Strap in. Enjoy. This one is a banger.

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1. “I need money,” I told .

2. “I’m worried about what might happen,” I told Luka, “if Trump wins; like, what if I can’t stay here anymore?”

3. I told Quyen, my ex, it was simply something I needed to do.

4. “Some things in life,” I said to Anna, “seem to arrive with the force of a necessity: I can ask why and assess the risks, but at some point, I know I’m going to do it.”

5. “Why does there need to be a reason?” asked.

6. “You don’t need to explain,” said, sending me Cash / Consent by .

7. Cissy sent me links to some massage places. “You can’t do online stuff, right, because of your visa?” she said. “These places pay cash. It might be a safe way to start.”

8. “Are you really sure,” Luka asked, “you’re not just doing this so you can write about it later?”

9. “I don’t know, Thalia,” Quyen said, “but it kind of feels like your whole life has been leading to this.”

10. I talked about starting sex work for three months. I received more warnings than I did encouragement or advice.

11. I was all talk. Three months of talking, and I still hadn’t followed through.

12. Maybe it started with Cissy. She had been working for a decade as a dominatrix. I became her sub. One day, when I was wiping down her kitchen, she told me about baby-poop probiotics. “Babies, you see,” she said, “have the perfect gut microbiome, and you can get these sterilized baby-poop supplements, and—I know it sounds ridiculous—but I used to have so many tummy issues. The baby poop fixed them all.”

13. I have suffered, for years, from chronic gastritis.

14. “But it’s like $200,” she said, “for a 30-day supply. It’s a lot.”

15. “It’s a lot,” I said.

16. I’d paused my cleaning, because I could feel her eyes on me. I looked at her. She cocked her head. “You know what?” she said. “You should be doing what I do. You should be making money.”

17. “No way,” I said. “I’m a sub. I’m a lesbian. There’s no way I could be dominant, especially not with men.”

18. “No,” she said. “I can see it already. You’ll learn so fast. You’ve explored so much as a sub. You know how everything feels.”

19. “I’m not so sure about that,” I said.

20. “I am,” she said.

21. Or maybe it started with Mei, a few months earlier. I had met her in Japan, six years before I moved to LA, but we had somehow both ended up in LA. Another dominatrix, she had many clients who had a thing for trans women. We met for coffee in downtown LA, after she’d finished a session. She said she’d give me a 50/50 split if someone booked. She charged $600 per hour. All I’d have to do was follow her instructions.

22. $300 for an hour’s work. Not bad. Sure, I’d have to dissociate to get through it, but what had three decades in the closet given me if not for mastery in the art of dissociation.

23. Or maybe it started with Akiko, six years earlier, when I was still living in Tokyo. Another dominatrix, she let me live in the studio she used for shibari sessions and rented to other workers by the hour. I didn’t pay rent, but she and her friends would sometimes invite clients to her apartment, then put on a show for them, tying me up and toying with me.

24. I met Mei, by chance, at a similar time. I introduced her and Akiko. I only learned, six years later, when Mei and I both moved to LA, that the two had become besties, such that Mei’s offer of a generous 50/50 split came, I think, from a place of gratitude.

25. Or maybe it started with Jade, in London, twelve years earlier. Another dominatrix, she was my girlfriend for a year. I helped her with her admin. She showed me everything about the work, how to do marketing, how to vet clients, what kinds of things went down in sessions. She also showed me some of the dangers of BDSM: Sometimes, when we played, after she tied me up, she would torture me for hours. Safe words wouldn’t matter. They would only make things worse. Cissy was right: I knew how everything felt.

26. Or maybe it started with the fantasies I began having as a little girl, in which a woman would bind me in rope and do, with me, whatever she wished.

27. These fantasies that, with Jade, became far more real than they were ever meant to me.

28. Or maybe I was born with it.

29. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

30. I have come to learn that many people, when they learn that you do sex work, need an account of how you came to it.

31. But they don’t usually want a mere explanation. They need you to justify your debasement. They need to know that it wasn’t on you.

32. You are either victim or deviant, with no in between. Even when you hate the work, they want you to do so on their terms.

33. I could tell them I did it for baby poop.

34. But I never, in the end, purchased any.

35. My gastritis lives on.

36. So, thirty-six years into my life, twenty-four years after my earliest fantasies, twelve years after Jade, six years after meeting Akiko and Mei, and six months after meeting Cissy, I started it for real. I stumbled on an ad on Fetlife, a social media site for BDSM enthusiasts: A dungeon in West Hollywood was interviewing for new girls. I messaged them. They told me they didn’t want me to waste my time. They hadn’t seen much success with trans girls.

37. But I had a friend who already worked there. She spoke with the owner. The owner messaged again: “But why don’t you come in anyway.”

38. “I wouldn’t want to stop you,” the owner told me, lying prone on a black pleather sofa for the most informal interview of my life, “but I mean it when I say I don’t want you to waste your time.”

39. “I can’t waste my time,” I said, remembering Luka’s words. “Even in the worst case, it will give me something to write about.”

40. I didn’t waste any time. I started that weekend. I had two clients on my first day. I usually took four or five six-hour shifts per week, although I would sometimes only see one or two clients in that time. Work was slow, at this time, for almost everyone.

41. “Last summer,” Antonia told me, “was maybe the slowest I’d ever seen in LA. Things don’t seem to be picking up.”

42. Sex work isn’t ‘easy money.’

43. Cissy gave me the bag she had started out with, a decade earlier. She included some lingerie and toys. She gave me a bright purple taser. “This is for your safety,” she said. She pressed the button. The crackle made me jump. “But you might be able to use it in sessions, too.”

44. I organized a photoshoot with a photographer that Luka recommended, an amateur enthusiast with a penchant for latex.

45. In some photos, I wear white, lacy lingerie. Very demure. Very mindful. In one of these, my friend-who-was-now-a-colleague’s stiletto-clad foot rests on my chest. These photos were for the clients who would want me to be their sub.

46. In other photos, I wear black, latex opera gloves, which the photographer loaned me, and a black pleather corset. I wield a whip. More clients were likely to hire me—a six-foot trans woman with angular, fierce features—to dominate them.

47. During the idle hours, the other girls taught me the skills of the trade. How to tie basic knots. How to safely use a flogger, a single-tail whip, a paddle, and a cane. The best way to attach clamps to someone’s nipples. The best way to pull them off: “Tell them to take a deep breath in, then count down from three as they’re breathing out. Warn them that it’s going to hurt.” They got me to download Mr. Numbers, an app in which you can look up and a number and see if other workers have commented on them. I looked up the number, of course, of every terrible man I could think of. I found a disparaging comment about a famous professor, one who used to bully me. I remembered that his wife worked in the same department. I let my heart grow a little more bitter.

48. The other new girls and I would practice on each other.

49. It was the closest thing I had ever experienced, as a trans woman robbed of a conventional girlhood, to girls’ time.

50. The owner and the desk girl kept telling me, even though I had as many clients as any of the other new girls—and even once I had lasted longer than all but one of the other new girls—they still were worried about me wasting my time. The desk girl, when receiving a phone call, would sometimes name all the girls present except for me. “Trust me,” she would say, “I know this guy. He’s old. He just won’t get all this transgender stuff.”

51. “It’s the old guys,” my friend-turned-colleague assured me, “that are most desperate for novelty. They’ll be the ones just dying to try something new.”

52. One day, I received a DM on my Instagram—my second account, since my first received a permanent ban within a matter of weeks, a symptom of the online-marketing wack-a-mole that Donald Trump’s FOSTA-SESTA bill, supposedly passed to combat trafficking, built off the work of feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, was forcing all of us to survive—from a prospective client who wanted to meet me. My shift finished at 11pm, but he wouldn’t be done with work by then.

53. “Can you come to my hotel?” he asked.

54. “I’m not allowed,” I said.

55. “I’ll double your rate,” he said.

56. Double was more than double when it meant the house didn’t take a cut.

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This piece was prompted by ‘s Note asking for a full-on gay person to write a “sexual things I find attractive” post, my counter-Note to say the world wouldn’t be ready for my version of this, and ’s Reply to affirm that everyone would be ready, and “if they don’t think so they just don’t know it yet.” Scrawled hastily during an antibiotics-induced delirium, starting at the spicier and ending somewhere softer. In an ideal world, the publishing of this essay will summon forth my dreamgirl.

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1. A pinch of evil

Or a tablespoon.

Or maybe a dollop.

I’m talking about a woman evil enough that if someone sleights me—in a way I would be too timid to respond to—she will give them the dressing down of their life. The lash of her tongue will leave scars on their soul.

Evil enough that the only things that would hold back her desire to torment and torture me during our private play would be a pre-stated hard limit or a safe word, such that even my most desperate begging might still be liable to egg her on, maybe make her cackle, maybe make her coo in false sympathy, to say something like, “Baby, are you crying? And yet here you are, still taking it for me” (I believe I am quoting an ex, here). Her imagination is excessive. Maybe even more excessive than mine, always giddy to try new toys, set new traps, and create ever-more intricate mindfucks. She is the kind of person with whom I’ll share a fantasy that, to many, will evoke instant disgust, and reply, “Oh… I like it, but what if we took it even further, what if I were to…”

Evil enough that, in such a moment, she can silence me with nothing more than a flicker in her eye.

