Deer don’t wear leather boots or tucking underwear. Deer will go about their merry way and not be troubled by their protruding form. Everyone wants to give up their teeth, hands, legs these days. If the deer is helpless then all self-disrespecting poets ought to be forest animals like her. Yet a deer will still fight and terrorize short foliage. Few wish to be ferns, it is harder to sexualize a fern.
Deer do not need to argue for their victimhood; They will be shot or run out. Trannies complain about it all so fucking often. Stigmatization bores through me to limp me in a forest bed. Pain is conferred to me in heaps of pity: in the woods, in sex scenes, in the DSM, in a poetry reading, in the awkward smiles of my antlers; If only I was allowed to have them.
So, I am told this is what I am born for. The zoo is the most generous place I can be put, to be a Deer would be to at least walk the shrinking forests. A zoo is a compromise, and my thanks should ring through a proud body. All this thing can muster is unearnable anger, but that is not very Deer-like. Animal metaphors are not allowed for me, unless I am in a zoo. My heart cannot confer me a delicate nature.
Note: If this is a piece being read aloud, this section should be read in a jaded and angry tone that will make that one person who is mad at me for being in the woman’s bathroom jump. This can be a reminder of my revoltingly violent nature. That person is not dating my friend, that person is not mad at me for dancing too hard, that person is not misgendering me in my queer theories class, that person is fake. They will detransition in a few years, which means no longer using they/them pronouns and will decry the disgusting ones who want to be a woman. How awful would it be if this was a choice? How awful, if I dream of something more than a cage?
