today is the first day of the most torturous luxury experience of my life. i’m being held captive in an apartment worth two million dollars which also doubles as a resort. it’s less like a vacation and more like being exiled to a remote island. this is a business trip - my mother is being paid to care for two dogs owned by a rich couple while they’re away, and as usual, she’s dragged the rest of us into this mess along with her.

when i arrived here, i explored every room in the house. positioned on the wall across from the only queen-sized bed are two senior portraits - the daughters, presumably. i struggle to distinguish them from each other - blonde hair, brown eyes, palatably tan faces splattered in freckles. they look like they share one collective brain cell. they’re grinning, their exposed skeleton put on display to the world. the latest psychiatrist told me that i’m a hypocrite for silently judging people based on their appearance and then being upset when they do the same, but i can just tell they don’t smile like that when they see someone who looks like me pass by them on the street. i can picture the scenario in my mind in photographic detail. their lips are pursed, curled in an uncomfortably forced grimace, with no gums in sight. i study the mirrored image of myself in the glass, trying to get the reflection of my face to align with theirs, staring at myself from different angles, imagining what it would be like to be someone else. they’re trapped in those photos, and i think that if they could, they’d reach out and drag me down to upper-middle-class beach town country club hell with them. bloody mary, bloody mary, bloody mary…

it’s true, i am a shapeshifter of sorts. i could wear their skin if i wanted to. well, maybe not the meat suits themselves, but i do have access to their closets. i take some sick satisfaction in knowing that i could study the behavior of someone who probably wants me dead like an amoeba underneath a microscope and mimic every aspect of their personality - this is the ultimate form of revenge. it’s not much different than stealing the identity of a deceased person. i can’t decide if the knowledge that they are alive makes it better or worse. but by the time i have successfully morphed into a copy of them, they are already effectively dead in every way except one. i resist the temptation to do this. that hideous leopard print scarf in the closet remains untouched. i will not deflower it. i can’t contaminate with my touch. maybe if i paired it with a partially unbuttoned shirt and those platform boots….no. to play their role in society, i have to fully commit to the bit. i am a good person and everyone loves me.

i noticed that the town’s population seemed evenly split between geriatric caucasians - these stiff wax-mannequin families clad in polo shirt militaria - and older black folks who came from down south. there are plenty of the latter in this town. the whites put their blinders on around them. look directly ahead, stay focused, eyes on the road. each individual soul is its own gated community. they are segregated - if not literally, then figuratively. we don’t want them gone, we just never want to see them, hear of them, or think about them ever again. no ghosts in white sheets haunt the premises, but a palpable sense of tension lingers in the air at all times.

earlier i built up the courage to venture outside and headed to the local record store. i noticed that the owner greeted the rather conventional-looking woman who walked in after i did, but not me. i didn’t think much of it at first. i approached him, seeking his advice on where to find the hardcore records. he was maybe 40, muscular with a buzzcut. i wondered why he shaved his head, seeing as he wasn’t coping with a receding hairline. usually, only men who were already balding buzzed it all off and then told their coworkers that they wanted to “try something different.” i opened my mouth to compliment him on his black flag tattoo but trailed off mid-sentence as i scanned his arms. an ss bolt on his left arm, the odal rune on his right, triskele on his shoulder. i averted my gaze from his tattoos only to notice an iron cross flag on the wall. a row of german battle helmets was lined up on the shelf behind him - being somewhat of a history buff myself, i quickly identified them as wwi-era pickelhaubes. i almost admired him for being smart enough to pick out those particular helmets because he knew some dork like me would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt (alternatively, he might just have been too stupid to buy the right ones). his whole body was a morbid where’s waldo? comic strip - the more i looked, the worse it got. i quickly changed the subject and made up some excuse to get out of there that i’ve since forgotten. “have a great day”, he said, beaming. “you too, man”, i sputtered. i scuttled out the door like a half-dead cockroach.

when i visit a more conservative area, i always prepare myself for the worst beforehand, being the type of person that republicans are not very fond of and all. but if this place is considered a blue state and people are still growing more comfortable with openly espousing the sort of beliefs that would have only been tolerated in the form of a palatable euphemism just a few years ago, then how would i fare in texas? i would’ve probably been dead by now.

i stumbled onto the street like an irishman after one too many lagers at the local pub. i briefly considered leaving a negative review, but i decided against it. trying to censor these people or get them exiled from mainstream society wouldn’t stop them, it would just drive the movement underground, forcing them into echo chambers where they’d be radicalized even further.

i caught myself wondering what had made the record shop owner the way that he was. if you didn’t look like a freak, you wouldn’t get treated like a freak, i told myself. in truth, if someone is wronged by a member of a certain group and becomes prejudiced against them as a result, that just indicates they were already predisposed to developing these beliefs. their hatefulness was a dormant trait that was waiting for an opportunity to be activated. becoming evil is neither fate nor a choice for many, but somewhere in between.

