the girl's guide to gutting a citrus
an “exposé” on cis women, grief, and detransitioning
there is a little story that i know. though it officially starts at the beginning of 2024, it escalates on the 12th of the same year’s december, during a drive to my childhood home from one of the best and loneliest dinners of my life.
“i don’t know, it’s been hard […] i’ve been talking with some other transmasculine folks lately, about mourning losing the relationships [cis] girls form with each other. it doesn’t feel they really see me the same way anymore and like, i don’t know.” but i do know. i feel excluded, i feel isolated. being the one trans person in a group of cis women is social suicide. i have tits and a voice that doesn’t drop down all the way, so i’m “woman” enough for you all to befriend, but too different to fully open up to. there’s this barrier between us, and you’re ignoring it, everyone’s ignoring it. these last few months have been hell, and when there’s no one else like me in this space to talk to, you guys leave me to go through it alone. but you’re my best friend, maybe you can help me figure it out, work with me to come up with a solution, just please—
my words are brushed off like the raindrops streaking down the passenger side window as she replies, “oh, yeah. i feel like [cis] men feel that way too, though.”
but i’m not a cis man. why would you compare me to one? you know i’m not a man at all. i must have told you a billion times that i’m a butch by now. do you know what that word means? do you even want to?
“but.. that’s different.” i’ve forgotten how to articulate my main point—that i lack community or real friendship in this space due to my rejection of cisheteropatriarchal womanhood—and my best friend loves to put me on the spot.
“how?” she keeps talking nonsense without waiting a second to actually listen, so i tune her out until she says this: “i just really hope you can get what you’re looking for in queer spaces.” because you won’t in ours, is what she means to add. “besides, the more i’ve gotten to know you, the more i see you as your authentic trans self.” you didn’t in the first place, when i told you who i was?
her words are so stereotypically cishet i’m not sure if i should laugh or cry. what i want to tell her in that moment is that there are no queer spaces to turn to. all of the queers who i share the same values with and might be willing to listen or love me are the same ones you and our other friends make fun of in our group chats, where no one else can see. how do i build community with the people we so clearly dislike when loyalty is the only thing that’s gotten me this far? but i don’t. i also don’t comment on how gross her attempts to analyze the situation or my words have made me feel. i just watch the rain continue to go down the car window, arms crossed as she keeps driving on down the highway.
the silence between us feels like a death of sorts, laced with a subtext that suggests a need for metamorphosis: things would be so much easier for you if you were a girl.
after months of conversations like these with our friends, i’m finally convinced they’re right. i vow to make myself detransition by the next time i see her. maybe she and the rest of these girls will finally let me in. i won’t be lonely anymore, and they won’t hide me from their families. the miserable thoughts make my stomach churn, but my mind insists they’re true. if i want to keep this best friend, if i want to live a better life, they need to be.
continuing to exist as i am will kill me.
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. […] 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.
an able-bodied, cis, often heterosexual (but does not necessarily have to be) girl, in her analysis of how queer liberation or disability justice interconnects with larger conversations about global solidarity movements, often creates dialogue that draws divisions between different revolutionary struggles. she’s typically given the benefit of the doubt when this happens. come on, what do cishets and ableds know? she just hasn’t been given the opportunity to learn. she can do better; she doesn’t know better. the violence she incites through the divide she establishes between the queers and disabled from the communities she claims to be fighting for and the larger marginalized masses that make up the majority of the people who are interested in struggling in solidarity with the global south largely goes unchecked. she is “just a girl,” after all, one who does not realize how she plays into the trope no doubt mocked in the song this trend about cis women making fun of their shortcomings originates from because it is easier to ignore the harm she enables than dismantle it for the greater cause.
you’re already in too deep by the time you’ve become aware of this narrative. like the roots of a citrus tree you never realized you had planted, your whole life has gotten entangled in a trap that, from the outside in, is the very opportunity past you would have killed for. it’s a sick thing, this conclusion. the world you love so dearly is sucking away your soul, and by the time that this occurs to you, you’ve already changed so much. you are cruel, calculating, and cowardly. being two-faced and a liar in the name of security has been taught to be second nature to you. gone are the queers you used to love, having left due to disgust at how much you’ve changed or been iced out because they keep asking you why you refuse to leave when it is so clear how much it hurts you to stay. it’s not one individual that are behind these issues in this world of yours, or two; the whole foundation is rotten. you’re pretty sure that you are rotten. and because you have no one else, you choose to survive at the expense of your morality. you squirrel away all the things you’ve witnessed being said when the collective thinks no one is looking not to compile into some sort of exposé, but so you can torture yourself with everything you’ve looked past. your internalized homophobia, fatphobia—all the worst things you can think of—have surged to the surface despite being worked through by a younger you. what you’ve done and let happen feel like deeper betrayals than anyone gives you credit for, even to this day.
