. She was a grade ahead of him and he figured that she would go off to college and begin her actual life in some city on one of the coasts afterwards. He wasn’t wrong but they did keep in touch even after she became a real person filled with memories beyond studying and the type of suburban melodrama that only Arcade Fire could build a career off of. They wouldn’t see each other again for a year. After a brief visit over her winter break, where she tried to hook with him in a way that felt somewhere between awkward and somewhat upsetting, he didn’t see her in person for years. Instead, they texted, at first, about once a week until eventually every day as she told him about her adventures in New York and her growing portfolio of artistic projects. He didn’t tell her everything about his life with the same amount of detail but he gave her bits and pieces. He avoided talking about his breakdown senior year and he also avoided talking about his suicidal bipolar ex who almost convinced him to transition and start HRT. Later, a couple months into their Brooklyn life, he briefly mentioned the mutual emotional trauma only two teens with severe dysphoria could inflict upon each other, the story only coming out of him after a bottle of wine. He couldn’t tell her about being trans as he himself was trying to repress it so instead he came up with other stories to tell to make his life at the time seem less soul crushing and devoid of the hedonistic joy that people his age are supposed to experience before they become too old to make dumb decisions.

While his life seemed full of adventures too from his texts, in reality he spent most days going to class, returning home to do his homework, and then drinking black coffee while driving around in the night listening to fucked up depressing music. He figured that his life was just broken now, like a stopwatch that couldn’t tick anymore and it was too late to do anything to even repair it. After a couple breakdowns that no one found about unlike his high school one, he decided to join the military and chose one of the harder jobs, a job that only strong stoic men could do. He chose the reserves though so he could continue school but the training pipeline took so long that he felt like he was finally leaving his hometown for real, like the rest of his friends did years ago. He was giving up on transitioning by joining the military and more specifically attempting to join this specialized organization, full of tough men who thought a trans woman entering their ranks would destroy their brotherhood. He watched a lot of depressing shows meant for disillusioned men who needed therapy but instead took those shows to mean that they needed to isolate further and become more fucked up in their self hatred and meaningless misery. He never connected that mentality, which he kept reinforcing, to his motivation for joining the military until he regretted his service entirely years later.

Once he got in, the military was annoying to a frustrating degree that he had never experienced before as someone who never worked a service industry job but in a way it was more comforting than his days of complete Internet-fueled isolation. It’s hard to notice dysphoria when life externally fucking sucks in so many other more tangible ways. It’s still there but it’s not the focus, especially when you’re carrying a 60 pound pack for miles after getting two to three hours of sleep for six weeks. After graduating what a southern white gay with fagcent would call “bootscamp”, he went to a new base in a different southern state and started his next training course, his days there consisting of sitting in a classroom learning things that could be taught in an hour for an entire week while finding time to sneak out of class and bitch about it with his temporary friend that only the Army’s miserable boredom could force him to make. He ended up never talking to that friend again after the course ended, like a lot of other people who he assumed weren’t worth it to deal with the eventual transphobia for when he did come out. He was supposed to be training for his quickly approaching rigorous selection course in a couple months but instead he smoked a lot of cigarettes, at first to make friends, but eventually towards the end by himself, pacing around the limited areas his drill sergeants allowed him to exist in and thinking about what the fuck he was doing with his life.

By the time he began the hardest phase of his training, the gauntlet to determine if he could enter this elite brotherhood of arms, he couldn’t really remember why he decided to do all of this in the first place. He kept thinking back to that failed relationship right after high school where he almost managed to start HRT before the relationship crumbled and he threw away his opportunity with the help of some heavy internalized transphobia. He wondered how his life would have been different as a trans girl in college in one of the more bustling queer friendly areas of the country as she grew into her womanhood. Only after a failed attempt at passing the selection course that was supposed to prove his ability to endure and accept his masculinity did that daydreaming about starting HRT back then start to feel like an entire life he lost to an alternate universe due to a decision that he would regret for the rest of his days. The night he got back from the course, he called her and they talked for hours like they did at this point in their relationship while he drank whatever crappy liquor he could find from his friend’s room and she drank whatever wine she still had from her monthly shipment of expensive European bottles. She comforted him and told him that not passing the course didn’t matter and that he could still do plenty of other things in life to find fulfillment. Of course, it didn’t matter what career he chose or what path he ended up taking if it meant being a guy. When the secret finally came out, she told him that it was okay and that she loved him and that she was here for him no matter what. As he tried to ignore what the impact of transitioning would actually mean for their relationship, making up excuses about the fact that she was bi or how he wouldn’t socially transition for a long time, she ignored said excuses and continued to comfort him until the sun began to come up and their alcohol ran out.

