Future Feeling by Joss Lake

Author:Joss Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593766894
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF PENFIELD R(UTH) HENDERSON AT NEW YORK CITY COURTHOUSE, 111 CENTRE STREET

A wordless clerk handed me a pile of paperwork and a beige warning slip because I hadn’t worn proper footwear. The courts still used the old bureaucratic ways of endless documents. No one could rewrite the law fast enough to allow surveillance tech to supply all their informational needs.

When I was finished offering two to three anecdotes about why my name definitely needed to be changed, I slipped the paperwork into a metal bucket at the edge of the bench and waited with the rest of the silent room.

“Penfield Ruth Henderson?” a young man in a long coat called out. A tall, slippery fellow, he practically vibrated with restlessness.

I stood, ready to declare myself a trans who deserved to take three letters out of his name.

He beckoned and I followed him through a door next to the judge’s bench. Above the empty judge’s chair was a portrait of a severe woman in a bonnet, standing in a moving field of wheat. I started shrinking down without my crew in sight. Sid and Minna waited in the courtroom.

He took me into a windowless vestibule with velvet-lined benches and motioned for me to sit. His face narrowed with seriousness, and he started undressing, setting down his collegiate-striped scarf and long wool coat and kicking off his shoes. In a white ribbed undershirt and men’s slacks, this irregular arm of the law bowed before me.

“I’m Tommy, the magistrate. You’re going to have to step it up here, Penfield. You gave us this very dry Explanation of Name Change petition, and we’re used to dazzling tales of violence, exploitation, assumed identity, and mental breaks causing one part of the self to splinter off, assume dominance, and rename the entire subject. Give us something juicy. Trans is juicy, trans is mind/body split”—he jumped back—“and then reunion.”

He did a back handspring, which the adolescent Pen could never master.

“Trans is people kicked to the curb”—he kicked a small hole in the wall for emphasis—“by their stupid”—another kick—“loved ones who hate the gendered system of dominance but feel the only control they have over their lives is to play out the role they were assigned, wipe the countertops with bleach spray and paper towels, and force their offspring to do the same; trans is ‘I don’t give a fuck about the public gaze averting itself from me as I transition and then gluing itself to my new form, begging for me to perfect, enhance, and moisturize myself back into being a good boy.’” He thrust out his chest, ripping through a flimsy undershirt and splitting it in two, and I saw that his chest had no scars. He was not a passionate trans guy, just a bad actor.

My first thought: Does he really want the juice?

Usually, people greeted us trans with a weak smile because their minds were too busy calculating, Okay, you are actually a girl, but through the wonders of pharmaceutical intervention

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