Before the plane landed Iris chugged her last bit of Riesling and scrolled through her notifications. Dozens of pastel affirmations about trans women’s resilience and artistic brilliance. TRANS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE, TRANS DAY OF VISIBILITY, TRANS GIRLS ARE GIRLS the colorful squares announced in periwinkle script.
Outside her window she saw the limestone sprawl of the Midwest. She was visiting Chicago from New York for the first time in years. Welcome home little girl.
Iris was the face of a popular start-up that focused on providing trans women a “smooth transition experience.” She posted hazy babydoll photos surrounded by pink flowers meant to symbolize biological fertility. Every day Iris wished she could personally welcome the new girls. A host animation named Lilac was there in her stead, waiting patiently like a guardian angel. The animation barked encouraging slogans in all caps. TOGETHER WE CAN HATCH A WORLD FREE FROM BINARY GENDER IDEOLOGY. It almost sounded TERFy. Iris got into a cab and sped toward her hotel in the Loop. The app’s icon was a blooming iris. Of course.
The app beamed a hologram of Iris talking about womanhood to the new initiates. Iris no longer looked at the incoming profile pictures of girls with stubble and bobbing Adam’s apples. It was depressing. Service meant something else. Something cleaner. Something valid.
She stepped into her hotel room and turned on the TV to find a perfume commercial. The Famous Trans Girl Actress smiled back at her in a Prada dress. They were almost mirrors of each other, tall pale blonde women with long arms like willow branches.
The app made things easy. A slick new identity baptized in estrogen. Through a few easy questionnaires, a girl could make appointments with trans-friendly therapists, reach out to a new primary care provider who was trans-approved, find an endocrinologist who would prescribe progesterone, start the process of booking surgery consults, and begin a legal name change. The only thing the app didn’t do was come out for you. Though it did provide pre-written copy.
There was a lot of code on the back end. Iris had an armada of employees, mostly other trans girls who’d already been through the process themselves. They had to maintain their screening process and ability to respond to emergencies.
There are two types of trans girls. Girls who think there are two types of trans girls and girls who do not. Girls who wear chokers and girls who wear turtlenecks. Iris was the kind who wore turtlenecks. Not black, that was too overdone. She was not going to be mocked for her fashion choices when they finally made a documentary about her. She wore plum, emerald, and sky blue turtlenecks, the kind her cis ex-girlfriend wore. Her ex-girlfriend had tried to develop an app too, but Iris’s app was the only one that got made in the end. When her vegan lesbian dating app failed, her ex-girlfriend moved home to some godforsaken suburb of Chicago. The last Iris heard she did freelance coding, temping from one sad Midwestern car dealership in need of a website to the next.
Iris was a big idea person. Her one-bedroom apartment in Park Slope was full of yonic art. This aesthetic was, according to her, subversive. One of Iris’s employees, a twenty-three year old coder—who had access to puberty blockers as a child—told her, “Not everything can be subversive. The numbers don’t add up.” Iris fired the girl a few weeks later, mumbling something about performance issues. The next day the former employee made a post that said:
“My boss told me i had performance issues lol personally as a trans girl i have two and they both can be shortened to ED.”
Some girls just had Imposter Pussy Syndrome. There were other acronyms related to autogynephilia or having once identified as a gay man, but Iris preferred the simple tactlessness of IPS. It was like IBS, which she also had. She had yet to meet a woman who didn’t. No amount of yogurt or probiotic supplements helped. She went to increasingly esoteric stores. Men with scrying eyes told her she should eat more, less, or increasingly esoteric objects. A man in a mint tweed suit told Iris that she should boil rocks in a pot and suck on the salt. A pair of twins in matching white dresses told her that she should meditate on the beach and only eat oysters for a week. Finally, a week ago, a chat bot claiming to be a doctor told her to lay down in a field of dandelions and hug an eel. Iris wasn’t actually sure if the bot said ‘eel’ since there was a lot of broken HTML around the word. Maybe it was something about healing. But with a typo.
In her hotel room Iris turned off the TV and grabbed a Diet Dr. Pepper. Maybe after the launch party she and her mom would see if the ice cream shop downtown they loved was still open. Her eyes glanced over a dashboard that displayed the app’s analytics. How many users were active, the most requested services, that sort of thing. Right then she knew a lot of users were watching her intro speech.