After getting off of active duty and returning to what most people think of as the Army reserves, monthly training on the weekend and a longer annual training session that he actually never did, he drove across the country back to California, to his hometown, a bit earlier than he expected. His friends were still gone and now figuring themselves out a third time in some new city out of college and he was alone spending his days getting black coffee at the same cafe where they met years ago. The cafe had fallen into disarray though with its sense of community gone and the locals he once chatted with having seemingly found new homes. Now, it was just a place where he went to have a three sentence social interaction each day with a tired art student barista to convince himself that he existed. Now that he thought about it, nothing really felt the same. It all looked and sounded more or less similar to what he remembered but it felt like a different place, having replaced all of what he once knew so well with something so disconnected and foreign.

The relationship started after enough isolation caused him to find refuge in an online penpal but now it was fueled by this desperate need for connection at a time when it felt like everything was fucked and the world as a whole wasn’t going to give him any love so he figured might as well take some from the only person offering it. One day, during a particularly bad wildfire season, the sky even ran a hazy dark orange as if it was the end times and he could finally be freed of his existence without guilt. Instead the streets remained empty as he wandered them at night, listening to his sad playlists of music becoming infected with waves of poisoned nostalgia, changing each song’s memory for the worse and corrupting them with a now all-consuming dysphoria. By the time he got accepted to a college in the city she lived in, allowing him to finally leave his hometown now blighted by regret, he’d lost the ability to talk to people and at least pretend he was a person beyond cappuccinos and whatever else he consumed.

What do you want to eat tonight?

Do you wanna cook?

Do you wanna cook?

Well obviously I meant we would both cook.

Okay… what would you want to cook?

I don’t know. I could try to find a recipe online? What are you in the mood for?

No I want you to cook.

Well… I know but I want you to eat something that you’re craving too?

I just want you to cook.

They ordered Thai off a delivery app and drank their Pinot with drunken noodles and fried rice. They told each other each time that they would try different stuff off the menu but they pretty much stuck to the same rotation of four dishes. After dinner, he retreated to the couch and she returned to the office.

It’s Tuesday?

He wasn’t sure since he didn’t go to class and just lived off homework assignment due dates that he was somewhat aware of along with whatever his internship told him to do. His work was pretty simple even if a bit mind numbing. It wasn’t a real software engineering internship but he called it that on his resume just for the workload this disorganized startup gave him weekly as a college student who was “part-time.” What he really liked is that it gave him legitimacy to ignore her. If he was just browsing Reddit or 4chan, then their relationship was fucked as he couldn’t even be bothered to give up that for her. However, this was work, like for-money work and she didn’t even have a job despite being out of college now so in a way he was more of an adult than her. He didn’t let himself be too honest though and stopped that train of thought before he found the source of it.

After finishing up his repetitive tasks that he’d almost automated at this point, he closed the laptop and looked toward the bedroom. It was almost 10.

Would this be when we have sex?

He peered down his railway style apartment towards the office, wondering whether she was still toiling away at whatever project she had attempted to start that week.

Wait, were we supposed to cuddle up on the couch together after dinner and talk about our respective days until we kissed each other for long enough to get horny and finally fuck?

