[Note from future Eris: although this essay cost me a lot of friends, I am still proud of it beyond measure. I highly recommend that readers experiencing this essay for the first time consider that these were some of my last words before coming out. (My actual coming-out post went live a little less than two months later, but the two essays were edited concurrently, and the original draft of this essay ended with me coming out.) If I were attempting this essay today—and maybe someday I will—I’d be able to more clearly state that the observations I made regarding my treatment were examples of how the patriarchy clocks and punishes trans people pre-transition. I’d talk more about how some of the women enforced this, too, by sabotaging some of my closest connections and all but ensuring anyone in our community who did date me would be subject to a unique flavor of hell. I kept my mouth shut about that in the original, hoping to keep friendships intact, but that didn’t work out.

I love this essay. I love how committed I was to telling my story as an individual for the first time, rather than trying to flatten my experiences to make them more palatable to large groups of other people. Someday, I owe it another follow-up so I can properly give it its due.]

When I was an undergrad running with the jazz boys, no one wanted to sleep with me.

…Yeah, I didn’t know how to start this one, either. For all my work addressing sexual assault, I actually don’t spend all that much time dealing with sex. (I tend to leave that creative artistry to Rebecca Drapkin, who writes about the consensual side of things.) While I love my body and everything it can do, I’ve grown accustomed to keeping my sexual side to myself. I’m still figuring out how much of it belongs in my artistic life. And though that answer is nonzero, part of why I keep my sex life (and body, and sexuality, and . . .) separate from the rest of my artistic discourse is just because I don’t share all of me with all of you. But part of it isn’t, and there are reasons for that—reasons I can trace back to a very specific time and place—and though I’d rather not discuss any of this, I think it’s time.