On Thanksgiving night, having recently moved to a new city, writer Lira Green attends a crowded potluck of trans women, expecting fear and grief but instead finding herself saturated with intimacy and hope.
By Lira Green for our CELEBRATE issue
It’s after dark on Thanksgiving Day, and I’m standing on the stoop of a walk-up littered with fallen leaves and chips of peeling paint. For the first time since starting my trek across the strip malls at the edge of my new city, I take my hand off the pepper spray clipped to my bag. The stairs creak as I venture upstairs, and before opening Mara’s door, I let out a very shaky breath.
As I step into her tiny apartment, clutching my offering of cream sherry, I hear laughter, rustling chip bags, the sound of Franzia Merlot flowing into glasses. The room is packed wall-to-wall. Haunting electronic music floats through the air, blending with an array of voices I mostly don’t recognize. Under flags and fairy lights, folding tables hold mountains of food. There are buttery, sage-scented kolaches from a recipe my friend Charlotte had held onto while fleeing Texas. There is turkey and gravy, fluffy piles of wheat and cornmeal stuffing, a pan of glistening okra, crisp shrimp cocktail, cheese balls, popcorn, charcuterie, beer, and “gender rolls,” which another friend and I had sardonically kneaded into the shapes of Ares’s spear or Venus’s mirror — more food than I’ve ever seen.
Every guest, like me, is trans. This is a celebration of our own.
What do people like us have to be thankful for? The President of our country has just recently called to ‘eliminate transgenderism’ to cheering crowds. I’m terrified and furious, and have no idea how our potluck could be anything but a dirge of fear and misery under the circumstances. But as I watch, wide-eyed, all around me transfemmes flirt, play, and chatter happily; vibrantly alive. I’ve never attended an event with other trans women before, or even seen more than a couple of them in the same place. Beholding over twenty of them, cuddling, arguing, and keening as each dish is added to the table is a spectacle beyond my comprehension.
Tentatively, I enter the fray, pulling out a chair at the head of one of the tables and setting down the sherry. A pair of warm brown eyes blink at me from the couch, and I turn to see Charlotte waving before nuzzling it’s green curls back into it’s lover. I try not to look at it’s lips or remember the way it’s apron fell over it’s slight frame as it rolled out the dough for the kolaches the day before.
Everyone looks alarmingly attractive, and I’m intimidated. On one side of me, conversations bloom and topics turn towards resistance. On my other side, spontaneous polyamorous couplings paw at each other and vie for the couch. I have no idea what’s going on. Someone pats me on the head and I yip with surprise, then delight. Slowly, as I settle into the evening, my new companions share their food, stories, touches. Some are generous.
Flushed from the gentle attention, I cast around, looking for the first face I’d ever kissed. From the opposite table, August watches the flick of someone’s lighter with their soft eyes, snorting at the way I hold a joint in the tips of my fingers like it might burn me.
I quickly learn how I hold precious things, too, as before long, I find myself wrapped around another woman. Charlotte squirms happily in my arms, and Stella shoots me a smirk from across the room. Instinctively, I embrace it tightly, carefully, like I’m protecting it from some unnamed thing.
Here in this strange new home, I find myself engulfed in trans women and their joy. Banal joys, transcendent joys. Trans women defending the honour of their pan of mac and cheese. Trans women making faces as they swallow gulps of their Franzia. A masseuse offering scalp massages. A glimpse of someone’s arm with a fresh bite mark that makes me blaze with wanting. Flirting and drinking and eating too many kolaches—the pastry flaky, the sausage juicy and rich—and making a fool of myself and whining at the force of my massage and accepting compliments on the sherry and beaming and learning people’s names.
As my eyes swim over the room, warm and drunk and safe, a strange irony occurs to me. Here, in an unremarkable house on a quiet street off the main drag, where strip malls spread from my campus to the green woods of the suburbs, I have the distinct sense that in that very moment, I am standing in the place that matters most in the world.
Just as everyone’s tipsy enough to giggle, with a flash of golden hair, Jeanne stands and raises her cup, eyes bright with laughter.
“Here’s to still being alive!” she cries.
The roar goes up louder than any toast I’d ever heard.
Oh my God, I think to myself. Shivers wring their way out of my back as I laugh and tilt back my last dregs of sweet wine. I’m going to make it, after all.
Lira Green is a fantasy author who writes stories about trans women who grow old and lesbians who get the chance to be young. Her favourite meal can be cooked by tossing farfalle with a white sauce made with Parmesan and miso, and serving it with white beans and kale cooked in aromatics with milk. She previously wrote a serialized story, My Trans Body Longs for Love and Salt, for FFJ’s BODY issue.