He avoided thinking about it further. They’d have sex at some point since he was her boyfriend and she was his girlfriend, assuming that was just what happened in relationships after the honeymoon phase. Instead of having sex, they brushed their teeth and she did her skincare routine as he sat on the bed looking at his phone and she wondered how he had given up on himself so quickly and whether he even realized it yet.

3.

So this course is in Monterey, in California, and it’s over a year long?

Yeah. And the military would pay for housing too but we could split the rent and get a really nice place.

What about actual school though?

I’ll take a leave of absence. Because it's for the military, I can take up to two years off. It’s probably meant for the international students who have mandatory conscription but hey why not use it and get a free year long vacation?

He didn’t really want to go to Monterey. To study Russian, a subject he hadn’t had much interest in for years now? At this point, he had been on HRT for about a year. If he went to Monterey, it would mean ordering HRT off a DIY site, which wasn’t the worst thing but definitely not what he wanted to do ideally. His dreams of being a super secret commando were almost gone too so Russian wouldn’t really help him on that front as he understood that, by starting HRT a.k.a. his performance decreasing drugs, he had effectively erased any chance of entering that career. That being said, he was almost failing classes at university, the university he had spent so much effort getting into, mostly for her even if he didn’t admit it to himself, and it felt like New York was still dead. Of course, it wasn’t really dead at that point; he was just in one of the more boring neighborhoods and hadn’t tried to make any friends at school or even reach out to some of the different artsy communities his one sort-of friend was in out in Bushwick or Ridgewood or wherever the young creatives made hyperpop and wrote essays about queerness. He thought going to Monterey, like most similar decisions in his life, would allow him to reset and become a person again. After a brief moment of debating whether she was ready to leave New York after having spent seven years in the city already, she agreed but really she agreed for the same motivation he had. She knew the relationship was dead, not even dying, but she deluded herself into thinking that it could somehow be reborn with a change of pace and a new coast. When they moved out of their perfect Park Slope brownstone that they had moved into only a year ago with such excitement for their future, she packed the majority of their things as he frantically finished his procrastinated final projects and knocked out work for his internship that he could have gotten around to a week before.

He knew she felt weird about being back in their hometown, especially staying at her boyfriend’s place, so he told her they would only stay at his parent’s house for a week or two while he waited for the course to start. A week or two turned into three months stuck in his parent’s basement waiting for the Army to give him orders. To make things worse, his dad unknowingly threw out his estradiol gel, causing him to get off HRT for a month or so until they finally moved out. He felt awful not being on HRT but it also caused him to wonder what HRT was even doing. He got tits from it; a lot of girls don't even get that. They were definitely more than A cups and no longer cone shaped but he also wasn’t ready to apply to Hooters. Besides breast development, he felt that HRT didn’t really do anything to him. Like most heavily dysphoric trans girls, he ignored the micro-changes that occur with each passing month and eventually saw HRT instead as some sick placebo that causes mentally ill fuckers like him to find some excuse for their neurosis in the hope of transition, the Twitter posts of dolls somewhat justifiably bashing 4chan femcel trans girls for their toxic beliefs and sometimes even calling them men only reinforcing this idea. Any hope for joy though to come from being trans was gone by now, replaced with dooming dysphoric thoughts about his failure of a transition. He remembered the term catastrophization from his therapy back in the day and recognized that he was doing this to himself but didn’t, or couldn’t, do anything to change his thinking, becoming even more bitter about the fact that he was able to recognize his own cognitive distortions but was powerless to stop them from continuing or even worsening. Eventually, he just assumed it was fate that some girls could accept themselves and socially transition, regardless of whether they passed, while others remained stuck in this initial period of longing for self-actualization just outside their reach. Instead of joy, he saw being trans as like having a terminal illness. It could be alleviated or even ignored somewhat but it was always there with the treatments for it just numbing agents, as if it was this festering cancer, that cancer being the thought that he wasn’t who he was supposed to be but was helpless to become the person that he wanted to be.

