My (Intentionally) Failed NEA Application
If you’re a writer (as many of you are), I know you already know about the National Endowment for the Arts grants that have historically been given out to poets and prose writers. And you probably already know that this year, under Trump, the application process changed early on to award writers who celebrated America (and weren’t transgender) and the current presidency. And maybe you even heard, from a slew of writers who received rejections after the arduous process of applying for this corrupted grant, that the NEA decided not to award the $50,000 prizes this year at all.
I never had any illusions that I was going to receive an NEA grant under the current administration, so I decided to take the opportunity to apply with a “fuck you” application. Specifically, one about a disgraced Trump regime employing the services of a mercenary “gender flipper” to go into hiding, living the rest of their lives as trans people after the fall of the neo-fascist government.
I’m proud to say I didn’t even receive a rejection. I’m actually probably on a watch list now for this application, which includes a slew of the former-fascists-turned-underground-forcibly-transitioned people launching an assault on the new government.
I will let you read the beginning of it for yourself, and you can decide whether I deserve $50,000 or a place on an FBI list that won’t be declassified for a long time.
GOOD BONES
1.
I was on my way to a meeting point. These spots are usually off the beaten path. The people who come to me – they would never want to be seen with a person like me. They are often the people who lobbied for laws against people like me, who stood in the spotlight of national media saying words like “mentally ill” and “sick” and “perverse” when talking about people like me. They are the people who made it what it is to live as transgender today. What better way for them to hide than to become a person like me?
That morning, I was meeting someone at Washington Avenue Green. He’d been in hiding in Philadelphia since the fall of the Trump regime, he told me. The Signal message he sent me late last night told me who he was, generally, but not his name. There were only so many people who fit his description. A young techie who had worked for Elon Musk’s highly illegal and since fallen DOGE department. His life, he said, was ruined by this decision, now that the country had returned to sanity. I could almost hear the tears in his message. He was only now 25, and his life was over.
He was part of the wave who’d left the trans community in shambles, not that I moved in that community at all – but I couldn’t help but be aware of what had become of many people like me. The jails, the camps, the executions. I was spared by my line of work. Transitioning for the purpose of being oneself was viewed as vile, pornographic, but transitioning to evade the law was perfectly reasonable, even back then. Their morals have never made logical sense. During the regime, it was mostly people outside of government who employed my services, but they were people with money, with clout – the language that those who’d taken over spoke. They were criminals, sure, drug runners, mafiosos, but they had enough power that my work remained in the shadows and valuable.
But the Trump regime had fallen and been replaced by its progressive backlash. The people from the prior government were being prosecuted, and one by one, they came to me. They were like the Nazis escaping to Argentina. They hoped to disappear, to start anew. And that’s where I came in.
The boy stood by the spiral metal staircase that led up to an observation deck. In the early morning, as it was, no one was on the pier or the small strip of green near it. He had chosen his location well. He wore a hoodie in the early spring air, the hood up over his head and shadowing his face. He was slight - as he’d said in his Signal message, he was little more than a boy. A boy who had played fast and loose with the government of the United States of America, who had hoped to bring about its downfall, who had caused suffering to countless people. A boy who, now, had lost all the power he once held in his barely-adult hands, and stood before me humbled. I could almost smell the desperation on him – the remains of a cloud of weed smoke and the funk of having not showered for days. As I approached him, his eyes darted to me and away. I suspected he was high. Their reign of terror had been ketamine and methamphetamine feuled. He was like a lump of putty, waiting for sculpting hands. He was mine.
I circled him like a shark without saying anything. He stood there with his hands in the pockets of his khaki pants. Here he was, hoping to be saved by the sort of person he had spent so much time trying to destroy. Here he was, with me his only hope. I wanted to let him marinate in his fear for just a moment longer.
Finally, I stood in front of him.
“You have good bones. Young. Malleable. Not everyone can be flipped, at least not to great effect. Some of the older men who’ve come to me – we haven’t been able to do much. Facial surgeries, hormones – they only go so far. But you? Good bones. You’ll flip easy. You’ll blend right in, after.”
