I just think you all fail trans people everyday. Full stop. There’s not one day I lack reason to utter, “I hate cis people.” There was a day one cis man emailed me to say, “You shouldn’t say that! It hurts my feelings.” B/c you’ve thrown your pronouns, you believe you’re good.

Not a day passes where a cis person who, b/c he’s gay, or black, or she’s a woman, or disabled, presumes they must get not just what transness is, but what hostility toward trans persons looks like. Well, if in America racism remains a noose, transphobia is a bullet in my head.

But of course racism isn’t just a noose; were some 400 odd years of slavery prior to the dawn of Jim Crow. I would think PhDs, folks with MacArthurs, Guggenheims, tenured professorships and wouldn’t require you to spell out these logical parallels, but they do.

So I have sit here, tediously, tweet by tweet replay the violent episodes of just my one year, 2020. I have to feed into your need to see the blood first, before you stop raising the whip, & give into an American lust for flesh, dying flesh, that seems at times the only catalyst.

Don’t take my word for it? Take George Floyd’s then, Breonna Taylor’s, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice—dead flesh that urged a moment. It isn’t enuf to say, “We are dying.” We must already be dead, in what’s already a season of dying. Oh, but I digress.

Let’s see: in February I turned 31, but I had no ID to prove it. Because my passport (!) had been, effectively, stolen and held hostage by a @lyft driver who essentially used it as bait to get back to me and make advances at me. Lyft was entirely unhelpful—

—during the process, claiming there was no way they could retrieve the missing item. It was only happenstance that, a month later, another ride, I got the same driver again. He still refused to give me my property, claiming it was in his other car. When I called police—

As I refused to get out the car without my property—and the police arrived, nonchalantly, early in the wet morning, suddenly my passport was recovered! They handed it back to me with an expression like, “Well, you got back what was lost. Everything’s good here, right?” Oh—

It was a black cop, white cop and a black man driver. Everyone was cis. The black cop licked his lips as I angrily returned to my apartment, asking “So what you doing later?” You fail us. We’re in April now, everyone’s dying. We’re in May, June. A friend—

A Gemini is having a surprise birthday party. I arrive to what I think will be three people in attendance; its more like 7. Well. Over the evening, I meet two new women who are sisters. One is a little person w/ whom I have a love chat outside about *visible difference*—

I mean, I had noticed at the party how folks literally were petting this grown woman, speaking to her as a child, and I wanted her to know I see that, I think it’s fucked up, AND I WILL HELP HER. We cry together alone outside, away from the others. It’s a good memory. Her sister—

A black cis “sis”—we’re the same age, practically the same build, she’s dressed eccentrically, she seems fun—snaps at me. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” Everyone in the room looks incredulous. Who is she speaking to? Her finger raised in anger pointing at me said it was me.

“What?” I say, simply confused. We’d gone from discussing the Tea in China to an episode of Bad Girls Club in 0.3 sec. “You think you can be me?!” She’s hysterical. “You’re clearly intimidated by my femininity.” I didn’t say that; she said it to me, and I laugh. The projection!

All these episodes are longer, more dramatic, and I’m permitting myself to their summary because that’s what you need; it’s all you need, just a taste of the blood, whiff of the iron. Homegirl’s getting really hyfy now. I can hold my own. Evidently, it’s just my words & presence—

That disturb, so I use that. At some point, homegirl rips off her Beyoncé Drunk-in-Love wig, screaming, “She’s proud of the black girl she is!” Folks, including her sister, try to calm her down. Her two kids upstairs are crying. I’m shaking my head. Homegirl nearly spazzes—

On the host, an exmarine. That’s no good. Eventually, she’s escorted out. The room is breathless, then: “Wow. Is that what you have to go thru?” I look over to the host & shake my head slowly, now crying. “Yes.” B/c it’s true, at any moment y’all can just snap, smash the glass.

“The beautiful ones always smash the picture,” Prince sung. “Well, the beautiful ones smash the mirror,” says this queen. Is that how transness ontologically works, for you, at least? We present a schism, a glitch & fracture in the rational order “gender” allegedly dictates.

Once I told a poet, at one tome a good friend, many years before I knew I was trans, “I want to write myself outside of gender.” And looking back at me, he said: “That would make you irrational.” Thank you, Roger. You were right. I am irrational, at least I return irrationality—

—into the eye that believes, and ergo works ardently to maintain, an idea of their rationality. That idea, again, is “gender,” a system of categorization we merely depend on so as to know how to *treat* each other. That’s why you *need* the blood—I mean, my pronouns—

You need to know if you: want to be attracted to me, & ergo how to lust for me; if you want to respect me, ergo listen to me, take me as an authority; if you want to dismiss me, ergo condescend or pity me; if you want to support me, ergo send guilty $10 to my venmo. You need me.

I started after that bizarre party to say, “This is why I should stay my pretty ass home.” After laughing, I started also to return to the myths: of Orpheus, whose song or refusal to sing into Ed the Maenads to rip him; of any of the gods who dare not descent Olympus—

—for mortals, who awed at the same time hated them, were below. I still haven’t received my 1st blow yet, as to the cheek; we’re still early in the story. I think cis fail trans by not realizing gender as its elaborate story, one written in the interactions btwn persons.

And its for this reason why I—even as I understand the sentiment of the slogan—reject the idea that my gender isn’t about you, or yours mine. When I make a change about my body, or reflect my gender, it causes to your mind you to have to realize you COULD do the same.

You could also change, form yourself, become that smallest wish you left dormant in the back of your head but for adulthood—“responsibility,” “reality”—you left tucked away. So what I now do is that I smash the mirror you’ve made of yourself, the self you want reflected.