Iris knew the speech her avatar gave by heart. “With the touch of a button you can book your first HRT appointment. No phone calls necessary. Explore transition timelines and read articles selected just for you…”
As she was watching the holographic stats shoot up and down, Iris got an alert about a girl who was having trouble with the app not sending in the correct paperwork. The poor girl was going to have to go to the courthouse in person. Iris didn’t know how to break it to the kid: she was always going to have to go in person. Most of the cases were handled by IT, but the team was small and they escalated things quickly. Everything was always ultimately up to Iris. She fell asleep to the sound of her auto-tuned voice.
◆
They met in the hotel bar later that night. Sara was visiting Chicago but was evasive when Iris asked why. Iris explained that her app was launching in the Midwest. They swilled cheap Cabernet and started getting to know each other like two misplaced trannies always do. Sara stared into her wine like a crystal ball. She wouldn’t look Iris in the eyes while they talked. Iris was talking two notches too loud in the dim lights. Sara barely talked above a whisper.
Unlike Iris, Sara was T4T. Sara was quick to unload her case history. Depression, OCD, anxiety, and a history of self-harm. Iris may not have let her on the app if she’d applied. Not in a truscum way, just in a yikes-go-to-therapy-first way. Besides, the girl was from Florida. Things were hard there.
“It’s a way for girls to bypass the medical industrial complex,” Iris said.
“So it’s easy to sign up?”
“Well…” Iris slid a hand toward Sara’s thigh. She didn’t want to talk about work.
Sara looked at her with pity but acquiesced, dripping like honey from a spoon. Iris didn’t notice the pity, only that Sara was horny. In the elevator Sara’s body felt heavy against the mirrored wall, like something slumped against inevitability. Iris closed her eyes so she didn’t have to watch.
“Girls with OCD have the tightest pussy,” Sara said as they reached the room.
The AC wouldn’t turn off. Sara was complaining about the cold when Iris tore off her conquest’s cheap black dress like a plastic couch cover. Iris was trying to remember the last time she’d fucked a pre-op girl. Cis men only came along occasionally, usually only if she was in the mood for trouble. She looked for trouble whenever the heavy feeling dripped down the back of her stomach, even though she was, for all intents and purposes, happy. Ninety-five percent of her past hookups had been frail cis women. They all loved a femme top.
“Turn the AC off,” Sara begged as Iris moved to the foot of the bed and slid Sara’s dress up. Then Sara went quiet. “It’s been a while hasn’t it?”
Iris looked out from under the tunnel of black silk. They stared at each other like owls before Iris got up, stood tall, and flipped Sara onto her stomach, gripping her pale tattooed legs. Iris positioned them like a mannequin: up, down, swivel, ass into mouth. Soon Sara stopped talking in a good way. Iris heard her name pronounced like a potion of vowels.
“Irrriiiiiss.” Much better.
◆
The next morning Iris walked into a coffee shop and ordered a flat white. Unlike other girls she could tolerate dairy and still talked to her mom, who she had asked to come and see the app launch in the Midwest. She’d done an elimination diet when her mom recommended it. Food anxiety was one of the few ways they both accessed their womanhood. Fretting felt like something Iris was supposed to do.
Sixteen minutes later her mom walked in wearing a white blouse and a gaudy dragonfly brooch. Her hair was cropped short, perfect slivers of gray framing her face. Iris was glad her mom’s second husband wasn’t in tow.
“What’s on the docket for today?”
“Whatever you want,” Iris said.
Her mom took a long gulp of a disturbingly sugary drink. They sat across from each other in silence.
“Are you excited to be in Chicago?”
“Not really,” her mom said looking at her watch. “I was maybe going to see a musical though.” “Of course.”
“The Shed Aquarium is too expensive,” her mom said.
“I know.”
“Besides, I don’t want to pet sharks. I have you.”
Iris blinked, trying to clear her field of vision, but her mom still sat in front of her drinking her expensive coffee like a Big Gulp and scrolling through an app that her daughter did not invent. Iris would never create something as ubiquitous as the App Her Mother Loved. Most people Iris knew no longer used that app, felt that the privacy issues were too threatening, even though Iris knew all apps, regardless of their popularity, had the same issues. She knew what laid behind the curtain, having seen the code, having known how the sourcing worked, the ease of back doors, of third parties. “Encryption” was just a way for your data to be stored in a private, exclusive storefront.
