i feel so weird and alone in transition—like it’s this weight inside me i am desperate to put down. late at night, i lie beneath the blankets in my room lit up, yellow streetlights dimly illuminating the piles of detritus i have nested myself in. transition never ends, i realize. you never really get where you’re trying to go. you can approach it, asymptotically approaching some ideal of femininity or womanhood that always eludes your grasp.

there’s a dark hallway in between the proverbial men’s room and women’s room. to be trans is to sit uncomfortably in this hallway, the doors on either side closed to our kind. in the shadows we light candles and smoke cigarettes, huddling for warmth, caring for each other as only queer people could. through transition you exile yourself from the room you were born in, and light your own path through the in-between. i know of others who have settled down in this interstitial space, who have set down roots and began homes, families, communities here, who have cozied around the fire; i hear of drag queens and stone butches, chronically-online transbians and he/him lesbians, falloutboy transmascs and genderfuck nonbinaries, occupying spaces both real and virtual, sexual and hypertextual, creating warmth and light and poetry in these fractured grounds.

I know that, nominally, I am invited and am entitled to a plot of ground here. it is a place I have come to desire. but I can never really get away from my first desire—the unchanged dream of being born in the womens room to begin with. to hold my own body with certainty and grace, to walk past a mirror without gender-checking, to live in the light rather than peering in through the crack in the door.. that is, and maybe always will be, my fantasy.

Anyway poor writing aside here are the next few writing prompts. biopsychosexual paradox of the transfem top


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