“What about my va…vagina?” He said it like a child saying a curse word for the first time, hesitantly. “Will anyone notice?”
Of course, his first thoughts were about being fucked.
“There will be scarring, but to most it should be invisible. You’ll be treated just like you’ve treated women your whole life. How does that sound?”
His face crumpled like a child who dropped their ice cream cone. It wasn’t a hard guess how he’d treated women thus far. And the long corridor of misogyny that opened before him as his future was delicious for me to watch him comprehend.
He was crying now. “There’s no other way, is there?” he said.
“Yes. There is. You go to prison. You rot your life away there. You die there, like so many trans people your work sent to such places. Or you try to survive, underground, as a marked man. No government ID, no way to make a gainful living. You’ve secured it so that such people don’t have an easy life, even now. Those are the other ways. Or there’s this. There’s freedom. Relatively speaking.”
“I’m not one of you,” he insisted. “I’m not sick. I’m just desperate.”
Even now, he clung so closely to his hate. I looked him in his blue eyes, stormy with terror.
“Have you thought of a new name?”
“Madison,” he said quietly, looking down.
“Good. Basic. Unremarkable.”
“I told you, I’m not one of you. I don’t want to call myself something like Viola or Geraldine.”
“Good girl,” I said. I reached out my hand towards his face. The gesture was condescending. He flinched back from it at first, and then let me place the palm of my hand on his cheek, inside his hood. My thumb caressed his high cheekbone. “You’ll make such a good girl.”
*
After our initial meeting, after he handed me all the money in unmarked bills, I went back to my apartment and sent a signal message to the boy who would soon be a girl named Madison. I outlined the next steps. He would undergo surgeries: genital, chest construction, facial reconstruction. He would go on hormones, which he will have to procure illegally for the rest of his life, and though these will help him gain the chest he will need to pass as female, the process would be too slow and awkward. He is paying good money for the changes to be immediate. I provide him with the names of doctors, mercenaries like me, who will perform the necessary actions.
These providers are a step up from the back-alley abortion doctors who operated under the Trump regime when abortion was outlawed. They do not work in hospitals, and if they botch their duties, there will be no recourse. With what the men are paying them, accidents are few and far between, but they do happen. There is more than one woman out there with poorly healed incisions, unhealable infections, and stenosis of the vagina. Some of them have lost feeling in that area altogether. Some died. It’s beyond the scope of my limited care to feel much about these injuries and deaths. Sometimes, I think, the ones who died got off easy.
I will help him procure the forged identification necessary for him to continue his life. New birth certificate, new Social Security number, new passport, and new state ID. Has he thought of his new last name? I asked. It should be nothing that could even remotely be traced back to him, completely fabricated. Any holding onto vestiges of who he was, like by adopting a grandparent’s name, or another long-ago family name, should be viewed as dangerous sentimentality. He was a new person, now. She was a new person. She would cut ties with her former life entirely.
“What about my parents?” she texted back. “Will I ever see them again?”
“No. The person you were will be dead.”
I imagined her face that morning, crumbling under the weight of tears and understanding. I smiled.
After I sent these messages, after I was sure that Madison was fully aware of the process, I put my phone down. It buzzed a few times, questions I would not answer yet. I was going to let her wait.
I sat back on my couch, tilted my head back so that I was looking up at the exposed beams in my condo. Around me, the room was wide-open, white-walled, and spacious, with track lighting complementing the copious amounts of sunlight that came in through the windows. I lived in a split-level former synagogue behind a brick walkway set back from the street, and beyond that a wrought-iron gate. I lived in Queen Village, in a condo that was both private and well-maintained. I had been there a few years – since Gender Flipping took off for me, and provided me with the nearly half a million dollars cash I needed to buy it, no questions asked. It lacks the luxury of some of the newer condos built in high rises – pools, saunas, gyms – but its privacy was perfect for my purpose. I imagined myself, for a moment, lounging beside a swimming pool with other thirty-somethings, my chest scars pink in the sun, and shook my head with laughter.
