B Was My Friend, And Then She Wasn't

On friendship breakups and the marks they leave.

Something that’s been weighing on me for a while, on friendships that are here and then suddenly gone.

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B was my friend. In a way that a lot of other people weren’t.

There was an in-between period after I came out as transgender in 2020 where I hung onto my natal last name, until fully deciding to embrace a new identity. B was one of a few relationships I made after I had fully embraced my new identity.

I had just finished a bit of work for the Burning Man non-profit around the time B founded her event, and I started a new position as director of a music festival. I was enamoured with social entrepreneurship, and even without our shared community I think maybe we would have met each other.

I’ve thought a lot about why she made such an impact on me.

There are the shared experiences. That time B helped me with a harm reduction demonstration at a Berkeley party, and we re-enacted a pivotal scene from Pulp Fiction: Substituting Narcan for a shot of adrenaline to the heart.

I think of it often, even though it’s a painful memory now. It wasn’t just a bucket list item; it was some expression of the kind of virtual reality that exists in San Francisco. One of combining care for others with weaving magic into real life.

B was kind during the Courtney Love-iest of my Courtney Love moments. One of those expressions of kindness is one of the last texts I ever received from her.

While I do want to keep private things private, it delivered the same core message as many other messages from her: i wish i could help you.

Then, I talked about men who groped and made me feel unsafe. Things got complicated.

I’ve updated my thesis on the default world: I think it eventually punches your ticket. You can be really good at dodging and weaving, but I think on a long enough time horizon you just can’t escape what it does to people, and to you.

One day I woke up and B was no longer my friend. Unkind things were subtweeted.

I wish I had just talked to her. That I offered her the same grace that I wish others had shown me. I regret not doing so every day.

There’s a lot to be said for communities formed during the pandemic and/or in digital spaces, but hashing out relationships via subtweets is supremely not it. I just…. should have known what was going to happen.

B and I have never spoken again after that point. I think that the person I want to talk to isn’t there anymore, and some of the reason why is my fault. Regardless of what state I might have been in.

I thought that one way to work through it is to try and find some wisdom to impart to you, yet I can’t really think of anything.

I reacted to a traumatic event, in the way that many women do. To have reacted differently, I would have needed to be someone else. Someone who wasn’t getting an early preview of the coming backlash against transgender people.

Being transgender didn’t have a lot to do with the specific circumstances I talked about, I think. But it did have a large impact on how I reacted to things.

My friendship with B was important. Important enough, that now, I would choose to keep my mouth shut about various safety incidents that have happened at her event if it meant things were no longer complicated.

I think maybe that’s the cost of friendship between cis and trans women, especially the wrong kind of trans women. It’s not enough that cis people treat you as a cis woman, but you have to treat yourself as a cis woman.

Cis women don’t talk about how men hurt them, at least not publicly. There are whisper lists between friends and acquaintances, and stories that get told in private.

Things feel emptier now. B had a certain kind of energy that I don’t think I’ll ever come across again. There was always this presence behind her eyes, like every moment of life she was experiencing was something special.

I tried really hard to see the world through her eyes, but I never could. I’ve wondered about why: Why do some people who have been through traumatic experiences become optimists, while others don’t? I’ve never found an answer to that question.

I didn’t just feel lucky that she was my friend, I felt lucky to be living a similar story. Sometimes I thought we were two different stars, shooting on their paths through various adventures. I never thought that would change.

I wonder if it still would have changed, if I was a cis woman.

Those thought exercises are pointless, but in a strange way they keep me sane. Things would just have been easy, you know? I could exist in the world without consistently feeling like I had to earn the right to do so.

If I wasn’t transgender, I like to think B would still be my friend.