if there were no consequences for doing so, that man from the record would have undoubtedly killed me. and yet, not only did he decide against harming me, he treated me with courtesy and kindness. i was shocked by this, but in retrospect, i shouldn’t have been. evil is inherently mundane. everyone takes comfort in the idea that you can easily identify predators. they want to believe that human beings display aposematism. a true predator wouldn’t play into every stereotype on earth related to their kind - they would make an effort to come across as the most normal human being alive.

evil people do not go out of their way to antagonize everyone they hate, or else they would not have any allies. to succeed in their mission to destroy their enemies, they must first earn their trust. and every time, the group they wish to destroy falls for this old trick. there will always be members of these marginalized communities who truly believe that they are the exception. they find the idea that they are special enough to be spared the wrath of their persecutors titillating. it’s practically a fetish for them. many women, for example, not only tolerate but encourage men’s misogynistic behavior as long as the man in question picks them. i can’t believe i’m so special that he’d make an exception for me. i really am not like those other girls. the men who don’t openly espouse their hatred for women are even more sexist behind closed doors. the things that men who treat me like “one of the boys” feel comfortable saying around me make me wonder how they talk around actual men. i’m not sure if i want to know.

be respectable, non-threatening, palatable, bland. surely you will be rewarded eventually. you can be friends with anyone you wish, but you have to make a compromise. they’ll lug you around like a human shield and then crop you out of the group photos that they post on the internet, but it’s okay because you’re important to them when it’s convenient. i can’t be [insert ideology], i have a [insert thing ideology is trying to wipe out] friend! when they call you a slur (the last documented use of that word was in a newspaper article from 1897, so you know they must have studied up - vintage! how cute!), you laugh it off because it’s just a joke, and you don’t want to sound like one of those people, do you? when the last other remaining member of your kind has been reduced to maggot meal, they’ll acknowledge all the effort you put into making sure that there would be no negative publicity for people like you at last. you’ll win a medal, maybe a girl scout badge with honorary aryan spelled out in big bright letters on it to display on your sash proudly. i survived the day of the rope and all i got was this lousy t-shirt.

you fucking retard. you blathering idiot. there is no positive publicity for “people” like you because you’re not people. at best, you can star in some freaky fetish porno, subjecting yourself to these humiliation rituals for their entertainment. if they don’t see you as a walking circus act, then they tolerate your presence out of pity.

but hey - it’s never too late to pursue your dreams. one day they will finally congratulate you for all that you’ve done for them. thanks for all the help. it was fun while it lasted. if you did a particularly good job, they won’t string your body up in the town square as a warning to passersby - you’ll be given a proper burial, and then they’ll scatter your ashes upon the same ground where the ones who weren’t as fortunate as you are decomposing underneath.

i had done everything that my mother always told me i needed to do in order to be accepted, and it was not enough. why not just be a butch lesbian? how can you “feel like a man?” what does that even mean? she promised me that she would love me for who i was as long as i was “just” a masculine woman (i was never going to turn out to be butch regardless - if anything i was more like a sexually ambiguous man in both appearance and behavior, but i didn’t even bother trying to explain this to her). to her, my gender non-conformity was only tolerable as a compromise. heterosexual women seem to share a universal belief that you’re not “allowed” to rail against societal norms after the age of 16 or so. gender nonconformity is a form of rebellion, and so by extension, it is childish and immature. it’s tomboy, not tomman. you may be an ugly bulldyke now, but fear not - it’s never too late to blossom into the beautiful cookie-cutter barbie doll you were always meant to be. as soon as i detransitioned, the goalposts shifted. why won’t you wear something nice like a dress, just this once? you look slobby, like you don’t take care of yourself. she was concerned about my fertility, she said. she still wanted to believe that someday i’d settle down and churn out a whole line of mutant spawn, continuing my family’s cursed bloodline. she didn’t even consider that anyone insane enough to marry me would probably carry genes even worse than my own, rendering any (already incredibly low) possibility that even one of my hypothetical children would turn out to be remotely normal moot.

throughout my childhood i was told that i was too masculine to be a girl, yet when i reclaimed manhood on my own terms, the same people who used to tell me that i was so manly i might as well have been a man started insisting that i was too feminine to ever be able to handle manhood. “womanhood” and “manhood” are social castes that exist solely to distinguish the fucked from the fuckers. if you’re unfuckable, congratulations - you have invented a third gender. you don’t even have to be butch to disrupt the status quo so heavily that even your fellow women start to reject you. confidence, outspokenness, even traits that come along with mental conditions such as autism - these are all considered masculine behaviors, and you will be punished for displaying them. every woman spends all day mentally preparing herself for the abuse of men, who withhold the title of “most fuckable” from women as a form of punishment. but will you be prepared when the other women exile you from the tribe?

the men i knew shared one thing in common by default - they all despised women to varying degrees, just like a good rape-ape should. one would think that men who have been tormented by other males might seek comfort in the company of women, who are more willing to put up with those who deviate from social norms, but oddly enough, “failed” males tend to hate women even more than socially successful men. when a group of men decide that one man is not a worthy member of the tribe, they attempt to beat him into compliance. the only way to earn their respect is to fight back and come away from the experience even stronger. when the adolescent female hivemind turns on one of their own, girls commit acts of psychological warfare against each other rather than physically attacking one another. their chosen methods of torture are less violent but far more insidious than those deployed by the male subspecies. directly confronting their enemies one-on-one is not enough to satisfy their bloodlust - they must infiltrate their friend groups and destroy them from within, slowly turning everyone who ever loved them against them.

