one

"Let's give it to our wonderful presenters!"

A small clatter of applause went through the room, quickly dissipating as members of the audience rushed out to get first in line for thin coffee and soggy sandwiches. June hesitated a moment longer, in that silly hope that someone would come up to her to ask further questions, or maybe even just praise her presentation. But they were all three days into the conference, so obviously none did. Only the panel chair—a small woman who flew in all the way from New Delhi—stayed behind to give the presenters a stock "thank you, that was very interesting" alongside a singularly tired smile. June gathered her notes, stuffed them into her trans pride tote, and left for the lobby, her conference duty fulfilled.

Familiar sights of a feminist gathering in a full swing surrounded her. Silver-haired butch professors congregated in their little cliques, exchanging gossip about the disastrous morning keynote. The younger generation of scholars—grad students, freshly minted PhDs, and an odd representative of the "activist community" —crowded around the refreshments tables, also arguing about the keynote, only louder and angrier. June looked around for friendly faces, and finding none, resignedly tucked herself in the queue for hot drinks, trying to not let the old aches run too rampant.

The woman in front of her did not make it easy. She—no, they, as the ID pinned to their patchwork vest helpfully noted—was gorgeous in that effortless way that made June squirm with envy. Intricate floral tattoos climbed up their tanned arms, gentle curving patterns perfectly balancing out ostentatious metal spikes of her jewelry and bleached hair. They were the picture of academic punk chic that June viscerally knew she was too late to embody, leaving to her nothing but the mandatory nod of acknowledgment at the "protect the dolls" patch at the back of the enbie's vest.

"Hey, is everything alright?" someone asked, in a thick German accent.

"Yeah, sorry, sorry," June startled, and looked away, hoping she had not just been caught staring.

The problem was that there was nowhere to rest her eyes that did not make her feel the same wretched way. People June could have been, if only she had realized things earlier, if only she had been bolder, abler, and more fortunately born, surrounded her, and for the second time in the day, she had to bite down on an urge to flee the conference, lock herself in her hotel room, and tend to her rampaging dysphoria with a little bit of therapeutic doomscrolling. Instead, she grabbed her cup of coffee, and went looking for Maria, who had to be somewhere around.

Unfortunately, that somewhere turned out to be "in the middle of a spirited conversation with a well-known affect theory scholar whom she idolized". Since the last thing that June wanted was to intrude, she dejectedly sat down all by her lonesome, hoping to wait the coffee break away. As always, it left her bitterly frustrated. What was she even doing here? How many times had she been told that the breaks were the actual reason people attended conferences? Sulking alone, phone in hand, was not the energetic networking that she needed to get out of the adjunct hell. But she was not Maria; she had learned to mingle not with people, but randos online, on countless IRC (and later Discord) servers, and besides she was a cinderblock transsexual nightmare that…

"Oh fuck me," she muttered into her coffee, desperately wishing that the intrusive thoughts would, for once, shut up.

They did not. Instead, they made her wonder if the two students who were sitting at the table over and conversing in rapid-fire Chinese had just stood up and left because she creeped them out. This was supposed to be an inclusive, intersectional feminist conference, but it wouldn't be the first time that…

"Doctor Morawska?"

The spiral ground to a momentary halt, interrupted by a pencil-skirt wearing woman suddenly looming over June, and sounding like she had just fallen out of some government panel. Who the hell started a conversation like that, with junior scholars?

"May I sit with you for a moment?"

The woman was not entirely unfamiliar. June had seen her around earlier, and she even recalled noticing her in the audience of her panel. In a crowd clothed for the liberal arts classroom, her corporate boardroom fashion made an obvious impression.

"Uh, sure."

"Victoria Roj. I represent the Clear Skies Foundation. We are one of the sponsors of this conference."

June nodded slowly. The name rang some distant bell, and helped to explain the strange outfit, along with the unbearably formal tone. What it did not explain, not even in the slightest, was why this NGO spook decided to talk to her as if she had actual business with a transsexual porn studies scholar.

"I'm June," she tried to smile back. "Pleased to meet you?"

