The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

Yet, for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s, the Sex and the City Problem was an aspirational problem. Only the rarest, most stealth, most successful of trans women ever had the chance to even confront it. The rest were barred from all four options at the outset. No jobs, no lovers, no babies, and while a trans woman might have been a muse, no one wanted art in which she spoke for herself. And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.

Reese first came across Tammi at Saint Vitus, a dank club that primarily hosted music of the angry male variety. Every surface of the interior was painted black and therein such ample moshing had occurred over the years that the accumulated musk of sweaty post-adolescent boys forever lingered in the circulation-free air. A straight Tinder boy who was into noise had suggested meeting Reese there one night, and she agreed, primarily because she’d know immediately whether he was worth fucking or whether to flee after a drink, and either way, her apartment was two blocks away. Onstage, a cadre of boys hunched over keyboards. Among them, the only thing truly worth looking at in the whole club: a trans woman on guitar. Six foot three, tattoos jagged on lean porcelain arms, slashes of asymmetrical dark hair bisecting a face made up so expertly vampiric that had Elvira known about it, she’d have stopped by to learn something. The woman less played her instrument than throttled it every ten seconds or so, between which attacks she gazed with poised stillness at some unfixed point over the heads of the audience, listening to the reverberations of her own sudden violence, as a hiker who has shouted over an empty alpine lake holds quiet for the moments it takes his echo to return.