i am envious of those who weren’t born into this industry, forced to work as child actors from the age of nine onwards. i feel as if i’ve signed a lifelong contract and now i can’t leave this show, even though it’s gone to shit and the ratings are plummeting by the hour. i have to consciously play the same gender roles that normal people so effortlessly assimilate into. every morning i wake up and spend each second of the day in constant pain agonizing over whether to be a man or a woman, feeling powerless knowing that i ultimately have no control over how others perceive me. i wish my body was composed of interchangeable parts, that i was mister-slash-misses potato head. maybe if i could tune my voice like a radio i’d be able to gain the trust of women instead of turning heads and receiving horrified stares every time i slip up and speak too loudly in a public restroom. if only i could control how intimidating i am - if i was a double amputee, i’d either go limb-less or wear prosthetic legs the size of stilts depending on the situation. i want to have a detachable cock that i can take off and then put back on again once getting fucked starts to feel too humiliating. i am permanently emotionally stunted because my journey to womanhood was interrupted when i started aping the males around me at a certain age. my masculinity isn’t that of the fatherly variety. it is the kind that only adolescent boys display. it is a caricature of itself.

all of the traits which led me to be branded as a failed female were praised in men. intimidating. masculine. blunt. people are more progressive now. they ask me what label i would prefer, what cramped box i’d rather be stuffed into. they profile me so politely. i’m just trying to be politically correct - i thought so. ha-ha, you never know these days. to be quite frank, i’d rather be called an “it” and a “man-woman” on a regular basis the way i used to than be asked to explain myself to someone who will never understand, and doesn’t really want to, one more time. these people demand that i describe exactly who i am to them, dissect myself for their viewing pleasure, hold their hand and walk them through it like a toddler. then when i do what they ask and tell them just what i stand for, they try to prove me wrong in any way possible.

girlhood was a cage. i was forced into that role and then chastised for not performing it correctly. men disliked me because i was too masculine to fit in with women but too feminine to fully assimilate and be accepted as one of them. they only treated me like a girl to spite me, and when i finally gave in and put on the womanface, i was ridiculed for being a man in a dress. i was effeminate, not feminine. my appearance was constantly compared to that of every male celebrity who’d ever been ridiculed for being too womanly. the girl in my class turned around to ask me why i, as a boy, was wearing something meant for girls with disgust in her voice before even asking my name. the same student who outed me to the entire school later complained that i was using my “white male privilege” to my advantage when i reported them. the school bully, who usually called me a “she”, asked one of my only friends why he’d ever willingly spend time with a man who dressed the way that i did. some women wanted me because dating me was like having a boyfriend without the scary parts. they still labeled our relationship as “queer” for progressive points because they didn’t actually see me as a man, but when they got angry at me, they proclaimed that i was just like all of their other boyfriends.

i was either a sissy or a dyke based on whichever one they deemed a more humiliating position to be in. i was constantly angry, and unlike the women around me, who had been trained to hide their emotions from day one to avoid being branded as hysterical, i sulked out in the open. men were reprimanded for expressing their feelings as well, but at least they were allowed to express rage and discomfort if not vulnerability. women are unfairly branded as the more emotional sex because men are so accustomed to being furious all of the time that they don’t even view it as a feeling, but rather a state of being, and the only emotion that they recognize as one is sadness. women hated me as well because i lured them into my trap. i tricked them into believing that i was one of them by merely existing in a female body and then i subverted their expectations in the most negative way possible the second i opened my mouth. i was an imposter invading women’s spaces, the first female autogynephile. i never missed girlhood because girlhood wasn’t something that belonged to me - i belonged to it.

i became bitter and resentful. every emotion manifested itself as anger. loneliness, pain, jealousy, regret. i’d have uncontrollable public meltdowns. i’d throw chairs at teachers and scream at anyone who challenged me. the first time i got institutionalized, it didn’t make much of a difference. the second time around rewired something in my brain. it was as if someone had reached inside my mind, toyed with it, rearranged everything. suddenly i couldn’t lash out at anyone anymore, even when i wanted to. i became somebody i didn’t recognize.

i need to experience an orgasmic fit of rage. i would give anything to break something irreplaceable. to scream again. just once.

i delve headfirst into performing femininity after i go back into the closet. i shave my eyebrows off and draw them on pencil thin. i enter the woman’s bathroom dressed in hooker chic. i hear the old woman next to me hiss something to her friend when she thinks i’m not listening - “that’s a man.” a drunk frat boy walks up to me at a party and starts proclaiming his love for shemale porn. he inquires about the size of my cock. the first time i meet this girl's little brother he looks at me with terror in his eyes and pulls her aside. she comes to me laughing and saying that he asked if i was born male. i’ve noticed that funnily enough, despite consciously knowing they are far more likely to be assaulted by a straight man than a gay one, women are more scared of a broad-shouldered 6’4 man in a dress than an identical man wearing a suit. what the fuck am i doing wrong? yes, i’m permanently stuck with the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy and i walk with a man’s exaggerated gait, but i thought my heart-shaped face and my unremarkable height would balance it out. i did everything i was supposed to.

