It’s March 2026: I’m rocking a blue bikini and I’m on my second cocktail and I’m feeling unashamed. I’m walking along a beach in the Dominican Republic at a resort where 300 other tipsy Brown students vacation. This resort has a shiny exterior with its four separate pools, but rot peeks out from the bark of the palm trees and the chlorine smells a bit like corruption or greed…yet that’s beside the point, because I’m kicking up sparkling rocks and seashells. They’re damaging my feet as I kick them, but I’m at the point where I don’t care enough to stop. I’m on the phone.

On the line, my ear turns cold as my mom tells me that it is normal to feel out of place on a college spring break trip; it is normal to feel insecure. I recount the ample time I spent speaking with a young man on the sand whom I did not know had a girlfriend and who, after disclosing my transness, drunkenly slurred, “but you are so very pretty.” I recount trudging through the beach fearing my tuck had slipped, and as waves glowed and pulsed my mind’s eye stayed glued to the adolescent American children who, either in projection or in reality, would stare and stare and stare just below my belly button, even after their parents gave them glares and gave me a look of apology. There had been a week that felt like twenty years of white parties and posed hot tub photos and I had concluded my life would ripen and open with ease once I stopped fighting the current. I exhaled the last of it and announced to my mom: I wanted a vagina.

I felt so much guilt after this realization in my gut because I recognized the tension. I was fundamentally giving up something I had held onto for so long: that even though “trans” is only an adjective, a modifier to my womanhood, it is one that I have held dear, one I am always shouting out. I am loud and have no shame. It’s my obligation; it lives as my brave arrogance. I sometimes joke with friends that I am the campus-celebrity transsexual. People whose names I don't know sometimes know mine. Word of mouth or admiration or simply audacious vivid bullshit. Though as an adult I have only lived as a cis-passing woman, and I have been a girl for so long now that any life before is foggy, I remain aware of just how much performance it requires, the daily maintenance it has instilled in me—the loud click of my boots in the library and the plum lip liner I reapply in the bathroom and the blowout I try to make last a week to savor the sporadic compliment from an aimless sophomore who whispers my hair looks better straight—but all I am doing is washing my hands, all I want is to keep myself clean. Being a doll is work and it is work that I take seriously, never for granted, because if I were born even thirty years earlier, there would be no career for me as a writer, no career at all really, if only because the history of trans womanhood in America is the history of spectacle, of being surveilled and dismissed. Candy Darling once said that her medium for being a celebrity was being a woman.

I feel that I am constantly riding the line between the normative and ultimately privileged world that Brown has tossed me into and the emotional, psychological, and financial volatility of the trans scene in NYC. When I compare spring break white parties and campus dances with the lives my trans girl friends are living in New York—the raves and the ketamine and the lack of family support and the lack of degrees—a pit the size of a peach weighs me down. It sits in my stomach and it grows bigger but tastes sweet, because ultimately I will end up on the dance floor too, swaying my hips to a bad melody, choking on someone else’s strawberry vape smoke, opening my mouth and sticking my tongue out after exiting the subway for some cool summer rain relief.

Most of my trans friends are living rapid cosmopolitan lives in New York City where they too are depressed and medicated, having to navigate systemic transphobia, state-inflicted poverty, emotional and sexual violence, and an increasingly fascist culture. At times I have felt guilty for allowing myself the privilege and pleasure of being cis-passing and mingling and growing up with friends at Brown who would ultimately be living stable and wealthy lives soon enough, if not already.

And Brown is a beautiful place to live a beautiful life.

Frankly it is easier to live a normative life. This past weekend, I flew home to Toronto to witness the beautiful wedding of my straight male cousin, a union eleven years in the making. I sobbed heavy as rocks as they walked down the aisle. So stunning, such magic. I leaned into my mom’s ear and I bit down my lips to quiet myself; I admitted I wanted this, I wanted the love and the comfort that would come with living a life as a fully assimilated heteronormative woman, one who no longer had any ties to her birth as a boy.