Madison buzzed my phone several more times, and I ignored it. Best to let her ruminate. Best to let the full gravity of her situation sink in. Best to let her think about the world that she was going to have to live in, that she had made for people like me, never imagining that one day it would be her world, too.
But my phone continued to buzz, breaking up my reveries. Finally, I picked it up and looked at the messages. A few were from Madison, but there were other ones which seemed urgent. I looked at the name attached to them. Ophelia. This couldn’t be good, I decided.
I dialed her number.
“Max,” she said, breathless, when she picked up the phone. “Max. Did you get my messages?”
“I didn’t read them yet,” I admitted.
“Jesus Christ. Read them. Then get down here.”
“Down where?”
“To my office. There’s trouble. Big trouble.”
*
Ophelia was a trans woman – it’s easy to guess from her name. She had survived the purge during the Trump years by going stealth and laying low. She was convincing. So convincing that a name like Ophelia seemed, to most, like an affectation of terminally unique parents. She didn’t travel except by train or car, she didn’t call any unnecessary attention to herself. There was a rumor that she had, every now and again during the height of Trump’s power, seduced a right-winger and slit his throat in bed, leaving his body a bloody mess the police never figured out. I didn’t know whether or not to believe it. She was tough and beautiful, and she worked for me. I’d hired her in one of my rare moments of altruism towards the trans community – maybe some vestige of a time long passed, when I had longed for the love or companionship of someone just like her, someone enough like me to make sense out of my existence. I hired her to forge documents, a job she turned out to have a real talent for.
I arrived outside her office in my black Jaguar F-type convertible. It’s an ostentatious car, and I suppose it would have behooved me to select something less conspicuous. I flaunt my wealth in the usual places, however. My cars, my house, my clothing. Though it was a casual occasion, I’d dressed in a bespoke suit to make my way to Opehlia’s office. I looked briefly in the rearview mirror of my car before stepping out, then observed my figure in the shining chrome and metal of the car’s exterior. I was short, but my manicured beard and my short-cut hair all meant that to the untrained eye, I was nothing more than your average man. I put on a pair of sunglasses that had been perched on top of my head and walked toward Ophelia’s office.
Ophelia worked in a high-rise in Center City. From there, from her inconspicuously named office, she created new people. They came to her after the surgeries, after the hormones, after they bought their first wigs, or with their hair cut into pixie cuts they would grow out, and they left someone new with the papers to prove it. Her work was seamless. Never had one of her documents been questioned. I knew the problem was not with her, or her work, though she was vague on the phone and in her messages about what exactly the problem was. I walked towards her high-rise with apprehension bubbling in my stomach. I signed in at the front desk, and took an elevator up to the tenth floor.
Her office was down a hall, tucked into a corner. There were no glass doors opening into a reception area – nothing modern. She was behind a steel door, and inside she was the only occupant. I knocked on the door and waited for her to answer.
The door swung open, and I walked into the meticulously clean office. She never let the office cleaners in, lest they learn too much – she kept the place clean herself. Ophelia walked me to her enormous desk, one of the few pieces of furniture in the room, and offered me a seat on the side closest to the door. I sat in the comfy chair thinking how many newly minted women had sat in it, waiting for Ophelia’s services. She had a lighter touch than me. Something in her forgave them, welcomed them to the world they would now inhabit. They were sisters to her, as cruel and deranged as they had once been to people just like her.
“You look good,” she said, sitting across from me. “Healthy. Been on vacation?”
“Most of my life’s a vacation,” I replied. “Cut the shit, Ophelia. What’s the big emergency? What’s going on?”
She opened a desk drawer and slid a picture across to me. It was a passport photo.
“Remember this one?”
“I don’t keep track like you do,” I said. “Once I’m finished with them, they’re done.”
“Think hard,” she said.
I looked down at the picture again. Despite the facial feminization surgery she’d undergone, glimmers of her old self remained. In my mind, I sifted through the deluge of men who’d come to me, desperate. Finally, I came up with a name.
