“If you see some depressed or poor people about to get on, just move down a few cars so you don’t have to soak in some horrible color. But they should know better than to walk into a perfectly pleasant pastel car,” she said, glancing over at the angry mother with three screaming children who were probably keeping the train’s interior in the limbo of lime. “Often, white kids in their early twenties try to sneak into dying grass or algal bloom cars, but they end up returning to the tasteful colors,” she added, pushing the child’s hair back from his face.

We reached Mulberry Street and passed consumers who did not have the privilege of mind-cleaning, who only wanted to find the perfect acid-wash jeans to go with their despair. I saw our reflection in a storefront and wondered how anyone could ever want to hate-crime us.

We were looking so hot and unified!

Inside the over-lit store, techno throbbed and Blithe and I fished complimentary ear plugs out of a mesh basket. The overstimulation didn’t seem to bother Aiden, who wandered off without us. The edgy retailer sold three items, all unisex: enormous T-shirts, long shorts, and a pair of sweatpants with legs four times the size of a usual leg, designed for a monster. The colors rotated every three weeks. That week’s: Fragile Violet, Renaissance Gold, and Horchata.

“I miss those shiny Adidas track pants,” I told Blithe.

“I’m nostalgic for every single part of my life that didn’t feel like a pit of despair,” he responded, and walked away.

I started spiraling, thinking how feminist cis-dudes out there would be scoring major points for wearing genderless ift sweatpants in their dating profiles while all of us trans who wanted actual fitting M or F clothing were told: Just wait a little longer for the next stage of capitalism to bring strange new forms into the marketplace.

Trans desires still counted for about fifteen cents on every dollar, unless there was easy entertainment value. All these well-meaning fools were sitting around a boardroom table in a smart office with whiteboard floors for creative juicing, thinking up a thousand new, disposable ways for cis, straight, skinny women to dress themselves.

Oh, but look at these giant coral shorts on sale!

The color-archives sale rack had a pair that was très cute. I decided my furry legs and olive skin would look great in the shorts against a sea-blue yoga mat or riding in a sherbet subway. I held up the shorts to my waist, as if these sizes would ever fit properly.

Brain and creature desires do not need to align, I told myself.

I don’t need to be a pure trans of ideals, wearing only Levi’s from the thrift store that still carry the ball sweat of some skinny graphic novelist in his forties.