"Yes, it is a pleasure."

The confusion did not help with June's usual struggle of trying to face Victoria directly, like a normal human being should. The upside was that as long as she was staring to the side of Victoria's head, she could not tell if the woman was already starting to frown.

Victoria sat down across from June, hands folded professionally on the table, her expertly made-up face focused entirely on the scholar in front. It made June try to straighten awkwardly and pull her shoulders back; even in actual job interviews, she had rarely been granted this kind of concentrated attention.

It made her squirm.

"I wanted to congratulate you for an excellent presentation," Victoria said solemnly. "I am not an academic, and some intricacies eluded me, but it was nonetheless fascinating."

The compliment, however stock, made June smile. But Victoria was far from finished. Even worse, she spoke with a decisive sharpness that made her sound like it was an actual pleasure, like she meant every word to the fullest extent possible.

"I was particularly impressed by your ability to engage with the investment of many trans women in creating and propagating techno-fetish material. In my, however limited, experience few scholars actually pay attention to such connections."

That was finally enough to get June to finally look at Victoria's face. The woman's lipstick was a beautifully deep shade of burgundy, and inhumanly sharp. It only made June realize that hers was more of a carmine smear; she turned immediately away, again.

"Thank you," she managed to mutter.

What was this woman doing here? Why was she interested in a paper on contemporary extreme cartoon trans pornography? And why was she even aware of techno-fetish Patreons? Someone like Victoria was clearly meant for delivering TED talks, not slumming it with third-rate trans scholars writing about the rifts in the drone kink community.

"Yeah," June repeated dumbly. "Thank you."

She had no idea what to say next, so she said nothing, allowing the idle noise of the conference to fill in the embarrassing silence.

"Doctor," Victoria said finally. "Are you well?"

"Yes, yes," this time, June replied far too fast, her hand jumping up in a wild, dismissive wave. "Long day."

At least she managed to bite down on that casual you know. Did people like Victoria even get days like these? Did they get them every day, like June did? Judging by the gesture of something akin to disappointment that flashed through Victoria's face, they did not.

"I understand. I will not take too much of your time, then."

Before June remembered to insist that no, she had all the time in the world for someone interested in engaging with her work, Victoria reached for her purse, proudly embossed with a mark of an Italian luxury brand belonging to a world completely alien to mere adjuncts like June.

"Your work is highly relevant to the work we do at the Foundation," she announced, pulling out a plain white business card and a silver-tipped pen. "And since my superior is currently in town, I thought I should introduce you."

Quickly, she jotted down an address and a phone number on the back of the card, and passed it to an increasingly confused June.

"Please, if you only can, join us for dinner tomorrow."

"But what for?" June asked sheepishly, picking the card up. Victoria's handwriting was as sharp as her voice.

"To establish a professional connection, and possibly discuss possible avenues for future cooperation."

Everything that June could manage in response was a small "right." The conversation happened too fast, too abruptly, for her to even start making sense of it. She held the card, trying to make sense of the situation.

"The next panel is starting shortly," Victoria added, "and I do not want to miss it, so please excuse me, Doctor. We hope to see you tomorrow. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to give me a call."

She left as quickly as she appeared, the clicking of her heels lost in the general noise of the conference crowd. Stunned, June did not think to follow, to try to ask any of the countless questions that were only now starting to arrive in her overstuffed head. She stifled a groan, but couldn't hold back a gnawing sense that she had just somehow fucked something up, behaving like a startled animal, not an adult human person. The usual frustrations soon followed, seeping into her mind. If she could barely hold a conversation here, what hope did she have of not making a mockery of herself during that supposed dinner? And besides, what chance was there of it being something real, instead of some strange prank being pulled on her, or more likely, a hyper-specialized version of a pay-to-publish scam? It had to be a scam, right?

In truth, she had no idea what to think about it, only a gut-level understanding that she really did not want to think about it right now. Reluctantly, she opened the conference programme, trying to remember which panel she was going to attend next. The tension in her shoulders refused to release.