2. But still ethical, patient, and compassionate

Such that the limit to her evil is to do no harm to those who neither deserve it nor consent to it, so that when she takes me to those spicy places, she can, afterwards, bring me back alive, show her satisfaction, and we can reset again as equals. She loves herself enough that she has no need to be mean or indulge in petty cruelties when it’s not something we’ve agreed to.

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Such that our ability to go hard is only made possible by our mutual obsession with communicating and working to understand each other, of telling the truth even when we’re worried that the truth might put a damper, for a moment, on the other person’s fun.

So that I can show her this side of me—this side that wants to suffer and obey—and she will never, being complicit herself, do anything to make me feel ashamed.

This side is what allows the other side to be hot not just in theory but in practice.

3. Shared documents and spreadsheets

When time separates us, and we want to build out a world of possibility. Lists of ideas and rules and conditions. Color-coded columns. My side. Her side. If you think that’s boring, I think you’re boring. Nothing is less boring, to me, than an imagination on fire.

4. FASHION

By which I mean a sense of style that drapes off her body as thought it was a treasure map guiding a keen adventurer towards the key to her heart, every layer an echo of her intellect and inner life, a carnival of quirks, showing her unique sensitivity to material, texture, composition, and color, to what commands power and what emanates softness, to what each occasion calls for and what she would rather, on her own terms, force the occasion to accept, so that, in a world that treats a woman’s expression of her own sexuality as an invitation for violence, everyone will be able to see, also, that she knows how to wield her body as a weapon, that it belongs to her and no one else, not even to me.

5. Brainpower

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A sapiosexual thing I find attractive in women: A neuronal network so vast that if you rolled it flat it would outstretch the universe itself. Men will leave almost every conversation with her feeling upset, in denial, unable to accept their inferiority. Our intellects are something we can share together, away from the eyes of uncomprehending men, so that our minds can reach out to each other like thousands of delicate tendrils, weaving through each other, creating new textures, tying little knots. Our sexual play like a game of 4D chess on a board made out of BDSM.

6. Flaws

Being awkward. Being a bit ‘too skinny’ or a bit ‘too fat.’ Having a birth mark with a unique shape at a striking spot on her face. To have the kind of body that the world expects and teaches her to hate without ever quite succeeding. Maybe she makes inappropriate comments sometimes without realizing she has done so. Perhaps, in an effort to flirt, something mechanical comes out instead, followed by a blush. For all her evil and ethics and brilliance, she is still human, still a little unsure of herself, unsure enough to listen and let the world in. Unsure enough to keep on growing. Unsure enough to feel in all her body the risks of love but to plunge into it, nonetheless, with all her weight.

She may also have weird obsessions and special interests that few can understand, is never deterred by their lack of encouragement, always ready to share her knowledge as if everyone was equal in their passion for whatever is obsessing her on this day.

Neurotic enough that she had no choice but to look deeply into herself. Perhaps she is here against the odds, a tale of endless impossible overcoming.

Maybe these are non-sexual things I find attractive, but I find them sexy, nonetheless.

Full of lore, but no longer at the mercy of all that came before.

Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment with sexual things you find attractive in women, whether they are kinky or vanilla. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. If you think this essay describes you, my DMs are open ;-).

Expanding on a thought from a recent Note. If you enjoy my work, please subscribe and help me bring it to a wider audience by liking and sharing it. Donate to ko-fi.com/thaliavacha or become a paying subscriber to support me.

1. I remember once reading a tweet by a transgender social media influencer that read something like, “This is why I always say trans women shouldn’t be allowed to write about transition until they are at least five years into it.” I was less than a year into my transition when I read this. Instead of clicking on the essay the OP had posted, I clicked through to an open word document, then clicked the X.

2. “Do you want to save the changes you made to the document, “The Silent Part: A Girlhood,” it asked.

3. Of course not.

4. I did not need any extra encouragement to avoid writing about my transition. I knew nothing about transition. I hadn’t even been on hormones for a year. Like Socrates, I knew that I knew nothing. Unlike Socrates, this didn’t make me wise. But I needed to write. Writing can feel to me, on some days, like the only thing I know how to do. Sometimes, it feels like the one thing I need to do. Some things haven’t happened, I feel, at times, until I have written about them. And it turned out that I didn’t know nothing: I knew the closet (or the egg). I’d lived inside the egg for 33 years. Surely I could had much to say of the egg’s interior.

5. But it was not so straightforward. To say that I knew nothing of transition didn’t seem the same, to me, as saying that I knew nothing of girl- or womanhood. I had spent my whole life contemplating the matter. I still looked, at this stage, to all the world, like a man. All that had changed was that I now claimed otherwise. What kind of magic spell had I cast with my claim? Was I not naming what was already there? Through the physical and social changes I made, was I transitioning to a new gender or merely helping others see and interact with what was already there? Certainly, something fundamental about my social position was changing, but had anything fundamental changed in me?

6. I thought not. So when I began writing, I wrote in the third person, and I presented my younger self as a little girl. The reader does not know that the girl in the story is trans, not until, at the end of the first page, she asks her mother if she can get braids in her hair. Her mother says, “No, that’s for girls.”

7. In presuming myself a regular girl, I stepped away from a classic trope of trans memoir that presents the trans girl as the boy who was somehow different. I drew attention, instead, to how differently the world treated this girl compared to all the other girls.

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8. What I found, in turn, was that, while set apart from the boys, the girl still experienced much in common with other girls. Some cis women read some early pages. They concurred. Joyland Magazine published the first chapter. I received an email from a cis Black woman, who had transferred, around age eight, from a nearly all-Black school to a predominately white one, all of a sudden finding herself unable to conform to a standard of girlhood that had previously seemed natural and overflowing with possibility. I received a message from someone with whom I was developing a fledging friendship—the writer —in which she shared her experiences moving between a home in which an Afghan muslim father and a Catholic American mother fought over her body and identity and a mostly-white school environment in which conforming meant rebelling against the already-impossible demands that her parents put on her. She told me that the opening chapter of her own memoir, by chance, shared an exact phrase: We had each found ourselves, as young girls, living “at the precipice of a threatening exposure.” At a party, I met someone who had read the excerpt, who told me that it had got her returning to her own childhood memories. “Not to be dramatic,” she said, “but it totally changed how I understand myself.”

9. But I had fucked up. At the time of publication, I had barely even started hormones, and not only was I now, by virtue of this rhetorical move, writing about transition, I was doing so publicly and through a prestigious outlet with a largely cis audience.

10. So I stopped writing for a while. Was I 34 years old or was I just a baby? It was hard to tell. Sometimes, when I told a woman about some instance of harassment from a man, she would say, “Welcome to womanhood.” And while I wouldn’t say it aloud, I would stew over the fact that, while plenty was new to me, this particular issue wasn’t. I had gone to an all-boys’ school as a child. I was the closest thing my year group had to a girl. I know that what I experienced was, in some ways, nothing like what a cis girl goes through, but it sometimes felt closer to cis girlhood than cis boyhood. I would ask cis people if it seemed fucked up that I went to an all boys’ school. They would shrug. I would ask how they’d feel if a cis girl was put in the same situation. I started to call my early life ‘girlhood in a funhouse mirror.’

11. The influencer’s tweet wasn’t the first disparaging remark I had seen someone later in their transition make about someone earlier in their transition. I hardly, in any case, needed any reinforcement from an external source. Early transition can feel, at times, like a humiliation ritual. Even if I had known how to dress well, the shape of my body put dressing well on hard mode. Even if I had acquired some decent make-up skills, what a face I had to work with. I lived in a red city. Even if I could present myself in a way that a community of queer and trans people might embrace, I was mostly scared to go outside. I shopped online. I drove everywhere and parked, always, as close to whichever venue I was visiting to minimize my time outside. I remember once filling up my car at the gas station, staring at a man wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a broad, straggly beard, who was filling up his pick-up truck as he mouthed what I could only presume were obscenities at me. Someone broke through my terrified reverie by asking me for money. I asked if she was hungry. She said she was. “We can go wherever you want,” I told her, but she didn’t want to make any decisions, she just wanted to eat, so we went to the nearest place, Yafa, where she ordered two large portions of fries and poured every kind of condiment over them and where, now I could see that the man had vanished, I left her to enjoy her food, so much more important, in that moment, than my gender, what a relief.

    

12. I remember, before a party, trying to paint my own nails, making a mess, removing the paint, crying, trying again, making a mess, removing the paint, trying again, and finally just accepting the mess. I didn’t want to go to the party. I wanted help, but I didn’t want anyone to give me advice. I was afraid they would sneer at me, would welcome me to womanhood. But I forced myself to go. “You have to push through and do it anyway,” had become such a common refrain, even if I rarely followed it. At the party, a bunch of people complimented my nails. They complimented without condescension, although I sometimes projected it onto their tone like a special effect. Anything less than perfection, I feared, would present an incompetence that could confirm I was, at best, a man trying his best.

