an open letter to my MTF partner, from a woman who is slowly peak-trans’ing
I am looking at you right now. your lips are full and you are up to your chin in sheets and sometimes, when I see you asleep this way, I can see a woman. most of the time I feel the way you take up 3/4ths of the space in bed and know you are a man. our conversations consist of you monologing and me nodding. I hear you move through this apartment with no regard to the noise you’re making, and when I need to sleep at night, you can’t turn your music down. you move around me and touch me without a care for whether your elbow catches my tit or if you push my head back against a wall. I ask you to be more careful around my body, you forget, you don’t change.
you need my help with the simplest spills, and I wonder why your mother, a wonderful woman, never made you clean up your own messes. (I know why.) your hair is in the drain, and you’re so disgusted by this that I have to clean it out. me, with my close-cropped haircut, whose loose hairs vanish without a trace instead of clumping up in the shower. the toilet seat is left up and the bowl has yellow splatters on it— I ask you to clean it up and you deny involvement— so was it me or our female housemate who has mysteriously learned to piss standing? the dishes sit in the sink until I scrub them or move them to the dishwasher. I ask if you would be willing to put them in the dishwasher instead of the sink. I say it will be easier for all of us (for me) if we don’t have to load all the dishes at once. you refuse, for no discernible reason except that it would take effort for you to break a habit. meanwhile my old habits— reading, playing, resting— have all been abandoned in my quest to live peacefully with you.
you won’t give up your “right” to sleep with other women, even though we’ve been through weeks of tearful nights where I tell you how this makes me feel. it’s just too hard for you to “do monogamy”, and in over a year, you have been nothing but content as you watch me struggle to support your interest in women who might give you no-strings-attached sex. I am withdrawn; where any intimacy between us existed, I am too hurt, confused, and alienated to maintain it. you would like to have sex every night, and I would like to have sex with you never. I have started to think of women when I’m alone, their bodies, their voices. (when did I start? now? or when I was a teenager?) I am more confused than ever. I want them; I don’t want you, but why? your body confuses me. the width of your back and shoulders, your slight, childish hips— every night I’m thrown. I was willing to overlook and combat these thoughts to be a “good” woman/lesbian, but my life as a good woman is beyond unfulfilling.
I would like my needs met in all spheres from domestic to sexual. the womanly idea of you that exists in your mind and the minds of so many well-intentioned people is only a fiction, and I’m a flesh-and-blood woman; I can’t love an incorporeal wish. I regret this, all of it. I truly do not mean to hurt you, and if we split I fervently hope we can do it amicably.
in infatuation and in frustration,
snowghoul
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
titsay
germansingergirl