When they finally moved into their quaint Monterey beach cottage, the size comforting to their New York expectations of living space, they felt for a second like this cottage and this new environment in general could be a spark for rekindling their relationship. With some free time to use before his course started, they decided to explore the area, going on scenic coastal hikes in the morning followed by peaceful afternoons spent at picturesque wineries, before retreating back to their sleepy tourist town for dinner at the one of the several places they had deemed good enough for their Brooklyn palettes. They felt at peace and enjoyed each other’s company but it felt less like a renewal of the relationship and more like a sweet final act to all the bitterness that they had built against each other over the years.

He continued to take his estradiol gel but besides that he was back to being a guy, a monthly mandatory short masculine haircut reinforcing this. When he was a kid, before puberty started, he would throw fits and even cry at the hair salon as he tried to convince his mom, and then even the stylist, to leave his hair alone and let it grow out. Now, when he went to the barbershop, he would ask for “a low taper on the sides” and “a couple inches off the top” without much regard for how it actually looked in the end. One day his barber, a slightly fat older white guy local to the area, who said at least two vaguely racist or sexist things every appointment, griped about one of his clients bringing his girlfriend along with him the previous hour, proclaiming his shop was supposed to be a place where “men can be men” as the closeted trans girl in his chair nervously replied with a “yeah man totally” and subtly made sure her bra straps weren’t visible. Unlike his social isolation back in Brooklyn though, he, or at least the character he was playing, surprisingly made friends at school with some of the other guys in his classes and sister classes. They would go out together and drink at breweries and local dives in the area, shooting the shit about whatever was going on in the world conflict-wise through gallows humor that it seemed only military guys could understand. Sometimes they would also talk about what they and their significant others were doing for the weekend as if they were a bunch of well-to-do New Englanders debating whether to take a trip out to their lake chalet or go to a ski resort for the holidays. What actually mattered is that he didn’t think about “trans stuff” or attempt to have any connection to queerness during his time in Monterey.

What the fuck is queerness to a manmoder anyway? How is it supposed to comfort me?

Instead he found comfort in this model of being the “husband” that leaves for work every day before coming home to take his “wife” out to the farmer’s market or some other activity to make her content, like she was some dog waiting for its owner to take it out for a walk at the end of the day. He was good at this. Of course, he still hardly cooked, despite the fact that they had a dishwasher and a real kitchen, drawing blame to his early morning physical training that he was forced to attend and that he also needed those three hours of sitting on his laptop doing nothing after coming back from class. He was maintaining the appearance of being this committed traditional boyfriend to his friends while distancing himself even more from her as they became roommates that bonded over food, seldom having sex and only when they got precisely drunk enough to become attracted to each other but not too sick to hurl while fucking.

After a year and some change in Monterey, the course began to wrap up and they started thinking about returning to New York. They’d grown restless as their quiet refuge from a pandemic stricken New York turned into another suburban prison like the one they grew up in. He was 24 or maybe 25 now but it didn’t matter as he felt old seeing his friends from high school start careers and put down roots in their respective cities, finding their own communities and growing creatively and socially. As for him though, he just felt old. Well, he didn’t do anything to become old. He wasn’t filled with memories of some adventurous life, reminiscing on this time in a rocking chair while looking at a scrapbook of memories beside a fire. Instead, he really felt dull, like a tool that was just fucking bashed against a concrete wall for years instead of being used properly for its purpose, whatever that was. He now understood how she felt about him and herself and their situation but at this point the relationship was over. They were together in name but roommates in reality, using the expense of New York rent to keep the relationship together on paper.

4.