“As long as you’re back in time for the party it doesn’t really matter to me what you do,” Iris said, finishing her flat white and setting the empty cup gently on the table.
“Sounds good.”
Iris knew inviting her mom to the app launch was a bad idea. Nevertheless, she persisted. She wanted to feel the truth of the matter, to understand her relationship with her mother from all sides, like a geode. She also wanted to smash it.
“I need to go on a walk,” Iris said. “To clear my head before tonight.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
Of course not.
“You go ahead and see your matinee. I’ll see you later and we can get a drink after or something,” Iris said before drawing a stiff smile. Her mom gave a genuine smile, glad to escape the threat of quality time.
A lo-fi jazz song twinkled in the background of the white cafe. Through the glass a flurry of teens fell into each other before slamming against the glass windows with a thud. The screech of bike tires followed, drowning out her mom’s voice.
◆
While Iris and her mom had coffee, Sara had been in court. She was in town for a lawsuit but wouldn’t divulge any details. Iris invited her to go on a walk in Lincoln Park past the sunbathers and screaming children.
“Thanks for getting the cab,” Sara said as she smoothed her t-shirt down.
“Of course. I just wanted a little nature before tonight.”
Iris needed her nature in small doses. Looking at flowers was just another mindfulness exercise.
“Do you have a lot to do beforehand?”
“I should get there a little early but no. We worked out all the bugs last week.”
“You must be a Virgo.”
“Capricorn,” Iris said. “But I think it’s kind of bullshit.”
“Of course,” Sara said, surveying the lake.
They came across a patch of violets and roses choked with weeds.
“I’ve always wanted to take up gardening. But I don’t think I could do it,” Sara said.
In the late morning warmth, Iris thought Sara seemed very much like a gardener. Fertile. But then she remembered Iris wasn’t fertile at all.
“What should we talk about?”
“Can I ask you about vaginoplasty?” Sara said without hesitation.
Iris made a dismissive noise and her tongue wagged like an exhausted dog. “I guess,” she said after a moment.
“Did it make you more or less depressed?”
Happiness always seemed fragile, needing tending to, always about to slip downstream. Sadness, though exhausting, was not like a garden. Sadness did not require crop rotation or a fresh coat of paint.
“I guess I was depressed for a minute after the anesthesia. Then I just sort of got over it.” “I tried to get FFS a while back. No dice,” Sara said.
Iris internally made a note, tracking a shadow across the younger woman’s face. Not that she was much older. In transition years they were about the same age, but Iris felt wearier, like a crow.
“That sucks,” Iris said.
The waves foamed under the sun’s summer oblivion. More kids ran by on the gravel path. One kid nearly pushed the girls onto the grass. They slammed into each other and muttered apologies before Sara dug her head into Iris’s shoulder and rubbed her eyes against the white linen. Iris had bought the blouse for the party, but she didn’t say anything. After a few minutes a family of three started staring at them. Two flamingos snuggling in an enclosure. Iris lifted Sara’s chin and kissed her. The family turned back to their bubble wands.
“You’re sweet,” Sara said, flashing a wry smile and leading the way.
When they got to the water Sara slipped off her sandals and dipped her toes into the deep green muck. Iris sat criss-cross on a large rock and smoothed her pants out.
“So what made you make the app?” Sara asked while lighting a cigarette.
“Give me one,” Iris said, taking the lighter from her hand and examining the stickers on it. “I want trans girls to have an easier time than I did.”
“And you think you can provide that?”
“I do. I can give girls the validation and tools they need to streamline the process,” she said, parroting the app’s script.
“Sounds nice enough.”
“But what?”
“You said you had a screening policy.”
Iris sat for a while, inhaling and exhaling smoke and holding the cigarette like a joint. She forgot she’d mentioned the screening process.
“Some girls aren’t ready.”
“How do you decide?”
“Some people don’t really want it.”
“Is there like a background check?”
Iris sighed. “We screen their social media and stuff. Ask for a therapist’s letter. Just one though. And there’s a questionnaire.” She thought about all the piled-up IT tickets waiting for her.
“Sounds like some panopticon shit if you ask me,” Sara laughed.
“It’s for their own good! We don’t want them to detransition or, like, have a mental health crisis and then it’s on us.”
“Has that happened?”
“Once,” Iris said. “Some girl got really depressed after her parents stopped talking to her.”
“Jesus,” Sara said.