-


The hotel room AC whirred quietly, the night outside dead silent. Too drowsy to think clearly, and too anxious to actually sleep, June lay in bed, her laptop's browser opened on the home page of the Clear Skies Foundation.

"No, but seriously," Maria called out from the other bed. "It's not like a conference afterparty. You can't skip."

Faces of trans women, all of them beaming and obnoxiously pretty, stared at June from the screen, illustrating the Foundation's supposed commitment to the "all the diverse genders" and "marginalized sexual minorities". All the buzzwords and boilerplate language made it borderline impossible to determine what the Foundation was actually doing, apart from what appeared as a genuinely robust selection of scholarships for "FLINTA-identified people".

"Why not?"

Maria sighed, hiding her face in her dainty hands. June had always envied her for those; for a trans girl, Maria had been blessed with what June could only describe unusually feminine finger bones. Which was a frankly insane thing to notice, let alone think about repeatedly, and at length, so June tried not to mention it too much.

"It's an opportunity! You've spent the last two days complaining about how no one wants to talk to you!"

"I meant in the field," June muttered. "Besides, just…"

She switched to the article in another tab, and resumed skimming. It helped her remember where she had heard the Foundation's name before. Apparently, it was a beacon for controversy—mostly the usual right wing conspiracies about Big Pharma pushing hormones on kids, only supercharged by the Clear Skies' actual focus on the trans community. But the radical side of the internet was not actually that friendly to them, either. As it turned out, the Foundation's president was also a CEO of a major subsidiary of the infamous Galatea Corporation, the giant biotech that made drones real and spawned an entire secondary critical literature on the renaissance of techno-slavery. Even worse, the man apparently had recently divorced his ex-college athlete husband, only to marry a prominent trans woman podcaster, leading to even more lurid conspiracies, and truly incredible amounts of gossip.

"Just what? You trailed off again."

"Just bad vibes," June shrugged. "It's all so awfully corporate. And has a little bit of that 'we've noticed you from across the bar' vibe, you know?"

Maria sighed, in that trademark exaggerated way she had mastered back in her days of wearing "Evil Twink Energy" shirts to gay clubs.

"That's your argument now? A woman in a devil wears Prada getup invites you to a dinner, and your concern is that you're gonna get cruised? I'd have expected you to get on your knees and bark."

This was not wrong, but also not the real reason why June struggled to imagine actually going tomorrow. She said nothing, searched for the address that Victoria gave her: a nice-looking Thai place just at the edge of the campus, that seemed to actually adroitly straddle the line between "a bit fancy" and "actually too posh". It was even in the walking distance from the hotel, too.

"I don't even know what I would wear…" she complained, flicking through the menu in search of the vegetarian options, but unfortunately, there were plenty.

"I have a little black you can borrow," Maria offered immediately.

"I'd have to shave my legs."

"High time you did that, anyway."

Trying to look up Victoria returned fewer results. She held a high, but non-descript position in the Foundation, and last year had given a master class on "advocacy in the new puritanism era" for representatives of smaller NGOs. Aside from that, nothing; no socials that June could find, no interviews, no public meltdowns. The woman kept an admirably low profile, which made sense, considering her line of work. Still, it was somewhat disappointing, even if June wasn't sure what she was expecting to find. Some actual reason to not go, probably, some justification to give in to her usual, ingrown ways.

Maria's phone vibrated loudly on the nightstand.

"Well, that's my cue," she declared, slipping out of the bed.

She met June's puzzled look with a wry smile, just a little bit of teeth showing. It was, like most of Maria's affect, frustratingly, and effortlessly charming.

"It's that cute guy from Brighton, from the historical materialism panel."

"Wasn't he gay?" June frowned, recalling a wiry twink who just couldn't shut up about Samuel Chitty.

"Well, not too gay for me, apparently," Maria laughed.

She stopped at the desk to fix her bushy hair into just the right level of carefully disheveled.

"He's staying at our hotel, turns out. Same floor, even. See you later, babe. Hopefully in the morning. And do take what I am doing right now as advice, okay?"