He started classes back at his actual university, once again talking how he was going to turn things around this semester. She felt stuck still, not working since she quit a temporary corporate job that made her miserable enough to the point of being able to get her allowance back. Any comfort that he gave her was in food or wine or offers of going up to a cabin in the Catskills that he never booked. After visiting a new provider at his school’s clinic, he got on injections, which gave him more stable hormone levels and also made HRT less of a hassle, replacing the bi-weekly annoying adhesive patches with a once a week injection. At this point, his breasts had gotten bigger, which to some trans women would make them feel ecstatic and filled with “trans joy” but for him meant bedrotting during the summer as he couldn’t hide them with sports bras and button down shirts anymore, with now only oversized zip-up hoodies making him enough of a blob to go unnoticed, as if everyone around him was constantly trying to spot boymoders. Some days he thought that New York was too trans friendly to the point of even cis queers being able to spot a manmoder on HRT with his quite masculine features. He wondered what the fuck being queer really meant too beyond having a bleached wolf cut and a septum piercing. He didn’t grow up with queer friends beyond those from his high school friend group that eventually came out as some member of the alphabet club. Later, when visiting his one trans friend, he met a person that he used to be friends with in high school who didn’t have any gender dysphoria and didn’t need HRT but felt gender euphoria for being nonbinary. He couldn’t understand this person’s outlook and why they would just so willingly give themself this disability. In fact, it made him angry at this person, filled with envy wishing that he could just simply put on some crappy polyester Amazon mini skirt and cure his dysphoria.

His paranoia about being visibly trans got worse and worse to the point of not being able to go to classes or talk to people beyond the brief interaction with the cute girl who wore a variety of emo band hats at his go-to pizza place a couple times a week. As the school year ended in academic and social failure like usual, he flew out with her to California to visit her sister and more importantly enjoy a free stay in one of the nicer neighborhoods of San Francisco. If Monterey was the final act, San Francisco was the epilogue. They knew the relationship was over before but now they had finally accepted it, consciously, like he had with gender dysphoria a decade ago. The relationship didn’t end in some fiery crash of uncovered lies or exploding emotions; it ended with quiet days of enjoying each other’s company, at a distance, while exploring a city that felt special to the both of them, as she found a new home, making friends and finding community for the first time in years, while he said goodbye to a place that he could never exactly call home but felt as close as it could be to one.

When they returned to New York after the summer, she broke up with him.

He cried for a few days, even knowing that the relationship was over long before she gave him the final news. In fact, if she hadn’t done it, he probably would have by the end of the year, treating it like some subscription that he needed to cancel before his card got charged again at the end of the month. He cried and he cried until he wept less and less each day. It felt good to cry though. He was crying over something that was flawed and ultimately couldn’t be repaired given the different paths they were now on but it felt natural, like something that was okay, something that was human. He tried to purely grieve the loss of her presence for as long as he could keep those memories clean from what seemed to infect everything else in his life but eventually they too became corrupted and tarnished, his dysphoria crawling back into the picture, latching onto him like a parasite, as if to say that he was cursed and would always be cursed as long as he existed within this body, poisoned by his very nature itself. His one chance for being with someone as this repressed gender-fucked castrated creature was over and he had to accept now that he was fundamentally broken, left to live this life of quiet misery forever alone like those Tokyo salarymen dissociating to Chet Baker each day.

There’s a point where most trans girls realize that they can’t get back those teenage years taken from them but what’s even more insidious is the loss of a 20’s for a girl. In high school, everyone is a hormonal creature taking inspiration from every piece of media or art or any other influence when making decisions in their lives without thinking of what they could create themselves. In your 20s though, you’re supposed to become an actual person who fucks up and does shitty things but also experiences genuine moments, especially with others, that give you so much joy and appreciation for being alive even in this post-ironic hellscape of a world.

However, as an in-the-closet trans girl, or more accurately, a manmoder, he shut himself off from experiencing that. His one relationship now finally over, he wished he could he get back at least that heartbreak instead of this dull pain, now less and less dull as the years went by and his youth left him. As school started again, he broke down but this time without her to prevent him from falling apart completely. One drink after dinner turning into a bottle of wine to himself every other night, he realized that drinking out in New York was too expensive and that the ability to socialize didn’t mean anything if he was lying as soon as he introduced himself to anyone else.

