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I don’t think I was ever really aboard the trans train, though I made a valiant effort to understand, as the good little liberal I was.

At age 18, I hit peak trans living in a terrible house with terrible people, including a “trans woman” who was James at work and “Taryn” after hours. Taryn’s entire wardrobe consisted of stripper clothes, which I mean literally—they had Velcro up the sides for easy removal. She was a living, breathing stereotype in 8” heels and a bad wig. “Her” boyfriend was a homophobe, who quickly informed everyone he met about the fact that he “wasn’t gay,” that it “was okay because she was actually a woman and would have surgery soon,” and emphasized that HE was the one who always did the penetration. He had a huge collection of porn magazines lying around featuring women with cartoonishly enormous breasts—not just your standard porn-implant fare, but specifically focused on grotesquely enlarged women. It could not be more clear that they both had no respect for actual women, rather, they saw “womanhood” as being properly embodied by over the top pornified caricatures of femininity and fuckability.

At 23 I hit peak trans again, after I made the naïve mistake of believing that my boyfriend’s attraction to cross-dressing meant that, like me, he wished to challenge and abolish gender roles, and would make an ideal partner what with being less attached to notions of masculinity. I got pregnant and married in short succession, and only then realized how wrong I was. Now that this narcissist had his “supply” firmly in hand, the mask could come off, and the appalling behavior began. But I felt stuck, and without other options. Caught up in the whirlwind of pregnancy and parenthood, I simply tried to make the best of things.

He could not possibly have behaved more like an entitled stereotypical white male if he tried, and then he’d secret himself away, put on some ridiculous lingerie and masturbate to the thought of what a pretty, pretty girl he was. And so it went for nearly 20 years of emotionally abusive bullshit.

[Will spare you the details of the repeated absurd conversations around womanhood and his distorted picture of what it was; skip the fact that he constantly spent nights playing the “poor me, I never got to be that pretty girl wearing pretty things that men look longingly at” game any time we were around young women. Skip his disdain for my post-pregnancy body and weight gain and how quickly sex turned into just an utterly one-sided playing-out of his distorted fantasies. How the house became a place where my daughter and I were constantly on edge wondering when the next time he would go off was. And how I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, because he was closeted and wanted no one to know of his proclivities.]

Peak trans. Over and over. Ridiculous conversations where he’d dismiss feminism because look how HARD being a boy was for HIM. Contributing nothing to the running of the household beyond a paycheck. On and on. Michfest were evil, evil women for not making it all about dick.