assimilation as cannibalization

To Muhsin Hendricks — I wish I had been able to write something sweeter for you, but it did not feel right to release this without mentioning you at all. I spent so much time trying to justify surviving in silence at the cost of my queerness. You made it a point to not hide, while I tried to eat myself alive for cisheterosexual pleasure. May I be half the Muslim you were, and never suppress myself again. ‎إنا لله وإنا اليه راجعون

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“I know that when I die somebody’s going to sell my flesh on the black market, one of my awful distant relatives. That’s why I smoke and drink, so I taste bitter and no one gets any pleasure out of my death [...] Today I’m the butcher, tomorrow I might be the cattle.”

— Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh

It’s kill or be cannibalized, so you tell yourself that this is a new chapter in your life. You can be the new sexy, pretty number for cisheterosexuals to fawn over; you’ve spent your life studying your socialite mother, the Sunni matriarch that’s taught you all the ways to be a woman. It’s easier to pull off than anything that is actually natural to you. And for a while, it works! You turn heads and people chase after you in public, but it isn’t to call you a faggot. Cis women are kinder, softer, more willing to share a giggle as long as they can keep blurring the lines between you being their friend or fetish. You push it down because this new world you’ve been gifted grants you more opportunities than your imagination could ever grant after almost a decade in exile.

You get slapped on the ass by gay men that market themselves as “palatable” instead of being groped in dark corners, and the cis lesbians that would’ve never dreamed of coming onto you try slipping you their number. You’re told that you’re losing weight and it looks good, what’s your secret? You’re so ravenous you start gnawing on your duvet in your sleep. You start wearing tight little tops that flatten you and suddenly your mental state depends on the swell of your chest and hips. I don’t know why you’d ever dream of going on those hormones, you’re told at petty-bourgeois dinner parties, bitch, you’re hot!

They always pick prey that reminds you of you. But no, it’s your past, you’re a new woman now. Suddenly not queering your faith begins to make sense to you. And maybe you like men? Do they get you going, hon? If you close your eyes and hurl after they finish inside of you, sure. When push came to shove, you chose to survive. And was that not the only choice you could've made? Someone would’ve been eaten, and you needed to make sure that it wasn’t you. You’re the one who gets to sleep with a full belly, loving and loved. Is this not what you wanted? Your days are draped in babydolls and your nights come decorated in sheer slips. It’s a beautiful, hazy mess of all the feminine desires you never wanted, which is good because being California sober was deemed haram at girls’ night last week.

I’d put a baby in you if I could, one of your cisheterosexual girlfriends tells you when you’re half asleep in the shotgun seat of her car. I still can’t believe that a girl like you was buried underneath all that. So glad you’re not a cuntlicker type anymore. You try not to vomit across her dashboard. You’re beautiful, you’re so beautiful, mashallah. I wish I could peel your face off and wear it over my own.

And then you begin to see the butch you used to be everywhere you look. He’s smoking, laughing, flirting; zie knows when to flex his muscles to get a queer to swoon and he doesn’t try to hide how deep hir voice actually is when he’s not sweetening it for the straights. He regularly quotes the Quran and Imam Ali (as) while parsing through the Bible. His mustache is coming in and zie has the kind of easygoing grin that reminds you of stretching out on sunlight-drenched sheets while lighting a cigarette. Zie’s authentic in all the ways you’ve been taught to suppress again. He doesn’t hide hir transsexual cravings and he doesn’t care about cisheterosexual acceptance. He’s kinky, he’s a stoner, he’s loud, and he’s fucking free. It is love at first sight, but how can a butcher care for the twitchy-nosed preything she’s slaughtered?

The truth is that you never swung the axe. Instead, you scream nightly as your body betrays itself and tears meat from bone. It couldn’t give a damn about carving out juicy cuts to roast over a spit, the thing just digs into anything it can get. Flank; thigh; rib; throat; calf. It spits on your makeup and licks at the sweat of your skin with its roughened tongue until the flesh starts to slough off. Whatever is inside of you is starving, and you taste sweeter than you smell these days. When its had its fill, you jolt awake, swaddled in yet another babydoll as the sun claws over the horizon. Your eyes wander over to the mirror opposite your bed. Sweet heavens, you’re gorgeous.

But was it worth it? The question finally sticks with you one morning when you’re perched naked on the bathroom counter, balancing dangerously on the edge to try and apply mascara with the help of the medicine cabinet’s mirror door. You stumble away from your reflection, the hunger that usually strikes you at your most isolated hours bubbling up your throat. Was it worth it? The preything begins to pound its paws against your jugular, biting until it bursts from the inside out. It’s not enough, this isn’t enough. You’ve tried to twist and bend yourself in every way possible to stifle the butch in you, tried to use false equivalencies of gender to justify this prison you’ve placed yourself back in. Genderfluid, femme, woman-ish, maybe—no.

Butch, butch, butch, it roars at you with impatient need, howling like a father for his son. Butch, butch, butch, it hisses and spits to be heard. So your nails slice at your chest until your breasts come clean off. You start shoving chunks of the tissue down your tongue, swallowing mouthfuls until you gag. Your eyes flick back to the medicine cabinet. You swear you can see a faint outline of hair on your upper lip, beneath the gore smeared across your cheeks. A laugh spills out of you. Then another. You keep laughing, and you don’t stop until you’ve lost your voice.

Somehow, you finally feel home.