T-GIRL CONFESSIONS:

SHE TEACHES ME EVERYTHING

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DICK CHRISTMAS

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SHABBY STREET BOOKS

She's wearing a black, ridged button-down collared shirt with a plunging neckline and a form-fitting charcoal pencil skirt with a cinched waist and a black leather belt fit for delivering lashings. Her

rich honey ankles are covered in strappy high heels that highlight the French tipped pedi on her perfect Roman toes.

I'm trying to pay attention to her lecture, trying to understand the course material, because I am failing Comparative Literature and feel like I really need to get my grade up. But her body is just too bangin' to ignore. Her golden skin is always moisturized to the point of luminescence, she glows in the afternoon light. And though Miss Long scares the fuck out of me, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't half-hard in every one of her classes.

We're already halfway through the second semester of Literature Without Borders, but the only thing I've really learned so far is how to be less obvious when I'm staring at her body. There are six moves I've mastered to look casual when stealing a glance at her long legs and luscious feet, to say nothing of her massive tits. I won't bore you with them here, but suffice it to say the old fallen pencil trick is one of many I've got up my sleeve.

Miss Long doesn't need tricks to keep your attention, her body and brains do all the work for her. She doesn't just stand at her podium; she commands the spatial geometry of the entire room. The structured shoulders of her top give her an effortless, blade-sharp silhouette, her dark hair pulled back into a severe, immaculate chignon. Her voice is a low, modulated contralto that cuts through the hum of the fluorescent lights without ever needing to be raised.

“Wolff's Orlando does not merely cross the boundaries of biological sex,” she explains. “It treats gender as an elastic garment, stretched and reshaped across the centuries by the pressures of history and social performance.”

She paces slowly, deliberately, toward the edge of the dais. Her gaze sweeps the rows, cool, analytical, and entirely unbothered by the blank stares that meet hers.

“And when we place Orlando next to Le Guin's Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness,” she continues, “we see that stability is the illusion. Le Guin strips away permanent sexual categorization to ask a fundamental question: what remains of human society, of power, of love, when the architecture of binary gender is completely dismantled.”

She pauses, letting the silence settle with the weight of an unpaid debt.

I shift in my seat, the desk groaning beneath my elbows. My copy of Le Guin is dog-eared to the point of exhaustion, covered in margin notes that, looking back, probably make zero sense. My grade in this class is circling the drain, and the panic is starting to acidify in my throat. I don't want to speak up, I really don't, but I need a lifeline.

“Professor Long,” I blurt, my voice cracking across the quiet auditorium. Heads turn. Miss Long stops pacing, her eyes locking onto mine with the precise lethality of a sniper acquiring a target.

“Yes, Mr. Scout?” Her tone isn't hostile, it's worse—clinical.

I swallow hard, feeling the heat rise up my spine and sting my cheeks.

“I just... I'm struggling with how I'm supposed to reconcile the text. How we're...” I look around at my fellow students, all of whom pretend they don't see me. “... supposed to reconcile the text. If Le Guin and Woolf both treat gender as this totally, like, fluid, unstable construct, isn't it kind of, like, a cop-out?”

“A cop-out,” Miss Long repeats impassively.

“Like, it feels like if gender can mean anything, or change on a whim, then... structurally, it doesn't mean anything. And, so, then... why should we care about their, their subversion if the categories are so vague that they're, ya know, like, practically useless in real-world critical theory?”

The second the words leave my mouth, I know I've fucked up, and the whole class knows it too. I realize at once how arrogant and entirely stupid I