Reverse Cowgirl

When I finished McKenzie Wark's Reverse Cowgirl, I closed it and placed it on my chest, folding both hands over it. I swooned. It was as if I was holding a coveted object from a sweetie. This was, I suspect, a letdown: the book quite bluntly commands you to roll it into a tube and fuck it. As I read it, it was hard not to think of myself, as is de rigueur for the trans autobiography.

I've always been one to honor the frame while also wanting to break it. Perhaps it's the natural culmination of being the daughter of an abstract painter and a computer toucher: I always desired perfect comportment, shoulders back, a spine more useful than a level. And I always wanted to be the one to flick the cigarette at those who would value such things. This is what let me live in a gender limbo through most of my life, only realizing a couple of years ago that maybe I'd prefer to spend my fourth decade on earth as a "woman".

But what of "woman"? I agonized over what this meant. I wasn't invited, but nobody is. To be vaguely queer, as others had identified me, partly means that anyone can be anything, want anything. But why "woman"? What were the irrefutable facts that made this true? How could I be sure that my definitions were clear? Would I do a bad job? It's strange to be so quiet that others come out for you. I'm sorry to those who took me for an aloof gay, or worse, a resentful straight man. As it turns out, something more complicated was going on.

As I read Reverse Cowgirl I recognized the patchwork of experiences: fragments of moments that meant something but, as they happened, had no clear theme or definition. Yes, there were moments where I undeniably wanted to be the girl, but, what did that mean, really? In retrospect, they added up to something: the exhaustion of performing masculinity, the desire for desire. I knew transness existed, but the popular narratives didn't fit: there was no clear urgency to be recognized, but an ongoing fragmented disquiet. If you were the first vampire, would you even know you had been cursed? Or would you think that life is just the feeling of being blood-sick?

"I'm going to have to get to know you again," a friend said to me, when I revealed that the change was deeper than physical expression. I'm going to have to get to know myself again, too. Now that I'm naked and vulnerable, things hurt more. But the things I do are, for the first time, real. I know for a fact that I am little spoon. I know I like to embed a little rhyme in how I express myself. It feels good to be at home in my body and wield feminine sensuality. And yet, I still know, there is so much that I don't know. I guess I've started to domme a bit—when do I add Fractional Findomme to my LinkedIn profile? Or is it just a hobby? I don't know.

For once, I am content to be unresolved. I'm not late, I'm on time. I'm here.