t4t Valentine (If You Didn’t Have to Be a Saint)
the humiliating fact that desire can mean wanting to be someone, not just wanting to have them, goes both ways.
Who are you that’s in love with a century’s old lie about me?
History’s a hard swallow for some of you. Trans women can’t dare pleasure, let’s just classify it as violence for me to have a body that’s alive because in truth it makes the pseudoscientist too horny—and his hard drive is already full of hypno porn. Trans men can’t be horny at all because good English women don’t read Confessions of the Fox. You’re so vain, you probably think our sex is about you.
But it’s not just the cis. t4t Zendaya and Tom Holland is some bad bad, no good, illegal shit on Twitter. Don’t you dare fetishize trans men by wanting them, they aren’t grown up enough for that. Always, the original sin of The Extraordinary AMAB, bearer of the root of all evil (penis penis penis). All hail Queer St. Valentine’s arrival. If you want to be rescued from those completely fucked headlines in The Guardian, or OANN, you have to put in for the gay moralist’s hagiography instead. Didn’t you hear? Only trans saints go to queer heaven. No room for your sex. No room for your fantasy. You only get to exist for the certification of the Very Truly Good Queers who smile on your zombified, desexualized corpse.
The love of Saint Sylvia and Saint Marsha isn’t that different from the Catholics: they’re canon because they’re dead. The reliquary’s as big as culture itself.
A hundred years ago, Magnus Hirschfeld concluded that the most extreme inverts were best suited to desire each other, femme with masc. Say what you will, it’s a heterosexualizing logic and all that make believe, but the man had trans friends and what if he was also just reporting? Can you not shrink your sense of possibility so prematurely? Then it’s not so much one hundred years of solitude as one hundred years of the gorgeous, gorgeous girls looking for their rock n’ roll gay guy. It’s a century of hot-blooded boys exalting in the highest of femme worship.
Nothing’s guaranteed here, nothing’s obligatory either. You don’t get to be good just because you’re t4t. That’s lazy, some mirror image of the cis or gay moralist who believes in “sexual deviants” more deeply than the police officer scoping out a gloryhole in a tearoom. I’m talking about a subterranean thing, a shared world that’s only temporary and fleeting. The interval between us when trans doesn’t mean my private little identity, but a slick and electric field of sharing.
John Rechy went to a Chicano gay bar in East L.A. one night in the late 1950s: “cramped bodies in the tiny room exploding with the odor of maryjane smoke.” He peered out at the dance floor, “the bulldikes and the femme-queens dance with each other—the roles of course reversed but legal—broadshouldered women and waist-squeezed youngmen. The dikes are leading the queens.” But most of the time, Rechy knew—good boy that he was—it worked the other way around. In the bathroom at Harold’s on main street, he records a message from above scratched into the stall: “IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED FAIRIES & THEY MADE MEN.”
Not many are brave enough to admit they owe it all to the dolls. But my t4t valentine knows. He isn’t afraid to be made.
The function of desire isn’t to tell on yourself, but in our paranoid culture it sure does. The more you lie, the more I can’t believe a single thing you say or do. So, what if the humiliating fact that desire can mean wanting to be someone, not just wanting to have them, goes both ways? Huh, cis?
It’s important to have experiences that are like an apprenticeship in how to want. For some of us, that means learning how to stop making ourselves small because a liar can’t stop screaming that our sexuality is dangerous, afraid of her own. The self-love influencers seem to be obsessed with making this harder than it has to be. You can learn that you’re desirable just by being desired by someone. Your t4t valentine teaches you the difference between wanting as a matter of getting any particular thing that you want, and wanting as a way of life. The thrill of a hunger that demands you build a world with friends and lovers big enough for it to live in. A horizon called being able to want over and over, without apology. When valentine isn’t a saint anymore, maybe you’ll start to feel it.
Happy Valentine’s Day from The Sad Brown Girl.