Talking to Xyr (sample)
On a Sunday, and a rainy one, the girl tells the boy that she is not a girl. This doesn’t surprise him, exactly—he’s followed the lead-up to this for some time, he’s heard all the thoughts that were once thought out loud, and it’s all but formalities now. He does not hear it face to face—they’re not close enough for face to face. He gets the message in chilly blue pixels, in an e-mail that (he knows) must have taken some courage to write. “I am a transgender person.” The language is no more and no less specific than that. She explains—oh, but, Jesus, that can’t be the word, can it, ‘she’. She explains between typos that it’s not a phase, that she’s still figuring it all out—and no closer to that than ever—but she (he?) needs her closest friends to know, and to hold on, for the storms of discovery are coming. In truth, Jim’s surprised to be on this list at all, this list of Sarah’s. Surely he can’t keep calling her Sarah. But she signs it Sarah Hartnett still, so Sarah’s the name, it seems, if there’s even a Sarah, or even a her, and Jim Bishop doesn’t think it right to ask what happens next.
“Well, even when we were going out she talked about it,” he tells a friend, a mutual friend who needs the mysterious message explained. “I mean, her default state, she was never super-happy in her own skin. You know that.” But Eugene—that’s the friend’s name—he needs to know more. “Well, you knew her,” says Jim. “She was always trying on identities like clothing. She used to wear a tie, like Annie Hall.” Apparently that is not enough information. Jim sighs and submits. “She changed her major twice. She did that whole Eastern-religion thing in college. She didn’t like commitment—not even to me. Dude, you know this.” That is still not what Eugene wants to talk about. “Well, she said she was bi,” Jim admits. “For shit. A lot of college girls do that. They think it’s cute.” “I don’t think that Sarah meant it to be cute.” Jim does not enjoy the conversation. “But did she ever actually find a woman attractive—like, to say, ‘I would go out on a date with her, I would want to go out on a date with her—’” “Well, I don’t think this is about that, Eugene.” A lot of Jim’s statements end up starting with ‘Well’. He has his own questions, of course. The name, for one—and what that guy she’s dating, that guy he doesn’t know but doesn’t like, what’s he think of all this. There is nothing in the world that tells him that this is the time to ask. There are also more general questions, and they fall under something called Trans 101. And he’s happy to learn.
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