Read Online Nevada by Imogen Binnie - Free Book Online

people she met, even if they were on the Internet and didn’t know what they looked like. She’d stay up all night, night after night, gushing her feelings all over the Internet until she figured out she was trans, transitioned, and wound up having the exact same problems as every other messed up, emotionally shut-off person in New York. She doesn’t post there as much as she used to but she still has that blog. People read it. Kids who are figuring out that they’re trans look up to her. It’s kind of nice although since there are so few decent resources for trans women that aren’t for rich trans women or boring trans women, sometimes being the big sister is exhausting.
    Her computer is booted up and she is logging in when a man in a navy blue pea coat sits down at the computer next to her. He is stubbly.
    Hello, he says.
    Oh god dammit, she thinks.
    Straight men are so weird. So weird. Like, she can already tell that he wants to be her boyfriend. He is sitting next to her and smiling like he knows something, or like he is intentionally trying to look unintimidating. Great.
    Hi, she says.
    You are doing what this morning, he asks with a Russian accent or something.
    I’m going to read my email, she says, wishing she had the nerve to say: Go away, I don’t want to talk to you. But that feels like it would draw attention to herself in a weird way for being too forward, and if she draws undue attention to herself this dude might figure out she is trans and then there would be a scene, except probably a small one because people whose first language isn’t English tend to have their own self-consciousnesses to worry about and also not to want to draw complicated attention to themselves, too. Given the fact that nobody ever reads Maria as trans any more, she thinks: what would Courtney Love do here? How does Courtney Love turn away the attention of strange men she doesn’t like.
    Then: no, even better, what would Steph do?
    This is what Steph would do.
    I’m posting an ad on Craigslist for people to date who also have chlamydia, Maria says.
    You are funny, he says.
    Yeah, she says, turning away from him and back to the computer. It works, he doesn’t keep trying to talk to her. Good thing, too, because it’s too early and she’s too tired to deal with this dude who thinks chlamydia infection disclosure is flirting.
    She feels bad for a second though. She’s never had it, but it probably sucks to have chlamydia. What if she were some girl in the coffee shop who had chlamydia and overheard that? Maria makes a mental note not to joke about chlamydia and never to turn away heteronormative advances with sexual-health-normative maneuvers. Seriously.
    She reads blogs and writes in her own. She tells the Internet about her early night, her early morning, the haircuts in the diner, figuring out her life. She used to write in this thing, like, every day, but she’s lucky if she can update it once a week any more. Although it’s probably luckier not to stare at a computer all the time.
    She writes.
    Oh man. Can we talk about stereotypes and staring at the computer? Okay. I imagine that you’re familiar with the stereotypes around transsexual women: that we’re all sex workers, that we’re all hairy, potbellied old men, that we’re all deep-voiced nightlife phoenixes, that we’re all drag queens, that we’re all repressed, that we’re all horny shemales with twelve-inch cocks. Sometimes the stereotypes are contradictory. Those ones are weird. Can we talk about what the actual stereotypes around transsexual women should be. The ones that hit a little too close to home to be funny.
    1. We are not sex fiends, we are Internet fiends. This one is easy to understand. When you come out as trans, it’s hard to tell your wife, or your het bros, or your dad or your, I don’t know, bookstore coworkers. For whatever reason, though, it’s pretty easy to tell some people from Alaska or California or, y’know, England. In this