short story: deathclocked

CN: This is something new for the blog, a piece of actual fiction. I was inspired. I am not actually a blonde ex-Polish trans hitwoman.

I strike at his throat with knuckled fist. I move the arm up to block, programming the motion before even it has a chance to happen. I’ll also step aside and put my knee between his legs. Then either head butt him or bring my elbow down in his face. I don’t know yet. As a child, I never ever fought. The thought of striking back was worse. It would have made me like them, and even then I knew I feared that. Better to run away, or else to let them. They wanted me to strike back, I know that now. If I had, they would have known I was like them, and we would have been friends. And I would have been something worse than being the nothing that I was. In a sense, they were so persistent because they were concerned for me, and perhaps scared as well – my existence as an oddity raised the potential things could have been different for them, too. We all fear the thought we might not be who and what we need to be, and it drives hatred of the strange all too often.

Ironic then that now I fight so effortlessly. It does not feel like aggression. It feels like stretching out. It feels like singing out loud. I miss that very much, but as time went by, it became less and less comfortable to hear myself, especially resonating in skull. Practicing martial arts, any kind, feels freeing. I feel present and moving and unbound by everything else. I decide my movement beforehand and execute it. If I am struck, I will be hurt, and accepting that makes it something I am not afraid of. In the training ring I don’t feel or express anger, and my training mates accept that. When I fight for real, like now, they don’t expect me to strike. In some ways, that is the point. It is because they don’t expect it that I feel at peace being the one initiating. And ending it.

The man in front of me, I think of him as Boss Man, he wears sports gear slick enough for clubbing and laid back enough no-one will think he is gay or anything. God forbid. Sweatpants showing boxers. Tattoos, expensive wrist watch. He didn’t have to queue to get into this club, which already sets him apart from 999 of 1000 people anywhere. There are several ways in which each of us stand out so. He and I share some, including, for me in recent years at least, spending significant time in the company of organized criminals. Boss Man is a criminal organizer, and I can only imagine this is why he passed the doorman directly whereas I stood in line. This place started as a gay club and in many ways still is, men give each other blow jobs among the smoky labyrinths that are the chill out area, the beat of a DJ I don’t recognize but do like there in the background like a storm. Boss Man is the type of the leather bear doorman no more than I am in my skimpy sundress, but either he has the money or the fear capital from being a known gang leader that he gets in anyway. Even so, he still passes through the coat check, which means he has no weapon tonight and no body armour. Otherwise typically he does, and this is why I planned to take him down in here tonight. I too am unarmed, but as I now set out to demonstrate, this need not mean much.

I got close enough in the otherwise empty passage, so that first strike goes fine. He staggers, but he’s been boxing; now he goes back and into something like stance. He’ll strike next. Or will he? He backs up and stares at me. I followed him in here, when he was going to snort or inject I assume, or make a phone call. But when I did, he leered at me, smiling as I approached. Maybe he had not expected to, but he was fine with it, up until the point where I struck. There’s enough of a code that he saw my following him as safe. It’s what a girl would do if she was aware of his status and wanted him to share something of his – drugs, kisses, cock, recognition in some circles, though I don’t know exactly which one. This city has several separate gang environments and they are not all hanging out. “My” criminals are part of other networks than his are. More to the point, “my” criminals live in little circles of salt surrounding a few people who also post on TOR-accessible truly anonymous forums.

Boss Man is an awful person. I know this because I read some of the police reports on things that happened with some girls who spent some time with him. None went to trial, and a few years back they stopped coming because none of them would risk filing one. This isn’t why I’m here seeking him out. I’m not a vigilante, I just checked that before I decided to pursue the contract on him. Back in the old days, there were brokers who could connect clients and contract killers anonymously, for a cut. Apparently. They still exist, now they too are on the dark net. It works like a betting service, using crypto currencies and everything. Someone puts out a contract on a mark by anonymously depositing the prize with the broker. The broker verifies the money is legit and makes a bet on when the mark will die. Whoever comes closest wins the money, also anonymously. In theory someone could “kill steal” if they witness a contract killing, but the system works well enough. I was spending a lot of time on the dark web.

