Casey Plett

How gruelling was the adjustment to life on hormones with grinding workweeks and no time or energy—not just the wringer of bar work but also the basic physical demands of living here, of taking the stairs and riding trains and carrying groceries up four flights. Yet this was paradoxically not without positives: the obliterating tiredness that now lived in David’s body became a passageway through which he learned about that body.

It was a mental sleight of hand, an escape through a wall; the bovine stasis that had characterized his adult life suddenly transfigured into bovine momentum.

Vera realized her selfhood was sutured with these women from her life, that the only lie about the old him dying was that the skin of the person she’d stepped into wasn’t a cis lady she’d conjured from the air but a blanket fashioned from a kaleidoscope of them, shards and spackles that lived in her like bacteria, like DNA, joyous and ailing, a double helix of protection and illness.

The temptation to remove oneself from the world does not lack for appeal,” she says. “The idea does not need a Scriptural mandate to accrue power. Anybody who doesn’t feel accepted within the world—which is most people, regardless of whether it’s actually true—can be excited by this desire.”

Gemma’s drunk for real now. She continues, “To cut yourself off from the world. It makes you resistant to outside forces, yes. But narrowly. Not in a way that is strong. Like a tree that grows only upwards, never outwards. Is a poplar not easier to fell than an oak?”