you never give yourself the freedom to fantasize about jumping ship. you are what they call disciplined, principled (i.e., being loyal to a fault). so you? leaving? ha! a pipe dream. you’ve heard all the bad news, all the bad reviews from the queers who haven’t given up on you about these people, but you’re fascinated by the girlier things in life in a way that is divorced from your faggotry. you tell yourself it isn’t, though, that it has nothing to do with how many likes on your instagram stories you get when you’re all dolled up vs. when you’re just you, without all the feminine fanfare. this isn’t you regressing until you’re on the verge of detransitioning, you tell yourself. no, it’s a complex, nuanced exploration into learning how to be a transsexual who doesn’t give a fuck about their gender, because being one of those trans people, the ones who care, has not served you well in this world thus far. you’re sexier when you line your eyes with sharp strokes of black liner and wear pretty little skirts with lace on the trim. you turn heads and people chase after you in public. you put the “BANG!” in bangladesh, or however the joke goes.
the last time your best friend said it, the one-liner went a little like this: a giggle, a hesitant pause, and then the punchline. you felt so uncomfortable in your skin you nearly tore off your skirts and flung yourself out the nearest window.
during this time, you are handled the way citrus fruits are when they’re ripening, with tenderness and care, in anticipation for the harvest to come. you don’t have a worry in the world. but there’s this problem that keeps you up at night: it seems all of the things eating you alive are catching up to you. it make you distracted, disinterested, disengaged. people begin to notice, but you can’t help yourself. something has gone awry in your great plan to inch back into cisheteropatriarchal womanhood, and you can’t pinpoint the moment you started to struggle with pretending.
except you do. it happened during a january dinner party too bourgeois for your taste, back when your life was dictated by a father who refused to differentiate between love and control. your eye was constantly on the clock, everything was too loud, and out of nowhere, your best friend says this:
“[once i get married and have kids], junaid, you’ll be the uncle they go to when they get in trouble..” you can't remember the rest of the sentence, it trails off in your memory. but the gist of it gives you pause.
once she gets married and has kids? does this girl not realize how different your lives will be once you’ve both moved on to bigger things? would her family even tolerate your presence at her wedding? or around her children? what if you feed them the “western practice” that is your queerness? this girl will have a home in the suburbs with an upper-middle class husband, driving a flashy car and hosting parties just like the one you’re at, while you.. well, you don’t know. but you probably won’t ever own a home as nice as hers. or make as much money as she will. in fact, there’s a high chance you might just die. disabled trans lesbians that will inevitably have to escape their abusive parents before getting forcibly married off to the first man willing rarely—
but wait. you aren’t any of those things anymore. right? you’re beautiful now, on the cusp of announcing your return to cisgender sisterhood to these same people. you’ve tried hiding the physical symptoms of your disability the best you can. maybe you really are just lazy. you’re not thinking about leaving your family behind anymore. you can maybe tolerate whatever suitor ma and baba pick for you, try to lead your best lesbian life in secret, or you can figure out a lavender marriage to buy you more time. hormone replacement therapy is a foreign, faraway dream. your body in its current state is the currency that grants your acceptance, which is already conditional and shaky as is.
so if you’re burying the most marginalized parts of yourself, why do your best friend’s words bother you?
the answer comes in the form of a queer that ducks through the front door, strolling into the living room where you’re sitting with all the swagger of someone unbothered by how their presence makes the cishets around you shift in discomfort. you’re terrified of being a topic of gossip for your friends if you get up to say hello, so you watch this queer out of the corner of your eye. you multitask between continuing the conversation you’re still having with your best friend and wondering why you can’t just quiet the voice inside of you that isn’t satisfied with this new life that you’ve been granted.
another hour passes before the queer eventually meanders their way around to you. the timing feels perfect, almost straight out of a movie. you lock eyes and start chatting like you’re not two acquaintances who always manage to miss each other at your common events, but as if you’ve known them for years. it’s natural, how the conversation flows. you talk about queer praxis like you haven’t spent the last year learning how to make yourself more palatable for cisheterosexual tastes. the girls you came here with fade into characters from a distant reality, even though they’re on the next couch over.
you bump into another queer who walked in with the one you’re talking to and suddenly you two are also happily chatting, swapping words while trying to ignore how your best friend—who is in earshot, as you’ve accidentally interrupted her conversation with this other person—is gawking a little, trying to parse language from a world she is not part of, from a world she’s never had the desire to really get to know.