This also means that in principle a mark can know there’s a contract on them. But in reality, most people where some shadowy figure want them dead will be just like Boss Man, a career criminal who is not all that computer savvy but rather very invested in his offline social network. I have no idea who wants him dead, I just looked into him enough to see if it was at all possible, and also on whether he has any redeeming traits that would make me feel guilty for it. I’ve cashed in contracts on people who were not gangsters too, some domestic abusers mostly. Still no idea on the client. Boss Man is just always paranoid, when on the streets he has a gun. His driver keeps that for him now I guess. If I guess closest for when he’s dead, that’s about 40K worth of bitcoins. The call was out for six months already. So either there aren’t so many assassins around who’d take it, or some did and failed for whatever reason. I’ve tried and given up with several marks, sometimes others got them later. No idea on which other, either. I don’t think I know any other contract killers, but then again, would I even know?

The thought strikes me that I should make a smartwatch app that bets on my time of death should my pulse stop, in case I find anyone contracting me. That way at least my death can be my own kill. But honestly, if my actual identity ended up there, something already is wrong. No one should know who I am. Heh. They’d have to use my deadname, since the road to a legal name change in my country of citizenship is… long. How fucking appropriate. Ha ha. Like cancer, fun for the whole family. I literally would have to sue my parents, which means I’d have to meet them again. It’s been seven years now. They’re still around in Krakow, I know, and my little brother hasn’t moved out yet. He and I still talk every now and then. I wonder how he’s going to make it.

Boss Man isn’t going to shout, is he? Not that it makes all that much difference in this loud environment. No. He needs to do this himself or he’ll lose face. He stares at me incredulously, already pretty coked up I guess, and leaps at me, all 95 kilo of muscle and bone and Axe bodyspray. I’m in the motion, I sidestep and rotate. Detachedly, I wonder again what precisely is wrong with me. I don’t think I’m a sociopath. Is that even possible for me? If I were then surely I wouldn’t have all these social anxieties, or feelings of inadequacy, and I wouldn’t end up crying over youtube clips where little ugly fruits find other little ugly fruit friends. I do have empathy, for all that everyone tried to grind it out of me, growing up. I couldn’t cry for years and years, it took me doubling the recommended dosage to get there finally. Now, it’s not so much a matter on if something will make me cry, but when. I used to simply be unable. Now I cannot decide the “if”, but I can delay it if I have to. There has to be something that I’m processing here though, it can’t be just for the money. Maybe I’m processing my feelings of being an outsider by ensuring I must always be, that there is (yet another?) thing in my life that no-one ever will understand? Some sort of reaction formation? Or am I an adrenaline junkie?

“What the… fucking bitch! Fucking cunt!” he exclaims, slamming against the wall. I swing my fist at the back of Boss Man’s head but he’s already turned back and lifted a meaty arm for blocking. He has a tattoo of an eagle. He’s in stance now. No more surprises.

He stares at me. With a sickening dread my guts recognize that look before my brain does. I shiver. He blinks. “What the fuck? You’re a fucking man in a dress? A fucking tranny faggot?” Boss Man laughs. “That’s why you fight like that. No fucking real girl could land a hit like that on me! Fuck! I can see it now, look at you, full of makeup and shit. But you’ve got balls, right? Show me you’ve got balls, man!” He takes fighting stance again, like he’s challenging me. He smiles like a maniac. I’m staggering. It’s like I’m split in two pictures like with those old 3D images, floating in different directions, none of them me. I can’t sense my body, but it’s like I see it from the outside. Tall, flat-chested. Tuck isn’t perfect, is it? And I’m blonde, so plenty of electrolysis left before any kind of smoothness. Would any cis woman do contract killings like this? He’s implying that, isn’t he? That only someone incurably steeped in toxic masculinity would be a… a… hitman.

