Tell Me I'm Worthless(11)
She leaves her glass of wine on the table and goes to the women’s toilets. The room is starkly modern. The walls are yellow, and the toilet stalls feel like escape pods from a spaceship. She locks herself in one, and sits down to piss a long, satisfying stream into the toilet bowl. When she’s done, she takes her wine glass into the conference room. She stands outside, a little away from everyone else, holding her wine firmly, and goes through a mindfulness exercise in her head. I can smell perfume. I can see people. I can hear the crowd… no, ignore that. I can hear people pleasantly talking. I can taste this cheap red wine. I can feel the glass in my hand. I am calm. I am correct. I am okay. This is a therapy.
Ila doesn’t see ghosts. If she does, she tries not to look, and instead looks around them. In her flat, she has a little balcony with plants on, and when it’s warm she likes to sit out there and smoke weed as the sun sets. She left the Labour Party due to what she saw as their ignorance on women’s rights issues. Her scars no longer show as much as they once did. You have to look, carefully, to see most of them. There is one on her upper thigh, a cut that looks like a word, although it’s unclear what it actually says. She doesn’t remember making the cut, and she wonders if, in fact, she didn’t make it at all. In the bath, she sits and looks at her thigh and tries to decipher it. A lover, post-coital, once traced her finger along it idly, and told her she thought it said panic.
Ila walks into the room. The meeting should be starting soon, but the crowd is still loud, making conversation difficult at best. They have stopped hitting the windows, at least. The blinds have been pulled down but, through the gaps, she can see the protesters outside, their faces and bodies pressed close up against the glass. One of the women, with short grey hair, strides purposefully up to the window, although it is unclear what she was planning on doing, and in any case, another woman, also with short grey hair, grabs her and convinces her to sit back down.
“We should start,” shouts Gemma over the din.
Ila thought Gemma was just working there, not actually involved in the proceedings. In actual fact, Gemma is neither working nor properly involved, but has instead inserted herself there as a mole. She just texted somebody outside that they need to start singing louder because things are starting properly, and they do, they start chanting even louder than before, loud enough to vibrate the glass in the windows and the legs of the seats.
Gemma introduces the evening. Originally, there had been hope that she might be able to get the protesters into the building itself, but it became clear that the legality of doing this would have been tenuous. But she’s able to leak information, which is better than nothing. None of the people in the room have even clocked that she’s actually transgender and has lived happily as a woman since her late teens. Three years from now, she will test positive for breast cancer, having not thought to get tested because it didn’t seem possible that a trans woman would be able to develop it. She will have to have her left breast removed. Her breasts had begun to grow at about twenty, and now she’s thirty-two, and suddenly there she will be, feeling the angry pain of teenage dysphoria all over again concentrated on the left of her chest where there is now a curved scar that she thought was ugly. However, through advances in medical technology, as well as the loving support of her friends, Gemma will live a long and happy life. She will be marching in the parade during the 2028 Pride Bombing, but will suffer only superficial injuries, whereas others standing close to her on that day will be killed in the explosion.
After Gemma, women, one by one, come up to speak on why this fight matters to them, on how they see this current war on women, but it is all fairly pointless because the protestors are shouting loud enough that all these women’s words are flattened into vague noise. A woman comes up to talk, with a shock of spiky black hair, clearly dyed. Her face is wrinkled like a pale tree’s bark. Ila tries to concentrate on what she’s saying, which is something vague about academic freedom, two words that make Ila roll her eyes. Too many of the people here only care about academic freedom. She wants to scream, first at the people outside to shut the fuck up so she can hear herself think, but then she wants to scream at the people in this room to listen to her, to please listen to what she is saying, to think about what this all means, the fact that it is materially affecting her body, that she will find herself, if this keeps happening, in some toilet, panicking because there is somebody in there who breaks the social contract of who you should be when you come into the fucking women’s toilets, who has deluded themselves into thinking they belong. And even if they stay private and respectful, as she’s sure most trans people really are, the simple fact they are there makes her unsafe.
Gemma was in the toilet at the same time as her, just now. After Ila realised she had to piss, Gemma had followed her in. She was shitting in one of the stalls while Ila pissed, and Ila hadn’t noticed, or cared.
Outside, things have degraded. Six policemen (policemen specifically) are attempting to use their bodies to get between the protestors and the windows. In response, the protestors sing louder. It feels dangerous. Residents in the local area have come out to see what’s happening, and are shouting back at the protestors, not knowing or caring what is going on just wanting them to be quiet.
“What I think,” says the woman with black hair. She’d said her name was… Joyce? That sounded right. “Is that the erasure of the term, ‘woman’, is a dangerous precedent. Once you erase something, its existence as a unique category ceases to exist, and that’s why I’m here, really.”