everyone follows you out to your car a few minutes later, huddled in a circle while your car warms up because they all want to savor your presence for a minute longer. in this moment, you truly believe you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted: good friends, a bright future, and a rapidly shrinking waist. but still, you’re not satisfied.
you’ve felt this way one time before. it was at the end of a halloween-themed outing, when these same people cheered for you after hearing that an article of yours got published. that piece was pretty similar to this one, honestly—except you’d intentionally left out your queerness in your analysis. your creative cowardice made you cringe at their joy, even though you knew it’d been genuine.
it hurts, this unhappiness. you thought doing this would save your life. it hasn’t. you’re pretty sure this hiding and pretending is going to be the death of you.
you ignore it. it’s more nonsense you can’t afford to consider. you’re being ungrateful. you’re don’t want to know what your dissatisfaction might mean.
you notice that the voice inside of your head has piped down for the night during the drive home. it surprises you, how little it took for it to be satisfied. maybe this detransitioning thing is doable if you have some queers in your life. you promise yourself to pursue the queers from that night in full force and reach back out to the ones in their circles you’ve already befriended. you haven’t given up on your detransition, but you suddenly think there is a way to reconcile these two lives, the queer and cishet ones.
except you can’t. except you’re trying to hold back tears when the queer you chatted about praxis with asks you the hard questions, the uncomfortable questions, posed to make you reassess your relationship with these cishets. except you end up sobbing to another queer that you’ve already been friends with for some time, confessing your worst feelings while they sit and listen in an elementary school parking lot, both of you high enough that your loyalty to the ones who have reared you since you were a revolutionary seedling goes fuzzy around the edges.
except your best friend, the one from the party and december drive, shuts you down when you try to explain all these feelings about stifling your butchness. she doesn’t really try to hear you, she just immediately jumps to problem solving. you can’t remember exactly what she said to you anymore, but it was along the lines of something that encouraged you to go to someone else, someone with “more experience” with or who “knew more” about these kinds of issues. but she was the one who finally pushed you to detransition! of course you want to talk to her about it, make her see why what she said hurt you. it makes you want to scream. i love you, i care for you, so why can’t you listen? why can’t you learn? why aren’t you willing to listen? why aren’t you willing to learn? it’s taken you weeks to swallow your difficulties with being vulnerable, and this is the response she’s given you.
except one day you’re in public and struggling to rise from a chair after another disability flare-up has reminded everyone around you that you’re physically disabled. this other cis girl you love loudly asks one of your queer friends if they can take care of you, if they can “keep you safe,” like you’re a dog that she has to worry about and look after. once she leaves, comrades you didn’t think were listening rush to your side and even more text you later that night, worried about her treatment of you. this apparently isn’t the first time she’s said something like this in front of other people. it’s just the first time you’ve noticed.
your confusion after this still haunts you. too many people were concerned for you. you know you’re not making this up, so did she ever care? according to everyone present, it didn't seem like it. your gut instinct for the first day or so was to defend her—she was worried, she had other places to be, she just wanted to make sure you would get home alright—but you’ve explained her and your best friend’s behavior away in your head for so long something makes you eventually stop.
except you try to express these concerns to her and you’re not met with an apology for the accidental harm, but denial and assertions that it wasn’t her intention. you’re accused of “harboring your emotions,” of implicit deceit. according to her, your attempts to separate your cishet world from your queer one have come out in your texts and your discomfort must be sorted out on a quicker timeline (i.e., one that is more convenient for her, despite the fact you only took three days to bring it up). you’ve been trying to quietly distance yourself from your personal relationship while you stress out about the dilemma of your detransition, sure, but suddenly the whole situation has been spun so you are the real problem, even though she hadn’t communicated her issues until you approached her. you feel like the shitty boyfriend she’s taking all her anger out on, except you know you’re not either of these things. this interaction tears your mind apart so badly you do your best to avoid talking to her about anything that bothers you again.
your best friend and this cis girl’s words rip apart your insides like nails sinking deep into your bright yellow fruit flesh, disregarding the fact you’re still hanging from the tree. you’ve been violated and too roughly handled, but you’re trying so hard to cling to the branch you’re on that you’re desperate to turn a blind eye to everything that hurts you. you can’t afford to have any more rips in your skin; you’re terrified you’ll bleed out sooner than you can accept.
besides, it’s not like they meant to do these things. it’s not like anyone explicitly told you to detransition or that they preferred it when you were feminine. they’re just girls, they’d never hurt you like a cis man would. they’re blameless, eternal victims of subjugation in this cisheteropatriarchal world. and while it is true that cis men are more capable of the standard, more expected forms of violence you experience on a day-to-day, you learn with time that cis women who have not taken the time to expand their feminist praxis are not much safer to trust, either.