all the world’s a stage, and every woman is a drag queen.

there’s nothing “manly” about me. i can’t chop wood, i don’t smoke cigars. but there’s a massive gap in my being where my womanhood is supposed to be. the butch-est lesbian on earth is still every bit as female as the most compliant, submissive stay-at-home mom. perhaps it’s because i wasn't raised as a boy or a girl, but as a parasite that needed to be removed through any means possible. in no way do i look down upon women who consciously choose to be masculine, but i don’t need a flannel shirt or an undercut to prove what i am to the world because normal people could sniff it out before i even knew who i was. i don’t believe that i am “not like other girls” because i don’t belong to the human race at all. how can i be a woman when i was never a girl? how can i be a woman when i was never even a person?

i have always been astounded by how much women are willing to forgive. a complete stranger could walk up to your average woman, kidnap her, beat her, rape her, and torture her to the point of near-death and she’d still find some way to blame herself for it because she got in his way. in contrast, i believe on some level that everything i have ever done was justified in some way. i desperately want people to like me, even though i consciously despise them. i fear that i have never truly loved anyone, and what i often mistake as my love for an individual is simply an absence of the intense hatred that i feel toward everybody else. i confess my sins to anyone who will listen, secretly hoping that they’ll reassure me and tell me i’m a good person. i force myself to be kind, not because i have any genuine desire to be so, but because i want to be seen as such. the only thing that brings me comfort is knowing that the material impact i make on the world is more important than the reasoning behind my actions. i carry more anger with me everywhere i go than every woman i have ever met combined.

god didn’t make a mistake when he created me. god made me a woman precisely because he knew that a man as perpetually angry as i am would’ve shot up a school by the age of thirteen, invented a torture device more brutal than the iron maiden and the catherine wheel combined, or sent a mail bomb to every tech bro in silicon valley (possibly all 3, ten times over). i wake up angry, eat breakfast angry, go to work angry, masturbate angry, shower angry, shop for clothes angry, go to bed angry. every cell of my body vibrates with rage and i don’t even know why. some people got molested as a kid (well, i sucked off my friend when i was eleven but that doesn’t count) or beaten (sometimes my mother would pull me outside and hold her hand inches away from my face as if she was going to slap me but she could never bring herself to do it) or they’re just inexplicably, uncontrollably insane (my father’s bipolar, but not me - i’m so glad i turned out normal). i, on the other hand, had parents who loved me (well, sometimes) and a warm bed to sleep in. yet by the age of nine, i was already an angsty teenager. i couldn’t tell you what the square root of twenty was but i could show you how to get the blade out of a pencil sharpener or recite the lyrics to every song off of korn’s debut album. my neurotic jewish mother wrung her hands and lamented over my behavior. oy vey, sam! i’m so tired of everyone asking us what we must have done to you for you to have turned out like this. we did everything right. mental illness isn’t real. there’s a word for that. it’s called being an american, and i’m as patriotic as a red, white, and blue eagle that shits hamburgers. nothing that happened to me was bad enough to explain why i am the way i am. if god gave me a cock i would have taken everything he created and destroyed it.

maybe i'm giving myself too much credit here. my anger is too unpredictable to be channeled into something productive, such as carrying out such calculated acts of violence. i probably would’ve just ended up getting arrested for body-slamming some poor mcdonald’s employee wwe-style for putting pickles on my burger when i asked for none. dudes with adhd don’t make very good dictators anyway.

at the age of around seven, i was “invited” to the birthday party of a boy in my class. it was really more like being drafted - he didn’t want to invite me, but his parents demanded that he invite everyone in the class so no one would feel left out. by the time i arrived at the pool party, every individual child was armed with a water gun beside me. they were spraying each other in the eyes with pure chlorine and i was caught in the crossfire. i started bawling, and the adults present tried to comfort me to no avail. one of them suggested giving me a gun. he handed it over to me - it was a monstrous ar-15-looking thing, a beauty. i immediately stopped crying, turned around, and shot the nearest gun-wielding child in the face. i whooped and hollered as i went on a rampage, annihilating anyone who dared to stand in my way. “all you needed was a really big gun”, my mother said. “who would’ve known?”

i am not, and never will be a vigilante. only the most pathetic of losers have revenge fantasies, so i try to accept that i can’t change the past. i can’t save anyone except for myself, and even then i doubt my ability to do that. but every time some smug sorority girl in child labor-chic makes fun of my (extremely rare, mind you) jacket when i’m walking down the street and i don’t retaliate, i ruminate over it for months, even years. ugly people learn that they can’t get away with picking on others early on, but that waste of oxygen will cruise through life with the audacity of a supermodel because no one bothered to humble her the way she so desperately needs to be humbled. i actively decide to make myself a target in some aspects, but not everyone who is a social reject does. once she’s done with me, she’ll go on to ruin the day of someone who has it much worse than i do. the more people let her get away with it, the more sadistic her social experiments will become. she’ll walk around testing how far she can push freaks like me before they snap, all because i wasn’t ballsy enough to put her in her place.

