Slowly, her smile faded. “With Black Iris?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve heard of them. Of you, I guess. Why did you hide this?”
“Because it would have endangered you.”
“Why are you telling me now?”
It had been so long since I’d touched her. When I grazed her bare shin I couldn’t stop. Fingers wrapped around bone, skin, felt her calf flex, her muscle hot and firm. She gazed down at me, pitiless. Ever so slightly her legs parted.
God, Ingrid. You still do it to me.
“I’m telling you because I fucked up. I pissed off someone from our past. Someone who hunts down and harasses girls for kicks. Now Black Iris is on the run from him, and they don’t have my back anymore. It’s just a matter of time till he finds me. And hurts me. And the girls I love.” My thumb pressed hard, pulse to pulse. “Including you.”
THREE YEARS AGO
VLOG #104: MONSTER
REN: See this shit? [Touches his mouth.] It’s not makeup, you guys. This is real. Real red American blood. All it took was one fuckup to remind me how fragile it is, this fucking illusion of gender we’re all performing for each other.
Let me start at the beginning.
I got drunk tonight. Really, really drunk.
[Jump cut.]
Lately I’ve been feeling like garbage. Moody, insecure, self-loathing. Almost—I hate to say this, but it’s true—like a girl. The girl I used to be, anyway. And I know exactly the reason why: my T level is low. I’m not properly absorbing the gel, or something. My endo’s upping the dose. But until the prescription goes through, I’m self-medicating with everyone’s favorite fix-you-upper: alcohol.
T and booze have similar effects. Overconfidence. Lust.
And, crucially, not fucking recognizing danger.
Tonight I got drunk at the club. Made a total slut of myself. And because I was in a shit mood, I was a jerk to my friends. Can’t remember what I said, but now E won’t return my texts.
I deserved this.
I’m a monster.
My roomie thinks it’s because my T’s too high, that it’s making me aggressive, mean, but the bloodwork says the opposite. So what’s the fucking answer? I’ll tell you: I’m just an asshole. I’m a bad boy. Not in a sexy-leather-jacket, cigarette, pomade way—I mean I’m bad at being a boy. I overcompensate. Try too hard to be hard. It’s all an act, covering up how fucking weak and fake I am inside. My body’s so different now, so much stronger, but behind this [taps his chest] I’m a scared little kid who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. No one knows I skipped all the formative lessons. It’s like that nightmare where you show up for a big test at school, and you didn’t study. That’s every day of my fucking life. I’m not ready for this.
I’m a man who never had a boyhood.
[Jump cut.]
So I was drinking. And flirting my ass off with this girl. We danced, and touched, and for a minute I felt like everything could be okay. She wanted to hook up, and I wanted to be a normal guy who could give it to her.
I went to piss first, to check myself. Not myself, exactly—the equipment.
Trigger warning: anatomical talk.
One of the most common questions I get is: How do trans men fuck?
And like, okay. You could just google that. But it’s one thing to read a dry—pun intended—explanation of how this stuff works, and another to hear it straight from a real live trans boy. To have that information humanized. The whole point of this—of me getting on camera and sharing my life with you—is to humanize a transgender life. To show you that I’m flesh and blood, just like you. Well, except for my plastic cock.
Let’s learn together, kids.
One of the effects of being on T is growing a dick. It’s my clit, technically. Testosterone enlarges it. When we’re in the womb, we all start off with the same junk. Depending on which hormone we’re exposed to, that junk turns male or female—or ambiguous, as the case may be. You know the little notch that runs down the underside of a penis? That’s where the labia fused to form the scrotum. And when people with clits get aroused? Their clit gets stiff and erect. Literal lady boners.
Our junk has the same origin. And T blurs that line.
But a trans guy never gets to typical cis male size. We get a small dick that can’t penetrate, not satisfyingly. But it gets hard. I get morning wood—after I take my daily T dose. I jerk off like a guy, except with two fingers, not my fist.
