Maria knows people who transitioned years before she did, even a couple people who started transitioning like a decade before she did. They’re not fuckups. But they’re not, like, buddhas, either. She’s thought of them as buddhas, in her life, and then been disappointed when they’ve explained that their enlightenment consists of the same platitudes that every enlightenment consists of: Fuck what people think, and I dunno man, and There is no center at the center of things. It’s like, cool, but then how do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you?

tadc spoilers below (trans jax and trans representations)

Because there was at the time, and I’m sure you still see this, but at the time it was very much like, if there was a trans character in a book then the narrative would fucking screech to a halt so that they could explain what hormones do and whether you know, if estrogen does anything to your voice, or like, what penile inversion surgery—or you know, it just felt like you could not tell a story about a fuckin’ trans person, and if they showed up they were either tragic, dying-in-a-gutter figures, or angelic… angels, I guess. [Both laugh] And so the idea really was, you know, let’s write this for a trans audience. And now to be like, oh, this thing that assumed some level of knowledge is suddenly going out to this wider audience which does not, like I said before, doesn’t have the same…I don’t know. I was gonna say, “which doesn’t have the same context,” but at this point, I guess people in general know more about trans people than they did 15 years ago, right? So like…. [Laughs] Are you kind of saying yes and no?

Tuck: I think the ones who are picking up Nevada does, yeah. I’m thinking about, a lot of my job outside of this is talking to cis people about gender, and I’m like, “A lot of them still don’t know any of it,” but they probably aren’t reading Nevada, so, I guess that’s fair.

Imogen: Right, yeah.”]