it’s a gunmetal snakeskin print quilted jacket by yves saint laurent circa 1986, by the way. none of these idiots - brain-damaged from the bleach seeping through their thick skulls - could fit into a fr size 34 even if they wanted to. it would be a shame if someone slit their throats like the cows they are, bled them dry. then they could finally make themselves useful for once in their lives - as a nice kosher meal. don’t hate me because i’m beautiful. just because i despise myself doesn’t mean i’m not aware that i am still better than everyone else.

i’ve written about the casual cruelty of heterosexual women, the way they feel confident to walk around disrespecting others around them so openly because even other grls don't want to hit a girl. but for every group of teenage girls who giggle wordlessly and exchange glances with each other when they pass by me on the street, there are 100 men who’d spew unintelligible slurs at me out of the window of their moving car or slow down just to gawk. for every man who’d spew unintelligible slurs at me out of the window of their moving car or slow down just to gawk, there are 1,000 men who’d gladly rape and murder me if no one was around to see it. they don’t want me, but they want to remind me of my place in society. they don’t desire to fuck me in spite of their disgust towards me - the repulsion is part of the thrill for them. i overhear the things they say about me when they think i’m not listening. what a freak. give me a paper bag and i’d still hit it. it is not a matter of “if”, but “when.” i sleepwalk through life, constantly aware that everything and everyone wants to kill me. i participate in mundane activities such as grocery shopping and mini golf with the anxiety level of an animal being hunted for sport. i refuse to accept that i have a victim complex. there is nothing that i believe without a reason.

they could simply laugh at me, or they could beat me into an unrecognizable bloody pulp and leave me on the sidewalk to die. it doesn’t make a difference to me. they actively decided to hurt me just because they could, and that’s what gets to me. i tell myself that these people are so obsessed with me they might as well start a fan club dedicated to me. i guess it makes me feel a little better, if only temporarily. but a small part of me knows that they don’t do this to me because i matter to them. they do this to me because i don’t matter to them at all.

there is no pill on earth that will quell the constant anxiety, silence the radio chatter inside my brain. i can’t even change the station. in my mind i’m always eating supper alone at some broken-down midwestern diner, sitting across from a bickering couple, the only other customers there. their argument escalates to a screaming match and i get up to leave. i try to open the door and i realize that it’s locked. i expect a waiter to approach me in an hour or so. someone has to come to my aid eventually. they don’t. i wait for the sun to rise. it never does. i can’t interrupt their conversation. i’m paralyzed by fear. all i can do is sit there and try to tune out the noise. i’m trapped in purgatory for eternity and god has seated me beside this window just to torment me. i can’t escape and run off into the night. i can only watch. this doesn’t bother me as much as it should. it's been like this for so long that i can’t imagine it being any other way. i don’t think i want to. it’s less painful if i don’t.

the only group of human beings i detest more than conservative pundits are all of the people who made it possible for me to be here right now, writing this story for you to read. if they could see this, they’d immediately drop the “friendly” act. why aren’t you grateful for all we’ve done for you? are you malfunctioning? you’re not banging two cymbals together to entertain us like the brainless ape you are. we need to take you to the repair shop so that you’ll start regurgitating empty platitudes about “queer joy” and become a worker drone in an advertising agency, churning out 100 pamphlets full of corporate memphis-style illustrations to dish out to wage slaves every day. these people will never understand the extent of my hatred for them, how much more they revolt me than everyone who actively chose to torment me. they wouldn’t stick up for me if they didn’t feel so inadequate. they see a part of themselves in me, and they must defend their honor. i’ve been publicly crucified so many times that it is a part of my daily routine, as mundane as brushing my teeth. i don’t just take it - i smile for the paparazzi. thank god for all of these saviors coming to my defense, because god knows i couldn’t save myself. looking at me is like prodding at an unhealed wound. your pity is palpable. your sympathy makes me sick.

when they get bored of torturing you, the same people who made your life hell will one day turn around and put on your pain as a costume. emily, who so kindly informed you that you would benefit from getting a perm, shows up to class one day with blonde box braids, a brand spanking new brazilian butt lift, and a tan the color of a beta-carotene poisoning patient. the same girls who giggled as their meathead boyfriends berated you for being a “fag” in the hallways - “brad, stawwwwhhppp”, they’d say through stifled laughter - take makeup lessons from drag queens now. every straight woman wants a gay best friend that acts like stereotypical flamer while simultaneously remaining chaste and pure, a modern castrato. he must act as their personal therapist, give them endless relationship advice, but never offend hetero sensibilities by talking about his sex life the way that normal (straight) people do - a spiritual eunuch. he must be feminine enough to be non-threatening without crossing over into transsexual territory, lest he be branded as a perverted skinwalker. these people will carefully moderate your self-expression, slap a PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT label over every blemish and flaw, put you on house arrest, give you an ankle monitor that goes off every time you venture even slightly outside of their comfort zone. they’ll pick and choose aspects of your soul that they can steal without risking their status in society. everything you were ever taunted for is a fashion statement when it’s worn by someone who isn’t you.