On one of his last nights out at a cocktail bar on the Lower East Side with typical overpriced drinks, he met a cis girl who was also alone and looking for company. Like always, he lied to her, making up some entertaining life story that was fairly similar to what he had experienced but seemed less depressing, as if he was a real person that had his shit together and grew from his downplayed trauma instead of trapping himself in it. After two drinks turned into five, he finally got the courage to lean in for a kiss after she gave him enough signals to make it undeniably obvious. The kiss didn’t feel real though. It felt like he was trapped in some foreign body, controlled by an alien entity pressing its lips against hers, temporarily adopting some amount of masculinity that this girl so clearly desired from him. They left the bar right before last call and decided to split an Uber back to their apartments. After making out in the taxi for a bit, now sufficiently drunk enough to do that in front of their driver without giving a shit, she decided to invite him back to her place. He gave her a ‘I’m down to do whatever’ type reply but really he was terrified. At this point he had D-cups underneath a binder and a flannel but this girl probably thought that he was a cis guy with just a shaggy haircut and softer skin than the average man. When they got to her place, she offered him more wine and he said sure or fuck it, figuring if his next drink caused him to black out, he could at least avoid remembering whatever was about to happen. That night they had drunk sloppy sex that unfortunately he did remember but he kept his flannel on the entire time despite occasionally feeling her fingers reach across his lower back every so often. Waking up the next day, he put on his clothes quickly enough to avoid giving any signals for morning sex so instead they went to a local breakfast place to recover from the booze before he headed home, feeling shame for what he had done to himself and also her. The next months went by in a drunken haze interrupted by brief moments of crushing clarity over his declining state and loss of self.

One day, after the alcoholism had run its course, he bought a shrooms chocolate bar and ate it entirely on a Thursday afternoon for no particular reason other than boredom. During his trip, he got to live in that alternate universe where that girl said the right thing to her parents and prevented herself from experiencing the body horror that is male puberty. It didn’t feel like day-dreaming but instead as if he was living all those years of her life over the course of a couple hours in bed. He got to see her grow as a person, finding passions and people she cared about. He got to see her find a community and feel a type of love from others, especially from other trans people, that she could never feel from her family, as supporting and loving as they were. He even got to see her try different fashion styles over the years while in reality he laid catatonic in bed next to a closet full of flannel shirts and hoodies his parents bought for him over a decade ago. It was if he was simultaneously observing her life as a phantom while getting to experience certain moments as just her, nothing else. When the trip ended, he fell into a depression hole deeper than usual and began a cycle that he couldn’t stop of regretting his past while letting the present go by, only adding to his regret and building dread for his future, whatever that was at this point. He turned to literature to try to fix himself and there was something about fig trees but it didn’t really help him. Instead, he felt less like a person now and more like some sort of wraith, walking around with a vague physical presence but unable to participate in what he saw or communicate to those who he desperately wanted to reach out to.

After the fall semester came to an end, he flew back out to California, this time to visit family briefly but mainly to visit his best friend Sarah from high school, one of the few people he still felt close to. Most importantly, she also knew about his secret and was trans herself so he could actually talk to her about it without having to explain these unexplainable concepts that his family, or really any cis person, couldn't even come close to understanding, remembering how he tried to rely on poorly constructed metaphors that didn’t really make anything more clear but instead left him and his family equally frustrated. However, Sarah was at a point in her transition where she was out and had a group of friends around her that loved her, many of them queer and trans themselves. It broke him to see her so happy and it destroyed him entirely when he met some other trans girls on that trip. He felt like an imposter or some intruder violating their space when talking to them. Did they know he was trans? Could they tell he was on HRT? While he felt immense dread over this paranoia, he also desperately wanted one of these women to find out about his secret. He wanted someone to reach out and offer to help him make the final push to transition. He wanted someone to paint his nails, do his brows, and give him different outfits to try on while offering love and—

That’s fucking AGP. Do you want to be an AGP hon?