the danger of in dynamics with cis women who do not struggle in solidarity with other oppressed genders lies in this refusal to grasp the power dynamic between them and other misogyny affected individuals and marginalized genders (i.e., trans people like you). they fail to grasp the “cis” part of cisheteropatriarchy, base their analyses of the world in a gender binary they understand is colonial and white supremacist in origin but still uphold as truth in their feminism. they will not see your disability, trans identity, and subversion of masculinity outside of manhood for what it is: a target on your back that invites prejudice from everyone you cross. they do not understand the importance of addressing their internalized biases in your relationship with them, or how they present you to those external to this group.
in the middle of all this chaos, you spiral so badly into cisheteropatriarchal womanhood again that you have a panic attack while getting ready one morning, knees pulled up to your breasts while you rock back and forth on your bathroom floor. tears mixed with mascara flow down your face; you’re wailing like you’re being torn in two while on the phone with a childhood friend who lives on the west coast now. you try to imagine she’s cupping your face in her hands and pressing her forehead against yours.
“oh, habibi,” she says quietly, sounding as wounded as you feel. this is the same girl who told you in high school how much she admired your assertiveness when it came to your pronouns. look how far you’ve fallen. “i’m so, so sorry, my dear. no one should be making you feel like this.”
“it’s fine, it’s fine,” you choke out, “these are good people, good friends. i got all dressed up when we went thrifting yesterday and they loved it. you should’ve seen their faces—i looked so beautiful. it’s finally working. they care about me, really. they’ll be so excited when i break the news that i’m a girl again. i just have to work up the nerve to tell them. it’ll all be fine. really.”
she hesitates for a second. “sweetheart,” she starts slowly, drawing out the word, “they might care about you, sure, but do they care for you? because those are two different things, my love. and i’m not hearing much of the second in what you’re telling me.”
“they.. i.. i’m happy,” you say, trying to mask the nausea that bubbles up when you tell her that. it’s too late to lie, but you’d be damned if you don’t make her believe you. “yes, yes, yes. i'm happy.”
“are you? because it seems like you’re eating yourself alive to please everyone else.”
“i…”
“cis women don’t have panic attacks over trying to force themselves into femininity, junaid. i love you, but i don’t think you’re a woman. you just don’t want to be alone.”
fuck. she knows. your illusions have caught up to you. her words make you cry until it’s too difficult to breathe.
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.
it takes you a while, but you eventually accept your butchness again. it saddens you to give up on your attempts to conform and detransition, but trying to kill the butch inside of you would be gutting the citrus right on the tree. such a fate would be so much worse than having those little holes clawed into you by your friends.
eventually, you find joy in your refusal to detransition. you fall in love with who you are and relearn the commitment to butchness again. this blend of gentle strength with rebellious masculinity fits you like a glove. you are tender, you are kind, and you are notoriously stubborn.
you are butch.
there are a million ways that i could explain the ending to this story. where do i even begin? the fleeing of an abusive household underpinning this whole struggle to detransition; the misunderstandings; words so harsh i was barely given time to breathe; the confessionals in the pitch black of a runaway trap, the digital evidence submitted by third parties in the worst hours of the night, proving i was a pattern, not the problem? the goading, the cornering, the pushing until the butch i had kept locked away for so long came out roaring in full force? the intersections of ableism, lesbophobia, and transphobia; the double standards; the dilemma between leaving and losing myself? the immediate grief of severing, you don’t abandon your chosen family like this, the anguish that you revealed to the wrong person after she, days after you cut ties, crossed your boundaries yet again?
it’s so much, it often feels like too much. but despite what the subjects of this piece might claim, this story needs to be written, it needs to be told.
the end of it all eases in during a grace period in which you feel like you’re able to reconcile your butchness with this cishet reality. of course, it’s a deluded final gasp for air and waters down your disgust at how your cis friends have pushed you to the edge of detransitioning. you’re still shying away from admitting their role in all of this because doing so will drive you mad. you’re acting cruel again, even though you swore off your old habits not too long ago. it’s easier to regress, though, when you’re doing it for someone else.
during this time, you become a little too aware of the cis girl from before, the one you’ve been tiptoeing around since her reaction to your attempts to communicate. you notice how she giggles a beat too long when you make a comment that isn’t particularly funny and how she goes out of her way to tease you even though you’ve stopped initiating banter with her a long time ago. you see her eyes everywhere, so you write about them until you’ve scrawled out pages upon pages of poetry in her name. the thought of her slams into your butch defiance and quiets it in a way that sends you spinning. you’ve never been good at figuring out the line between platonic relationships and well, more. it’s when you sit down to think about how you two spoke to each other, all of the tension, and the tumultuous nature of your dynamic, that you realize she’d crossed that line much earlier than you had noticed.