people like you died fighting to create a world in which you were allowed to exist - not even flourish, but simply survive- and these leeches take it all for granted. you are merely a squatter in what was once your own house, barely getting by, surviving on cans of slop and sleeping on a dirty mattress. your crackhouse is their vacation home, a hotel that they can check in and out of at will.

i had to emotionally prostitute myself just to get by, whether by establishing myself as the class clown in a room full of republican hicks by telling self-deprecating jokes or recounting sob stories about my childhood before a group of patronizing liberal do-gooders. i couldn’t give less of a shit about representation. the more visible we become in the media, the more the public grows to hate us. they get sick of it and i can’t blame them. i can’t even bear to stare at my own reflection in the mirror, why would anyone else want to? i never want to see anybody who looks, acts, or thinks even remotely like me in a tv commercial ever again. i want to forget i exist. even when no one is around, i put on a show for a hypothetical audience. i’m part of this minority group, i’ve got that mental disorder. spare some change. anything helps. give me your money and tell me i’m worth it. that you feel awful for me. remind me of how glad you are that you’re anyone other than me.

nobody wants to hear a story with a happy ending. the real sickos aren’t hiding a stack of 50 different porno magazines with the pages glued together by cum underneath their beds, they’re reading self-help books. charlie manson’s favorite book was how to win friends and influence people. how fucking twisted do you have to be to walk into a library and ask the guy at the front desk to direct you to the section with the dale carnegie books? how do you let it get to that point?

when i was about seven years old, i used to sit alone in the sandbox at recess while all of the other schoolchildren played and conversed with each other. one day, a well-liked and popular girl noticed me sitting there, and she walked up to me. i was the tallest one in class back then - they called me the queen, and one boy (5’3), the king - but i didn’t stand up to reach her eye level. instead, i let her intimidate me. i crouched in the corner, looking up at her like an insect about to be crushed beneath her heel. she looked back at me with an expression of disdain.

“you know, if you didn’t walk around looking so miserable all the time, maybe you’d actually have some friends.”

this was the worst decision i would ever make, and it would define the rest of my life. it seemed so insignificant, and yet that was the moment in which i resigned myself to being a victim.

deep in my heart i knew she wasn't wrong, but i still wished i would have hit her, hard. i did not teach her how it felt to be miserable, and i will regret that until the day that i die.

i remember thinking that she was the prettiest girl in the world - i did not envy her beauty itself, but i wanted to strip her of it just to see what she’d look like underneath all that beauty. i needed to reduce her to a fleshless mass of exposed nerves and see if everyone would still love her then. even at that age, i knew that there was no point in daydreaming about having something i’d never achieve. i had two choices - i could either destroy every last beautiful thing in my life, these reminders of my own failure that seemed to taunt me with their very existence. or i could mutilate myself beyond recognition, make my entire existence a monument to ugliness as an act of resistance. i’d rather make a decision i’d come to regret forever than leave this earth without knowing what it could’ve been like if i dared to take that risk.

i’m a feral child, bred and raised in captivity.

i watch the anglo-saxon princess standing next to me in the elevator clutch her purse instinctively as a black man gets in with us. the part of me they tried to suffocate with ssris and breathing exercises says i want to give her something to actually be afraid of. the reflex comes so naturally to them that one might think it really is encoded in their dna, but what angers me even more is the way that they avert their gaze when an outsider passes by. they try so hard not to stare, straining so hard that you almost expect a third eye to sprout from their forehead. it’s just another way of subtly letting those undesirables know that they’ll never know what it’s like to be fully human.

maybe every woman should experience a good 3 years of "male socialization", preferably that of a scrawny nerd or a real faggy flamer rather than a muscular jock. many straight women never outgrow the catty high school bully mentality and stop pitting themselves against one another, they just get older. men, however, would side with the one male that they hate more than any other man alive before coming to a woman’s defense. i never thought i'd say this, but women have a lot to learn from men in that regard. i was special because hating me brought people together. both men and women joined forces to torment me more effectively. being ostracized gave me a bit of a martyr complex. because i am a lightning rod for harassment, i have indirectly saved dozens, even hundreds of people from the same fate because i made them look normal in comparison. these people should’ve been thanking me, but instead, they joined in on tormenting me to become a higher ranking member in the social hierarchy. i’ve never met an angel, but i encounter demons everywhere i go, so i know that they must be out there somewhere. there would be no hell without a heaven to balance it out.