She was gone before June could figure out an apparently snappy response. Instead, she sank deeper into the bed. On a reflex, she opened her favourite porn feeds, scrolled briefly, and finding nothing interesting, booted up her latest gacha distraction. The bright colours and loud voices helped to silence most of her thoughts, and for a moment, forget about tomorrow.


-


A frenzied "I'm sorry I'm late," was the first thing out of June's mouth, as she threw herself into the restaurant, sweat collecting on her forehead from the panicked dash from the hotel. "Terribly sorry!"

The cold glare that Victoria greeted her with from under her almost-finished cup of Vietnamese coffee seemed to confirm all of June's worst expectations. If there was an opportunity to fuck up today, she had already fucked it up, massively and irrevocably. But it wasn't Victoria who turned to greet her.

"Not to worry, Doctor! We were just getting comfortable."

The man sitting to Victoria's side was so unassuming that June had initially not even noticed him. While his companion was even more immaculate than the day before, he wore a simple flannel shirt lazily tucked into washed-out jeans, which combined with a reddish beard and thick-rim glasses to give him the look of a software engineer trapped in the last decade. It wasn't until he stood up to shake June's hand that she finally realized that she had seen him before, yesterday.

Victoria's superior was the president of the Clear Skies Foundation. June had just squeezed the palm of a millionaire. Maybe a billionaire

"Again, I'm so sorry," she mumbled, trying to process the realization. "Thank you for waiting."

"It's nothing," the man replied, flashing her a toothy grin.

"It was only half an hour," Victoria said, a conspicuous lack of affect in her voice.

June murmured something again, and dropped into her chair. The restaurant swam around her, burnished wood and dim lights. She remembered too late not to wipe her forehead with the palm of her hand, and was rewarded with a fresh spike of dysphoric embarrassment. She could just feel Victoria's gaze on her, judging her for not knowing how a woman should act. She tried to tell herself she was projecting, and just look at the menu. She managed one of those things.

"I'm August Dietz, and I am overjoyed to see that you have accepted our invitation. And, if you forgive me for being so forward, I must also say that you look gorgeous today, Doctor."

June's head snapped to face him, the compliment landing about as well as a punch to the gut. She knew exactly well how she looked; she had the misfortune of looking in the mirror before going out.

"Thank you," she said with muted insincerity. "I don't get that often."

He laughed loudly, as if it was supposed to be a joke.

"Oh, don't be so modest. That people can't see the beauty in front of them is their fault, not…"

"I think we should order," Victoria interrupted, earning June's eternal gratitude, only to give her a pointed look and add "I'm getting hungry."

June shrunk into her seat, staring blankly at a menu in front of her. To her side, August was settling on a multiple course meal, excitedly chatting the waiter up about recommendations, and his love of Thai cooking. Victoria ordered a mango salad, to "balance out the coffee". Decision paralysis hit June hard, and she only ended up panickedly asking for drunken noodles when it seemed like she was being stared at. August then made a show insisting that she should get more than just that, so she added a house lemonade to the order, and a profuse apology. Only when the waiter withdrew from the table did it cross her mind that maybe excess frugality was not expected out of her here. In her mind, she cursed Maria. This was all a disaster. She sat on her hands, hoping that this way at least she would not end up fidgeting with the phone out of sheer habit.

"Well!"

August clasped his hands and rubbed them together, clearly expectant. Nobody said anything in response, leaving a clumsy silence to stretch over the table. June could tell that there was something she was meant to say now, but her mind kept coming up blank when it came to figuring out the specifics.

"Well," August repeated, his enthusiasm audibly dampening.

"Why don't you tell us about your work, Doctor?" Victoria offered.

"Which part?" June asked, painfully uncertain.

Victoria flipped open a leatherbound notebook, her finger quickly running down columns of jagged handwriting filling the page.

"During your talk, you made a mention of 'dirty desire' as it pertains to trans sexual fantasies. I think this could be a good starting point?"

This was possibly the last aspect of her scholarship that June expected to capture the private sector's interest. But Victoria asked with such lucid, sharp curiosity; and wrote down what was ultimately just an off-hand remark during a dense presentation. It flattered June, and reeled her in.

