when I heard his voice). “Exactly,” I howled
back at him, “and I NEEDED THAT SCREEN.”
I narrowly survived the night, unable to handle
a reality where what had happened to me had
happened to an actual human, much less feel
what it’s like to be that human.
At the same time, I was viscerally aware
that to much of the rest of the world, of course,
I’d become less human. Unhuman. Human-
ish. To legislators, to comedians, to more than
half of average American adults, who, accord-
ing to the Pew Research Center, don’t believe
in trans people. It’d been only a couple of years
since epic amounts of therapy had finally
kicked my reasonable fear that men I passed
on the street might try to hurt me for looking
female, but shortly after surgery, I gave some
guy directions on an otherwise deserted road
in the middle of the day and then instinctively
turned around after we passed each other, in
case he’d turned around, too, in case he’d only
asked so he could use my voice as a tiebreaker
to confirm that my face and chest were not
lining up right and he should beat me to death.
It is hard.
Some of the hardness was new to me
because of how I was able to play my biology
before, and how thoroughly the world bends
to accommodate able-privileged, acceptably
gender-conforming people of my race.
It is harder for others. I cannot begin to
imagine how much scarier interactions with
police or landlords or the general public could
be for a trans person of color.
It has also never been easier. Every time I
have to say “trans” and don’t have to explain
what it means, I am overwhelmed with grat-
itude for everyone who went before me. And
whatever other indignities precede or follow,
I have never had to explain what it means,
not to anyone, rural or elderly or doctor or
cashier. I got my testosterone for free under
my insurance. The friend who injected me
with it the first time got his, when he started
transitioning years ago, black market, o≠ a
guy whom he helped pay for top surgery by
stealing flea medication to resell online.
Trans health care still isn’t covered by
Medicaid in the state he lived in then. But it is,
at the time of press, in the state he lives in now,
and by Medicaid in 18 other states and D.C.
Make no mistake that there is an onslaught of
discriminations and violences, and that they
cost lives. Insert a data dump of statistics, with
personalizing anecdote, about LGBTQ home-
lessness/suicide/harassment/assault/bully-
ing/sex-abuse/dropout rates here. LGBTQ
hate killings in America are up—way up, to
one murder per week in 2017, with black trans
women murdered the most—in recent years.
But it is also true that there is no returning
in the least to the total straight supremacy of
my eighth-grade world, when The New York
Times called a weak, wildly controversial
absurdity that the number of genders encom-
passing all complex humanity could be two.
Consider that you are currently encountering
any of the preceding words in Gentlemen’s
Quarterly. In my envisioned lede, the line
that should be showstopper—That Asha,
as a teenager, can conceive of living openly
transgender, much less be doing it—is already
years stale, unsurprising, at this point, to any
American reader.
I don’t need to convince anyone that
straight is over. Though my most singular,
agonizing wish since I was a child was to be
safe and to be loved, I’ve staked my life on it.
It’s too late for me to live my youth, or my
20s, or most of my 30s, uncaged. But last
summer, I was in a Whole Foods, where, like
everywhere then, most every gaze I passed
lingered with curiosity or confusion or hostil-
ity. And. As I stood amid the bins of the bulk
section, each breath I took was expansive pos-
sibility, exhaling deep, dead grief. Not passing
as either accepted gender, I was as visible as
I could be—and there I was, buying lentils like
anyone, stunned and ecstatic to be alive.
It’s too soon to know whether younger
Americans’ broader acceptance of genders and
sexualities will translate to fewer votes for leg-
islators and presidents who would endanger
Asha, or if there will be fewer murders as the
people who hate her die o≠ faster than they’re
being replaced, as nearly every survey of this
country’s generational attitudes indicates.
Either way, her bold walk (to her own house,
now, as she’s since come out to her parents)
and every other LGBTQQIP2SAA+ person
chips away at a system that can’t rebuild itself
quickly enough. We chip away at rigidity and
oppressions and silence that have long recy-
cled into more pain, more violence.
