When I got a job at a dungeon, the dirtbag who owned the place organized the girls based on when they joined. According to her, you were in a litter with everyone hired around the same time as you. Litter. The girls I trained with were creatures of the same parturition; one of our rotating chores was picking up sidewalk trash in order to ingratiate ourselves with the neighbors, who knew everything.
As I began medical transition in my late twenties, a trans friend on a similar timeline referred to us as littermates. Though biologically speaking she had a few years on me, we were in our transsexual infancy together. And who had whelped us? I wondered. But I liked the idea. I still feel a cozy, familial intimacy when I learn another trans person started HRT in the spring of 2019, or got one of their surgeries in autumn of that year.
At Doll Invasion a few months ago, I met a butch who also began testosterone in the last year before the pandemic, a tidy half-century since Stonewall. We were in the pool together. They were theoretically my type, but I felt warmly platonic toward them—always a nice surprise. We’re the same age! I said, though their birthday was closer to my mom’s than to mine.
Trans anniversaries, like before/afters, are played out, but I still noticed this week that it’s almost been four years since my (second) top surgery. This means that it’s almost been four years since I met Jade.
The appropriate gift for this milestone, according to Brides magazine, is fruit or flowers. There are pink raspberries in the fridge and scarlet amaranth hung to dry—but those are for me. I’ve already picked out Jade’s anniversary gift, which is more on theme for a third anniversary. I don’t think she’ll mind.
Jade is cis, but since she came out when we met, her queerness is about the same age as my medical transition. The first time I visited her apartment, I still had tape on my chest. I discovered that she wanted to touch me. I couldn’t remember a woman ever touching me that way before (or a man, for that matter). What is a whelp’s earliest sensation: the crush of the birth canal, or the warmth of its littermates down in the grass? Her acrylics felt natural, if not normal.
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i still feel your absence here, but i’d lose you ten more times if it meant you and jade finding one another