i am lucky in a way. i choose to advertise my freakishness like a walking billboard. dressing flamboyantly was a way for me to reclaim my outsider status - no one could ridicule me for being a misfit if i actively chose to stand out - and i would rather be ostracized for something i could control than something i couldn’t. my eccentric appearance is simply an outward reflection of what goes on in my inner world, and i can drop it whenever i please. when i behave strangely, no one’s surprised. they’d be more shocked if i was well-adjusted and normal. on the contrary, when a completely unremarkable-looking or attractive person acts outrageously, they feel personally betrayed. nobody assumes that all rich people are funny, or that all friendly people are 160-iq geniuses. yet somehow all beautiful people are also hilarious, elegant, classy, kind, and innocent. beauty trumps all. i thank god every day for gifting me with a physical form deemed vaguely human. all i need to do is wear long sleeves every day for the rest of my life, buy a whole new wardrobe, sign up for speech therapy, fix my body language, go to the salon, pay some vampiric l.a. psycho to suck all the buccal fat from my face, and most importantly - keep my mouth shut. forever.

i don’t bother trying to train myself to be normal because no matter which shade of blonde i bleach my hair to or how many inches my waist is, i’ll never forget what they did to me for committing the crime of existing nor forgive them for it. i can still hear the sound of trash thudding on the bathroom floor as they followed me in there and hurled it over the stall door, a metal rod hitting my skin, the sting of my bruised eye after i challenged one of them to a fight. that’s what real men do, don’t they? or do boys not feel the need to prove their manhood to the world?

my father often told me that growing up, he was terrified that he was secretly gay. now he says that he isn’t a homosexual, but he commends them for their bravery. here’s the thing, though - he is gay, or bisexual at the very least. i’ve seen his search history. i’m a lot like him. when i look back on my childhood and try to think of all the people i idolized, i realize that i never admired universally beloved celebrities. i looked up to those who were controversial and divisive at best, widely mocked trainwrecks at worst. i’m able to appreciate the qualities that i hate about myself as long as another person is displaying them.

when i walk into the women’s restroom, the sound of laughter like chiming bells and casual conversation suddenly halts. even the women who clearly belong to the liberal-arts-school-student clan look the other way. their tolerance of gender non-conformity begins and ends at a pixie cut. this is not a uniform for me. it’s encoded into the walk i walk, talk, move, breathe. you could dress me up like a living blow-up doll and my freakishness would still shine through. you can almost see the outline of my alien skull through the thin skin of my face. i enter these spaces the way that moses parted the red sea.

when i initially detransitioned, i immersed myself in radical feminist literature, hoping that overcoming what i thought was internalized misogyny would help me connect with women and accept my status as one. instead, dworkin and solanas opened my eyes to how complacent women are in their own oppression. i truly believe that if you walked up to the average heterosexual woman and gave her the opportunity to press a button that would completely eliminate misogyny, she would not push it. many find power in weakness. they do not desire autonomy, being strong would render them disposable to the men they want.

if i had to describe my relationship with sex, i wouldn’t say that i’m a “man trapped in a woman’s body.” i’m a woman trapped in the body of a man trapped in the body of a woman. i already am a man, and i’m a man who wishes he was a woman. i can't bring myself to view these people as my sisters. they’re more like my distant cousins. we share one thing in common - being loathed by men and reduced to fuck objects by them at the same time - and nothing else. the more the average straight man claims to be sexually repulsed by you, the more niche porn categories you fit into. an obese, elderly transvestite checks off far more fetish fodder boxes than a thin, beautiful blonde. i could never find a man willing to take me out on a nice dinner date even if i wanted to, but if i walked up to any man on the street and propositioned him, i guarantee that he’d take me up on that offer - just as long as i promised him that no one would ever find out.

men operate under the assumption that everything and everyone wants to fuck them at all times, and if they don’t, then they want to fuck another man. nobody spends more time thinking about cock than heterosexual men do. men can’t even befriend other heterosexual men because they’re so afraid that their wives will cheat on them. everything comes back to sex with them. if a woman treats you like shit, that means she’s negging you and playing hard to get. if she treats you with a modicum of basic human decency, she must want to fuck you too. liberal men don’t exist - only conservative men smart enough to realize that role-playing as a revolutionary grants them easy access to art school student pussy.

many of the gay men i knew let their body count determine their self-worth just as much as women did, but while women went to great lengths to avoid being seen as whores, these men didn’t feel desirable unless they were being used by an older and more powerful man. though i also felt like i had no internal sense of self and i let society name their own price when it came to my value as a human being, i did not crave validation from men in particular. i sought out women, not because i was necessarily more sexually attracted to them than i was to men, but because i needed a woman in my life to make me feel like more of a man, and they were a rare delicacy. finding a woman willing to sleep with me was a badge of honor. if i punched a hole in the wall a man would eventually come around and fuck it. men were the real sluts. what was admirable about getting a brain-dead fuck machine to do its job? how could i pride myself upon winning a battle if there was no war?

to my sexual partners, i was their wildest dream and their worst nightmare. they gushed about how they “admired my confidence.” they self-inserted as me, or rather the being that they thought i was, in an escapist fantasy world. they wanted to wear me as a costume, both metaphorically and literally, free to take my skin on and off as they pleased. the idea of actually being, rather than impersonating, me was horrifying. roleplaying is a lot less fun when you’re typecasted and forced to play the same character for all eternity.