13. These people had understood me as a man, at this point, for many years. During the first year of the MFA that I was now close to completing, before I transitioned, I finished the draft of a memoir about a year I spent living with an abusive partner in my 20s. I was one of the older students on the program. I asked a professor if she would read it. She did. She made thorough notes. Two years later, my friend told me on the phone that she had recently been hanging out with two of our other friends, cis women, who had agreed, between them, that “if only they’d grown up with Thalia’s male privilege, maybe they, too, would have the confidence to ask a professor to read a whole manuscript.” But no amount of male privilege would have helped them: neither of them had a full manuscript for anyone to read. After I put down my phone, I opened that document, the one I knew I was too inexperienced to write: The Silent Part: A Girlhood.

14. The manuscript is full of apologies to the future, apologies for not knowing enough, for being cringe, for caring too much about what transphobes have to say, for caring too much about gender, since a number of trans women I knew and followed online assured me that, in the end, it turns out that gender isn’t all that interesting. There are more important things to worry about. What a fool I felt, to preoccupy myself so completely with such a juvenile matter. All my apologies presumed a future version of myself, perhaps one I modeled on other trans women, which model, in turn, may have been a projection of all the tropes that our society casts onto trans women, that would denigrate and dismiss her younger self. She didn’t know that this process, her transition, would allow her, at least on her better days, to become kinder, more compassionate. She did not know how to give herself a grace that she had not, as far as she was aware, ever before received.

15. Another literary journal accepted the second chapter of the book for publication. The editor went through it with a red pen, deleting almost every overt (and many implicit) reference to gender. “These are the basics,” she wrote in the margin. “Assume your reader gets this already.” No cis person had yet shown me it was safe to assume such things. I assumed, instead, that the editor either disagreed or had recast what i was doing through a framework of her own. I may have been wrong. I sent a short email in reply, asking to withdraw the work from publication.

16. A year after I finished a draft of the book—after dealing with various rejections from literary agents—I decided to rewrite the whole thing, thinking that maybe I could make the two versions work together to form a larger whole. In the original version, my younger self talks back to the narrator. In the rewrite, which begins with the same series of events, it becomes apparent that, while the narrator remembers the original, she has swiped the virtual child’s memory, dismissing her whenever she begins to get suspicious. The narrator is deceptive but kinder. Where the first version peaks with the little girl, off the page, committing a chainsaw massacre—much to the narrator’s disapproval—the rewrite calmly fizzles out, as if the narrator and the child had stopped caring quite so much.

17. “We wish it didn’t matter which words we choose,” goes the final page, all the different versions of Thalia now speaking as a collective. “We want to choose silence. We want to choose. Do we have nothing more to say? We want to choose to say nothing more.”

18. I have been through a lot since I transitioned. I moved from Riverside to Los Angeles, then to Bangkok. I have had, owing in part to my propensity for complications, seven surgical procedures in the space of two and a half years. One day, in LA, I bumped into a trans friend in a lingerie store. She said it was great to see me, but she had to rush. She introduced me to the friend she had been hanging out with, who asked, apropos of nothing, if I wanted to go buy a fiberglass horse with her. It was for a performance. Of course I did. We went for a coffee at a nearby cafe, Stories. She told me that she had been close friends with SOPHIE, the pop star. She said she felt like SOPHIE’s ghost was living in me. She drove me to the house of another person who had been close to SOPHIE. He concurred. A third joined, who was a little taken aback. They played a video of an interview with SOPHIE, to show me what they meant. Within a few minutes of the video playing, all of them were crying. SOPHIE and I did, indeed, at least, have a similar accent.

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19. We never got the fiberglass horse that day, but the artist asked if I could join the performance. It was about ghosts. I would be a ghost. “We can’t tell people you are SOPHIE,” she said (good, I thought, because I’m not), “but that’s what will be happening.” She asked to read my writing. She told me she was obsessed. She asked if I could make some recordings of my writing. She gave a backing track to my essay, Girls I Grew Up With. A week before the performance, Ghosts, two men raped the performer. She wasn’t well. Neither was I. After developing a migraine, I asked to reschedule a rehearsal. She kicked me off the performance, but asked if she could still use the recordings. I told her she could not, but the recordings, it seemed, had already got into the hands of the event organizer, who, a few weeks later, asked me to perform.

20. “But I’m less than two years into my transition,” I told them. They didn’t care. So I read some of my work—my stupid, inadvisable work—to an audience of around sixty people. After a standing ovation, they surrounded me. “We need you,” someone said. “You’re doing the work no one wants to do,” another said. “You’re trying to communicate with cis people,” chimed in a third. Another friend, a cis woman, sent me reams of texts the next morning, talking about menopause, telling me how my reading had helped her understand that trans women and cis women weren’t so different, after all.

21. I handed the same piece in to a workshop at school. My cis classmates weren’t impressed. The professor, a famous queer writer, covered the margins in red ink, chastising the hostility of my tone, telling me that I clearly hadn’t read x and y, and advising me to do away with my “gender police super ego,” a “straw man.”

    

22. The essay would not have been so upsetting, I don’t think, to anyone who didn’t feel it implicated them, even if only a little. But her voice was easier for my super ego to absorb than the encouragement of the audience after the performance, which felt, to me, who knew she knew nothing, like only pressure. Her comment about the gender police super ego was a rebuke of my experiences of transphobia, and I knew I was getting a lot of things wrong, so maybe she was right; maybe I had been projecting these experiences onto the world. I knew that knowing I knew nothing didn’t make me wise. I still needed to write, but I stopped altogether. The famous professor had told me that my writing was no good. Surely, I wasn’t fit for the big leagues. I wrote nothing for at least another six months.

23. I have an audience on Substack. I have enough readers, now, to ensure that every kind of projection lands on me. I am on the receiving end of envy, adulation, admonishment, and enthusiastic bursts of praise. More than 320 people have blocked me. I am still only three and a half years into my transition. I still, sometimes, wonder what enlightenment I might find at year five, as if these five years could be a ladder that, once I have reached the next plane, I will be free to throw away. I like to believe that the rewritten version of The Silent Part is far superior to the original. My agent disagrees. It would be an insult to the readers who gained something from the original if I were to dismiss it as the cringe output of someone too naive to write about transition. I have learned some compassion, yes, but I still err too easily towards drawing a curtain over those first two years of transition.

24. Trans women, in the earliest years of our transition, are the easiest women to hate. The number of changes we are undergoing at any given moment is staggering. The hormones—throwing us into what trans people call a second puberty—send our emotions haywire. Past memories return to us from an entirely new angle. Buried traumas sometimes rear their ugly heads. However old we are, many of us will still fret and wonder why we didn’t transition earlier, whether we even could have if we wanted to, and how things would have been different if we did. We are, according to normative beauty standards, taken as the ugliest women going. We are the least able to follow many of the unwritten standards of proper feminine behavour, even when our broad frames, the hint of stubble, and the rumble of our thick vocal codes don’t already, by default, give our behavior the air of the improper. We are precocious babies, trying to assimilate an impossible amount of information at once, using a processing system that we have built through often-desperate attempts to survive an initiation into masculinity that we never asked for and which almost all of us, however punishing we understand cis girl- and womanhood to be, would still have preferred to avoid. Dealing with all this, we become the best screen upon which to protect all of the worst stereotypes and tropes that society invests so much in creating for trans women.

25. Some of us are bound to be a bit fucked up, at times.

26. Volatile, maybe.

27. Lacking in the self-esteem department.

28. Ready to doubt our perceptions, which doubt too many cis people are all too happy to corroborate.

29. But not all of us. My story is just one permutation of a story as varied as all human stories are, as varied as all the girlhoods, Black, brown, homosexual, disabled, in England or Thailand or the 5th century BCE.

30. As much as trans people joke among ourselves about stereotypes—and as often as we do, indeed, see certain stereotypes appear again and again among ourselves—there is no such thing as the trans woman. No prototype for a to truly wax lyrical on. Or only aggregates of experiences that may or may not allow one to develop a set of limited expectations within certain communities and contexts.

31. For this reason, I try my best, most of the time, to stick to my own story. Trans women are more likely to see themselves in my stories. But cis women can see themselves, too. Sometimes cis men, also (and not just the eggs). Inevitably, many cis people will fall away from an essay like this the moment they start reading. They will assume it is about an experience they cannot understand. A trans experience.

32. But is it?

33. Because I think what I’m really writing about here is how to write through self-doubt, which is surely a subject every writer knows. I am asking how you can find it in yourself to speak despite how confident you are that no one wants to hear you, the situation of so many.

34. Either way, it seems that the early days of transition are important to write about not just in retrospect but as one is living through them. Like Socrates, many early transitioners know that they know nothing. They don’t always know that there’s a wisdom in that. Nor is almost anyone else willing to concede that they might have something to offer.

