I had to keep pushing, even if I made a thousand shitty mistakes, even if the patrons sitting next to us were discussing the newest nut milk.

“Why don’t you like talking about this stuff with me, when I’m trying to be open with you about trans things?” I waited for a most scorching retort.

“Why don’t I like talking about Black stuff with you?” she asked, and my question sounded absurd. “Well, I used to think I didn’t want to talk about race because I wanted to take comfort in midwestern propriety, niceness, low-hanging upper-middle-class perks—Van Leeuwen pistachio ice cream and steak-frites at Balthazar—and I presumed that if I went too deep into Black reality, I would lose it entirely, would break down, and nothing that my parents taught me about hard work and courage would mean anything and it would fall apart and there would be no consolation, just the cold hard stabbing edge of truth amid the Shake Shack wrappers.

“But that’s bullshit. What I really mean to say is that I’m uncomfortable when you regurgitate all these notions you’ve picked up by trolling the internet, whereas I am doing a lot of heavy lifting simply by existing in a PR office, online dating, getting on the subway, going to the hair salon—if I want my hair relaxed I have all the sisters hissing that I’m a self-hating Becky and that I need to decolonize my beauty regimen, and if I leave it natural, my boss’s boss asks me if he can touch my hair at the annual pub crawl, and wants to know my opinion of Kara Walker’s bugaboos that he saw over the weekend in Munich. So yes, I feel proprietorial about my Black experience, which is always being explained to me, and I’d really rather that you not mansplain it back to me as you compare it to the trans experience.”

“Got it.”

We sat in silence.

A Bio-meter would have beamed marigold with “social-justice-related awkwardness.”

Yes, as a trans guy with dead parents, going to the hardware store, the barber, the swimming pool, the grocery store, the airport, the car rental agency, the gym (which I hated anyway), and the clothing store was fraught with everything lost and gained, the constant crashing of memory into future joys, of girlhood training into unexpected manhood, of a body still as stone turning into a living organism, but it was not at all the same as being Black. My whiteness had protected me from violence and poverty. These were simply facts. It was up to me to start digesting reality.

“What do you think of the last G+T, OMG, when they did that faerie orgy flashback from the time before Fae Luc got sober?” I asked, moving back to safer territory.

First she ignored me and ordered another drink, further putting me in my place. The bartender handed her a shot of tequila, and she finally said, “Ugh, I was dying when they broke into a conga line with all their dicks in each other’s asses,” and we were friends.