"Yes, that sounds fascinating!" August seconded his subordinate, beaming.

June reached for the lemonade and tried to clear her throat. She exhaled. There was not much that could happen that would make the afternoon that worse, was there?

"Dirty desire," she began.

Her voice immediately hitched. She mouthed a few foul words, took another sip of her drink, and tried again.

"Dirty desire is what I call the many erotic fantasies we have that refuse respectability. That, despite our best efforts and sincerest wishes, cling to the problematic, dark, filthy…"

Both August and Victoria were listening with rapt attention, the latter pen in hand, pressed against the page and at the ready. June did not expect that, but at least knew well what to do next. She spoke, answered their questions with a teacher's certainty, and let all the fears and anxieties dissolve into the conversation's gentle flow. It carried June, guiding her surely through the initial points, through a pause for the best food she's had in months, and all the many conclusions and suggestions that followed.

Against all her expectations, and in spite of all her fears, August and Victoria made for an excellent audience, far better than most of her actual students. They wanted to listen to her! They were genuinely interested in the role that problematic desire could play in a trans identity formation, and in the many ways that obscene, esoteric erotic fantasies could help survive all the bad feelings that surrounded and sustained transition's messy chronologies. They laughed at the little jokes June wove into her analysis, and she in turn smiled confidently to each giggle she managed to draw from Victoria's cool facade.

Moments like that weren't happy, not exactly, even if they left June contented. What marked them for her was a brilliant kind of certainty. The world she lived in could never offer her stable footing, and every step she made making her way through it felt treacherous; but some things she knew, some things she could hold in her mind and her attention without fear of them slipping from her grasp. When she spoke and was listened to, she was gloriously real.

"Superb," August whispered, visibly stopping himself from clapping. "Absolutely engrossing, and illuminating. You have a beautiful mind, Doctor. Again, if you don't mind me saying that."

June turned to Victoria, who offered the trans woman yet another satisfied nod.

"Exactly as I told you," she looked at her boss. "A beautiful mind, for sure."

Outside, the long summer afternoon was leisurely passing into a bright evening. The idle hum campus quieted, and the restaurant slowly filled up. Sometimes, June felt a stray glance glaze over her exposed shoulders, but it rarely lingered. Who could expect this slightly unkempt man keeping a ratty trans woman's company to be some grand CEO? Especially in a place like that?

"Thank you," June smiled, for once genuine.

A waiter quietly cleared the table of the pile of bowls and plates.

"I still have some questions left," August added. "So would you like a drink or two? Victoria tells me their cocktail menu is even better than their food."

With the initial stumbles of the afternoon long washed away by how well the evening had been going, June did not protest. Soon, she found herself sipping on a dangerously sweet tiki-like concoction and listening to the CEO ramble about his respect for trans women who knew what they wanted and were unafraid to claim it, even if the society found it as problematic. She did not trust a single thing he said, obviously, but she had to give it to him: he managed to be more enthusiastic about her work than most of her colleagues and her actual dissertation supervisor, so she simply could not summon too much of the class war furor that she knew was expected of her. There was even a very small part of her, which she was doing her level best to ignore, that was wondering if he was actually the rich chaser she'd been hoping for all her life. Then again, he was married. Then again, he was filthy rich.

"I do wonder, however," he paused his rant, and leaned in exaggerated confidentiality. "What do you think of Galatea?"

June sipped from her drink, considering. This was hardly the first time she had been asked this question, though never before by a man who was actually working for the corporation in question. Especially not one at a c-suite level.

"Well…" she started, then her voice trailed off.

"Come on," August insisted, an eager smile on his face. "Just forget who I am. Treat me like one of your students. A journalist! Just give it to me straight."

Once again, June caught herself glancing at Victoria, looking for guidance, if not reassurance. But though the woman was clearly slightly frowning, there was no telling which of them it was directed at.

"Galatea," June tried a safe route, "is a corporation that rewrote labour laws in a number of countries, and not necessarily for the better."

