/ /

The man follows. He drives slowly. He cuts me off in his Mercedes (hah, I don’t remember the make). He cuts me off in some machine. I would like to think trauma is specific. I don’t know the limits of guilt as a structural force. I want to make a Facebook group called, that moment they realize you probably have a cock ;’). Prose already betrays. I mean it’s hard to find language that doesn’t point to some disaffection.

I thought of capitalizing ‘man.’

I thought which Plato will I be today.

/ /

In Jared Leto’s Oscar acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, in which he played a transfeminine character, Rayon, he centered Rayon’s addiction to drugs and slow death, failing to mention Rayon’s gender identity or trans people more generally. We can assume, however, Leto meant to refer to transfeminine existence when he referred to Rayon as a wonderful creature.

/ /

I tell you this and I’d like to say I must tell you. In this language you find a point of contact, and, by testing the limits of my agency, you think ‘disempowerment.’ Pity me. This is real. This happens and is happening and is on the horizon of everything that happens in my life.

Honk honk. Hey girl. Pity me. Blondie. What the fuck. That’s a dude. Nevermind. Pity me. Get in the car.

You feel things. You feel guilty and shameful. You feel a victim in life and feel in these words references—whether from personal experience or pornography or movies—to the helplessness you feel. You relate to me as an object of violence more than you feel complicity in being a potential or actual agent of violence. You have many theories. You think pity and shame are unilateral and human. You say, things with the same name come from similar places.

I don’t want to blame victims for how they choose to react. I don’t want to blame myself for how I react. I want to begin to write. I want an angle of things without disclosing my feelings as a prerequisite for attention.

Shame is passed down like the priest who told you the Divine Liturgy was passed (traditio, to hand down) to him. It is out there, in the world. All the thin white cis women. Currency and consumer. Yours is out there in the world. Maybe it’s the same, maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s shame over not fucking the thin white cis women or shame over fucking the thin white cis women. Maybe it’s something else. There are conditions that at once produce the trauma and obfuscate the trauma. I am tired of confessing. I am tired of reifying struggle to truth (my truth, they tell me).

I am tired of giving when mostly I want to destroy the destruction handed down to me through the years.

/ /

I don’t like these angles of my body. The porn angle. The tr*nny punch line angle. The inspirational (or dead) angle. The sexual assault angle. The street harassment angle. They’re unflattering and rarely fit. But they were there before I got here and I guess I’m stuck with them. Writing them—which on occasion I do—puts something out there in the world. One more story. Hopefully it’s alright. But it’s not for anyone to use. To mobilize. To weaponize.

/ /

The man follows. I was followed. No, the man follows. Yes, feelings. But the (cat)calling names the subject (as bitch, as tr*nny, as whore), who turns, who always turns, but also affirms the name, I mean power, of the one who calls. Choice never entered it. I am named, but I made a man. I birthed him right out my dick. I perform, given capitalism, the labor to uphold his position, as countless others positions, as man.

I inhabit that as. Trans as performance. Trans as radical. Trans as deviance. It’s a small kingdom, but in it I am queen. I am the Henry Ford of gender, fuckers. I assemble the machines that betray and run me down in the night. There are others too. Sometimes I get long lunches and a Christmas bonus. I mean, who works for you, for me, to live with the comfort of our own bodies? I mean, how many femmes—how many trans femmes of color—does it take to make one white man safe in his skin?

Jos Charles is a southern-California writer and founding-editor at THEM — a trans* literary journal. Their poetry publications include Denver Quarterly, BLOOM, Radioactive Moat, the YOLO pages, and Metazen. They also have writing featured on Huffington Post, Bitch Magazine, The Fanzine, and variously online.