Fuck.
I've been stuck on what to do with Undertow, my collection of short stories. I've been rereading it, revising things here and there, trying to figure out why a few of the stories just aren't quite doing what I want them to do. And somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that maybe I'd gone a little too literal with one of them.
Which is a strange fucking problem to have when you're writing fiction.
For those of you who have known me in real life for a long enough time, you might remember an incident at Evangelos years ago. I was using the women's restroom when another woman came barging in, screaming at me and pounding on the stall door. A little while later, the bar owner decided to join the festivities, coming into the restroom and trying to act like some kind of tough guy.
It rattled the fuck out of me.
Up until that night, I'd read stories about transgender women being confronted in bathrooms. I'd seen the videos, read the comments, watched the arguments unfold across social media. But those things always seemed to happen somewhere else, to somebody else, in some town I'd never visited.
And then suddenly it was happening to me. Right here in my own fucking backyard.
I'm not going to revisit every detail of that night. I've written about it before, and there are parts of the experience I'm not interested in discussing publicly. What matters here is that the incident became the basis for a story in Undertow called Spaces.
I changed the character's name. Changed the bar's name. Changed the name of the little fucker who owned it.
And that was pretty much it.
I called it fiction, but if I'm being perfectly fucking honest, it wasn't much of a fictional story. It was a real experience wearing a fake mustache and introducing itself under an assumed name.
So, while reviewing the manuscript, I decided to do something different.
What if I stopped writing about what actually happened and started writing about what could have happened?
What if that night had gone differently? What if the fear, humiliation, and anger had pushed me past the point where I could simply walk away? What if I'd acted on the thoughts that were racing through my head in that moment?
What would the consequences have been?
Now we're getting somewhere.
And because I don't like writing stories that require readers to suspend every ounce of common sense they possess, I started researching. If my character were arrested in Santa Fe County, what would happen to her? Where would she be held? What would happen if she were convicted and sent to a New Mexico prison?
And, more specifically, what happens to transgender women when the state decides to take away their liberty?
Holy. Fucking. Hell.
I wasn't prepared for the emotional weight of that research.
I'm not going to get too far into personal biology here, because frankly, some things are nobody's fucking business. But biology, anatomy, gender identity, and the way correctional systems classify human beings become awfully relevant when you're talking about where somebody is going to be locked up.
And the more I read, the more I found myself confronting a possibility that made my fucking stomach turn.
A transgender woman can be placed in a men's correctional facility. The specific decisions depend on the jurisdiction, the facility, and its classification procedures, but the possibility is real.
And here's where this gets very fucking personal.
I've been on hormone therapy for more than twenty fucking years. I'm not going to give you a detailed inventory of my genitalia, because frankly, it's none of your goddamned business. But I will tell you this: my body has changed considerably over those twenty years. I haven't had bottom surgery, but I don't exactly have what most people would recognize as typical male anatomy, either.
And yet, when I started researching what might happen to me if I were incarcerated, I was confronted with the possibility that all those years, all those changes, and everything about the woman I've become could be reduced to a single question about what's between my fucking legs.
And that realization scared the absolute shit out of me.
Think about that for a moment.
A woman, locked inside a facility full of men, unable to leave, unable to choose who surrounds her, unable to simply walk away from somebody who decides she's an acceptable target.
And when I started imagining myself in that position, my heart sank straight through my fucking guts.
I was sitting there researching a fictional story, and suddenly I wasn't thinking about my fictional character anymore.
I was thinking about me.
I was thinking about what might have happened if that night at Evangelos had ended differently. I was thinking about being arrested, being placed in a cell, and discovering that the very people responsible for keeping me safe had put me somewhere I might have every reason to fear for my safety.
And I was damn near in tears.
Because what the actual fuck?
We talk endlessly in this country about liberty. About freedom. About the presumption of innocence. About the principle that the government must prove its case before it can punish somebody for a crime.
Those aren't supposed to be decorative fucking words.
They're supposed to mean something.
Now, obviously, the government can detain people before trial under certain circumstances. I'm not pretending otherwise. But pretrial detention is supposed to serve a legitimate purpose, not become an opportunity to expose somebody to danger simply because their existence doesn't fit neatly into a bureaucratic classification system.
And that's the part that bothers the fuck out of me.
Because being transgender doesn't stop being a reality when somebody gets arrested. The vulnerability doesn't disappear when the handcuffs go on. And whatever somebody is accused of doing, their basic humanity doesn't evaporate the moment the government takes custody of them.
We can argue about crime and punishment all fucking day. We can argue about accountability, personal responsibility, and what people deserve when they hurt somebody else.
But none of those arguments answers the question that's been sitting in my chest since I started researching this.
What responsibility does the government have to protect the people whose liberty it takes away?
Because once the state locks somebody up, that person no longer has the ordinary ability to protect herself by leaving. She can't choose another room, another building, another neighborhood. She can't decide she's had enough and go home.
The government has taken those choices away.
And with that power comes a fucking responsibility.
This isn't about asking for special treatment. It's about asking whether the people making these decisions have thought through what those decisions actually mean for the human beings who have to live with them.
Or whether we're just another inconvenient complication in a system that would rather shove everybody into one of two boxes and call the problem solved.
And here's the thing: I didn't start this research because I wanted to write about prison policy. I didn't sit down with some grand political message in mind.
I was trying to fix a fucking short story.
That's it.
I had a story that was too close to reality, and I wanted to give it a little more fiction. I wanted to explore what could have happened instead of simply documenting what did happen.
And somehow that creative exercise led me straight into a question about liberty, vulnerability, and the extraordinary power we hand to the government when we allow it to lock human beings in cages.
I don't know quite what to do with all the emotions this has stirred up.
Actually, that's bullshit.
I know exactly what I'm going to do.
I'm going to fucking write about it.
That's what I do. That's how I process the things that frighten me, infuriate me, break my heart, or leave me staring at the ceiling wondering how the fuck the world got this way.
And I think Spaces is going to become a very different story because of it.
Darker. More uncomfortable. A hell of a lot less literal.
And probably a whole lot more honest about the things that matter.
Because my goal with Undertow has never been to give readers a collection of pleasant little stories they can finish and immediately forget.
I want them uncomfortable. I want them questioning things they thought they understood. I want them closing the book, staring into the distance for a moment, and asking themselves one very specific question: What the actual fuck?
And if I can accomplish that, then maybe this story will finally become what it was supposed to be.
