@CharlotteEowyn it is worth reflecting though…Maria is a cautionary tale of a sorts. There is a lot that’s very real about her, but she’s also so lost in herself a lot of times. She thinks she can force an egg to crack, and Binnie uses the novel to explore a part of many of us that wished a trans girl had just come into our lives when younger and told us we were trans and freed us. But it does the exact opposite, hard-boiling an egg and setting him back in the worst ways.
It’s not as black and white of a moral or takeaway in the story, that’s why it’s profound, but there is something to that. Binnie herself all these years later…I get the sense she sees something of how the world can twist us trans girls up, and wants us to see something about ourselves so we can untwist ourselves and find our way to wholeness.
And reflecting on it…this is our trauma and some of the realities of structure, but separatism will also fail us (see Torrey Peters work, taking this theme to its next logical points in Infect Your Friends and Detransition Baby). This points us to starting at t4t, because only we can make the commitment to care for each other the way cis people can’t. But we can’t stop there, and the longer I live as myself and experience some of the rougher edges of being a trans woman in this world, the more I see that for our own wholeness and recovery, we must find our way to build towards something bigger with everyone.
Honestly though, I think taking time in t4t friendships, relationships, and community can be deeply healing because of this very thing. It gives us a reprieve to even begin to see what security and being fully in ourselves can look like. And finding that gives us a strength and resiliency no one can shake.