It was more diplomatic than accusing them of making slavery legal, which is what some of June's colleagues would expect her to say. The pleasant buzz of the previous conversation continued to keep her afloat, but she found herself looking away from August and Victoria, and hanging her eyes on a certificate of authenticity adorning a nearby wall. She was feeling some kind of confusing way. Ashamed, maybe?

"But the dronification process is completely consensual," August replied with what June hoped was not an annoyed note in his voice. "All candidates undergo continuous assessment to avoid any ethical violation."

"That seems spurious, given how common mental health issues are among people who apply for the process."

"So would you think it better for people on the spectrum to be banned from applying?" August snorted. "And besides, the process is therapeutic. The mental health outcomes of former drones, long term, are actually excellent."

Was he right? As much as it reflected poorly on her public scholar's integrity, June had tried not to form a too strong of an opinion on Galatea. She preferred to let the discourse surrounding the corporation and its practices pass her by, and avoided looking—at least looking too much—into the often confusing and suspect mess of research created by the Galatea's detractors and supporters. She liked to tell herself that on some general level, the actual numbers and data were irrelevant. A corporation was a corporation, bound by its institutional and capitalist logics, and she resented it for having made being into drone kink a statement of support for multinationals. But that was not an informed position, only a kneejerk reaction, meant to keep at bay the aching fascination that the borderline supernatural technologies of sex that Galatea mastered and then offered had once sparked in her. It was safer to not think about them too much, and not consider the possibilities, which is to say temptations.

"Most drones also come from highly precarized backgrounds," she mumbled, repeating a point that stuck to her mind from the last time she looked into the relevant scholarship. "There is no avoiding coercion here."

"And how is that different from any other form of sex work?"

"Most third parties are not Fortune 500 companies, for starters."

"Please."

This time, there could be no doubt. August was getting audibly frustrated. June tried to look directly at him, but found herself unable. Instead she stared at the man in the corner of the restaurant, visibly impatient at a table set for two. Her focus was fraying.

"Dronification is a stable, readily available employment. Of course the poorer strata would be drawn to it. Besides, Galatea is currently expanding its outreach towards a more educated base for future candidates. Not to mention all the trans people who find the process liberating."

There was very little that June could say which would steer the conversation back towards safer waters, so she did the worst possible thing, and stayed conspicuously silent, as if August had actually managed to embarrass her. Which, to be honest, he had. Was she really getting outflanked in this conversation by a fucking CEO?

"Actually," he said, kicking back in his chair. "I'm curious now. You have such strong opinions, but also such sharp interests. Have you ever considered becoming a drone yourself?"

June's throat clenched suddenly. She had laid her foundation way too thick, but still, a blush had to show on her cheeks, and she hated every bit of it. Worse, when he spoke again, she could hear the smile in his voice. He was convinced he was winning.

"Of course, you don't have to say, it's a private matter, but given your autotheoretical leanings, I thought it would be interesting to ask. I, for once, have considered it multiple times."

This, she was not expecting. She reached for her drink, just to play for time.

"I think it is only natural," he continued, "that if you are faced with an opportunity for radically reshaping your embodiment like that, you at least give it a solid thought. You are trans, you should understand."

Of course June understood. And of course she had considered the Galatea drone contract, at length. She had masturbated to the fantasies of being forcibly converted into an unthinking machine too many times not to think about it, not to read into the testimonials of former drones, not to wonder if it was the way to actually becoming happy for once. There was a romance, grand, gothic, intoxicating, to being reduced to a shiny, beautiful object, to leaving behind the world for the sake of something so much simpler. But it was the sort of romance that she liked as long as it was kept from her at the distance of impossibility. It made it safe to indulge, knowing it could never touch her in the flesh. The reality of it poisoned the fantasy; to look at a drone now, to read about its experiences, became an exercise in wondering what sort of force, what sort of violence, what sort of coercion was being edited out of the picture of happy techno sex-slaves. It terrified her to know just how easy it would be for her to trade her life, or whatever semblance of it she managed to claw out of the world, away.

"I would really rather that we changed the subject."

"So you did."

A helpless anger bubbled up June's throat. What did this man want from her?

