Tender Buttons

She stopped, surprised at herself. She knew what she meant. The idea was right up there in the front of her mind. But she didn't know how to say it in words, even to herself.

"What will happen when we hit the ground?"

I still feel like the world is a piece of bread I’m holding out half to you.

"As with many loving parents, she let me be her blind spot, the one thing about which she was cruel and unreasonable and unfair. In this way, nothing much ever changes."

The closest emotional analogue is how I felt as a child when I was permitted to resume normal relations with the world after being punished. Flirting with evil and being redeemed; sorry for being part of the world's imperfection but also perversely craving the chastised state. If this sounds Catholic, please know that mine was not a religious upbringing. It's just that being a child is, in essence, a religious experience.

“I feel as if I am holding on to something, to the edge of something or to the end of something. Everything is going so fast. The light coming very quickly and the dark, too. The planet spinning and me pressed here on its surface. Every moment is the moment I know I am not going to be able to hang on.”

That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive.

And years ago, when I lived in New York [...] I would have said that it’s Bad and Wrong and False Consciousness or something, to want to be sexually and emotionally validated by a normatively hot person. But now I know it’s just part of trying to make sense of my own body in oppression, [...] and what I am actually hungry for is some kind of counter-narrative, some notion that the oppressor would deign to touch my body, sweat with my body, commune with my body, etc.

“If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of colour get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around the map. Basically literally. The museum.”