you aren’t the one to come to this realization first. some queers would later tell you they thought you two were dating or had a relationship they weren’t privy to. you also aren’t the one who comes to the conclusion she might be more than just another cishet woman you wouldn’t have given a second thought about had you not met her the way you did; it was a queer you had spilled your heart out to who suggested that she wasn’t entirely straight due to anecdotal evidence.
you’re uncomfortable with this crossing of boundaries, the blurring between friend and fetish from her end. it isn’t the first time a cis woman has done this to you, but it’s the one that hurts the most. she’d always been a weak spot of yours, the one who dictated the direction of your friendship. you didn’t question her. you always followed.
you wonder in the present if your choice to paint this narrative as a tragedy of mutual yearning, rather than a closeted girl’s homoerotic experiment gone wrong with the lesbian who never wanted it, is because you can’t stomach the implications of the latter. you’re not sure if it matters. she’ll always uniquely get under your skin. no one else could have caused you this kind of damage.
you wish she was irrelevant to you.
your reaction to this is twofold: first, you’re surprised. you’ve had whirlwind flings with more lesbians you know what to do with since your last major breakup the year prior, but nothing like this, nothing that has driven you to write poetry so beautiful that disappointed femmes tell you how lucky the subject is to be on your mind. second, you’re.. well, you don’t know. resigned, almost? it’s been a long time since you’ve been able to be in service to someone else. butch chivalry seeps into every part of your life, and it does with her. you’re content with the friendship you have, but being devoted to and head-over-heels for her seems to be inevitable. shouldn’t you be, if you wrote those poems? the answer has to be yes.
she loves it, this new attention you pay her. and you’re careful, so careful, to treat her with the tenderness you wish you’d gotten from others. you put her needs before yours, speak with newfound sweetness, and try to predict her every whim. she’s beautiful and sensitive, a hopeless romantic with a temper you find endearing. you love her company and her voice leaves you feeling warm in the quietest way. regardless of what does or doesn’t happen between you two, her happiness is what matters most to you now. you put aside all the anguish she put you through only a month ago, because surely no one who truly meant to hurt you would send you a voice note flaunting her british accent in the middle of the night.
you see how hard she tries to be something she is not, to fit into this cishet world that was not made with either of you in mind. it reminds you a little too much of you. your friends inquire again about her very public displays of ableism and you defend her. you’ve fallen for her, this cis girl who hides behind cisheteropatriarchal aesthetics and fictional romances to keep her queer heart from being exiled by the community you share. it’s painful to witness, but you tell everyone that she is gentle when she wants to be, how you see who she really is, who she can be when no one else is looking. you wonder whether she’d try to step out of the prison she’s placed herself in should this go in the direction your heart desires but your mind knows better than to fully hope for, or if she’ll hide you in an effort to protect her image. you’re not sure you care. you’d rather continue being her secret than nothing at all.
you let her put up walls between you and the queers you’ve befriended during the subsequent few weeks. she’s not great at articulating her emotions in a way that does not come off as callous. you take on the role of mediating her problems with your loved ones and serve as her first line of defense when they raise their issues with her. over time it impacts your relationships and perceptions of your character. your friends try to emphasize that it’s okay, she can fight her own battles, you don’t need to do this for her. you keep telling them that you need to do this, because really, you want to. you need to. you’d do anything for her.
“i’m worried about you, bhai,” your bangali brother says one night when you’re on the roof of a parking garage, sharing a cigarette. he blows out a stream of smoke and looks up at the night sky. “this doesn’t feel right.”
“please don’t lecture me again,” you reply and pluck the cigarette from his hand. your voice is light and teasing. “you wouldn’t know love if it walked up to you on the street and introduced itself.”