This is so dangerous, I know it. It feels like those times after meeting that support group when I couldn’t stop idly thinking as the train approached the platform that it would be so easy to solve everything by just stepping in front. One part of me is deep in, one is detached. Neither really cares how this goes, right now. Am I angry with him? No way to tell. The important thing is, how dangerous to my beliefs about my identity are these implications? And are those just beliefs? He clocked me in a dark club corridor without me even speaking, so that horrible voice I have isn’t it. What’s wrong with me? I feel like I’m already dead. A waterlogged corpse having rotted, the bones move through soft flesh-mud. I freeze.

Boss man knocks me over and I feel a sharp pain as I hit the floor. Only luck it was not head first. Then again, if that damn head with it’s fucking brow ridge and big nose cracked like a melon, then it would be over. He’s on top of me. “What the fuck is this about, you little faggot? Huh? Did you really think you could fool me, you fucking ugly little cocksucker bitch?” I know it’s over. I won’t have to worry again on whether I’m actually just a sad, misandrist failure of a man, someone who still ticks off all the boxes of male stereotype and socialization. It’ll be like with the train. Eventually it will all be over. Pain for a while. But only one outcome. It will be over.

He puts his hand on my left breast and there’s another look of surprise on his face. Then his mouth is at the side of my neck. I feel rough, raspy stubble and smell the sour musk of his sweat and breath. He bites my neck hard and grunts. I feel his cock quickly growing hard against my thigh. Another rough hand moves up my thigh. He has to make sure now. The smell, I can’t let it go. I remember my old training clothes. Four years ago? Before HRT. I used to smell like this. There is sausage on his breath, and beer. The stubble. When my hands had eczemas because I didn’t moisturize, and they itched, I would scratch them against the stubble of the cheek of the body that I was in. The skin would eventually blister and bleed and get sticky, and it would hurt more and longer.

That’s not me anymore.

That’s who he is. I’m different. I always was. That never was me. That surface was no-one. I’m the will to motion. I’m the choice I made. I am me.

Boss Man isn’t holding my hands in place because he’s too busy groping at my tuck. So I press them against the veins at the side of the neck, holding and twisting as if I was opening a jar of pickles. I hear his neck snap, and slowly he goes limp on top of me. My head is spinning and for a moment I forget who I am, where I am, what I am. There is only the naked tube lights of the ceiling high above and the graffiti on the concrete walls. My back hurts.

I turn to get him off me. I squeeze his neck again to be sure, check the pupils. I kick Boss Man in the side of the head, first gingerly, carefully. Then again, harder. Again. A dozen times, with the hard toes of my pumps. I take out the phone, choose the camera settings to ensure there is a time stamp watermark as well as a GPS watermark. Then I remember. I have to remove the little coloured sticker they put over the camera lenses on your phone in this club. Check. Filter settings. Check. I upload an image of Boss Man’s vacant gaze as he lies there to the server, through the TOR client app. It’s done.

I hurry down to the bathroom, one floor down. I shy away from the mirror image because I can already guess what it would show, and I go in to hide in a stall. I lock the door carefully. Then I let the tears come.

singulata

So, meeting where a lot of the speakers preceding me show the header from (Deadname et al., Nature 2015) because it was relevant. A little surreal, since I also talk at the meeting and so everyone sees my transitioning, but no-one asks or comments. All in all good, I want this, it helps me know they know me as trans and accept me, and it increases my visibility. But some people misgender me occasionally with pronouns and it hurts every time, leaves me reeling, keeping active. Most do not. For every rare hint of weird looks in the ladies’ room, there is a rare event of someone striking up conversation.

All in all good. This is me. I move forward.

Then the damn hotel sends me a receipt addressed to fucking Monsieur Newname Lastname after I asked them to mail it. Is it really that bad, so that random hotel clerk spontaneously believe I must be a cis man despite dress and purple lipstick? Is my voice so deep, my face so long, something manly in my manners? What flaw drove this, is it something I can fix? Not knowing what it is, I feel so helpless. Certainly a service person would not waste time actively misgendering, so it must be the honest belief, that the thought I might be a trans woman does not even strike them? What sort of monumental masculinity is this, that overpowers everything else?

