To Be a Transgender Woman (Fiction)

To be a transgender woman: because it is something I know about – yes. The story of my woman’s life, my transgender woman’s life, the story of any transgender woman’s life, not just my life, not just any transgender woman’s life, any life, any person’s life, any vegetable or mammal life – or of rocks and stones, the song of death… and it goes on easily from here, as life goes on easy, when you have accepted yourself, for who you are.

Not to undertake such a daunting task – it is not what I desire to do, what I wish to push upon the world, to push my transgender body upon the world that rejects us in so many ways, transgender women. To write a work that you could call fiction, a kind of fiction, in a literary genre. “Genres shall not be mixed,” Jacques Derrida wrote, when he explicitly intended to mix genres. I intend to mix genres – and I intend to mix genders.

She is hip, because she is a DJ. Spinning the latest hits at the disco, in her tight glittery dress, her nicely shaped, voluptuous breasts implanted surgically five months ago. It was painful, this process, as the new mammary glands healed, but she enjoyed the process, this new burgeoning body of womanhood, “which made me what I am,” she said. She was joking, but she was really telling the truth: it made her feel like a woman, which made her a woman, because that is what being a woman is.

Madonna and acid jazz, Paul Oakenfold trance, Paul Van Dyk, Armin van Buuren – all the cool stuff from the techno and electronic scenes. She knew it all – where the technicians came from, what made them tick, what made their music art. And she thought of it as such, though it was just fine disco to dance to, and she loved to dance, to feel her fine body moving on the dance floor, shaking her butt and breasts and hips in her tight glittering gown.

She had been assigned to have GRS the next summer. But it was delayed because of COVID-19. This almost broke her heart. It was a kind of trauma, because it was one that only women would understand: how crucial their body image is to them. She desperately wanted a vagina – they were nicely made by these surgeons – real Oreos, she said.

Kassandra cued the next disco song on the Technics turntable, she picked up a glass of rose wine. She had chosen it over the cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitans gave her a headache, though she loved the taste. The song was dry, a dry white-wine minimalist techno, with a blitzing heavy dance beat. It gave her anxiety, though it gave her energy. She thought about how hard it had been for her body to transition – and for her to transition, as a transgender woman.

People had accepted Kassandra, but the people she knew looked at her differently. She had a high, soft woman’s voice so the people who met her or didn’t know her just assumed she was a cis woman, which was nice, but she wondered if she felt pretty, if people thought she was pretty. “Do you think I’m pretty?” she asked. “is it all right for me to say?” I asked. “Of course,” she said. “Well, yes.” I answered. She said, “Aw, thanks.” I felt I had been attracted to her, and I liked her body, and how her easy disposition had fit so neatly into her personality of love and kind passion. I even asked her for a date to peruse tops and skirts and dresses at the local Goodwill, but I didn’t present it as a date.

People sometimes ask me if I would date other transgender women. I would. I am attracted to them. I like the mix of sexes and genders, it is a sexual thrill for me, the daring of a moment’s surrender to another body – it gives me dreams, and I wake up from them, satisfied and happy.

I always dreamed of being a goddess, dancing in the ballroom light of a late-night nightclub, with my breasts tight in my full lace brassiere, my body in the night. But I can’t really dance. Maybe Kassandra will show me, in some dream I conjure of her, together in the night with me, just dancing, just dancing free. It is nice to imagine her there in my home, when I am away, when she feeds my cat.

So that’s my story, the private story of a transgender woman in public. She loves being this woman she is, that she was becoming, ever since she was born. If you want to know what my birth certificate says, you will have to read my mind. My mind of transgender woman, of a child growing up to be a woman in a men’s world, and to change that world so that it loves women, transgender women.