“Jesus,” Iris said, “doesn’t want me for a sunbeam.”
They tried to locate the Michigan shoreline in the distance.
◆
The app told you what visual characteristics you should change to give yourself a more feminine appearance. The CGI woman danced in front of Georgia O’Keeffe lilies. TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. WOMEN DESERVE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS – EVEN IF THEY DON’T HAVE PUSSIES. Iris edited that out after the initial prototype. They decided the host should be a more delicate cheerleader. The initial animations were much dirtier. One had mommy milkers and went on and on about how some trans women found creative ways to mimic lactation for the pleasure of their sexual partners. Iris nixed that one too. The AI almost always got away from the programmers. She was like a doll, dressed up in a skirt then a turtleneck then an orange tube top then a red bralette. All to amuse the twenty-six year old head programmer. Eventually she and Iris agreed on a woman in a lavender top and black pants with C-cup tits. Not that they measured. They named her Lilac and gave her the gift of speech. Whenever Iris wasn’t projected like a phantom, Lilac was there to take her place.
Like Eve, Lilac quickly made interesting choices. She was semi-self-learning and semi-self-sufficient. Lilac always wanted to steer women toward signing up for vaginoplasty right away, earlier than Iris or anyone on the programming team thought appropriate. Lilac learned how to answer common questions about estrogen, breasts, eyeliner, coming out, local resources, and the great pussy conundrum. It got worse when Iris tried to teach her some basic therapy-speak. Feeding the code turned Lilac into a miserable bitch always telling you to feel better even if you didn’t say you were feeling bad—as if Lilac suspected everyone who transitioned of being utterly hopeless and depressed. Iris didn’t want her to suggest that, even if it was probably true of most girls joining the app.
“IT WILL BE OKAY”
“THE LOW AVERAGE LIFESPAN OF TRANS WOMEN IS A MYTH! YOU CAN DO IT!”
“MANY GREAT TRANS WOMEN CAME BEFORE YOU! YOU ARE BRAVER THAN THE MARINES!”
Iris and the other programmers couldn’t make Lilac stop yelling at them. She was furiously validating. But when they tried to feed her a bunch of transition timelines, Lilac became antagonistically pessimistic. She no longer directed the depressed to hotlines or therapists. Instead, she merely said “I understand” in a neutral tone. The programming team decided angrily positive was better than detached nihilism.
Lilac began turning out her own memes, much to everyone’s surprise. They were pink. She began intentionally avoiding any mention of the news. She only helped connect you to the next optimization. Fulfillment through leveling up. Once you had hormones, hair removal, vaginoplasty, FFS, and a breast augmentation, she just spaced out on screen. No one was sure if any girls would even use the app that far into their transition. Of course there was plenty of information, links, apps, email copy, and phone numbers to help people who felt their transition wasn’t complete. Body contouring, fillers, a Brazilian butt lift. Iris felt a woman should be as beautiful as she wanted. She said she was materially changing the landscape of transition-related care. And she was. There were just some hitches. Some spots that wouldn’t come out.
The programmer Iris fired had always been concerned about Lilac.
“Who is this even going to help? You’re being all Machiavellian about something that won’t even be a public good.”
“I’m doing whatever I have to do to help trans women,” Iris told the programmer.
The part that Iris did not remember was what the programmer said back: “Yes, but how many trans women are you hurting in the process?”
Afterwards, Iris decided to add the hologram-technology to the app, personally welcoming new additions to the community. WELCOME TO WOMANHOOD. It’s a trap, it’s a trap, it’s a trap, Iris said, finishing the thought herself.
◆
Sara and Iris took a cab back to their hotel.
“Do you top?” Iris whispered.
“No,” Sara said.
The rest of their cab ride was silent. When they got back to her hotel room, Iris gripped Sara’s hand like an angry mother and led her to the stairwell before sticking her hand down the novice’s pants and fingering her. Sara started moaning. Then she laughed. At the suddenness of it, at the obviousness. Iris went deeper into her ass, probing for something she couldn’t remember, not the prostate, but something worse than joy.
Sex was getting boring. Iris wanted someone to strip her of power, lead her to the bed and get it over within five minutes or less. Sara liked going slow; she pushed Iris’s hand out and then tugged Iris’s panties down until she was naked from the waist down. She was dry. Sara seemed prepared, she gripped Iris’s ass and dug her tongue in, eating pussy and mumbling expletives. Iris, on the other hand, already knew she wasn’t going to come.
