This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
“It’s a no,” said the door girl. “No chance. Zero.”
Dan* and I shivered at the threshold of a queer warehouse party somewhere in Berlin. It was 5 a.m. on the ninth September morning I’d spent with Dan since our first date, across the ocean nine nights prior, which was about three years since we’d matched on Raya and begun texting. Seven hours ago, we’d decided to be monogamous; in about two hours, he’d tell me he loved me. We were high on 2C-B, a designer drug that united the effects of MDMA and LSD. We were summoned here, to a party we couldn’t get into, by KG, a young art student I’d met in a gay bar.
*Names have been changed.
Prior to acting, I’d worked as a door girl. I’d brandished a clipboard and curated parties with qualified bodies. I imagined what the German door girl saw: me, a tallish young woman in a wool trench, a Gucci bag on her arm. Beside her, a man, ostensibly her boyfriend: brusquely handsome with a Roman-coin profile, wearing white jeans, Common Projects sneakers, a Rolex, and an APC leather jacket. Dan and I could really keep it together on drugs—it was something we admired in each other—so we couldn’t have looked too inebriated. For Berlin, we weren’t.
KG sprinted out of the warehouse, waving his phone in the air. He wore an iridescent blue vest with no shirt underneath and a structured skirt printed with shimmering butterflies. “I invited them,” he cried, pupils like saucers. “They’re my friends.” The door girl raised an eyebrow. A couple in head-to-toe fetish gear materialized behind us and were beckoned in with a wave. She scanned me again, then Dan.
“No,” she spat. “Sorry.”
I stared at her with everything I could but refused to say out loud: “I’m a trans woman and I belong inside your queer party! I grew up at parties like this. I used to shave my eyebrows off and paint my face blue and wear nothing but ribbons and vinyl to go dancing. My brow bone, in fact, used to jut out rather far, and my jaw was square—I was quite androgynous and fascinating-looking before my facial feminization surgeries! And sure, my boyfriend is cis and straight, but he enjoys the company of queers as much—if not more!—than I do. Hell, he’s dating one. Let us in, you superficial bitch.” The message wasn’t received. (I’m not a telepath, and neither, I suppose, was the door girl.) She jabbed her finger in the direction of the street.
I wove my arm around Dan’s as we glided away, KG flanking us, sputtering apologies. As I murmured “whatever”s and “totally fine”s, my lips curled into a crooked smile. Yes, I was offended—and bummed on principle to miss a party—but the Berlin morning had yielded an unexpected little glory: On the arm of a man I was fairly certain I loved, I had passed as a cisgender, heterosexual female. The tender wound of queerness I carried, and continue to carry, in my heart had ceased, in that moment, to be inscribed upon my body. “I’m an ugly girl trapped in a hot girl’s body” was a joke I’d begun to crack over the years I’d spent getting stared at on the New York subway, chased down city blocks with slurs and, one time, a knife; years behind the wheel of a lemon with no license. And now…what? Deliverance—from my gender dysphoria, and the gay club too? An eligible bachelor on my right arm, a Gucci bag dangling off my left? Designer pieces are, if nothing more, indicators of social class, and because of a stigma too vast and nuanced to cover here, one doesn’t necessarily expect to see them on a transsexual woman in the wild. Some gonzo alchemy of sex and class had submitted any lingering impression of my transness to an image of yuppie heterosexuality. The thought made me giggle, then sneer. What a shame, I thought, and what a joy.
Dan and I hugged KG goodbye, hailed a cab, and sped away from the warehouse to our Airbnb, where we would make love. As we got out of the car, I received a text from KG: “My friend Tendril told her who you were and she’s like ‘please apologize to her I’m humiliated!’ ” I wondered what, exactly, Tendril had said to the door girl. I wondered who—or what—exactly, they thought I was.
Hari Nef is a writer, actress, and model.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Getting Mistaken for Cis.”