So, I compensate. I wear this thing that gives me a bulge, called a packer. Mine is the deluxe kind: it also lets me piss standing up, and if I slide a stiff rod inside of it, it lets me fuck. It’s the all-in-one silicone wonder-cock.
I’m supposed to see this as an extension of my body. But to me, it’s a constant reminder that I’m not the same kind of man as the average cis guy on the street. Sure, some of them know how this feels—take a dude with testicular cancer who gets his junk surgically removed. We’re in the same boat. We were both supposed to have fully functioning original plumbing. We’re never, ever going to be satisfied with some prosthetic. It’s the most intimate part of your body, the most sensitive, the core physical component of your sexuality.
It’s the one part of being a guy that I will never truly know.
Don’t get me started on surgical options. Modern medicine can 3-D print a human heart, but it can’t make a flesh-and-blood dick that gets hard the way a cis guy’s does.
Do you know how a surgically constructed phallus becomes erect? They have to put a rod inside it.
Yeah.
I’ve already got something that does that, and I didn’t have to go through years of painful and expensive surgeries. I didn’t have to worry about loss of sensation or my body rejecting it. It cost fifty bucks online.
I want the real thing. And I can’t have it. None of us can.
I picked the wrong century to be trans.
Look, I won’t romanticize this shit. This is fucking hard to deal with. Being transgender is an endless compromise of half solutions and almost-like-the-real-things.
Sorry if that triggers you. Sorry if my definition of “real” makes you feel less real.
I’d like to not feel that way, too. I don’t know how.
But tonight a girl wanted to ride this half solution in my pants, and for a second I was drunk enough to believe that made me a real boy.
So I stood at a urinal, pretending to piss while I put the rod in to make my plastic dick hard.
This is what I mean, by the way. Tell me that is not the weirdest fucking sentence you’ve heard today.
Well, I was so damn drunk I dropped it.
The rod, the dick, the whole shebang.
And it rolled right against the shoe of the guy next to me.
I was so utterly wasted that I could only laugh. The guy’s face was priceless. He didn’t know what he was looking at, and when I put the cock back in my pants he walked out, fast. I didn’t care. Everyone knows me at this club. Not like I hide who I am.
Me and the girl hooked up, but I was too drunk to fuck like a man anyway, so I knelt between her legs and showed her what growing up identifying as lesbian can teach a guy.
Lust, check. Overconfidence, check.
Lack of situational awareness, check.
As I walked to the train on my way home, some guys followed me.
You probably know how this story goes.
It was late. Too late to run to the station for help. And I was still pretty damn drunk. So I turned into an alley and waited.
There were three of them. One was the guy who’d seen my dick. He said, “What the fuck are you?”
I said, “I’m the guy who’s going to kick your ass.”
A year ago this never would’ve left my mouth. But T is pure swagger. It makes you stupid.
They thought I was funny. They asked to see my dick. To pass it around.
Cute.
Bathroom Guy got in my face. He made various remarks implying I was
a disease-carrying degenerate, then gave himself away by saying he’d “fuck that boy-pussy straight.”
As you can imagine, that’s when I hit him.
My body really is different. I’ve been lifting hard. It’s one thing to see your muscle in a mirror and quite another to feel it galvanized by adrenaline, propelled by rage. Few things feel as good and primal as bone impacting bone. It was beautiful almost, the elegant cascade of nerves firing, muscle contracting, fist crushing jaw, a spark of violence tracing its way from my brain stem to his bloody mouth. And the hitting—the hitting felt like fucking. Violence is tangled up with sex, and when I slammed my knuckles into his cheek, his temple, I felt the same explosive jolt as when I jerk off. I beat the shit out of him and thought: I don’t mind not having a real dick if I can get off like this.
Besides, violence is better than sex. You don’t have to hold back.
Then his two buddies were on me, and this happened.
[Ren leans close to the camera. His face is mottled with bruises and cuts.]
I lost. But I lost clean.
