“I’m trans and I bound my chest for ten years so I can’t properly do boat pose and I want you to know this lest you take my ineptitude compared to all these lithe bodies as a personal failing and not a dense web of causal links and betrayals.”

She bowed. “Thank you for gifting that to us.”

I could see some eye rolls through the mirror.

We went through our flow faster than in the beginner class, with the usual farts and sighs. The pancakes rumbled around in my stomach as I inverted and watched the sweat-stained back of a long person, who had to be a ballerina, extending her leg back in dancer-pose.

I was always half-aware of Kaya hovering around. Before I started taking T, I hardly looked at str8 women—we lived in a world apart, without any sexual value to each other—but after, I could get lost in their scent and our feminism and how they looked at me curiously.

When it came to bridge pose, I couldn’t hold myself up with my arms. I caved in and thought of Aiden and all his weightlifting, and how I was hardly the muscular dude that trans men were supposed to become.

Phew. Thank gawdess I’m a bad trans, came the new refrain.

During shavasana, I dreamed I was on a tiny boat floating in the ocean.

Kaya rang a bell and the room filled with palo santo smoke.

I awoke with a fresh feeling.

We all hummed Om together in a cacophony, my voice cracking. I was trying to slip out the door when Kaya came over and put her hands on my chest.

“I feel the surging here,” she said, with eyes closed. “All that movement, stiffness, tissue.”

Am I comfortable with this? Do I want to punch, crumble, roar, or accept her touch?

Sophie always said that being an adult means having options. But sometimes our options were all second-tier shows available to stream instantly, while the option we needed had been removed due to copyright.

Or our options were all the foods at bicoastal food halls, from ramen burgers to burrata ice cream: As long as you were white and rich and didn’t mind waiting in a line of ift clothing and bamboo textiles for thirty minutes, you could chow down on all the earthly delights.

“You know, trans people have an extra chakra,” I told her, deciding to accept her touch but also educate.

She nodded.

“Equidistant from the third eye and the throat. Thanks to all the bullshit we have to process on a daily basis, we are at least gifted with a portal.”

“Do you mind if I put my Reiki fingers on you? You’re transmitting really hard.”

I shrugged.