“yes, yes, i know, my dating life is in the gutter. but you’re losing yourself again, and that scares me. i mean, the last time we spoke, you said you were uncomfortable with how she was making fun of you. has she truly changed so much in such little time?”
the flame of the cigarette trickles closer to the butt, pricking your fingers with sharp heat. “find a woman who takes your breath away when she talks to you about her favorite period pieces, and then come lecture me.”
he shoots you a worried look but doesn’t try to push again. he just takes the cigarette back from you and finishes it in a slow, heavy drag.
the hunt comes to us all in fragments. there was the numbing cold; sweaty flesh dragged across sharp roots; snow so thick that if you stopped running you’d sink right through; a lake larger than life, at my world’s end; desperation so tangible it’d make your mouth water; a delicate gold chain from which the heart of desires unspoken dangled; exhaustion seeping into muscle like a lullaby; prey who knew its appeals for mercy would tear the poor thing apart. the slowing of pace, the consideration of how to be consumed might be the only way to be loved; a dream i had once, a father bouncing an unruly child on his hip, soon to be shredded by the ones who bore me. […] so swallow me whole, i said, but at least permit me to martyr myself in the name of my struggle.
everything explodes quicker than you can process it.
again, it’s hard to figure out where to start. she’s stressed; you set her off with a hastily written text sent while you’re multitasking between driving, eating for the first time in days, and trying to put out another related fire after it kept you up for the entire previous night. after weeks of refusing to acknowledge how distant you’ve gotten, your (former) best friend tries to assuage the tension between you and this cis girl but instead winds up being the tinder for a fire you know you cannot put out without someone else to bear witness to the disaster. this sends the cis girl you love over the edge. she thinks she’s lost control of the narrative she’s carefully tried to maintain. you become a swindler, the ungrateful traitor she hates to have cared for so much overnight.
she and your (former) best friend assert that you have placed your own feelings above the sacrifice necessary for revolutionary struggle. if only you understood how much i’ve sacrificed to still be here, you think, but you don’t dare say it in the moment. these two would never acknowledge how your choice to continue existing as you are has you dealing with the material consequences of resisting the same institutions of oppression they uphold.
the girl you love’s temper isn’t endearing anymore. instead it unleashes your butch defiance, a stubborn refusal to back down when you know you should not. you do not agree to her demands as easily as you have during the grace period and prior; you hold your ground. there are certain things you wished you saved for a proper conversation, but in the heat of the moment, when she’s going on about how important it is to not obstruct “what needs to be said” and the ways you’ve supposedly villainized her—despite how she has certainly villainized you—you no longer are able to sweeten your tone in submission. the strength you pushed down for far too long comes out swinging, ready to protect you from all the hurt she and this world have inflicted.
then comes the horror of it all: she goes from someone you loved to a stranger you desperately hope still has some warmth beneath the ironic cruelty of the words she spits. you cannot bring yourself to look this individual so unfamiliar to you in the eye when you see her in public. this enrages her further. her responses cite how there’s a million things wrong with you. not once does she question whether the harm she’s caused you has played a role in her grievances.
you think about how you tested the imbalance in your dynamic once. she was always the one to call the shots, never the other way around. after the single instance you tried to even the scales, she immediately called you out on it. you think about how many double standards there are, what she can do and what you cannot, and how she accuses you of assigning malicious intent to her behavior while doing the same. it’s hypocritical and you finally see it for what it is: cis, able-bodied women, emboldened by their entitlement, choosing to violate you in alarmingly parallel ways to the cis men who oppress them.
your brain feels at war with itself. you don’t sleep for almost an entire week, sick to your stomach over this argument that you never wanted to have. your loved ones have to sit you down and gently explain how gaslighting functions like you’re a child who has no clue how dynamics of this nature work. you reflect and realize, horrified, that this is not the first time she has done this to you. it is also not the first time your (former) best friend has enabled this sort of behavior either.
you think you’re losing your mind until you receive evidence proving that this girl is not doing this because you are special or a beloved asset she needs to desperately keep in line. learning about this truth was done in secret too, late at night during hours she did not demand you be accounted for. forget her heart, her cruelty is not isolated, it is not an intimate act of forbidden affection. you are common, mundane, a citrus ripped violently from your tree, slammed onto a kitchen table, and ripped into with your harvester’s bare thumbs for sheer pleasure, nothing more.
you briefly consider caving into her demands, but the outcome of doing so, you realize in terror, is that you’d detransition for good. you’d need to apologize for all the things you haven’t done wrong, beg her to forgive you, and throw your butchhood under the bus in hopes that she’d forget about this in due time. you’d have to stop struggling to leave your abusive household and revert back to the bangali upper-middle class virgin sunni socialite this cishet world wants you to be so badly. you’d live out the rest of your life lavishly in a house larger than you could ever need with a charming, sensitive husband who worships the ground you walk on and is just as beautiful as you. after living so much of your life on the outside of everything, you could be a respectable, pious muslim woman who has it all. you’d keep this cishet world and these friends in your life even post graduation. you’d even be able to keep loving her.
it’s a nice fantasy, if you’re being honest. it’s also a dream you know she’s jealous that you have in the palm of your hand. it’s the life she so desperately wants it for herself, the one that has not been handed to her on a silver platter, the one she has had to fight for against all odds to even get a chance to pursue. and yet.. you can’t fathom choosing it. you know others would kill to be in your position. she’d kill to be in your position. but you still can’t swallow the idea of following through.