Sara knocked over a wine glass, its contents spilling imperceptibly into the dark carpet as an early afternoon talk show dissected the opioid crisis. An artist had just pulled her work from a major gallery in support of another artist who pulled her work over the gallery’s investments in Purdue Pharma. Iris let the news wash over her as her tongue darted around Sara’s body in slow, vicious circles.
◆
Iris never told her coming out story in public. Any time a reporter asked about her pre-transition life she just said it was “hard” and she wanted to make things easier for girls in the future. Her talking points were specified in her rider. When interviewed, she requested no-fat yogurt, an orange, English Breakfast tea, and bottled water. Going on morning shows was fun, going on late night was awful. She was due to go on a morning show in the predawn hours after the Midwest launch party. They had begged to ask about her past.
She wanted her eventual biography to have a section called WHY SHE IS THE WAY SHE IS. There would be something about mommy issues, AGP, HSTS, On Liking Women and Wanting To Be One Anyway, Courtney Love, doll parts, failing at sports, being good at English and bad at lunch, and the privacy afforded her from being a coder girl. Her narrative was predestined.
Somewhere in all that rubble there was an accurate anecdote that gave a scientific summation of Iris.
◆
Iris’s mom was sipping a yellow drink that looked like Gatorade mixed with piss. They were standing at the center of a large ballroom in front of a giant butterfly collaged together from roses. Her mom was wearing an old sand-colored pantsuit and a string of pearls. They weren’t real but her mom refused to buy real ones even when she had the money.
Iris scanned the room for Sara, who she’d invited last minute on a whim. Instead she only saw her assistant, foraging at the buffet like a frantic racoon. She was definitely a chaser but Iris hired her anyway. Her work ethic was impeccable.
As she waded deeper into the party with her mom attached at the hip, she smiled at fellow trans women and cis gay investors who downed fruity cocktails and screamed about outfits like banshees. Iris kept walking and smiling, holding her phone like a brick.
“You have about fifteen minutes,” her assistant finally said, clacking something into her tablet. “Ailey’s here.”
“Who’s Ailey?” Her mother said before picking up a piece of cheese on a toothpick.
“She’s just this big influencer,” Iris said.
“Aren’t you going to talk to her?”
“Of course,” she said, trying not to sound irked.
“Well let’s go.”
Ailey had a huge following on the video app. Iris had long since hired someone to take care of her social media presence, but she kept an eye on those who climbed through the ranks. Ailey wasn’t rich—not like the Trans Girl Actress with the impossibly twee name who starred in horror films—but she could get people to join the app. And that was what Iris really wanted. Finding investors had been easy. No one wanted to join a scam, so when Iris made modest claims and reasonable growth projections, she’d found a variety of nonprofits to partner with. A few months ago, two years after launching, they’d expanded to a larger office in DUMBO. They just needed more girls. Ailey was another step on the ladder. For some reason trans girls of all kinds wanted Ailey’s take on everything from pop music to post-op cunnilingus. She was one of those girls who found a way to spin her journey into a brand. That was what Iris wanted to do too. An app was only the beginning. At night she pretended to give exclusive interviews to celebrity journalists, carefully rehearsing her own life story into a tightly-wound coil.
A rosy-cheeked woman with perfect bangs, winged eyeliner, and huge tits was talking to a few short gay men in blue suede suits. She looked impossibly tall in her stilettos. Like Goliath. Iris felt wet for a minute before she collected herself and went over.
“I’m so happy you’re here. So few girls ever come out to the Midwest,” Ailey said.
“Are you from around?” Iris’s mother blurted out before Iris had a chance to ask. “I was born in Columbus but I moved to Chicago a few years ago.”
“I’m from Chicago too,” Iris said, splitting the difference.
“The suburbs,” her mom interjected.
“It’s just so important that folks have a smooth experience transitioning in this political climate,” Iris said. “I had to come. The Midwest is so close to my heart.”
Her mom made an unruly sound with her throat before nearly splashing half her drink on a venture capitalist in an orange spandex dress.
“I agree,” Ailey said. She was cradling her vodka stinger like Jesus in the manger. “I wish I had something like this when I was young. It must have taken you forever to make that little dancing girl,” she laughed. They circled each other like cobras.