Those fuckers just had to ruin it.
When they saw I couldn’t get back up, they started talking. They kept saying “it.” Obviously, “it” was me. Been a while since I’ve been a thing, not a person. And you can do almost anything to a thing.
Their voices were low, furtive. One of them said, “Let’s see its pussy.”
He moved closer and I drew the gun from my jacket.
I said, “Stay where you are.”
He said, “That’s not real, either.”
I said, “If you take another step I’ll shoot your dick off. Then we can compare holes.”
So I won, in the end. But I had to cheat by scaring them with another fake phallus. That’s all men care about—dicks, fucking dicks. They’re obsessed. It’s super homoerotic.
You know what hurts more than a busted face, and fractured ribs, and having to go to the ER and take your clothes off so strangers can ogle your chimera body?
Losing your pride.
On the plus side, I think I’m gonna look good with scars.
[Jump cut.]
My roomie’s wrong. T didn’t make me a monster—it gave me access to the monster that’s always been inside me.
Tonight I found a piece of myself. I learned that I’m a man who enjoys beating the shit out of other men.
I can work with that.
———
All night, she asked questions.
How do they find you?
How do you know they’re not lying?
How do you hurt the people who hurt them?
We brewed coffee, talked in low voices as the sky healed from the bruises of night. It’d been years since we’d stayed up together till dawn. Ingrid sat in the windowsill, one knee bent. A silver-blue thread of smoke unraveled from the cigarette in her hand. Legs bare, pale and iridescent as nacre in the breaking dawn. Her camisole barely covered her underwear.
I thought of all those high school nights we’d kept each other awake. Half-clothed, half-delirious, whispering about the future. The apartment we’d share, the entwined life. My sisters coming to visit when they were older.
Like a real family.
Black Iris, I told her, was my family now.
It was Laney and Blythe’s mad brainchild. Back in college, Blythe cheated on Armin, and Armin lashed out at her and everyone she loved. He challenged an underling—an incoming Corgan freshman who aimed to join his secret society—with a task: ruin a random queer girl’s life. That not-quite-random girl was Laney Keating. She was bullied, humiliated online, harassed mercilessly at school. When she tracked the trail of those who’d hurt her, it led to Armin. So she entangled him in her web and set about gradually ruining his life. Drugs in his drinks, sweet lies about love in his ear. A slow neurochemical dismantlement. The ultimate what-goes-around. And the whole time she was poisoning Armin, Laney was hooking up with both him and Blythe. One for love, one to make her final revenge sweeter. She was stone cold and stone hard. She fucked a man and made him fall in love just to hurt him more when she revealed how she’d been systematically destroying his sanity.
If Laney Keating ever met Ingrid Svensson, the universe would implode. The big bang in reverse.
Laney started Black Iris to organize what she was already doing—wreaking vengeance on those who’d wronged her. When she ran out of victims, she extended her services to others. Revenge for hire.
That’s where the rest of us came in.
Laney and Blythe enlisted Armin as their first recruit. He’d been broken, subjugated. Tamed. He bankrolled their early projects, smoothed hairy situations, tapped his social connections. He used his psych training to profile their targets. Guilt drove him to be a good little lapdog. Laney kept him on a tight leash; Blythe did the dirty fieldwork.
When Ellis came home to announce her engagement, Laney seized the opportunity. Ellis was the drama that started everything—the girl Blythe had cheated on Armin with, the only girl to ever break Blythe’s heart. Black Iris needed a tech to handle communications and make the group untraceable online. So Ellis stayed behind in Chicago while her fiancée went back to Maine. It’s just a temporary thing, E said. I won’t get into hot water, I promise.
I saw the way Ellis looked at Blythe. Not with longing—maybe a faint smolder—but mainly worry. It made me think of Inge, always watching over me. Disapproving but still caring.
Once you love someone that deeply, it never really stops. It just evolves into other forms.