35. This may sound harsh: I, too, often do not want to be around those who are early in their transition. Some are, frankly, if not entirely unjustifiably, insufferable. I know that, to many, I, too—sometimes through their projections, yes, but often through my behavior—was insufferable. I err too easily towards drawing a curtain over those first two years of transition.

36. But I still believe earlier transitioners have plenty valuable to say.

37. I have to believe, because I’m still one of them.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoy my work and would like to support it, please subscribe, like, and share. I encourage cis people, especially, to share my work as widely as you can, since I know some feel unsure on their footing when sharing work by a trans woman. Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber or donating to my Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/thaliavacha.

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For more from me on the topic of writing, you can try Writing Advice for People Who Hate Writing Advice and Writing as Therapy?. You can read the original version of The Silent Part’s first chapter here and the rewrite here. Many other versions exist.

If you have a comment that you are shy to share with your name, you can go to ngl.link/thaliavacha.

To finish, I will leave you with The First Trans Poem, by Amy Marvin

1. I once got in a fight with an ex wherein I lost my temper. Maybe I raised my voice. Afterwards, I couldn’t sleep. I felt so ashamed for having been so violent. The next day, I went to her. If I had a hat, I would have held it in my hands. I said, “I’m sorry for losing my temper last night.” She said, “Oh?” She giggled. She said, “That’s what you call losing your temper?”

2. She said, “That’s so cute.”

3. Another ex used to beat me. I was 23 and the ex, 33. She would tell me I abused her. I would believe her. I once went into work with a black eye—“Your missus do that to you?” said a colleague, Gavin, prompting a few other colleagues to chortle—but most of the time, she knew, like her parents knew before her, who had taught her on her own flesh, how to go hard without leaving marks. I remember one night, after she had gone on another tirade berating me, I didn’t react. I went quiet. Minutes passed. Then I said, “You know what, fuck you.” She started laughing. I said, “No, fuck you, I fucking hate you.” She was howling now. “That’s good,” she said, “you should let it out.” “Fuck you,” I said. “I love it,” she said. “Fuck off,” I said. “Keep going,” she said.

4. That was the worst I ever gave it to her.

5. When I get close enough to someone to tell them about Jade, they almost always respond with some degree of rage. I think this is true for most women I know: It is easier for us to get angry on behalf of a friend than for ourselves. But still, they almost always ask, “Why aren’t you angry, too? Don’t you hate her? Like, I want this bitch to die. I want to kill her myself.” And I’ll usually say something like, “What worse could I give her than her having to be who she already is?”

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6. I once wrote an essay about my mother. Rage fueled the essay. I poured into it a rage that had, I felt, lain dormant in me for decades. I held my mother to account for things that I had my whole life refused to see. I accused her, in short, of abusing me. I remember, not long after a journal published the essay, someone emailed me: “I was so inspired by your relationship with your mother,” he wrote. “You two would talk so openly, it encouraged me to reach out to my own.”

7. The version he read was one I had edited in response to feedback from a workshop, including, especially, this one comment from another participant: “I think there’s not enough rage. You need to make it more overt.”

8. “There are so many ways,” I wrote back, “to read this essay. I’m so glad it inspired you.”

9. In my mid-30s, I started working in a BDSM dungeon. As a professional submissive, my job was to let men shackle me, tie me up, spank me, flog me, and have me tell them yes daddy I’ll be your good little girl, I’ll do everything you want me to. We were to keep our panties on. We weren’t allowed to touch their genitals. They could put nipple clamps on our nipples but not fondle our breasts. Sometimes, I would encourage a guy to flog me harder, because I was getting bored. “I don’t feel a lot of people could handle this kind of work,” I told a friend at the end of my first week. “But I seem almost made for it.”

10. I had my first client, a walk-in, on my first shift. He had been a friend of the owner for twenty years. “A good guy,” the desk girl told me. “Respects boundaries,” one of the other girls told me. He groped my tits. He pressed his dick against my thigh. “It’s against the rules,” I said. He said, “I guess you just don’t know how things work here.” So I groaned, like a porn star. He kept groping. “You’re allowed to torture my nipples,” I said, “but you can’t caress them like that.” I felt his dick on my thigh. “This is your first day,” he said. “I’m a good friend of the person who owns this establishment, and I’ve been coming here a long time.” His dick flopped on and off my thigh. “Give me your number,” he said, “so next time you can come to mine and we can fuck.” So, like a porn star, I moaned. After the session ended, after he made himself come, I asked him if he’d had a good time, my voice at a slightly higher pitch than I carry it day to day. He said, “I had a great time; I just hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did.”

11. The next day, I watched Whispers of the Heart and My Neighbor Totoro back-to-back, to no avail. I couldn’t pretend that nothing had happened. But I suspected, also, that anyone I told would say, “Well, what did you expect?” Except for my friend, (herself an incredible writer, go check out her work), who had far more experience with sex work, who had told me that whatever happened, I could come to her, and she’d never say, ‘I told you so.’ So I told Antonia, and her compassion gave me the courage to tell a few of my new colleagues. “But he’s always so nice,” one of them said. “I wouldn’t expect this of him,” said a second. “But I heard,” said a third, “that this is exactly what he did to L—,” the other trans woman who was working at the dungeon.

12. One of these colleagues was a dominatrix. “He is a switch,” she said, “so if he comes back, say you want to dominate him, and make him pay.” He came back a week later. I told him I wanted to be the Domme. He paid, of course, in cash, up front. We discussed interests, limits, and safe words. For the session, I alternated between a flogger and a riding crop. I gave him the harshest nipple clamps. I sometimes checked in, reminding him of his safe words, but I kept going harder, as hard as I felt I could get away with. After the session was over, when he was buttoning up his shirt, I said, “I just hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did.” I would tell my friends that, as he was buttoning up his shirt, I noticed that his hands were shaking. “I kept it safe,” I told them, “but I made him suffer. I got my own back.” He came back the next week, and the week after, and with each new toy and type of play we explored, I found a new tool with which to convince myself I was winning.

13. “Sometimes, I think you don’t like me,” he once said. “But I’m going to win you over one of these days.”

14. The evening after that second session, the one after which his hands probably never trembled, I watched Castle in the Sky, to no avail. With the flogger and riding crop, I had gone harder than I’d known I was capable. I had peeled back some inner curtain. Behind it, I saw an endless lava-like expanse of bright, boiling rage. I couldn’t sleep. Had this been in me all along? It was an everything rage. There is no way, I thought, I can feel all this and be safe in the world. But there is also no way, I thought, to unsee it. If this is what I’ve been sitting on all this time, I thought, then no wonder I always feel so fucked up. The next day, I watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. I watched Nausicaä and the Valley of the Wind. I watched Spirited Away. To some avail. The curtains drew shut, letting my rage live on as a mere crack of light gasping between the gap.

15. The first two stories I told in this essay, about my two exes, occurred before I transitioned, when I was, as far as the world was concerned—and as far as the world had conditioned the functioning parts of me to believe—a cis man. “You have something in you,” the ex who used to beat me said. “I can see it, and once you realize what it is, you’re going to be so full of rage. You won’t be able to hold it back.” She would allow and even encourage me to wear her clothes. “I’m not an angry person,” I told her. “That’s what you think,” she said, “but you don’t understand.”

16. The other ex and I broke up not long after I realized or faced down the fact I was a woman. She later told me that, even though she knew this was unfair, she maybe felt similar to someone whose partner has cheated on them, like how had she not seen what was right in front of her. I told her that I had, indeed, for the entirety of our relationship, been lying to her, and she was right to be angry. But I added that I didn’t feel she should reserve all her anger for me. She should be angry, as I was, at the world that made me lie.

17. The game among the boys when I was a prepubescent child was to call me names, taunt me, push my buttons until I exploded. That’s when the real fun started: they could mimic my rage, show me how little it meant. I might yell, “Shut up,” and they would chant it back to me, louder. I could never outdo them. By the time I had passed through puberty, I had mostly forgotten how to express my anger at all. I cannot think of a single instance when acting on anger ended well for me.

18. Sometime before I hit puberty, I learned about eunuchs in ancient courts. They got to serve an empress. They had to become eunuchs, a teacher explained, so the emperor could trust they wouldn’t be a threat to his wife. I did not, of course, tell the teacher that I wanted to be in their place. I asked myself in earnest if I’d be ready to go through the physical trial of castration, whether living a life of servitude would be worth it if it meant no longer having to be a threat to women. Even at that age, I knew what I was, which is not to say, exactly, that I knew I was a girl: What I knew, already, so young, was how the world saw people like me.

19. Most of my close friends, once I entered my teenage years, were other girls. I knew that my presence changed the mood of a room. I learned to neuter myself, which is to say I learned to castrate myself, which is to say I learned how to so utterly cast aside any flickering desires as to guarantee that I could never be—and no one could ever accuse me of being—a threat. My sexuality, to this day, is still oriented almost entirely around masochism and submission: I ensure that every sexual act I ever perform hinges on another’s desire.