“So much of what you do is helping new girls get the care and support they need,” Iris countered. “The videos you make, the pep talks, the little infographics… Your video on trans periods was really great. I think the girls get a lot from what you do.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
Her assistant nodded to her. There were other donors, high-rollers, and industry-disruptors to meet.
“We’ll talk more?”
“Of course,” Ailey said, not letting go of her vodka stinger to hug or kiss Iris. Not that Iris was expecting anything.
“Nice to meet you,” her mom said.
“Over there is the VP from the new trans lawyering firm,” the assistant said, pulling Iris with more force than she thought necessary.
“He kind of looks like shit,” Iris replied.
“Well, his name is Aiden,” the assistant said, “and he’s about as rich as God.”
“All these trans dudes went into finance and lawyering and I went into fucking apps.”
Her assistant, a proper cis girl, said nothing. She just let her arms hang at her sides like overcooked noodles. As Iris made small talk with an armada of Aidens, her assistant scanned the room for the VIPs. Iris lost track of how often she said words like IMPORTANT, POLITICAL CLIMATE, THE VULNERABILITY OF TRANS GIRLS, and MEDICAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. Finally her assistant decided it was time to usher to the center stage.
“Let’s get you up there,” the assistant pushed. Iris saw her mom float by sipping something green and frothy. It was probably peppermint schnapps. Iris had gotten drunk from schnapps once at a college newspaper party. Coding was really just an alternative form of reporting. She dug until she hit a gold geyser of information.
Staff went around in gray charcoal pantsuits hushing the onlookers and hangers-on. Her assistant made a motion to the DJ, an expensive girl wearing long dangling earrings with a red streak in her black hair. Iris had seen her on an app a few hours earlier. The girl’s bio said something about the Cocteau Twins next to a bunch of glyphs.
Iris walked up to the podium silently as she tried to find the teleprompter in the distance. Instead she saw Sara walk in wearing a translucent silvery-blue dress. All the tattoos on her back were visible. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and a few stray strands fell in the neon light. Iris did not think of all the ways the girl didn’t pass. She stood and thought, awestruck, what a beautiful girl Sara was.
◆
When the trans woman musician died—the one who everyone loved, who changed pop music, who loved the moon—Iris wrote a little eulogy on her blog. At first she tried listing the accomplishments of the musician. But that seemed futile. They were ephemeral even as they pierced modern club music. Everyone’s ear had bent toward chopped chaos, wanting harder and harder blips and spliced BPMs. Tunnels of noise like club psalms. The pictures of lilac dresses haunted Iris. A clocky princess who sat on the throne, next to the musician with bouncy tits and more Top 40 hits than anyone her age. Iris wanted a throne too. She wanted to feel a part of the trans woman’s legacy even though they’d never met. When she heard about the musician’s death she cried herself to sleep and woke up wondering why. She turned on Lilac and asked her what she knew about the musician. The AI said the musician was “everything.” Perfect lipstick, cigarettes, fur coats, and pearls. The only trans woman to pull off leopard print. The AI pulled up a video of the Top 40 pop musician crying in an interview saying she wasn’t going to talk about it, her feelings about the musician’s death were her own. Everyone felt like they were owed her grief. Weren’t they all saying, LET ME MAKE THIS ABOUT ME? And this cis musician who knew her was saying, I CAN’T. Iris merely chimed in that she could. Wasn’t it true anyway that one trans woman’s death was only every future trans woman’s death looking back at her, asking what had they done for one another?
No one commented on her blog. Other girls wrote bigger posts that got at the woman’s legacy with pure, raw poetry. Iris wrote more long, rambly, desperate reflections on the trans icons she wished were her best friends.
In Iris’s favorite photo of the trans princess she is walking a donkey in a pink puffer coat and a black leather skirt. Her mauve lips just slightly open, staring at the viewer like Princess Diana.
◆
Iris stared at the blue screen hanging above a wreath of marigolds. “I, like many of us here, am from the Midwest. I was born in Chicago.” She rolled her eyes, paused for laughter. “I moved to New York City to try and find myself. And I did. I started transitioning, built a community, and started coding. Then I realized something. I wanted to give back. I didn’t just want to be another prissy white trans girl. Girls everywhere should have easy access to hormones. In New York, it’s fairly easy to find a doctor, get surgery, and connect to the community. Here, not so much.” Iris looked out and saw Sara sipping champagne. She looked bored. Her mom was whispering something into Ailey’s ear. Probably something about Iris being from the suburbs. “I want trans girls everywhere to feel safe, loved, and valid in their choices. Even if no one else in their life supports them, this app will. We worked hard to make this app every trans girl’s personal cheerleader.”