One night, he attended a dinner party at Sarah’s co-op that was a bit too crowded for his anxiety riddled brain but he wanted to feel alive and doing something that people his age were supposed to be doing instead of bedrotting and sending degrading comments about himself into a digital void that could only offer hostility or affirmation of his self hatred in response. The party began with everyone arriving fairly quickly with the guests then waiting for someone to open the alcohol until one of the hosts finally did it themselves. After that, everyone exchanged the usual what-do-you-do's and where-are-you-from’s until they fulfilled those social requirements enough to retreat back to their friend groups. Finally, one of the guests got up and let everyone know that her game of the night would now start, as Sarah had wanted each guest to come up with some sort of unique creative “thing”, offering little details on what counted as a “thing.” He hadn’t come up with anything but assumed Sarah understood why. The premise of this guest’s game was that each person had to come up with some known figure who they related to most, write only that name down on a piece of paper, and then after shuffling all the papers in a jar, a piece of paper would be drawn and everyone would have to guess who wrote which paper based off their personality or vibes. He stared at the blank piece of paper and tried to think of anyone but no one came to mind, wondering whether he had become consumed by solipsism. After feeling more and more anxious about not being able to come up with a name and the person running the game asking for everyone to turn in their paper soon, he instead got up, not being able to come up with a lie for his antisocial action, and went downstairs to hide in Sarah’s bedroom. After a soft cry, the type that doesn’t tear your tear ducts apart and leave your face puffy for hours, he went upstairs to try to be a real person again.

Sarah had mentioned earlier that one of the trans girls at the party struggled with severe anxiety about passing like him and he figured it was worth a shot to try to at least have the cis guy he was playing befriend her. She had long black hair with tiny curls and those oval shaped glasses every trans girl seems to wear along with overall a subtly alt aesthetic, as if to say “I used to be a goth girl but now I’m in grad school.” After finding a space in her conversation with one of her friends she came to the party with, he tried to introduce himself to her, using the name that he hated, hoping that she would see through his lie. Instead, she guardedly responded with a laconic reply that felt bitter and he assumed it was because he was trying to enter her space through a barely existent social connection, as a cis man.

She probably thinks I’m a fucking chaser.

What he didn’t realize is that even if this woman could tell that he was trans, she probably saw him in that moment how he now saw those mentally ill ex’s who he used to date in high school, where the relationships clearly didn’t help either party and only created a ping-pong effect of spiraling breakdowns. Or maybe she was just enjoying the company of her friends and didn’t feel like being particularly social that night. Either way, he retreated downstairs, back to the safety of Sarah’s bedroom, analyzing the interaction and coming up with a thousand different reasons for why it occurred the way it did while she probably forgot about meeting him within a couple hours. He cried to the point of having trouble breathing as the tips of his fingers began to vibrate and his vision became blurry. This time he wouldn’t go back upstairs for the rest of the night. Sarah mentioned later that they ended the night with whoever was still there in the early AM cuddling up against each other on the common area couch, which made him feel that he made the right choice to stay downstairs. The next day, after waking up on the floor of Sarah’s bedroom, he left with a quiet almost too terse goodbye, stopping at a sterile cafe for his caffeine fix before heading home to New York.

Back in New York, he felt more isolated than he did before he left, having seen what others had attained that he’d walled himself off from experiencing himself. As part of the trans Internet discourse, he frequently saw online fights between trans girls from 4chan, who felt they didn’t pass, and the rest of the more positive online trans community over the 4channer’s depressing envious comments left under posts of attractive passing trans women showing off their beauty or really just trying to advertise their sex work a lot of the time. He felt envious of these passing trans women as well but not to the point of wanting to leave comments like those. In fact, he felt more envious when he saw photos or videos of trans women, regardless of their passibility or conventional beauty, just being together and enjoying the solidarity that must come from having friends who’ve all experienced this sometimes socially suicidal but most likely rewarding transformation in their lives, having found love in each other and their ability to truly empathize with such a fucked up but probably profound human experience. He was even envious of posts that mentioned trans joy or how beautiful the experience of being trans was. He knew what was just beyond his reach and how all it would take was just leaning in to grab it but ultimately remained at this border stuck between acceptance of herself and acceptance of his salaryman future, unable to pick a side.

5.

