I’m dressed as JK Rowling. Am I trans? No. Am I doing drag? No. This is something entirely new that I invented. I need to inhabit this halfway zone in order to solve the number one issue plaguing Americans at every minute of their empty lives. Trans people.
I talk to guys at a truck stop about what they’d do if they were a woman for a day. Masturbate, get drinks bought for them, prostitute themselves. I ask them the top ten things they dislike about women and they say the same thing. It reminds me of when I was a boy, I had a fantasy where I would wake up in the body of a woman, track myself down (where a woman’s brain would be in my original body) and we'd have sex. Every man will at some point imagine what it’d be like to be a woman, and vice versa. So, it seems strange to me this has become a taboo, almost as if the whole thing was manufactured hatred because journalists couldn’t be bothered investigating anything meaningful.
I ask the fellas why they hate trans women, but it turns out my leading question was a road to nowhere. Only one of the truckers shakes his head, a brown goo leaking from his lips stuffed with snus.
"It ain’t natural."
"So you want to add thousands more people into the dating pool that would increase competition for viable partners and be alone for the rest of your life? Is that it?"
"I'm married." He says, showing me a photo of an old woman holding a pig.
"Do you want a medal? Get the fuck outta here." I say, slapping him round the chops.
"If you were a man I'd spank you."
"Ah, but I'm JK Rowling. I use the profits from my children’s books to attack marginalised groups." I say, blowing cigar smoke in his face. He gives me a ride back to Baltimore, the windows are rolled down and we're listening to Joe Rogan podcasts.
“A trans woman in a man’s body is more trans than if they were in a woman’s body.” I helpfully explain to a woman drinking a mojito. I'm at a bar. I’m surrounded by trans women. Some are beautiful, some aren't, but this isn’t important. It is as if society has decided a woman’s value is decided by how much a man wants to fuck her. I talk about misogyny with the dolls, calmly and logically explaining to them my ideas on gender. Contrapoints is here too, she keeps talking about dialectics.
"I thought you hated academia, why do you talk like a 500 page book?" I shout over the music. She clicks her tongue on the roof of her mouth and takes a drink, though the little cocktail umbrella goes in her mouth and opens up. A trans man who looks like Freddy Nietzsche starts to play an electric guitar and sings a song about not feeling seen, though unfortunately his entire performance is drowned out by a cross-eyed detransitioner protesting Hunter Schafer playing the role of Zelda in the upcoming movie, Zelda.
There is someone who has been silent the entire time, lying on a table, completely naked and covered in green paint.
"What's their story?"
"They identify as an attack helicopter."
I go over and talk to it.
"So you're a military helicopter?"
"Affirmative, over." It says. I look over its body. It is human, weak. I decide to start a justgiving campaign. Within ten minutes we've raised enough money to cover the costs of surgery. The women in the bar pick it up and as it moves it makes a 'chuka chuka' sound as it pretends to fly.
We're in a surgical theatre. The helicopter has been anaesthetised; the surgeon has pulled back its skin and muscle and is replacing its bones with a metal chassis. The air smells of pennies. A rotary engine is fitted in the vertebrae of its spine, digestive system replaced with fuel intake valves and a pair of sterilised machine guns are brought in and welded to its new wings by surgical engineers. The helicopter is stitched back up and we take it out into the car park. The blades start spinning and it begins to hover above the surgeons and me, we all start cheering. The helicopter begins to weep with happiness, unleashing a volley of machine gun fire into the air.
"Lets go, fly a kite,
Up to the highest height!
Let's go fly a kite and send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear!" We all start singing below.
That evening I hit the club in my JK Rowling ensemble. A shawl covers my prosthetic hunchback, it twists and turns as I dance to David Guetta, though in my mind I am reflecting on solutions to human identity. How can we ever advance as a species if we cannot transcend gender? You have nerds wishing they could fill their heads with microchips and be a robot, which is more transgressive than taking hormones which naturally occur in the body. I focus all of the testosterone into the left side of my body and all my oestrogen into the right side. Perhaps this is the way, everyone should switch genders multiple times in their lives. All of us could leave behind the social construct of gender, race, age, baldness. Imagine just limiting yourself to a single psychological construction. It would be as if Jesus denied that he was the incarnation of God.