20. One time, my eldest brother said to a friend, knowing I was in earshot, “A man who women don’t fear can hardly call himself a man.” I knew it was meant as a sleight, but deep down, of course, I hoped he was right.

21. I cannot tell you how many people have sexually assaulted me. I can tell you that the incident in the dungeon was the first time it was a man. No trans person has ever assaulted me, sexually or otherwise.

22. I write this with one bolster propping me upright, with my knees dangling over another bolster, less than two weeks out from a revision to a botched sexual reassignment surgery. I now lack the supposed source of threat. Still unable to rage.

23. But surely still a threat.

24. The nearest thing I can get to rage is when I write about politics. “None of us are free,” I might say, “until all of us are free,” because at least, with a just cause behind me and the lives of vulnerable people at stake, I feel more sure I can get away with it.

25. I still struggle to imagine the conditions—in real life, rather than in writing—under which expressing my rage would end well for me.

26. But surely I am still a threat.

27. At least that’s what I heard.

What to read next

In Watching the World Burn, I tell the story of my time working at a BDSM dungeon in Los Angeles in more detail. In Work, I tell the story of how I came to do BDSM sex work at all. In “I’m a real sadist: I don’t like it when they enjoy it,” I share about more about my relationship with Jade. In Boundaries, I rage or fail to rage at my mother. In White Ladyboy and Chain Smoking in the House of Shibari, I share stories about doing shibari in Pattaya and Tokyo, respectively, that contain anecdotes that would fit well in the essay you’ve just read.

This essay also ended up being the first in a sort-of trilogy of essays I wrote this week. The next in the series is Welcome to Womanhood, about the early days of transition, and the final is I Did It All For The Baby Poop: How I Became A Sex Worker.

Thank you for reading. Shout out to , who suggested I write it, feeling that both cis and trans women might find it relatable. I had originally planned something longer and perhaps more ambitious, but I am also off my face on various drowsy-making post-op drugs, and I wanted to get something done enough to gift you all.

I work hard to bring you everything that is this Substack. If you want to access more content or simply support me, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or tip me at ko-fi.com/thaliavacha. Liking and sharing my work is another way to support me. Those without means, as ever, please DM if you would like a comp, no justification required.

Please feel free to comment below or send an anonymous message with a question, confession, or observation at ngl.link/thaliavacha

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This will be the last entry of my post-op diary. If I continue, it will be post a different op. In one week, almost six months out from my initial sexual reassignment surgery, I will get a revision surgery with a different surgeon. My original surgeon has been coy about what complications had actually occurred, claiming it’s just a bit of excess swelling and wound separation. But this is not so: The urethra is on the side. The opening is around 3cm wide. The ridge that goes between the anus and vagina is inside the vagina and hairy (and while I have eliminated a lot through electrolysis, I won’t have time to eliminate it all). One side of the inner labia is almost the size of a golf ball. The inner labia hangs above the mouth. A lot of erectile tissue remains above the hood, meaning that my vagina currently gives a significantly bigger bulge than a tuck. Because my original surgeon tells me that this is just a bit of excess selling and wound separation, I cannot trust him to fix it.

The surgeon I am seeing next week has a stellar reputation. He sees my vagina as an especially challenging case. He thinks that, if the surgery goes well, he will be able to get it 80% towards his ideal, so I have a cap on my expectations even in the best case scenario. The erectile tissue is hard to remove, because there are lots of critical nerves around it, and it would be easy to permanently kill sensation; I think he will er on the side of leaving it still a little large rather than risk damaging the nerves. To fix the opening, he will bring the inner labia a little lower than is usual. He’ll smooth out the ridge at the entrance and the inner labia ought to hide the area with hair. He’ll make the inner labia more symmetrical and move the urethra to the center. He had some other complaint about the way my original surgeon did the urethra, something to do with leaving too much of my original shaft behind it, and I wasn’t clear on whether he can or will fix it. I’ll ask him in my pre-op on the 25^th.

After the surgery, I will wear a catheter for five days. I will stay at least one night in hospital. The initial swelling will mean I won’t be able to tell for a while how successful the surgery has been. There is a notable risk of wound separation occurring again; this is, in part, because I have asked him to connect the inner labia at the bottom. I will have a new scar that runs from the mouth of the vagina down one side of my thigh. The so-called ‘scarless technique’ that my previous surgeon boasted of means I have a strange scar lines going through the inner labia—which the new surgeon will open to get access to the erectile tissue—but I don’t have the usual scars that go either side of the thigh. I imagine dilation in the early weeks of recovery will be challenging, and I will have to take care not to rip any of the new parts.

The surgery was originally going to be on 14 June, but the surgeon couldn’t book his usual operating room on that day. I learned only a few days ago that this new date, just a week away, was now my only option within the timeframe that my insurance will still cover it. I had been planning to do more work on my manuscript, and since getting the news on the surgery date, my mind has halted all work on that, since it is not something that can be rushed. Instead, I’m just trying to get it in a readable-enough form that I can look at what needs removing and what will need filling in. I can get impatient and anxious when I know people are reading my longer-form work, so the fact I will be recovering from surgery will be a good distraction.

I anticipate the surgery with a mix of dread and excitement. Dread, for obvious reasons. I’ve been mostly repressing how intense some of the last recovery was. I will again be under general anesthetic for a long time. I know how badly my body reacts to it. The day and night after a major surgery is always a nightmare of nausea. Wearing the catheter will be unpleasant. All sorts of unexpected issues will arise, especially given that my body is prone to unusual scarring and wound separation. I am prone to anesthesia-induced post-op depression. Psychologically, surgery is always liable to take me to strange places. I do not know how good the results can be, and I cannot even be sure that this will be the final surgery.

The excitement is in the hope that it will be the final surgery and the results will be good enough that I can feel a little more comfortable in my body. It is my fifth major surgery in two and a half years. I also moved country in that time. I’m tired. I have been living these past three years always with a limited horizon, knowing that whatever I do, a major surgery will soon enough interrupt it and keep me in bed for one or more months. The third surgery was also a revision surgery, and the surgeon assured me that I wouldn’t be out of action for more than three weeks. My new surgeon has said the same for next week’s surgery. Alas, the last surgery knocked me back for almost two months, so I will also manage my expectations on this front.

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Knowing this might be the final major transition surgery—having only electrolysis as the only remaining disruptive medical-transition activity—I feel like a door is opening a crack, like maybe I can take up a new hobby, put more effort into developing friendships, try and date in earnest, and go to town on my book. Maybe I can start acting a little more in the world, rather than just writing in the day and hiding in my apartment every evening doing little. I know better than to assume everything will go perfectly. At the same time, when the surgery date came forward, I noticed the depression I have been living with in recent months start to soften. I haven’t had energy to do anything, because I haven’t had the motivation to do anything, and I remain hopeful that, with this surgery behind me, I will find more motivation and energy to start building a life, as cynical and exhausted as living in this world as a trans woman and a lesbian sometimes makes me, as difficult as I find it to find spaces, even in a relatively welcoming Thailand, in which I can feel some kind of psychological safety.

On Sunday, I am doing a shibari shoot in an onsen-style bath (pictured above). I like the photographer and the rigger (I have a mini crush, to be honest), and I think the results will help remind me, when I am stuck in bed, of the fun to be had. It will be nice to push my body one last time before the hiatus. I heard a rumor that the local lesbian bar now has a pool table, so perhaps my future will involve playing pool until my future wife turns up to challenge me (I’m not good at pool). I have told some friends that I’m getting the surgery, so I will hopefully have enough visits to get me through. My building charges double the government rate for electricity, meaning that the cost of air conditioning is extortionate. I try to use a fan as much as possible, but for this month, I’m just going to have to bite the bullet. Thailand is hot.

If you have the means, please considering buying a subscription to my Substack: for little more than the cost of a fancy latte each month, you’ll get access to more than 120k words of writing, which is the equivalent of two books. If you want to contribute without buying a subscription, you can also tip me at www.ko-fi.com/thaliavacha

I will keep posting Notes after the surgery, once I have the wherewithal to do so. I appreciate all the messages of support, and I hope all this writing is valuable to people who want surgery, people who have had it, and people who want to understand more about what these surgeries are like.

Thanks for reading. Have a lovely day.

This is part one of two. It’s simple and direct. Pa…

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This was my first attempt to write some scenes from a story I later summed up on here in Living as a Human Pet. I had wanted it to be a prequel of sorts to a sequence of sex work-related stories all written in the present tense, consisting of Work, Watching the World Burn, White Ladyboy, and Does My Pee Tast…

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The first half is available for free and is by itself longer than my average essay on here. The second half is available to paying subscribers. If you support me, instead, through ko-fi or f you are marginalized and lack means, please DM me for a special link. I am paywalling it, in part, because it is an excerpt from a piece of work I am currently in the process of tidying up to sell. I cannot account for the number of hours or the blood, sweat, and tears I have put into realizing this project, which I began in 2022, and which I believe deserves a wide audience.

