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Your story is due Monday. You spend an hour with coffee, scratching into paper, and then you hold up your hand to check if you’ve had too much caffeine: If you have to check, you know already. You wonder if you’re going to go by Wendy Xiao, or use a pen name. Most people must have the safesearch off on Google, and you can never take filthy slash fiction down from old message boards (not that you want to).

You wonder whether to write about transmisogyny. You decide there’s no way you can tell this story without getting so specific that you’ll get the last 10 percent of ostracization that you haven’t yet encountered in lit scenes, and in queer scenes. You think about every time you let someone know that they said something fucked up and transmisogynist or racist or ableist, and you read their lips, perfectly red Taylor Swift–type lips, that asked you if you even wanted their support. You weigh the pros and cons of never leaving your house, like some trans girls you know.