I disturb your belief that cis black womanhood is the lowest rung of society, totally unprivileged. I refuse your idea that cis masculinity just needs to be repaired, and not just rejected. I complicate notions who is lesbian, what is gay. I make your dick hard & your pussy #WAP.

It’s midsummer now. COVID kills more black flesh than white, and the Fascist in Office is still an idiot. Late one evening, I will hear a black woman who I’ll never meet again let holler in the air, “Uncuff her! She’s just a lady!” She’s walking forward, angry, speaking about me.

Moments early I had been manhandled by two security guards. The story bores me to sag, but I say it anyway: how the black security man, eager to touch me, but incapable of admitting that, chooses violence always instead as the touch. He just “pat me down” — altho just before—

—his colleague, a woman security officer, had. In Pittsburgh the black people here, whom I’m sorry to say I still love, notice something different in the carriage of my walk, hear treason in way of my speech. And they come into my face for it, eventually striking the face.

What I remember is saying to the woman security guard, herself butch, “This? You choose masculinity in order to peddle this?” before she erupted into a charge, and handled me back toward the ground. I feel like an angel. Nothing yet hurt. The growing crowd around us, horny men—

Screaming “jail bait, jail bait,” and snickering, my body twisted as the other security guard handcuffs me from behind, like I’m an enemy. He makes sure to press his knee hard into my back and graze his lips near my ear and he threatens to call the police. “Call them!” I return—

In my high Victorian voice. That disturbs them I seem so calm at the prospect, so he pushes harder. The scene feels grossly sexual. “Uncuff her!” I hear to my right before sirens also are heard. They quickly do uncuff, but random civilizing just can’t cuff people. It’s a crime.

It’s July. I’m at the Sunuco gas station, eager to buy a Gatorade and a small bag of peanuts totalling around $5.47. But the man behind the counter is watching me, & when I arrive to counter he’s made up his mind. I am wearing a beautiful yellow skirt, my love.

“I’m not servicing you,” he says. What? I’m confused and ask him why. He only repeats himself. He’s a toad, and I tell him so. He refuses. Another man is in the store, witnessing everything. I turn to him; though he was looking the whole rest of the time, he suddenly looks away.

I take the peanuts and Gatorade—unpaid—and storm out the door. I want you in this instance to imagine this incident as a accumulation of many, smaller, quicker ones. A “What is that?” tossed cavalierly down the road; a “Uh uh!”; a “Don’t hate cis people. It hurts my feelings.”

The morning after Sunoco, I return to Sunuco with the bag of peanuts and Gatorade unmessed with. The cashiers have changed shifts, so I ask if I can pay for my purchase. And the man smiles at me and says, “Of course. I’m so sorry. I’m so so so sorry.” I’m sorry. I’m so so sorry.

It happened twice at the same @SunocoRacing , same man. Although I reported the man, the internal investigation apparently determined nothing foul had happened, even as the second time the cops were again called on me after I was caged, literally caged, in the Sunoco.

Poets are out here arguing about metaphor, but there is no metaphor for these literal violences and harassments, just this year, in my life. Activists are telling me to take to the street, but I can’t be sure the street will protect me. A man tells me if I hadn’t—

—consented to what turned out to be lackluster sex, he would’ve raped me. A woman accuses me of hating black women because I hold them to the same fire with regard to transphobia as anyone else. I am suddenly very light skinned in everyone’s eyes, given the arrival of my breasts!

The world is changing around me as, meanwhile, everyone pretends they’re good, unchanged. A Pulitzer winner tells me gay men don’t see breasts; a MacArthur winner comforts me. And I’m forgetting countless episodes I’ve liked had to just to keep the days going. Like one night—

I forgot how to see, having been pepper-sprayed point blank in the eye by a 200 lbs cis man. I wrote about that here in twitter. It was quickly thereafter I was told not to write about that, as “it isn’t professional.” One can have no profession dead. But what I didn’t explain—

—was how the man who pepper sprayed me IMMEDIATELY turned soft, nursing me. “Okay, lemme get you cleaned up,” he said, and what choice did I have? Have you ever beensprayed for no reason by anyone who’s not a cop? Have you any context for that? Do see how quickly y’all snap?

That was the worst of it, but not the last. I had friends driving across country that same weekend to go pick up a gun for a coming race war they suspected—the blood they need—but there have been no guns raised to protect me. I have friends who put themselves center of my pain—

—and are surprised when I, human, lash back. I have folks who forget “grace” is not meant for the immediately wounded, but for the caregiver. I mean, if you have any grace, you’ll give to the hurt a moment to rage—otherwise, you aren’t caring. Your assuaging guilt.

Not a week later it’s Halloween, and I am getting tired of writing this. This happens on Halloween: https://www.gofundme.com/f/pb8ebe-new-glasses?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1

This happens:

This happens:

One day it’s:

The next day it’s:

It’s December. Donald Trump has 50 days, I think left in office. He fights furiously still over Pennsylvania, where I voted, claiming fraud with no evidence. I read tweets from “black radical feminists” who believe Elliot Page’s transition weakens their lesbian community.

Elsewhere, people debate the coronavirus vaccine, the Grammy’s nominations, the possible beauty of the word “hotep.” I notice I can’t write a tweet without a man telling me what he thinks anymore. I have about five hundred unread messages on Tindr—

—from men who would fuck me without even asking my name. There is somewhere right now a dark skinned woman who, at the thought of me, utters “that light skinned bitch.” Gay men are confused around me. We still want the killers of Breonna Taylor imprisoned—

—just as, the same mouth, we chant, “Abolish the Police!” “Attacks” are no longer physical, but tweets. Blood keeps. Obama is still a black man, raised by a white woman. The experiment’s failing. Snow’s on the ground. Snow’s crying. My cat, Trouble, sleeps patiently by my side.