Kay Gabriel

When I met S. I shouldn’t have been allowed in society. I was on a pill that made the walls melt. I saw him looking up at me with his big, high eyes and figured, fuck it, what’s the worst that could happen, he’s probably gay.

He doesn’t remember it that way. He saw a deliberate woman weave through a thick crowd to ask him if he wanted to make out. And I did, I did do that. Because you were staring, I remind him, You were staring at my ass, and he says, I don’t remember it that way.

He knew I was trans already, he told me later. He can’t remember how he knew, he just did. Was it my voice, was it my height? He’ll never tell, which is probably for the best.

Months later, after we had formalized our relationship, we fucked for the first time in a dark semi-public at a party. I leaned on, I think, a metal barricade. He held my hips and slid into me from behind and said with amazement that a cis woman would never have done that. To him sex where friends and strangers could see was something extraordinary.

What he said, sure, doesn’t apply in every case, but I actually do believe it’s a sharp and accurate observation about ironclad transsexual willfulness and exhibitionism, our desire to be desired, our gay assurance about ourselves, our allergy to caring whether a third party sees and notices and our urge, even, to lean into it. So the tell when he first saw me may also have been my determination to be found attractive, in addition to my proportions and mannerisms and company and whatever else gives it away. If I’m saying it’s a little clocky for a woman to command attention with a purpose, what then? Show ponies are bred that way.

I see it in others too, women who put on a performance whenever they enter a room, and make a stage out of any surface they stand or lie or kneel on. Like I’ll walk through a darkroom that’s supermajority gay guys and still see a majestic doll clearing a space for herself and her trade. It’s theater — there might as well be applause, and sometimes there is. You might think the government-issue faggots would have a problem with it, this fish served in gay guy soup. But they lap it up like drag, like men named Ryan at a ‘Drag Race’ watch party.

What do we get out of it? Desire goes off with a louder bang in front of an audience, who see you through your lover’s eyes. It’s as if strangers could cuck each other without cruelty. Everybody must feel it, this triangulation, and trannies who figure out how to move in the thick of attention feel it not more but differently.

With more determination, for instance. Like the night when I asked S. if he wanted to kiss me he demurred, but asked for my number. The pill steeled my nerves, and made casual touch a thrill. His rejection was thrilling up close, where his body, broad across delts and lats, made mine look breakable, as if I was a porcelain figurine under a spell that allowed me to move at night. Turns out we were about to upend each other’s lives. But we didn’t realize that yet, in the time when I only knew he found me attractive, rolling crazy and wearing little strips of plastic, and he knew that I was brash.

How brash? I was the kind of kid who made heads turn a lot, with long hair, a flat chest and proportions that said pick on me, goddammit. The scrambled gender signals made other teens furious. Attention has the pull and push of a material force, no different from being sucked by a tide. I sensed it all the time, across a subway platform or a crowded street. If you’re a young person who pulls attention you change your attitude and behavior — either to lean out of it or into it.

Ever wonder how self-assured trannies get like that? I do: an unfuckwithable gender.

Through repeat encounters, I somehow determined that, whether rapt or hostile, attention surrenders power in the form of another’s time, emotion, fixation, trained on you like a stage light. Once I walked through the Toronto gay village tonguing, I swear to god, a lollipop and watched the heads swivel in my direction.

Which set me on a path to become the type of woman who would approach an unapproachable person, someone, like S., whose sturdy shyness might read as impenetrable. When we fucked the first time, I marveled at his skill and attentiveness, luxuriated in touch and spectacle, while his eyes rolled back in his head. He pulled out to keep from coming and fanned himself with his hand.

We sanded away at each other’s defenses. Like one time at a gay guy party he would’ve gladly had me in a stall or on a pile of breeze blocks, but I cleared us a seat on a couch, while our friends stumbled in front of us and he bred me kind of slow and lavishly. A friend patted him on the back and asked me, Is this man bothering you, and the three of us laughed as if it really was that easy to do everything out loud.

Or another time we were at a festival and he fucked me from behind with a couple hundred of our friends moshing just in front of us. This time we stood inside the sound bath, where the bass made us tremble and the lights showed everything to everyone. I felt a firm, hot pressure — he pushed into and pounded out the shallow dimensions of my neovagina like he meant to deepen it. While he both steadied me with his hands and thrusted kind of hard and mean, my sister held the poppers out for me and this time I really did melt into it.

A couple days later a friend approached us in the middle of another set: I watched you two fucking during Bobby Beethoven, he said, That was hot as hell. Good, I said, Good, he’s in me right now. I mean his fingers were.