Conversely, the normative white-picket-fence lifestyle I eye from afar and fear from up close. A goldendoodle nuzzles its nose against the soft skin of my calf. A husband crouches and bends down, his knees against the hardwood, as he places a leash on the dog. Together they walk to blow off steam from his tedious job in finance, and upon returning home, a pot of pasta steams up the living room. There is a baby chair, and in the chair is a child born by fancy glamorous dazzling IVF, made with eggs that are not mine because large places like oceans and the worlds they push away know I cannot break water. I will never be pregnant. I had only known cis people to achieve the white-picket-fence lifestyle. I see it as a representation of the what-could-be, the material structure most trans women will never access. And even then I know many of my straighter peers end up depressed, medicated, and putting their entire hope, heart, and semen into what the next generation of their children could do. The notion of a white picket fence is just as terrifying as it is glamorous. My mom taught me true glamour is entirely effortless. 

Then I had a wonderful FaceTime with one of my sisters (a trans girl friend newer to her transition) about how I had always seen her as one of my own. Even before she had taken the time to tell me, our relationship was bound by the fact that there was an incongruence between her birth gender and how she lived and navigated the world, and that even if she, at one point, presented more androgynous or even more boy, she still lived as a girl, always to me. “Real is what you feel, honey.” 

Beyond what gender is, the greater question I am orbiting is what it is to other people: my relationship with my body in isolation versus in relation to others. If there is anything I have learned from my education in poetry at Brown, it is that there is no intrinsic self. The self is always placed in relation to others: There is you, there is me, and I am only someone when I’m talking to you. When I’m talking to someone else, I am a different me. 

I would like to clarify the misconceptions with sexuality and my transness. People sometimes assume that men are gay for wanting dolls and this couldn’t be farther from the truth—in fact, my gay ex-boyfriend broke up with me because he’s gay. (All love!) But beyond that, I have had experiences with straight guys from Brown, RISD, New York, and all over; who have found me sexy, attractive, glamorous; who have approached me at parties, become my friends, given me attention—whatever you want to call it—yet still seem to be dealing with some internal pressures that I do not fully grasp and I would not like to. No, do not let me see inside your veins, because what is inside you is sacred and because you need to figure out your sense of selfhood and assuredness first.

And my relationship to sex and sexuality is constantly in flux. I’m twenty-two, dammit—we all need to be having more sex! But here I am, essentially celibate at the moment, and happy as a clam—maybe more than ever—because it feels like I have stripped a part of myself. There was once a layer of outer skin and beneath that was a redder and fresher form, and now I am nude but not empty, onto the next level: to be a senior, to be writing daily, to be fully present in a way I perhaps wasn’t before I came to terms with myself fully. And yet this self is temporary.

I remember the first time I heard about a straight guy getting dogged on by his friends for being into me. All because I committed the great sin of being my beautiful self. All I could think was stupid, stupid, stupid, this world is so fucked. Sometimes I wonder how these dudes will get degrees from the same school as me, dudes who despise trans women on a deep level because they despise a woman who has chosen herself over what society thinks to any degree. But all I can control is who I surround myself with, all it boils down to is care, because Brown has brought hot water to my bed when I’m sick, Brown is my shower cleansing me when I’m shivering, Brown brings me to the water where my girl friends and I dolphin-kick with salt beneath our teeth. This school is hot and cold and icy and sticky, but I can spit away the gunk of their minds, honestly, I can spit all day long, whenever and wherever I want. I have wants. They're beyond here.

I remember, too, the first time I had sex with a woman. It was my freshman year, and I was still unashamed in the way only young women are. I lay flat against the pink sheets, sterile and barely moving. If you had to picture me, you might look into the eyes of a starfish. She was kind enough to do the work. I didn’t have the strength yet. In my memory I recall a push and pull between what felt pleasurable and what felt disgusting. What I was doing was not disgusting but it was the least womanly thing I could do. I had not fully conceptualized gender reassignment surgery beforehand.

I’ve gotten with people of all different genders since and with time have gotten more comfortable in movement, in the body I was given—making do, no weakness, only fish. Women have only been kind to me in these experiences. It is the men who seem to complicate my relationship with sex. There are those who don’t know I’m trans and when they find out think, holy shit, no or those who think, holy shit, yes. You tell me which is worse. There have been those with fetishes and those who want to be me, whether inside my body or to excavate the dysphoria in theirs. There are normal ones too, many of them typical boyish uneasy figures excited by tank top straps that slide off girls’ shoulders or those with brains rotted by porn, or the kind types who like to give you head in acts of selfless devotion and don’t want anything in return, or the opposite, who only want you to touch them, but fear is the spit beneath their tongue, all of it is so typical, so predictable, yet only some of it is pleasurable.

