“I do.”

“Think on it.” She could just fluidly chart out forward motion like this. Life paths were open things, and Iris picked and sampled and offered them at her choosing. “I have a room out there starting November 1. I was gonna go in October and look for a job.”

And I could disappear, thought David.

This was how he’d first understood being trans as a teenager, that mashed-up kinetic version of knowledge from the old forums and GeoCities-adjacent websites. His overloaded circuitry could tease out only a few ethoses at a time from that online hairball of fervently good intentions and horror, but a more nuanced one was Your old life won’t exist. The surgeries and hormones and voice training and document changes (and where you getting the money for those? Good question), they weren’t just inarguably necessary on their own terms to survive a malevolent world. They were in service to an idea: that a successful transition was to slip inside the skin of a cisgender woman you conjured from the air. And the old you? He had to die.

This road map had frightened teenage David, to whom such recommendations felt like being told to float in the sky. Never mind willpower, the literal ability to pull it off seemed out of the question. He was too tall and broad-shouldered, too loud and silly, too shitty at keeping his own secrets, liked sex with women too much (another whole can of worms unto itself: this new you had to be straight).

So, beyond the planet-sized question of fear—to transition felt like he would lose something innate about himself. And ergo, this logic told him, there was another sign that he wasn’t actually trans.

So.

In the subsequent years, he was warmed by radical blogs and the bandana’d trans woman who took umbrage with such an ethos, along with two guys in a gender studies class who quietly sat next to David for a while and eventually told him they were trans men. The men were a couple, and the men were kind. And David learned from all these people: That old mandated system? Which everyone had to play along with to get hormones until very recently, still did in most of the country? That old system was gatekeeping, transphobic, essentialist, et cetera, et cetera. It was classist and racist and founded on the idea that transness was inherently shameful and needed a specific corrective, and, by the way, for trans people to even be friends with each other was proof you were up to something weird. That old system said that not everyone who wanted to transition was meant to, and even if you did, that the goal of such a transition was cisness, to start out as one kind of cis person and end up another.