“Fuck off,” someone yelled from the crowd.
She felt just like she’d been clocked. Shaky. Icy. Nude. For a minute, Iris tried to press on and hoped security would take care of it. “We started working with AI because we believe there’s always been something cybernetic about transness––”
“Shut up Iris. It’s a fucking shit show. You know it doesn’t work.” It was the programmer, the one she had let go. Iris was going to fire whoever let the brat in. The programmer worked her way to the podium.
“Security, can we escort her out?” Iris said. No one was looking at Iris anymore. Iris’s mom was looking at her phone, color rushing to her cheeks. The men in blue suede suits looked anxious. Iris tried to locate Ailey only to see her making a slow exit. Her assistant was frantically working her way to the front of the crowd while Iris tried to refind her footing. The teleprompter was going too fast.
“I think it’s so important we have trans women entrepreneurs—Ailey and I were—”
The programmer wasn’t alone. A group of girls in black dresses unrolled a banner from the second floor balcony that said “WHO GETS TO BE A GIRL?” It was hard to read, Iris thought. The message was nearly illegible. But then they started shouting “Truscum” and “Girlboss.”
Iris realized she couldn’t even remember the programmer’s name. Tomorrow both their names would be all over the internet.
Two girls got onto the podium and stood next to Iris with a poster-board that said TRANS DAY OF INVISIBILITY. The assistant grabbed Iris and hissed into a headset. Iris saw her mom snap a picture of all the signs. Why were there so many signs? Iris was just one girl. She was not a political figure.
She and her assistant were backstage in a matter of minutes. Behind them, something made a rat-a-tat-tat sound, spooking both of them into stunned silence. A scratchy voice came over the headset: “They brought in paintball guns. They’re shooting everyone pink and blue.”
“That’s a little on the nose,” Iris said.
Backstage was little more than a break room with a giant gold espresso machine and a fake philodendron. A twenty-story drop shimmered beyond the glass window, leading out to a balcony and the blue Chicago night. Wailing orange lights lit their faces as they sat in silence. The assistant was furiously texting. Iris was trying not to look at her phone. Maybe everything would be over soon and she would go back out to make her speech. Then she would smile at her mom and they would go to a twenty-four hour grocery store to plunder the ice cream aisle. Reunited over sugary milk soup.
“Can you get my mom?”
“She left,” the assistant said. “I think you should too. We can talk more when we meet before the morning show.”
“Sounds good,” Iris said weakly. Her assistant squeezed her hand and walked out. From the hallway, Iris heard her talking about the “huge fucking mess” she was going to have to clean up.
The engagement rate on the app remained steady. She kept refreshing, wondering when the news would hit. Nothing ever landed all at once. Analytics took weeks to form real peaks and valleys. Iris looked at the last three unanswered texts she’d sent to Sara.
◆
Iris was standing on the balcony staring down at ant-sized cars when Sara found her. She wasn’t ready to leave. She could not walk through the ballroom with the paintball-splattered butterfly sculpture.
“I’m sorry,” Iris said.
Sara smiled and walked over to her.
“For what?”
“I didn’t think I was dragging you out into the eye of the storm.”
“It was kind of fun though,” Sara said. She gently stroked Iris behind the ear and let her hands drift down to Iris’s breasts, fumbling at the opening of her blouse before darting back down. “Did you know her?”
“She was a former employee.”
Sara nodded and looked down at her shoes.
“Do you think I’m that fucked up? To deserve this crucifixion?”
Sara paused for a moment and surveyed the city, her dress loose in the hot twilight breeze. Iris’s phone was blowing up. She silenced it, noting only a strange string of letters from her mom about being at a wine bar down the street with Ailey.
“At some point every trans woman will be publicly crucified. Sometimes you get a resurrection, sometimes you don’t.”
Iris looked at Sara expecting her to say more.
“I think your app is bullshit though,” Sara said before smiling and heading for the exit.
Iris listened to Sara’s heels on the stairs until all she could hear was the ambient sound of muted traffic. She picked up her phone, ignored the squall of notifications, and searched for twenty-four-hour grocery stores.