These days, he doesn’t drink as much as he used to, saving getting blackout drunk for one night a week and instead relies on weed as his daily vice. He remembers how getting high used to feel like some social ritual, how he and his friends would have to find the right smoke spot while concealing their drugs and paraphernalia from strangers and family with an anxiety of getting caught looming over them but the reward of being high with each other and going on adventures afterwards making their fear feel so worth it. Now, he takes out a pre-rolled joint he bought from a corner store and smokes it alone while walking the streets of lower Manhattan. He learned the word anhedonia from a YouTube comment on a Cumtown clip of all places and feels like this word sums up his experience with weed now. He still smokes but he’s recognized it’s more for making him feel something other than that boring dissociation he’s stuck in while sober. He quietly chuckles thinking about how the cashier asked him for his I.D. and wonders if there would ever come a time where someone would think he was his younger brother or even his sister. No one’s ever questioned his I.D. though so he assumes they see the same man in the photo in front of them, just with longer hair, now that he’s left the Army entirely.

After finishing his joint, he decides to sit in Washington Square Park until the temperature is no longer bearable, about an hour or so away at this point. He usually comes here to eat his croissant and drink his cappuccino or black coffee in the morning, some of the few calories he gives his body every day, acting like being a detached observer sitting in some quiet corner of the park counts as social interaction. Sipping his afternoon coffee on this fairly warm winter day while watching people go by with the comfort of his earbuds blocking out the sounds of the world around him, he wonders whether he’ll make it to 30. He’s not actively suicidal with any serious plans but, if a truck ran a red light as he was walking across one of the busier avenues and crushed his skull into a thousand fragments across the pavement instantly, he wouldn’t exactly feel sad about it. Sometimes, he even wishes he could get some terminal disease, one that would give him three to four months of relatively pain free time to go travel and say goodbye to loved ones before taking a trip to one of those European countries that allow you to kill yourself guilt free. Suicide, at least the malebrained-type, is fundamentally a choice to choose non-existence over existence but he wonders, now fully consumed by dysphoria, whether his current existence event counts as existing. He’s even lost the ability to embody that man he played fairly well for most of his life but the dysphoria still keeps locked her away, with only an empty vessel remaining. He bluntly tells his parents about these thoughts now but they don’t know how to help him and just look on in quiet horror as their child remains helplessly trapped in this liminal state of being.

A group of younger girls, who seem more fashion forward than the average group of NYU students, walk by and sit down at some benches next to him, as he glances up briefly to look at them, before quickly staring down at the ground in front of him. They’re students too but they were probably responsible enough as upper middle class kids to go to this university straight out of high school. A couple of the girls are trans or at least he thinks so from one girl having a clocky voice and the other a slightly clocky face. By now, he’s become disconcertingly skilled at clocking trans women after looking at thousands of transition timelines with the most amount of focus towards his own face, overanalyzing the smallest of facial features to convince himself that he could never truly pass even with the help of the most skilled facial feminization surgeons in the world. He hates himself for assigning these judgments of clockiness to strangers, inspecting the features of someone’s face like their philtrum length or the angle of their brow ridge or even the particular resonance of their voice but he so desperately wants to reach out and say something, anything to start a conversation with them and potentially find someone who understands him and what he’s experiencing. He looks up again for a brief second, wondering if he should find some way to say hi but he remembers the image of that ogre coming up to a group of girls pretending it could be anything other than what an ogre is, horrifying the group not just with its ugliness itself but its disgusting desire to attain something so pure as femininity. The girls eat their snacks while talking about some party they want to go later that night as he looks down at the ground and takes out an earbud to eavesdrop on their conversation a bit better, despite his shame in doing so.

You’ll never be a real woman like them.

You’ll yearn for this community while stopping yourself from ever even getting close to it.

You’ll play this character until your bones ache and your mind starts to leave you.

You’ll dream of a life that’s passed by and left you before you ever leave this pit.

After some time, the girls get up from the bench and leave while he stays and puts his earbud back in.