It would be silly for me to think that a vagina would magically make this form of heterosexual sex more pleasurable. It would be silly for me to fail to mention the orgasm gap, the unequal amounts of pleasure cis women receive compared to men on average, or the fact that penetration alone does not suffice for many women, or that many of my women friends are having sex they do not always enjoy, or that men are often bad at listening to what women say they need.

Sometimes my girl friends and I FaceTime and talk about what we think it will be like. We wonder if it will feel different to be penetrated in that way. We talk about where and when we’d want to do it, even though part of being new to being trans is being naive. Maybe being a girl is being naive, and being a woman is refusing passivity. All of us are young. Many of my girls are young to the journey. Fantasy keeps us alive. But surgery too is a fantasy and it’s one that I might not know for a good long while. 

I think here of Lauren Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism,” which I wrote about in post- this time last year. The idea is that we have attachments to fantasies that stop us from actually being free. The Berlantian answer here is that obviously, a vagina will not solve my problems. Hell, it may not even make me “normative” insofar as I can never bear my own children. I will never have ovaries, I will never be able to carry a kid, which is sort of the epitome and peak of the nuclear family, of the structure which we try to squeeze into, if only for the sunlight that brings us warmth through the window of the home we one day will live in, we must think we will live. 

Nothing really mattered on the spring break trip, nothing ever happened there. I wrote a letter to my future self on the flight home.

I’m writing to you from the airport. I’d like to know how it feels to have it done. I wonder if you’re glad. Do you wake up in the morning and bend down to look at it? When the steam rises above your hair in the shower, do you bend then too? Or is it only when you are walking down a narrow street and wind is closing in on you…Is it then that you open and close your legs and waddle as though a duck, knees bending in certainty to let the fabric be blown by the wind—without worry, without wear, without light.

I’m writing to you because I want to know if you will ever go through with it.

I’m writing to you because I want to know how it feels once you go through with it, once you begin to use it. Does it feel like power? How does it sound? Does it sound how you want it to sound, how you expect it to sound? How does it feel to urinate? Is urinating only using the feeling?

When you bend down I can’t help but wonder which direction you are bending toward, the arc of the past or the arc of the future.

When you are bending down I can’t help but listen, from a distance I see myself now pressing my ear up against the soft animal skin of your thigh, listening, just listening for the blood that rushes through and then floods.

I’m writing this in a text chain.

I’m writing this in an airport.

I’m writing this in transit because I want to type out how you will feel before I can chart out how I want to feel.

I have had so many conversations that grow then dwindle, dwindle, dwindle and finally spill like wine on carpet, conversations about women's sexual pleasure.

I become nauseous. Acid rises in my gut. I lack acid reflux but my reflexes are all galactic in the spine of my mind. 

How many of my girl friends actually enjoy the sex they’re having?

What makes us cry out the sex we enjoy and what makes us quiet in the sex we don’t enjoy?

I think I’d like to meet this version of you so much because I want to hear…I don’t yet know what I want to hear. Only you know where to think.

I can’t wait to meet you but until then, yes, yes—I’ll take a drink.

I never really understood devotion in relation to the body till I first had trouble sleeping. I would listen to light creep through my bedroom blinds. Even when I kept my eyes closed I would rustle in my sleep, some sleeping animal claimed me.

Sometimes, when I was marginally younger, I would close my eyes and imagine all the bodies of the people I had ever kissed, and then I would take them like a mechanical crane and release them into a picture, and in the picture they would be stacked on top of one another, just this pile of limbs and geometric shapes, and I think there was something pleasurable to the image, warm and pleasurable, because shapes placed in eloquent patterns are often sacred.

I never really believed I could devote my life to anything at all until I first listened to light creep through bedroom blinds.

I never really wanted a vagina all that badly until I started to assimilate.