This essay.
This is how the sausage is made. Dancing to no music, hearing the squeak of sneakers on the dance floor, smelling everybody’s B.O. This is the process whereby I, a person who has never so much as entered an actual club, now gets to act like it was my natural habitat. Or so I thought as I sat on the floor of the black box once our break ended, evaluating my bruised knees. Grinding for 12 hours to make an extra $250–this was not Hollywood glamour. This was becoming part of the sausage. I was the meat that was parsed and separated so that the different parts of the animal become meaningless, all part of the same, satisfying, salty tube.
Hollywood has already created a version of transness that the broader world finds somewhat acceptable. But these trans people don’t look like me, and they don’t feel like me. They’re growing up in a world where they can be out in high school and transition early enough to not lose years of their life and fuck who they want and be what they want, and I’m a little too late for that. I’m a little too old, too messy, for the glittery version of my own life Hollywood is trying to sell back to me.