Asha’s story sounds like it could be another
record of another trans teen’s hard road: the
isolation from her family; a battle between
blood and selfhood, happening on an actual
uphill. And it is. But it is also a record of the
staggering triumphs embedded in the con-
text. That Asha, who was assigned male at
birth, is permitted to attend public high
school dressed, and accepted, as female; that
she regularly takes this walk on the same
route at the same time in broad daylight in
a small city; that the friend’s mother who
opens the door to let her in to change is sym-
pathetic, and that to some degree, so, appar-
ently, are the unknowable number of other
parents in this tight community who drive
past her or witness her from their lawns and
don’t tell hers.
That Asha, as a teenager, can conceive of
living openly transgender, much less be doing
it—and with so many allies.
Her pseudonymous story, which I hap-
pened to encounter in the course of regular
life, was the opening to a story I’d been writ-
ing in my head called “The End of Straight,”
for which I was jotting down and mentally
collecting an ever increasing number of
threads. For a year. I had way more than
enough material, more than I usually do, to
pitch a feature, but I never wrote the e-mail
that would sell it, because I was telling myself
I was taking a break from work and I was.
And.
And I was becoming increasingly aware
of whom I was really talking to, with my fat-
tening file of data and experts and anecdotes,
about Asha, or about a middle-schooler in
the rural Midwest who turned in an essay
about his favorite color and ice cream
flavor and how, despite what his files say,
he’s a boy, or about a birthday party in San
Francisco for a five-year-old genderqueer
kid. “Who is this story for?” I started ask-
ing myself, sometimes out loud, shaking
my head or laughing softly—sadly—when I
thought about it while washing the dishes,
or happened upon another potential scene
or source. Increasingly I was aware, which
is to say I had reached the point at which,
despite heroic resistance, I could no longer
deny, that what I was chronicling wasn’t that
Asha could live as trans but that I could.ONE NIGHT THE JANUARY before last, I sat in
a booth in a tiki-themed karaoke bar watch-
ing a slim white woman in a crop top flail her
arms and hair during the musical breaks in
“Proud Mary.” Committedly. Compellingly. I
hadn’t walked in feeling good, and her per-
formance was further agitating my already
raw nerves.
“Do you ever miss the option to present
like that?” I asked my friend Julian, gestur-
ing at the stage.
He looked at me blankly, then asked me to
repeat myself. “No. No. I didn’t...,” he started.
“I wasn’t,” he continued, shaking his head,
waving his hand, looking for strong enough
words to describe how there was not one
second in his life, though he’d been raised
female, when he had tried or considered pre-
senting like that. He’d been butch and awk-
ward then, but several years into transition
now, he was a heartthrob, mussed hair, cute
scru≠. Masculinity so unquestioned that—
incredibly—the first time we met, a waiter
told us a joke about what it’s like to have a
dick and then nodded at Julian, saying: “He
knows what I’m talking about.”I wouldn’t have identified myself as some-
one who looked like the woman onstage,
either—I didn’t wear makeup, and frequently
left the house in sweatpants—but at five feet
nine, 120 pounds, with delicate features and
often long hair, whatever I did and didn’t do
to project a popular conception of female
desirability, I was made out of it. We were
at this karaoke bar, though, so I could sing
my go-to number (okay: “Redneck Woman”)
ceremonially. Finally. While I could still reach
the high notes. The next day, I was going to
start injecting testosterone.
I had waited. I had waited and deflected
and denied and waited more; I had held out
until my chances of continuing to survive
were zero. Until years after it’d already got-
ten bad enough for me to tell a therapist that
all I wanted was to saw my breast tissue o≠
with a jagged blade and smash it into a stone
table with my fists until it was particulates
of pulp, dust. Until I’d gotten cis-hetero-
married twice, wearing long white dresses,
and finalized my second divorce and contin-
ued to fight it still.
Until, several months before, I’d bolted
upright in the middle of the night, having
seen myself, again, as male, and started
panicking (Not this again). But instead of
pushing it away, again, I didn’t, and then
managed, after another brutal month of
making peace with my own inside war, to
say to myself in a burst of light and relief:
I’m trans.
“The solutions are imperfect,” a gender
therapist, who is also trans, said to me about
medically transitioning after I’d already
decided that I would do it, had to do it. And
though I understood what he meant, lying
in bed later with the sun coming through
the blinds and my body full of bright shim-
mer, I’d thought: Not for me. For me, they
are perfect.
By the time I got to karaoke, I recognized
that femaleness was slowly killing me—some-
times not so slowly; I’d spent the several
hours before walking out the door curled in
a sobbing ball, breathing myself through the
pain by clutching the little vial of hormones
I’d start shooting soon, soon.This is the lede I was going to write: Every weekday around 3 p.m., Asha,
which is not her real name, treks up the hill leading away from her high
school, her book bag full, her calves flexing in the steady street climb.
She is wearing a skirt, or pants and a top, but feminine; it’s 40 degrees
outside, or 100, in this town that won’t be identified. But whatever the
weather or the outfit, she is not going home. Most days, she goes to a
friend’s house to change her clothes, so she can hide from her parents
that she’s trans. ¶ “How I came out of the closet was I wore a dress and
fake boobs to school on the last day right before summer break in my
sophomore year,” she says. Dressing that way eased her gender dysphoria
some. She kept everything hidden at home, though—clothes, truth—
because, she says, she’d heard her mom making fun of trans people.
I had waited. I had waited anddeflected and denied andwaited more; I had held outuntil my chances of continuingto survive were zero.