Thank you for supporting my work.

She’s between the ages of two and five. That’s the best I can offer. She’s on a beach in Bali, and she’s walking beside her mother. I have a photograph that shows her walking on a beach in Bali, holding her mother’s hand, but I can’t be sure if the photograph captures the scene I remember.

Likely not. In the photograph, it is day, and in my memory, it seems to be night. In the photograph, she wears a red t-shirt with green sleeves and red shorts. Perhaps she wore it at the scene of my memory, walking alongside her mother, maybe holding her mother’s hand, maybe not, perhaps running about, skittish, a small child with a limited sense of the world and her place within it, moving safely through this land as good as if she owned it.

At some point, she and her mother come across a vendor selling translucent trinkets. A cool breeze blows. As they approach the vendor, she sees another girl getting her hair braided, the stylist threading the braids through a kaleidoscope of pony beads.

She’s beautiful.

The young girl points at the girl getting braids.

She says: Mummy, I want to do it. Can I?

No, her mother says. That’s for girls.

Between the ages of two and five the girl lived in Singapore, a white girl with rosy cheeks and blonde hair and a house so big she had to bounce a bouncy ball hard against the floor to make it hit the ceiling. Sometimes young couples would want to take a photo with her. She didn’t know what it was for apart from that her mom said her blonde hair was rare here. It made her feel pretty. Special.

At her primary school the boys and girls all sat together, but she would only play with the boys. It was what her parents wanted and what the school wanted. The world had decided. And she was mostly fine with it, although the boys would sometimes pick on her. Something about her seemed to make them uneasy. Was it the fact that she was the only girl in their friendship group?

One time she had to paint a picture of her mother in an art class and made a mistake on her mother’s face and tried to correct the mistake with another lick of paint and kept attempting corrections until her mother’s face became a green, blurry blob, like mold. Her mother, the one supposed to love and care for her, became mold. She was loved and cared for by mold. Loving, seeking safety, from mold. She cried so hard they had to call her mother, which would make things worse, because her mother would have to see the mold.

At some point, one of the boys said, Why are you being so sensitive? You’re acting like a girl.

What was wrong with being a girl? What was wrong with crying? Why does crying make you a girl? Was it different if a girl cried than if a boy cried? Was she not actually a girl? She didn’t look like other girls. Adults kept her away from other girls. She often didn’t think of herself as a girl. Or she didn’t think about her girlhood.

Didn’t dare.

Others called her a boy. Who was she to disagree? Better, among the boys, to act like a boy, to mimic their values even if in secret she aspired to be like other girls, girls and women; even if she knew that everything she heard about boys didn’t apply to her—their strength, their smarts, their competence, or whatever—even if she would have to fake all these things and live always at the precipice of a threatening exposure; and even if she knew that everything she heard about girls—their frivolous sensitivity, for example—hurt her, became her, and shaped the same self for whom she craved that same exposure. Better to pretend.

But why did they say that crying makes you weak? Crying hurt. Crying meant gazing at the pain without flinching, taking a nosedive through the storm’s eye. Surely avoiding pain would be the weaker choice?

All these thoughts and more, between the ages of two and five, ran wordless through her bones; structured her personality; outlined the contours of her omissions and displays; structured her brain around dark, forbidden zones; and drew circuitous pathways to circumvent these zones. In short, the thoughts divided her in two. Real girl. Fake boy.

When she was five her family moved back to her birthplace of England. It was cold. Why did they bring her to this awful place where the air hurt your skin and didn’t stop blowing? Her school made her wear shorts in winter, and it was terrible, and she promised she would always remember how alive she felt and how big the world was to a child, because all the adults around her seemed to have forgotten this or why would they make her wear shorts in winter?

It was a Christian school. The boys and girls had class together but parted in the playground. Most of the students were as pale her, but none of them had lived in Asia. When she said she was from Singapore, everybody laughed, and she at once thought she understood and refused to understand, so she gulped it down deep and kept it there, wherever it sank. She wasn’t from Singapore. Fine. But did they laugh at her for pretending or because they thought being Asian was bad? She should take note. She’d learn.

She didn’t like these people but wanted to be like them and, more than she realized, already was. The school made her stay late for special classes where they tried to teach her how to hold a pencil and write letters on the lines. The pencil wore a special plastic skirt to help her hold it. She wanted to wear a skirt. She struggled. With everything, she struggled. The other children were mean. The English were mean. There was one blond boy who was tall and wide and a bully, and she couldn’t understand his speech, and he didn’t understand the questions teachers asked, and she dreamed she was him, her perception so blurry she couldn’t navigate the classroom.

One time when her mum picked her up from the special needs class she ran so fast to hug her that her tooth flew out, and she soaked her mom’s dress with blood.

Other times, when her mother was late, she waited alone outside the school, her legs shivering in the cold, and she worried that her mother had died. She heard passages from the Bible in school assembly. She had to sing hymns in school assembly. She had to praise Jesus in school assembly. She had arrived as a stranger in a strange land where she looked and spoke like the strangers did and hated them all and herself even more. Was she strange? The English shared some barbs with the boys in Singapore: Why are you crying? Stop acting like a girl. Something had to change. It wasn’t going to be the world.

The only thing worse than being a girl, she learned, was being a girl who was supposed to be a boy. Or being a boy who was like a girl. The girlishness of girls could at least be blamed on the fact they were girls, poor things. She had no excuse: It was clear, by now, already, that she was meant to be a boy or to live as a boy, even if it wasn’t clear why. She didn’t really know or think much about genitals, as far as she remembers. Or did she? Did she look at them? Did she play with them, that young?

So she tried to comport herself as a boy. She made special compartments for her girlish desires. But what was a girlish desire? What was a girl? What was girlishness? What did those who attacked her see in her? Did they see a girl? The same thing she saw? Did they understand what she was before she could fully grasp it herself?

But whereas she saw it as right, being a girl, they saw it as wrong, so that she, of course, one against an insistent many, came to agree that she was, in some fundamental way, wrong. A logical contradiction. A moral disgrace.

Better to just be a boy.

So why did it still hurt her when girls were demeaned? And why did she feel jealous when she heard them praised? And why did she feel like she was less than both, the girls as much as the boys? Were there others like her? Was she the only one? The Girls: What lucky, precious, strange beings. If only she could understand.

The eight-year-old girl, who has been at school in England for a few years now, is now trying to tell me something. Which is to say I am finally listening to her, to all those words that got pushed down and locked up, kept almost always out of sight.

I’ve been teaching her, too, about all the things I’ve learned since she and I were one.

She says that she understands why I’m asking her for memories, she appreciates it, and she wants to help. She is glad someone is there for her; no one had ever been there for her in this way. But she has been pushed down, locked up: she never got to see much, so there’s not much for her to show.

The monster had mostly been in charge, she said.

The monster? I ask.

The monster, she says.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, she says. I’m talking about the one who pushed me down, locked me up—until you came along to listen—who saw my nature as a threat, who hated what I was, who tried to deny it was even there. I mean the part of that cared to listen to what others had to say.

Poor girl. How articulate she’s become, stewing inside me all these years. I don’t want to fight her. I’m here to finally listen, to support her, to let her be.

The monster was never a part of you, I say. You held onto its hatred only to survive. I’m here to help you cast it out.

Tell them about the happy times, the little girl says.

Why? I ask.

Because there are so many happy times, she says.

Really? I ask. But why do I need to share them here?

Because of what everyone is telling me, she says. You’re eight years old, they say. You’re from a good home, they say. Your parents are together. They don’t want for money. And you go to a private school. This is a first-world country, they say. Stop acting like you’ve been through some shit, they say. You’re just desperate, they say, for attention. Don’t you think they have a point?

Maybe some of them do, I say. And maybe most of them just don’t want to hear about your pain. How are we going to face the pain of others if we’re too afraid to know our own?

The little girl is silent. There are tears in her eyes.

You’re asking too much of me, she says. I’m just a little girl.

Slowly, she made friends, almost all of whom were boys. She loved video games. She would play WWF, Mario Kart, House of the Dead. She hated watching others play, always wanted to play herself, got jealous, felt bad for feeling jealous, felt jealous of others for their apparent lack of jealousy, their capacity for patience. If only she was patient, she would better fit in.

Nothing much seemed to have anything to do with gender, like if a scientific observer wanted to look at this girl at this time in her life and find evidence that her behavior or inner world oriented around a gendered reality at odds with how the world treated her, what would they find?

At some point her friends were the popular boys. At some point these boys were her friends no more. She got quarantined to the playground’s misfit quadrant. The boys here punched each other’s balls. She hated the pain of being punched, but something about it seemed… right?

Hmm.

She watched the girls play hopscotch or whatever. Do girl things. Open and close paper flowers. What would it be like to be like them? Sometimes she would feel jealous, would feel bad for feeling jealous, felt jealous at others for their apparent lack of jealousy, could hardly even believe they actually weren’t jealous.