I have moments when I still can’t believe
I’m queer or trans or both. Yes, sometimes like
I can’t believe this is happening, or like maybe
I could’ve come to embody womanhood if I had
just kept trying, tried harder, forever. But more
often like I cannot believe I can be this special,
to be born into this lineage.
Certainly one of the kids currently su≠er-
ing sexual abuse—Child Protective Services
discovers another every nine minutes,
according to RAINN—is queer or trans or
both, too. Whatever else he’s telling himself—
that he deserves it; that he is broken; that he
is unloved by God—to keep his rage leashed
and directed inward as he bides his time, he
at least knows, if he has access to a television
or computer or smartphone or newsstand
or library, that people like him are people.
That if he can just manage to survive, there
is a place in this world for people like him to
have jobs, and families, and the light on their
face. Even if his parents ultimately punish
him, or wring their hands lamenting why,
why their child is like this, or grieve him like
he’s died, there are also already people all
over who, when he reveals himself to them,
will instinctively celebrate that he has, that he
is, a gift—variance, the key to evolution—their
eyes and voices suddenly bright when they say,
Congratulations.gabriel mac is the author of two books and
a three-time National Magazine
Award finalist.closed-mouth kiss between Roseanne Barr
and Mariel Hemingway on TV “a small step
forward for the stirring of homosexuals into
the American melting pot.”
Nearly half of the generation now coming
of age identifies as queer. In the recent Ben
Stiller movie Brad’s Status, there’s a scene
where two “entitled and pretentious” chil-
dren are represented as sitting at the table
with their parents and saying, in turn, “Dad,
don’t be so cisgender,” and “Yeah, Dad, don’t
be so cis.” In the movie (which was written and
directed by a cis queer man), the point being
made is that these children are assholes. But
they have been educated and emboldened
by TV characters and YouTubers and Miley
Cyrus’s pansexuality—which I had to look up
in the dictionary, though I’ve been having gay
sex since Miley Cyrus was three—to stand with
aggressively marginalized members of a long
and bloody movement for human rights.
I have a flashback from when I was
younger. One of hundreds. In this one
(the figure, to reiterate, says I invented
all of this out of whole cloth), there is the
head-screaming of What did I DO? and the
Please, no of being turned over, plus the
soul-screaming conflict of the ways I was
physically less accommodating to anal rape
than to vaginal—versus the way the former
was the only thing in the world that vali-
dated my boyhood, all together tearing me
to pieces inside. Even after, on the outside, I
had adapted enough that I didn’t bleed from
any kind of rape anymore. It would take a lot
of words to describe the total desperation I
had for someone to come save me then. For a
cavalry to arrive. And while it’s true that none
ever did, in the ways I need now, it finally has.I HAD SO MANY GREAT potential set pieces
for this feature. It seemed like every time I
read the news or had a conversation, there
was another one: A high school in Texas with
a gay homecoming king. The Department of
Children and Families in Connecticut, which
is actively recruiting gay foster parents.
A gay-straight alliance club at a school in con-
servative southern Oregon. The entirety of
the Chicago public-school system, one of the
nation’s largest, which has clear anti-discrim-
ination policies protecting trans students.
A queer-youth center in Dothan, Alabama, or
homeless-queer-youth shelter in San Antonio.
A sidewalk, anywhere, where a transition-
ing adult thinks a passing stranger might
attack them, and feels a little more hope to
exist every time one doesn’t.
I don’t need to illuminate The End of
Straight with investigative reporting. By
arranging, just so, scenes and quotes from
experts into that argument. Heteronormativity
is so dead that ringing that knell is already
belated, regardless of whether the people par-
ticipating in its backlashing death throes can
admit it yet. Even homonormativity is dying,
now that establishment gays are finally cam-
paigning for poor and trans and POC queer
rights. Transnormativity has forever been chal-
lenged by the nonbinary and genderqueer and
genderfluid, who have more platforms than
ever, and who increase the permissions for
every one of us by pointing out the colonialistTHE END OF STRAIGHT CONTINUED
AUGUST 2019 GQ.COM 105
I saw that what the figure
had long told me in
private—that I’d be killed
if I didn’t play nice,
play pretty—was true.