Plus, Laney wanted Ellis here for a reason. A balance point within her twisted threesome. Someone to haunt Armin and keep him in line—and someone to look after Blythe, hold her back from the edge.
Once Ellis was officially on board, she recommended me.
I’d known them all for years now, but being in Black Iris brought us closer. We’d seen sides of each other we never had before. Our capacity for cruelty—and for kindness. Laney sheltering that girl at the coffeehouse. Armin pulling strings for me unasked.
There was good in us, beneath the righteous outrage.
It didn’t surprise me when Ingrid said, “I want in.”
I spun the ashtray between us. Cinders flaked off, sparkling darkly. “Not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Because Laney will kill me for telling you, for one.”
Inge nudged my hand with a toe. “For two?”
“For two,” I said, cupping her foot without looking at her, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
One of the most frightening and admirable things about Ingrid Svensson was her consummate self-control. An iceberg of a girl, all her cracks and jagged edges below the surface. Beneath that smooth façade she could rip you the fuck apart. And I was one of the few people on earth who knew. Who’d seen.
Who’d touched her there, and been torn.
Now she sat very still, expressionless, but I felt the churn of something cold and terrible inside her.
This time, she surprised me. “Bring her here.”
“Who, Laney?”
“The British one.”
I sat up straighter. “I don’t know anything about Tamsin.”
“You know she doesn’t trust them. She told you they’ve known about Adam for months. That puts her on our side.”
“Why are you us-versus-themming already? I’ve been friends with these people for years.”
“That doesn’t mean shit.” Her foot slid across my lap, thrust between my thighs. Nerves lit with pain, and arousal. “Don’t be naive. Laney is ruthless. She’ll do anything to get what she wants.”
“I’m familiar with the type.”
Our eyes locked. Against the wan morning sky she was a statue carved from opal. Sun turned her cami translucent, traced the contour of the breasts inside. Her curves were blue shadow. For months—years, actually—I’d been too daunted to stare like this. Don’t look at me with that fucking male gaze, she once said. The same gaze that had
adored her before I boosted my T to cis male range. Why is it different now? I’d asked. When did it cross the line from adoration to objectification?
It’s predatory, she said.
You always look at me that way.
But I’m a girl, she said.
So?
So girls can’t be predators.
Wrong, I thought, but she’d ended the argument by pushing me onto the bed and unbuckling my belt.
“What are you doing?” I breathed now.
Her foot ran up the inside of my thigh. “I’m fucking horny.”
“Ingrid.”
“Talking about hurting men gets me off. You too. I can feel it.”
Her voice made me shiver. It was vapor coming off a hot spring, a long-buried heat.
Halfheartedly I said, “Don’t. Stop.”
“Take that period out,” she said, her foot kneading, “and the meaning changes completely.”
I was hard as fuck. I’d been battling an erection all night, first over Tam, now Inge, and I couldn’t fight it anymore. Embarrassingly, I was wet, too. It’d been so long since I got wet.
She always did it to me.
“This is fucked-up,” I said.
“I know. That’s what makes it hot.”
“No, it’s fucked. You’re a fucking lesbian, Inge.”
She leaned closer. “And you have a fucking pussy.”
Something snapped in me, a spasm of furious eros, inseparable rage and lust. Denying and desiring me in the same breath. Fucking with my head, like she always did. I wanted her to feel how much that hurt. I could make her feel it. With this body’s strength, its ability to focus on something so single-mindedly it would deafen me to her pleas until I was done. Like the men I destroyed. How do you hurt them? she’d asked, and this was the answer: my hands clamping her thighs, my body shifting over hers. Our limbs twisted, tangling.
Then I realized the wetness between my legs felt . . . wrong.
Wrong in a very familiar, very alarming way.
I shoved her off. Stumbled to my feet.
Warmth ran down my thigh.
Oh fuck. Oh, fuck.
I made it to the bathroom, slammed the door. Dry heaved over the tub. Peeled my jeans off and stared with my mouth hanging soundlessly open, like someone in a nightmare.