She couldn’t repress the sensations themselves, only her interpretation. Her sensory field grew more confusing. Her world kept on dividing.

From across the playground, a messenger from the Girls approaches her.

We’d like you to join us, the messenger says.

When she joins the Girls, stands among them—excitement building in her fingers and toes—the most popular one speaks.

The popular girl wants to slap her face.

I want to know what it is like, she says, to slap a boy in the face.

The little girl consents. But why?

And how it stings and rushes blood to her cheeks, that single word: boy.

The eight-year-old girl is on a bus setting off for a school trip. She sits alone, and in the seat in front sit the messenger and the popular girl. Once the journey is underway, the two girls turn around, forming a pincer around her, and start asking questions.

She only remembers one of the questions: Can we see your penis? they ask.

Why? she asks.

Because we’ve never seen a penis before.

OK. Here.

Ew. Gross.

She sits in silence alone for the rest of the journey, wondering why she had said yes and why it had felt exciting before she said yes and awful after and even worse still after she’d shown the thing.

She doesn’t think about it for a while, but a few days later a teacher finds her in the bag racks before school starts; she is smashing her briefcase—because the children carry briefcases in this English private school—against the wooden beams of the bag racks, against the other bags, splintering the wood, sending fragments of plastic from the case’s casing all around the room.

She thinks she’s in trouble, but the teacher is concerned, shows a great amount of care, which in turn concerns the girl, distresses her, because what if she has to tell the teacher the source of her distress, which source and which distress she doesn’t anyway understand?

The teacher later tells her eldest brother about the incident, and the eldest brother comes to speak with her. She has some vague sense that the briefcase incident is connected to the bus incident but can’t quite grasp it, wants to express it, can’t understand why all of it feels icky and so bad.

But then she kind of does express it. She plants her face into her brother’s side and cries, and her brother’s blue blazer grows damp with tears.

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this woman she keeps talking about how she loves my abs, she loves my muscles, how it’s interest…

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I work so hard to bring you this Substack. I am always teetering on the edge of stepping back, so I want to see if I can make enough income that it can justify the time and effort, especially as I go back into editing mode for my larger projects. If you can afford to pay for access, I would greatly appreciate it. It costs little more than buying me a fancy matcha latte in an LA cafe once a month, so you can ask yourself how the idea of doing this feels, then consider just how much of my labor and love I bring to this platform (I think about 100-120k words, which is enough to fill two books).

If you don’t want to pay through Substack, you can also pay via my ko-fi page and DM me for access.

Thank you.

Part I — Transgender Politics

In this essay, I will share my journey as a writer on Substack. This will serve as a guide of sorts to the work I have on here—which now consists of more than 30 essays—but will also, I believe, echo a larger story about transgender lives in the US in the days since Donald Trump’s second inauguration on 21 January 2025.

I began this newsletter on 1 February 2025, less than two weeks after the inauguration. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, and I was concerned by what I saw as an increasing sense of detachment in many people around me from the reality of the changes taking place in their country: it was almost as if the worse things got, the greater the detachment became.

My first essay on here was called Our Fear is Not the Problem.

At the time of writing, I was terrified at the implications of the new administration’s executive orders relating to gender, but many people treated my fear as a problem of emotional dysregulation rather than a reasonable response to a real danger. So I wrote about it and, to my surprise, plenty of people read it.

After I published it, some trans people wrote to tell me that I had described how they were feeling, too, while some cis people wrote to say the essay helped them better understand what their trans loved ones were going through.

I have been writing for a long time, but up until this point I had almost exclusively been writing narrative nonfiction and reserving my work for literary journals. But after seeing the response to this essay, I wanted to try, best I could, to do work that might help support and fight for the transgender community as our situation worsened.

I wrote my next essay, It Was Never Really About Trans Women in Sport, in response to an executive order published on 5 February 2025 called, “KEEPING MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORT.” While I am far from an expert on the subject of women’s sports, I wanted to show that the so-called good faith discussions about trans women in women’s sports were less about sports than they were about finding a way to stigmatize trans women—to present us as a genuine threat in a context that everyday people could relate to—that seemed to have a rational basis. I write about how much of today’s rhetoric around trans women in sport has been recycled from the moral panics that racists of previous generations had created around Black women in sport. I ask why suddenly, when it comes to trans people, so many people seem to care about women’s sport.

As early as November of 2024, I decided I would leave the US if the administration began detaining or deporting international students on a political pretext. I was scared. It felt impossible to tell how bad things could get or how quickly things might escalate. I knew that if I did not set a clear red line, then I would be forever moving the goalposts. My decision became resolute after I read the executive orders about “gender ideology extremism” and “foreign terrorists” in January 2025.

On March 8 2025, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, an international student who was living on a green card, on a political pretext. This moment had come sooner than I expected. But I desperately didn’t want to leave to US. I had worked so hard to get there. I had a life, a community, and a vision for my future. I was so at odds with leaving the idea of leaving that I began to keep suicide equipment in my bedroom.

Some close friends knew about this. They would keep asking if I’d let them come over to dispose of it. I have lived through some extreme experiences of capture and violence. As an international student with political writing online and a mismatch of my gender and name between my visa and passport, I felt that, even with whiteness on my side, a timeline in which ICE detained was becoming more and more real. The fear I felt at this prospect, especially as a trans woman, even if I only thought there was only a small likelihood, ran deep in my bones.

I felt haunted. I wanted to die. But I also didn’t want to die. So instead of writing a suicide note, I wrote an anti-suicide note: I had become so convinced that I was going to end my life that I resolved to write until I rescued myself from this fate. I dedicated it to the memory of Elisa Rae Shupe, a non-binary veteran whose body was found hanging, wrapped in a trans flag, a few days after Trump’s inauguration.

You can read that note in full here.

After this, I wrote two manifesto-like polemics, the first of which aimed primarily to help non-trans-women better understand my reality as a trans woman, the second of which aimed to diagnose why it seemed so easy for cis people—and especially cis women—to distance themselves or ignore the threats trans people faced, despite the fact that these threats also consistently and specifically targeted the bodily autonomy of all women and defined us only with respect to our biological function.

I wrote these essays in one short sitting each, but poured many years’ worth of reflection into them, and they both achieved something like Substack virality. They are still by far my most popular essays on here. You can find them here:

• Who’s Afraid of Sex: Why No One Understands What Gender Is (and No One Ever Will)

• No Cis Person Will Read This Essay

A few weeks after publishing the latter, I moved to Thailand. I did not publish anything for another five months.

In Thailand, I found it almost impossible to keep writing about transgender issues domestic to the US. I found it almost impossible to write about anything at all. I found it almost impossible to hold onto any cohesive sense of whom I was. I was in a state of deep grief and full of doubt about my decision, which many around me had seen as paranoid and unwarranted. “You should learn some breathing techniques,” someone had told me before I left. “Maybe if you were a little calmer, you would be able to see things more clearly.”

“I was calm,” I said, “until I started sharing my reasons with you.”

When I returned to writing, it was with an essay about the language in public discourse that surrounded the genocide in Palestine and the administration’s recent actions in sending men to CECOT, a torture camp in El Salvador. I also seemed, through this essay, to be working through questions of how I was supposed to write at all from this place of displacement. The essay is called Elsewhere’s Homecoming, and it is interesting not just for the work it does on its own merit but as an artifact that shows how much the nature of public political discourse has continued to shift in the seven months since I wrote it.

Part II — Everything

After publishing this Elsewhere’s Homecoming, the Substack took a big turn. I have so much work on here now, and I write in a range of genres and modes, but there isn’t really a way, on Substack, to help people navigate to the kind of material they’re interested in. I’ve divided the essays into five categories, as below. So I am going to organize the rest of my essays below according to the following categories.

1. Lesbianism

2. Sex Work and BDSM

3. Sexual Reassignment Surgery

4. Criticism

5. Memoir

I am so grateful to all my readers; the care with which people here read my work launches fireworks through my brain. At present, most of my archived work is behind a paywall. Marginalized readers with limited means are welcome to DM me and ask for a complimentary subscription. You don’t need to explain yourself: I am going to trust that people aren’t going to lie just to get their hands on a Substack subscription.

I work so hard to bring you this Substack. I am always teetering on the edge of stepping back, so I want to see if I can make enough income that it can justify the time and effort, especially as I go back into editing mode for my larger projects. If you can afford to pay for access, I would greatly appreciate it. It costs little more than buying me a fancy matcha latte in an LA cafe once a month, so you can ask yourself how the idea of doing this feels, then consider just how much of my labor and love I bring to this platform (I think about 100-120k words, which is enough to fill two books).

If you don’t want to pay through Substack, you can also pay via my ko-fi page and DM me for access.

1. Lesbianism

These essays are all about living a lesbian life and my love for other lesbians, who are the best ⚢, especially the losers.

cool lesbians, loser lesbians, and slutty lesbians is about slutty lesbians, loser lesbians, and cool lesbians.

can a lesbian be a slut? says that yes, a lesbian can be a slut, and explores what that might look like.