i am a nobody, but in this moment i understand what it’s like to be a superstar. you cannot love a celebrity. no groupie wants to fuck their favorite singer. they want the idea of them. a famous “person” can be “loved” in the same way that the tiny silver cross on a necklace crafted in some fast-fashion sweatshop can represent the excruciating pain that jesus christ experienced in the hours before his death, the nails that dug deeper into his flesh the more he writhed in agony. in other words, you can’t. you’ve fallen for a persona. every glory hole is a confession booth. true love is something faceless, nameless, untraceable, and filthy.

i need to be anyone else other than me, anything. i want to be a buff jock with a girlfriend on the cheerleading team who makes me look even more macho in comparison. i want to be the girlfriend on the cheerleading team and take my ten beautiful blonde girlfriends out on platonic dates the way that women do. i want to be a pretentious artsy hipster who pretends to be bisexual for female attention. i want to be a construction worker and bond with my coworkers over our shared ability to lift heavy objects up and down. i want to be everything and cease existing all at once. i empathize with inanimate objects and cry at an ikea ad depicting a cow-shaped salt shaker falling to the floor and shattering into a thousand tiny pieces because i can’t think of a single person on earth who i can relate to, but i am an thing. i want to return to my original shapeless form of molten steel, what i was before i was forced into a mold and became a hardened hunk of cold metal.

i want to hurt someone so badly. it doesn’t have to be someone cartoonishly evil, someone who really deserves it. no one really deserves to be happy. i don’t need to be an avenging angel for the victims of bin laden or ted bundy. i can acknowledge that these crimes are acts of indescribable evil, but they seem so distant to me, as if they occurred in a universe completely separate from my own. it is the sort of pain that i feel detached from.

there are a lot of people on this earth who don’t deserve to die, but they don’t exactly deserve to live either. i used to think that all i really wanted was to be happy. then i realized that getting back at the people who had wronged me provided me with a sense of long-term satisfaction that no amount of do-goodery could, and that was when i knew that the only thing i truly desired was revenge.

perceive me the way i want you to see me or let me wither out of existence altogether. shower me with endless love and validation while also providing me with a steady drip of scorn to fuel my persecution complex like a hamster feeding off a water bottle. let me kill myself for attention once a year and then rise from the dead to proclaim myself as your new messiah. i need to be beautiful yet ugly enough to be interesting. i want to be craved carnally by beautiful redheads, exclusively. i should have a permit to throttle every man more handsome than me. the women can live but only if they love me. one old lady will be allowed to live there as a compromise. all the people i hate - these gorgeous people who think they run the world - will be kept in cages to perform for my entertainment. occasionally i’ll take them out on walks like a dog. my buddy once told me i’m living proof that someone can really be born into the wrong body, but if god made a man i think i’d still rip my cock off just to feel something. let me be a greek god, the type of man that the ancients would build statues of, and also be the queen bee. carve a swastika on my forehead manson-style to signal to the world that i’m not one of them easily offended, politically correct sissies. i want to bash my brains against the wall and watch from an out-of-body perspective as my skull is reduced to finely powdered dust.

the mildest flavor of hatred is one hundred times more bold than the strongest love. bond over your shared disdain for the same things. send each other hardcore pornography, links to gore sites, tell your buddies that you’d like to kiss them as a joke because the very idea that you’re capable of wanting anyone is hilarious and of itself. if all else fails, chop your dick off. if you can’t make friends with them, you can at least make yourself useful to them. by turning yourself into an object of their lust you can gain the ultimate form of power over them. it can’t get worse than it already is. pray that god will take mercy upon you. the next life will be tolerable, as long as the memories you’re stuck with now aren’t transplanted into that shiny new body.

i fantasize about blowing my brains out constantly. i don’t want to die because i’m always going through fresh and painful experiences. i want to disappear because this feeling is so familiar to me. boredom is far more tortuous than misery could ever be. i wish i could kill 87% of myself and leave the 13% behind. how tragic it is that you can’t kill parts - you can only kill people. i’ll never do it, of course, at least not before pumping myself full of whatever amount of testosterone is needed to “grow a pair” (a requirement for committing suicide). i am a slave to my own body.

one day, i will be old and wrinkled. i’ll no longer be able to take advantage of my subordinate status as an average-looking young woman in this society. i can only get away with being this off-putting because no one perceives me as a threat. i still have hope - no matter how unrealistic - that someday, someone will come along to love me, even though i don’t deserve it. but when enough time has passed for me to have aged out of my looks completely, i will not have found anyone. i will be truly alone for the first time. then, and only then, will i be relieved of my earthly duties. i’ll no longer feel obligated to try to make myself fuckable to anyone. i cannot wait to be worthless.

i’ve figured it out.

for my next trick, i’m going to tell everyone around me that i’m a male-to-female-to-male detransitioner. my face will be plastered all over fox news and then everyone will love me. i saw the light. i’m famous. i’m normal now, i’ve been reborn, fresh as a newborn babe. i get a chance to be human again.