Visibility

I’ve been lying to all of you. Not lying, uh tricking. Well, manipulating. Ooh that doesn’t sound right. Performing, yes, but also, hiding. Sneaking. I’ve been sneaky. Stealthy. Stealth. That’s the word I was looking for. Because stealth is about performance. Roll a D20, add dexterity. But it’s also about hiding. Sleight of Hand is about dexterous performance while hiding. The tool of magicians and thieves alike.

I just typed “trans stealth” into the Google Chrome search bar on a whim. I’m in Incognito Mode and I’m using a VPN. Google asked if I was a robot and is demanding I identify cars.

Stealth. It’s my favorite type of video game. I’m a huge video game player. Always have been, ever since Motoracer on Windows 98. The games I love the most involve sneaking around guards and maybe security cameras with an array of tools at my disposal. There’s nothing quite like eavesdropping on someone just chatting about the mysterious safe in the boss’s office. “I heard he has the key on his belt.” I spent so much of my time growing up hidden in the computer room, lights off, heisting a castle or dismantling a international meganuke.

For anyone who doesn’t know, stealth is a term often used to describe trans people who decide to present fully as their gender and are not known to have gone through a transition. I recently read an interesting essay about the pain and joys of being stealth. It seems harder and harder to accomplish with our current social media. https://www.them.us/story/along-with-pain-the-joy-of-stealth-meredith-talusan-fairest

Stealth. Some of my favorite stealth games are the Arkham series of games. Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight. You play as Batman in all of them, and much of the game is spent hanging from the ceiling. Waiting. And the guards are getting scared. One of them is shooting down gargoyles, trying to flush you out. You grapple to the vent, sliding smoothly down and crouching to descend beneath the floor grates. Detective Vision. 6 more thugs and goons are left, and Two-Face is taunting you. Those are the game’s terms by the way. It refers to them as thugs and goons.

I recently purchased three e-books about prison abolition on https://www.haymarketbooks.org/. The account I used was set up under my deadname, unbeknownst to me. I opened the files to learn that at the bottom of each chapter was a license to own the e-book, made out to {deadname} at {deadname}@gmail.com. It makes you wanna go mad, doesn’t it?

Stealth. I’ve written 164 {{{165}}} pieces relating to stealth. Something about it grabbed my attention from a young age. And on this Trans Day of Visibility I wonder.

I wonder if the hood works well but

there’s a creak and I’m shaken

and jolt in bed

sneaking

behind the boss and the boss’s swinging keychain

thinking of the treasures in the safe

and not of anything else