The Loser-Cool Horseshoe Theory of Lesbianism speculates on whether a cool lesbian is even a conceptual possibility. These first three essays make a trilogy.

lesbians (on words meaning things) is something like my belated response to the whole “lowkey, I chose to be a lesbian” debacle. Really, it is an opportunity to talk about the challenges faced by lesbians who can’t be any other way.

Invisible Lesbians is my love letter to lesbians for Lesbian Visibility Week. I also talk a little about femme4femme and being a lesbian who does sex work.

2. Sex Work and BDSM

These essays all revolve around sex work and BDSM. The first four make a series; I wrote them in the present, shortly after the events occurred, and included little no narrative reflection.

Work is about becoming a lifestyle submissive to a professional dominatrix, who later persuaded me to become a professional dominatrix.

Watching the World Burn is a sequel to Work. It takes place on the day after Trump’s second election, which I spent with said professional dominatrix, and recounts my early days working in a Los Angeles BDSM dungeon.

White Ladyboy captures some scenes from Pattaya in Thailand, when I worked as a professional submissive and shibari model and the line begins consent and coercion began to blur.

Does My Pee Taste of Coconut describes a kinky hookup with a sex worker in Bangkok, whom I later began to do work with. These first four essays all make up a single sequence.

because he could never make her come is a brief tale about two clients who came to me as a couple before breaking up and becoming separate clients.

Living as a Human Pet tries to fulfill its promise, describing the time I lived in a shibari studio in Tokyo that was owned by a professional dominatrix.

“i’m a real sadist: i don’t like it when they enjoy it” is a story about some abuse I experienced at the hands of a girlfriend in my early 20s, who was also a professional dominatrix; it is something like an origin story for all of the above.

3. Sexual Reassignment Surgery

These are all essays I wrote while recovering from my sexual reassignment surgery. I wrote most of them during my evening dilating hour, allowing the end of dilation to mark a natural end. I won’t give them blurbs, since they all read a bit like diary entries. I’ll just put them here for anyone who wants to read them in order. They cover the first four months of my recovery and the series is ongoing.

1. just another day

2. on music

3. just another fucking day

4. the trials of srs recovery

5. writing as therapy

6. Recovery / Healing

7. three months out, an eternity, the blink of an eye

8. it’s the size of the mountain (not your skills as a climber)

4. Criticism

These are more similar to my earlier essays, like No Cis Person Will Read This Essay. They comment on a topic, usually in list form.

Narcissisms within Narcissisms is my critique of the narcosphere.

Writing Advice for People Who Hate Writing Advice questions what counts as good writing or a successful career when you are a marginalized writer.

You Are (Probably) a Transmisogynist is something to read if you feel any kind of way about its title.

Girls I Grew Up With is about Lt. Lois Einhorn, Buffalo Bill, and other fine examples of 90s mainstream transgender representation.

notes on passing talks about some of the complexities that I have come across since I began passing more as a cis woman.

5. Memoir

These are examples of the kind of writing I do mostly outside of Substack. They usually tell stories from my life in a reflective mode.

The Silent Part: A Performance is (one of many versions) of the first chapter from my memoir that asks examines what happens when you frame a trans woman’s pre-transition childhood as another kind of girlhood.

The Switzerland Schedule is the only essay on here that I wrote pre-transition. It is about my mother’s assisted suicide in Switzerland. I wasn’t on Substack at the time; The Audacity. published it, and I am incredibly grateful to Roxane Gay and Megan Pillow for putting it out, since it in many ways it kick-started my career as a writer.

Boundaries follows on from The Switzerland Schedule and provides a deeper reflection of my relationship with my mother.

Eat, Pray, Flee: On Finding Myself in Thailand is about how and why I left the US for Thailand, shortly after the Trump administration started arresting and cancelling the visas of international students.

On Suffering as a Bridge includes some short musings on James Baldwin’s description of suffering as a bridge that allows you to connect with others.

—————

Thank you, everyone, for being here with me. My Ko-Fi, again, in case you are more invested by the end of this article than you were at the start, is here. Or just Restack!

one reason i sometimes prefer not to disclose that i am trans is that i know that many people will scrutinize my behavior as evidence for or against the case the trans women are women. they may take behaviors they read as masculine as evidence that i am fundamentally different from cis women, ie ‘really a man.’ they may take behaviors they read as feminine as evidence that trans women, maybe, are woman enough to deserve the label. they may take behaviors they read as too feminine as evidence of a man trying too hard.

their preconceptions, as much as my behavior, will determine what they read as masculine or feminine. i know this, because i have enough experience of others reading me as both cis and trans to see how differently, in general, people read my behavior in either situation; i also get to witness the changes that overcome some people once they learn that i am trans. sometimes, little changes. sometimes, it is as if a spirit has possessed them.

i know that in how i behave i don’t just represent myself as an individual but trans women as an entire group, a group towards whose integrity politicians and the media have invested a tremendous amount putting into question. the fewer trans women someone has met, the greater the extent to which they are likely to treat me as a representative.

this is an exhausting situation. people who possess other stigmatized identities may experience related issues, although there will, of course, be variety in the ways they manifest. one of the more unique features for trans people is that people will put the core of your identity under suspicion: they will question whether you are a man or a woman at all. for trans women, if someone believes you are not a woman, it usually comes with the belief that you are dangerous and predatory. most slurs are derogatory ways of saying what one is, whereas one of today’s most common slurs against trans women—man—is derogatory by way of saying one is what one isn’t.

some cis people might respond to my complaints about the scrutiny i describe by saying, “well, i don’t scrutinize your behavior this way, nor do i treat you as a representative,” i know this, because they often do respond this way. and it is true that there is a great deal of variance in the extent to which people do this. but from my perspective, there is no way of knowing who does and doesn’t do this or to what degree they do in any given situation. i just have so many experiences of cis people making comments to indicate they are doing all this that i can comfortably conclude it as common enough to be wary of in more situations than not.

some cis people might also respond by asking why i choose to focus on this scrutiny rather than simply ‘ignore it and be myself.’ i know this, again, because they often do. but this implies that i am describing here a psychological phenomenon, as if the only thing at stake is what i choose to attend to, implying almost that i am willing it to be by doing so, when i am in fact describing situational awareness. i can pretend that i am on a mountain when i am at the beach. i can pretend i am with my brother when i am with my father. i can pretend that i have no idea of the attitudes people have towards trans people or that i have only a weak ability in detecting these attitudes. i can ignore the tells (probing questions, misgendering, over-the-top affirmations, “please tell me if i offend you,” and so on) that indicate what kind of attitude someone has towards me. sometimes people even go to too great a length to try to demonstrate of how little consequence the fact i am trans is to them. i can pretend to myself that i can take this at face value.

when i describe a situation, it is a situation is hare with others. people have an easy time telling others to ignore what is easy for them to ignore, easy enough that they can pretend it doesn’t exist, easy enough that they can imply it is mostly in my head.

it is important to describe this as a situation, in other words, so that the cis person does not reduce their role in it to a question of their own psychological response. there are better and worse ways of navigating the situation, but no one can equalize the inequalities of situations in the context of oppression by being nicer or saying the right thing. the local situation of oppression is as inescapable for the oppressor as it is for the oppressed and the only way out of this is to dismantle the systems that create the situation.

of course, not all trans people have the same situational awareness or are attuned to the same aspects of their environment—and trans people in different communities and different parts of the world with different intersecting identities and different personalities will all have different experiences and priorities—but it would still be wrong to take this as evidence that i am describing here a merely psychological phenomenon, since the psychological phenomenon depends for its existence upon a situational phenomenon.

some cis people and especially cis queers—i know this—might also wonder why, just because people might be evaluating me in this way, i still feel any need to cater to it, which carries the connotation that my desire not to disclose my status as trans is a mere form of catering. it is fair to wonder about this. but whether i cater to it or not, the evaluation still exists and shapes my experience. one function of this monitoring of my behavior is discipline: if i behave in a way that people read as either too masculine or too exaggerated in its femininity to convince them of my womanhood (and hence, to a degree, the womanhood of all trans women), i may lose out on opportunities and find myself unable to access a wide array of situations. in some cases, i may put myself in danger. cis women understand how this kind of policing operates, so it will be no leap for them to see that trans women merely walk the same tightrope on a thinner piece of string: i know this, because the range of safe behavior available to me when others believe i am cis is significantly broader than those available to me when they read me as trans.

i can still be defiant, yes, but some queers of an anti-assimilationist bent rely too much on heroic individualistic narratives when speaking of such defiance. the degree to which i can be anti-assimilationist depends on what i can fall back on. if i am in a town or city or country with no access to a ready-made trans community, then refusing to perform for the cis gaze at all would be an act of social suicide and jeopardize my capacity to take care of myself. sometimes, i am just tired of navigating this stuff and want to make things a little easier for myself. sometimes, i just want to pass as cis, and this exercise of the will seems every bit as politically important as an indiscriminate aestheticized attitude of defiance that offers no material gain for any political project.

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