I exaggerate and sarcast, because I am bitter. I really cannot tell myself how I come across, and all my kindly loved ones just see me as they know I want them to see me. So I have no idea how strangers see me, but this makes me really deeply sad and ruminating on what could be wrong. I focus on what could be wrong because I must focus on something fixable. I’ll do anything, but what even can I do?

naz

So, I actually believe my nose hair is growing slower. More time elapses between consecutive occasions of me noticing it and thus plucking it. Body hair in general seems to grow back largely as vellus after I epilate, and from what I can tell, it does so slower. I have barely any beard shadow at all, though still stubble I can feel, for more lasering. I’m having less of that awful, horrible hair and it makes me incredibly happy. It really does feel like some threshold was reached at around M6-M7 of HRT in this regard. Might be enough hair cycles were affected. Still needing to maintain, but my skin really is that of a 37yo woman rather than a 37yo man. Which it should be. I am thankful to its causality.

intent

Things very intense. Some various things do stand out. My voice really bothers me, I really have to fix this and I don’t yet know how to escalate efforts and to remember to do all that is needed. I must.

Also, perhaps indicative of primitive weirdness. Changing my office most likely to the bigger one across the hall. Because this is an old hospital, it has an ensuite bathroom with a bidet. And the thought struck me since I saw it, “this is an office where I could work long days even on a 3/day dilation schedule“. I don’t think anyone ever had that particular revelation before in the history of our species.

Will do what I must. Which at this point means science.

bang

Huh. Am I crushing on someone I just met and know only little about? Moreover, am I doing so only based on them seeming smart, interesting, pretty and charismatic? Who knows? All fine. Back to work.

longing

It’s weird. How can I long so much for bottom surgery?

Obvious answer being dysphoria, I guess.

Corrected a misgendering by a flight attendant for the first time. And realizing my voice sounds OK on some recordings. I’m husky as fuck, but in many cases at least I do not sound like a straight cis man.

Attended my first scientific conference post-transition. It went well.

skinless moon

For whatever reasons (conceivable local ones involving stress, scares and hormone dosages going from low to high on microscale), I am emotional today. Emotions persist and storm inside my body. Stressors cause waves like when shaking a rickety bathtub. Noting volatility-for-whatever-reason, noting tendency/risk to go panicworryworryworry over every impulse, trying instead to stay focused. It works somewhat.

On another level, continuing to tuck. It’s not that it feels very special on a level I access, but that somehow not having its reshaping in place feels wrong. This seems consistent with a reduction in subtle and masked body dysphoria. Imagine having the proper anatomy. I do want that. I guess I will have it.

for a minute there

Read a post which mentioned, of all things, vitamin C as some way of not getting pregnant. Thinking for a second or so, “I don’t want to get pregnant, drinking lots of vitamin C is totally something I should do“.

It’s silly and odd and scattered. But it may have been the first second of my life that I passed to myself as a cis woman.

termidin

The following is something I wrote to comment on a reddit post defending the use of the term “sex” to mean “reproductive sex”, under which saying “trans women are biologically male” would mean “trans women can only reproduce with cis women”. I think my points are valid. But I wrote them to clarify my own thought process. If I post them in response to the poster pedant, there would be a long angsty discussion that would drain me at a time when I have to be 100% at capacity. I need to let it go. So my response instead goes here.

The main weakness is that in practice, when it comes to animals, we often do use a “master construct” of “biological sex” which means all the different subcomponents being aligned and pointing in either direction. In humans, retaining that use is highly problematic. The thought of myself as “biologically male” is abhorrent even if it was entirely uncoupled from role and position and. It is furthermore important to me that I am like other women in regard to all those other biological sex characteristics. Reproduction is the least meaningful of the biological sex continua, really. So I work to be “female” in all biological regards I can.