"There is no shame in admitting as much."

What did he want her to confess? What did he want her to do?

"You said much bolder things today."

Admit that she was dirty? Ask him to be dronefied?

"Of course I did," she snapped, terror jolting her even as her eyes remained pinned to the certificate on the wall. "Right next to becoming an OnlyFans model, and a live-in dog for my ex. I'm a filthy tranny perv, there you fucking go!"

Her cheeks were flustered, warm. She didn't feel drunk, but what she had was boozy, under all the layers of sugar. Or maybe there was something more in the drink, something to loosen her inhibitions, maybe the fantasy of a rich chaser was about to get so much realer, and so much darker. She was an adjunct nobody, and he was the world's new gentry.

"But I am also a professor," she added, doing her best to sound firm. "And I would like to remain that."

She tried to play it cool with a tough girl gesture and tried to down the rest of her drink in one go, only to choke and sputter. Someone passed her a napkin—Victoria, judging by the manicured nails. And then, nothing happened. No black bag coming out to upgrade her from adjunct faculty to an unsolved missing person case via the back of some rich psycho's lobotomy van. No reproach, no berating, no threats. Just another bit of extended, unpleasant silence.

Maybe, she thought with that absurd bitterness that kept company to the worst parts of her dysphoria, she was simply not cute enough to warrant any of that kind of sexist violence.

"I was told we were going to talk about my work, not my personal life," she sighed, defeated.

"But you have said it yourself that the two are inseparable in transfeminist theory," August observed, seemingly completely unperturbed by the outburst. Worse, he sounded satisfied. "Besides, I am just curious about what trans women want, so that I can help them achieve it. Whatever it is."

Well, if she was not going to be forcibly turned into a drone, or even asked to sell her soul, then at least she could give that question the answer it deserved. She crumpled the napkin in her hand, her voice dropping to a frustrated, boyish growl.

"I want a job that respects me and my work, I want a house I don't have to share with three other precarious freaks, and I want a doctor that is somehow affordable, accessible, and doesn't hate me," she declared into the empty space to the left of August's head, trying to muster up all the political conviction that she still could lay a claim to, despite agreeing to this dinner.

"Hm," August replied, as if he had really not considered that before. "I'm impressed by your clarity. Few people know how to speak about their needs so precisely."

The conversation lapsed not long after, not that there was much more left to say. Thankfully, August had to take an extended phone call, during which Victoria settled the bill, and June actually got the last of the cocktail in her. It seemed prudent; she didn't expect to get wine-and-dined by those people again, not anytime soon. Maybe, however, she could swing it into some kind of an anecdote to impress the dolls back home. She gave to the one percent as it was, and called them out on their bullshit. Mostly. Kind of.

"Now it's my turn to be terribly sorry, but it looks like we have to scramble," August announced, returning to the table, his face pinched into an expression of utter frustration. "Hate to cut this fascinating night short, but you will have to forgive me, Doctor."

June just waved her shoulders. The man continued to seem oddly genial, but the chances of him becoming her dreamed-of wealthy chaser were now close to nil. For the better, no doubt, given the sort of entity he worked for. June tried not to be too disappointed, and focus on the growing sense of numb relief at the evening being finally over.

"It's nothing," she mouthed. "It's really nothing."


-


A week later, several hundred kilometers to the east, and back in the cramped confines of the Department of Literature's office, June's phone buzzed with an email notification. She reached for it absent-mindedly, happy for a momentary distraction from the onerous work of course prep, then noticed the address the message came from and swore loudly. She opened it immediately, heart in her throat, expecting the worst.


Dear Doctor Morawska,

On behalf of the Clear Skies Foundation, it is my great pleasure to inform you that we are interested in working with your home institution to establish a research position in our Mount Verdant facility that should be a perfect fit for someone of your profile. Please review the enclosed proposal. If you need any further information, as always do not hesitate to reach out.

Sincerely yours,
Victoria Roj

PS: On a personal note, I want to reiterate that you have a beautiful mind, but terrible tableside manners.


June swore again, altogether different in tone.