really? you’d throw this away, throw me away? she screams in your head, frustrated, not willing to understand. why? what’s the matter with you?
because you can’t live a lie for the rest of your life. this future she craves for you, and by extension, herself, comes at the cost of your soul. everything that makes you the person you yearn to love would cease to exist. you’ve already fought so hard to not detransition and barely gotten out with your life. you also know you won’t be able to make this decision later on, not once children and a loveless marriage are on the line. no, letting her have her way is not something you can do. no matter how much you love her, you need to love yourself more.
once you’ve decided that giving in is not an option, you consider leaving. it’s a possibility that’s been pushed by too many people to count after they comprehend the reality of her and your (former) best friend’s behavior. you’ve immediately shut it down each time someone’s suggested it in the past. no, i can’t, i won’t, how could i? do you have any idea of how big of a betrayal that would be? i can fix this, i can figure something out. leaving isn’t an option. i can’t hurt any of them like that. they’re my family.
once again, it’s the west coast friend that manages to shock some sense into you.
“you talk so much about your fear of being a traitor and what it means to be in principled struggle,” she says after you’ve spent an hour explaining how you pulled an all-nighter writing a mountain of a message in defense of yourself. you’re about to launch into a monologue about the importance of staying grounded in this cishet reality through the context of your political framework when she asks, “but have these people not betrayed you by avoiding accountability? my friend, how can you be in principled struggle with individuals who refuse to actually struggle with you, for you, and deconstruct the harm they’ve caused you for the greater good of the movement?”
you take a long time to respond, much longer than someone else might take to reply in a normal conversation. your friend does not pressure you, she does not try to speak again. she just waits for your answer.
“i can’t,” you say quietly an hour later, a piece of your heart crumbling away.
you’re speeding down the highway on borrowed time as you pack up all the final ties you have to these people you’ve loved so dearly. you make preparations to hand off the things they’ll need back with someone entirely unaffiliated, who has no clue about what you’re really doing. you have one of your favorite queers hold your hand while you send goodbye messages at rapid-fire speed to everyone but the cis girl and your (former) best friend. once it’s done, you chuck your phone into the trunk of your car and wail into the chest of this queer you’ve come to love. they run their fingers through your hair and murmur sweet nothings.
“it’s going to be okay, i promise,” they say sweetly when your crying dies down. “give it time, you’ll see.”
your fists thud lightly against their shoulders. you want to take their words to heart, but this mourning will not leave you for a long time.
“this doesn’t have to be goodbye if you don’t want it to be. i don’t think any of this is final, junaid. there’s a lot here that can be fixed.”
if repair is on the table, though, it won’t be because of anything you do. it’s up to the ones who gave you too many reasons to leave and never expressed how much they wanted you to stay. you’ve been gutted, your pulp and juices staining the kitchen counter. you know you cannot do much more. you will not be the one to undo the devastation that has been wrought by hands that never belonged to you.
this is out of your control.
these days, you’re free in a way you could have never imagined before. you’ve escaped your abusive household; your appearance is authentic to your butchness. though there are struggles, you’re falling in love with life again.
weeks go by, and the memories of the loss you’ve endured catches up to you. in the background, your family has gone ballistic over your disappearance, hiring private investigators and blowing up the inboxes of you and anyone else they can scramble to tie to you. you’ve watched old friends who have gone through this exact turmoil die in the name of their family’s honor too, once it’s become evident to their relatives that they refuse to conform. you spend a lot of time making preparations for this potential outcome, saying your goodbyes and going through with the things you know you’ll have wished you’d done once this fate that seems so inevitable catches up to you.
but then a few days pass. then some more. you begin to feel alright. waiting for death seems like an unpleasant way to live out your days, so you write your farewell letter just in case. it does remarkably well, circulated in its physical form in offline spaces you never expected it would be. your words are more loved than you previously understood. even though it makes you cringe to look at the letter once you get a better hold on your panic, your friends insist that it's the best thing you’ve written.
you have blessed me with queerness as liberation, a test that exposes the corruption rotting the hearts of others who claim to be in service to you. they declare you make no mistakes while deeming me deviant in the same breath, tell me my role has been divinely determined. for the longest time, i felt so much rage that you didn’t make me the woman so many wished i was. what kind of test could this possibly be? but i understand it now. this material hardship you have thrust upon me is the resistance that has pushed me to devote my soul to something bigger than i could have possibly envisioned for myself. i understand the prophet (ﷺ), i understand my role, i understand you; what an honor you’ve bestowed upon me, this queerness.