“Formerly Stephen Miller,” I said. “One of Trump’s most trusted advisors.Jewish neo-Nazi. Charged with crimes for his torturous treatment of immigrants on US soil and deportation of immigrants and US citizens to concentration camps off US soil. We did a good job with the hairline. You can barely tell how bald he was.”
“Currently Abigail Rose, a hairdresser in rural Pennsylvania. Grows native flowers in her yard in her spare time. Has a little vegetable garden, too. Not involved in a relationship. Has two cats.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.
“She’s planning a major assault on the government. Think January sixth with artillery. She’s recruited a group of extremists to help her carry it out.”
“You’re right – that is bad news,” I said.
“There’s more. The extremists – they’re all transgender.”
“Right-wing transgender people? After all the right has put them through?”
“No. They’re separatists. People who think that transgender people have been through enough at the hands of the government and want autonomous spaces for themselves alone. They plan to strike and then make demands – sort of like the Zapatistas in Mexico in the 1990s. I suspect a few of them are white supremacists, like Miller. Some things, transition doesn’t change.”
I looked at the picture in my hands. “This is all very interesting. And all beyond the scope of what I actually do. Is there a reason you called me here?”
Ophelia slammed her hands down flat on her desk, making a bang that reverberated through the room. I didn’t flinch. I sat there staring, waiting for her anger to pass.
“You’ve done this,” she said. “You put her in the transgender community. A community that has suffered years of indignities, years of genocide. You took the tattered remains of a small group of people whom the government tried to wipe out, and you put people like Miller in their midst. This was bound to happen sooner or later. And now, you have to fix it.”
“Ophelia,” I said calmly, despite her emotional outburst, “I don’t have to do anything except what I’m paid to do. And as far as I can tell, there’s no money in stopping this attack.”
“Is that really all you care about?” she asked. “You know that even though the government has rescinded its policies on transgender genocide, there isn’t much protection for people like this from either side of the political equation. This attack could be the last straw, the moment the left has been waiting for to jettison trans rights altogether. You’re a transgender person, for God’s sake. Why don’t you care about your people?”
I shrugged, set on remaining calm no matter what. To her, I must have looked cold. And I suppose I was. “I didn’t survive this long worrying about the ‘transgender community,’ as you call it, if such a thing exists. I made it to this point thinking about myself. And I see no personal benefit from getting involved.”
“This is bigger than personal stakes,” she insisted.
“I’m apolitical.”
“There’s no such thing!” she said. “How could you say that, after what’s happened in this country? We said ‘never again,’ and then it happened again.”
“I never said that,” I said.
“You’re as bad as them,” she said.
“Probably worse,” I agreed.
“I’m going to stop this. With or without you.”
“There’s no or,” I replied. “There’s just without.”
There was fire in her eyes. “I quit. Find yourself another document maker, if you can. Neutrality in the face of evil is evil.”
I sighed. “You’ll be replaced. It may take a few weeks, but I assure you, you need me more than I need you. Be sure this is what you really want.”
She leaned forward, her eyes still burning and her mouth twitching at the edges from whatever emotion she was holding back. “I couldn’t possibly continue to introduce this sort of evil into a broken community. You said they would be docile. That they had learned their lessons. That they would disappear. I can’t take part in this sort of madness.”
I stood, nodding. “It sounds like you’ve made your decision. I expect your office to be clear by the end of the day. Leave the necessary files on a jump drive on the desk.”
“Fuck you,” she said. “I don’t work for you anymore.”
“Leave the files,” I said, my voice low, “or you will wish you had.”
“Fine. Jump drive. All the work I’ve done, all the documents I’ve made. I don’t ever want to hear from you again. You understand?”
“As long as we separate on good terms, you never will,” I replied.
I stood to leave the room. As I was nearing the door, I heard her voice.
“Max?”
“Yes?” I said, turning back to her.
“There’s more,” she said.
“What is it?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”