As long as you use the terms “male” and “female” to denote reproductive compatibility in some two-sex reproduction systems, what you say is true in the sense that we could describe the same reality and your statements would not be inconsistent under your language framework. However it is not the only way we could choose to define those words.

To me as a (somewhat established, now moving in to work on sex hormones and how they impact systemic disease) biologist, there are no formal terms that just state unqualified “male” or “female”. There are terms of karyotypic, specific genetic, endocrine, transcriptional, anatomic etc. “male” and “female” and they each describe concepts that almost always are continua, often have bimodal distributions, often have overlaps in those distributions, and often are correlated with each other, correlations which break down under intersex and under transition. I do not refer to someone as just “male” or “female” without qualifying which regard I mean. As a trans woman, I am presently e.g. karyotypically male, endocrinologically closer to female, anatomically closer to male (which likely will change), etc. E.g. my anatomic and endocrine sexes are not the same, and I don’t recognize as useful any master contruct of biological sex above the individual properties, if I want to talk about the correlation structure I can just do that directly.

When I do use unqualified “male” or “female” about humans in everyday speech it is not as a scientific term, it is intended to be understood as shorthand for the constructs of “man” and “woman” and carry the same opt-out, opt-in clauses as those do for me. More and more people are using language in this way, inside and outside of science and medicine, and I think it is good that we do. For lab animals in order to be quickly understood I will still use “female mice” e.g. as a short-hand for XX mice, e.g. in the sense of “ovarectomized female mice were supplemented with E2, then assessed for tumor growth”. But sex so used is a short-hand I neither need nor want for humans, and the animal use case is also an area where scientific terminology well may come to shift over the next decades.

If I wanted to address specifically what you talk of, I would talk of “reproductive sex” (leaving aside complexities that vary within and across species). I don’t think any practical utility is lost, whereas some is gained, by having that specified.

How do I start being consistent? Well, where space allows, and where I have enough clout (I don’t always), I might start specifying “genetically male mice” (implying endocrinology and anatomy following, even where we might alter both of these). Probably just using “genetically male/female” per default. It feels like a cop-out because then I am still using the ghost of the master construct, assuming typical development as it were, but if the alternative is full descriptive: “genetically, anatomically and endocrinologically male mice” which is too long, or unqualified, I’ll try to push this alternate term. Let’s see if it ends up in a paper sooner of later.

Looking back into thread, OP is providing amazing responses to this that are better than mine and I want to meet her and buy her drinks. That aside, the insight with regards to the animals is important and I should get to work on that.

Another comment in the thread makes the claim that someone’s womanhood is about whether others treat them so. As with sex and gender both, I want them at least implicitly qualified to who it is that assigns. And my sex, and my gender, if the two are not symbolic links to each other, is about how I label myself. Others inform that label. But stating I am not a woman in Texas because the Texans would not see me so does not match my use of the term. I am one equally there, in the sense that my own labeling of my own sexed body remains there.

Need to regain focus and grasp hold on that science so it can get to where I need it.

soror tuck

NSFW?

So, ah, another thing I thought I would never do, done. Hearing how a trans woman I strongly admire do tuck in her pre-op state as a matter of course, and hearing it recommended from others to try to get a view on a post-op body despite dissociation, I tried it tonight.

Put the awful cursed gonads (now nicely shrunk from HRT, though still not all the way down to grape size – more like large olives) into the body somehow. Then using a gaff made by pinterest instruction from pantyhose parts, and a thong above that, and another pair of panties on that, and then intact pantyhose.

Then went out on the subway to one of my late night café haunts to work a while.

Did not feel much at first, not from the sight in the mirror, but I like the sight when sitting crosslegged. Some attention drawn to the area, as a drawback, but I do experience that I am not “protruding“ sensory nerves to some weird point in front of the body.

Still don’t know fully what I think about this. But the thought of being able to wear any underwear I want, and the feeling of not protruding out, that is interesting. A little cumbersome, but I think I will keep experimenting with this.