“i don’t know if i’m allowed to keep writing,” you confess to one of your current best friends on the phone while scrolling through your newest piece, a poem about girls and rabbits and men and wolves inspired by your butch brother’s femme. “it feels weird to write a whole goodbye and then continue on as normal.”
this best friend isn’t taking any of your nonsense. “wasn’t the whole point of creating that was to ensure you could continue writing? i don’t see how moving on undermines the purpose of that letter.”
“it doesn’t?”
“no. you don’t have to live out the time you have left as a ghost, dude.”
a ghost. it’s a beautiful gift, his advice. his words stick with you as you sort your life together, figure out who you are and what you want to be in the quiet of your new home.
you also think about the cishet world you left behind and the people who still live in it. looking back, they seem like characters in a book you never asked to be written into. you think about the forgiveness you granted them while in the throes of certain death. you wonder if you take it back now, as you’re trying to learn how to live, not survive, for the first time in your life. there’s a lot of things you wish you were able to change, but there’s also a lot of things you know that needed to play out the way it had so you might get to where you are in this moment.
no, you don’t regret doing what you have in this frantic scramble to ensure all your loose ends are tied up before the end. everyone around you is a myriad of contradictions, riddled with inconsistencies and complexity that cannot always be rooted out with critical analysis. it’s not fair to try and hold yourself to that standard either. you’re going through grief twofold, of leaving two different families who were your world until they couldn’t be. so you don’t try to. you just keep living.
for the first time since birth, my life would belong to me, and no one else.
this morning is peaceful. you roll over in bed, acknowledge the silence that fills your new home, and get out, rubbing your eyes as you stumble out of your room and into the kitchen. a friend who had been visiting you on a trip did your dishes last night as a final act of love before heading home. they’ve left a copy of the new york war crimes on the breakfast table and some of those hemp cigarettes they tease you for liking so much. you make yourself a cup of tea and sit down for the morning.
it’s funny, you swear you can hear the people you’ve left behind somewhere down the hall. they excitedly chat among themselves as they get closer to your door. you can almost picture a woman perched on the chair opposite you, her eyes crinkling with joy as you tell her a joke.
“recite that poem again, jaan,” she giggles as you lean over to kiss her cheek and rise to pack her a lunch for work. “the one about the tiger prince.”
you do so happily as you move around the kitchen. she eventually gets up too, wrapping her arms around your waist and resting her head on your shoulder. her cheek warms the soft skin of your neck. she murmurs about how wonderful it is to be loved by a poet and peppers kisses down your shoulders.
you’re safe, you realize. after years of running from everything, you feel happy. you are finally afforded the opportunity to be, to stay. you are finally at peace.
you have been gutted, sure. but now you can at last be reared anew.
final words:
this piece was a pain in the ass to write but my god, i’m so happy it’s finally published.
i started writing this story in mid may and refused to finish it for weeks, believing it was wrong for me to go through with putting the last seven months into words. aren’t you being cruel? what if you get misconstrued again? what if the wrong people see? what about all the things you didn’t include? my art is often what helps me process my emotions. i believed if i got this out, i could finally move on—but i couldn’t at the time, which must have meant i was irreparably broken by the choice to leave. my grief made me avoidant, which was something i wasn’t used to; i beat myself up for it.
the joke is i began to heal when i wasn’t even looking. sitting and letting myself feel all of the emotions that come with losing people i thought i’d be tied to for the rest of my life is what let me get to where i am today. by beginning to accept what happened, i found myself able to write again. and when i came back to the girl’s guide to gutting a citrus, i made it a point to ensure this “exposé” wasn’t one at all, but a send off to a chapter of my life i never thought i’d have to bury.
to the friends who read this article over and over as i obsessed over which words went where: thank you for your patience, the late nights listening to me cry while you read my rough drafts, and for keeping me sane at rock bottom. your support means more than i can ever express in writing. to the readers who have watched me struggle through the worst period of my life: you are the reason i chose to publish this here, instead of pitching it to another publication. i will never find an audience as loving as you.
and to those that this is about—the ones i’ve left out and the ones whose words i’ve included alike: there are parts of this you’ll hate, or make you feel embarrassed, angry, and uncomfortable. but i didn’t write this to get a rise out of you. if that was the case, i would’ve identified you in more explicit terms. no, this piece was for myself and no one else. call me whatever you like, spread whatever rumors you need to get over what i’ve done. it doesn’t matter to me anymore. i’ve already forgiven you and myself.
just know that i am free, so free that if you knew how much love comes from this sort of liberation, you’d be glad this has brought me peace.