Cispocalypse Now!
The fire cracks as I lie in the grass and watch the stars. It’s quiet except for the crickets and the occasional birdcall. No lights as far as the eye can see. I hold my hands up in the light of the fire to examine the shine of the new hot pink polish. Too much? I ask myself before deciding that, if anything, they could be pinker. I tap my fingers together to confirm it’s dry, and I can go about my normal chores around the campsite.
Yes, the world has ended, and yes, I rarely see any other living people. But I didn’t spend all that time transitioning just to go back to masc presenting. In some ways, it’s more empowering now. I’m not doing this for anyone else but me. I’m going to have the best fucking nails in this wasteland. Not to mention my hair. It’s a lot of weight carrying around the bottles of shampoo and conditioner. And my camping solar panels don’t generate enough voltage to run a hair dryer. But I still have some of the best locks in the new world.
What’s my name, you ask, dear reader? That doesn’t matter. Names aren’t needed when you don’t talk to anyone. Now I’ve got two dead names. Dead names outnumber living names a thousand to one in this world. Pronouns are also mostly useless given the state of things, which is a shame after making such a big deal about them to my friends and family while they were alive. Still, there is the occasional skirmish with less than friendly surviving trans sisters and brothers, when they might wonder, “How should I refer to the person who just shot me in the ass?” So, to help them out, I scratch my pronouns into my bullets. Little she/theys etched into the lead so when they extract it, they can know how to properly address me while they curse me.
So now you’re probably asking: What happened to the world? The cispocalypse happened, which probably raises more questions.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, huge sums of money were poured into researching viruses. Eventually, this led to breakthroughs in virus technology. Governments found ways of engineering viruses. An arms race appeared, with countries competing to make better vaccines and more deadly viruses. As things escalated, viruses could not only be targeted to attack specific genomes, but they could decode brain patterns and target personality types. The only silver lining was, much like with nuclear weapons, no one was ever stupid enough actually to use any of these super viruses. It was mutually assured destruction; no one was crazy enough to risk it. Then came the TERFs. Their hatred of trans people knew no bounds. Their strange obsession with gender caused their brains to rot past the point of reason. Eventually, they managed to infiltrate the UK government and implement their final solution to the trans problem: a lethal virus that only targets trans people.
Of course, the trans community resisted. Once news got out about their plans, the queer community organised and isolated themselves. The virus couldn’t spread if we all worked together and stayed away from each other. So, I locked myself in my apartment for what I thought would be a months-long stay. After a week, the power went out. I cautiously emerged from my quarantine and found all the cis people dead or dying. As usual, the TERFs weren’t as good at distinguishing who was and was not trans as they thought they were. The virus started infecting cis people. Of course, cis people didn’t want to admit that anyone, or thing, could mistake them for being trans. So they would ignore their sniffles, say it was the cold, and not do anything like isolate. After that, the virus spread, and the records got patchy, but as best we could tell, the virus mutated and started infecting everyone. By the time the trans people emerged from our lockdown, it was all gone.
Life’s not so bad. There’s plenty of food. Supermarkets are filled with processed foods, so stuffed with preservatives that they’ll probably never go off. It’s easy to find water filters in abandoned camping stores, and anyway, the waterways are far less polluted now that there are barely any humans left. I raid libraries and bookstores for reading material. I dig through old hard drives for copies of shows and movies to watch. It’s a pretty relaxed lifestyle. Though, there is one problem: estrogen.
Fortunately, before everything went to shit, I had the sense to have an orchidectomy, meaning I no longer produce testosterone. So no need to worry about sourcing blockers. Unfortunately, my body has no means to produce large quantities of estrogen, and I’d really prefer not to get osteoporosis. The other unfortunate thing is that most of the other trans femmes in the wasteland have the same problem. So we fight over the remnants of estrogen that we can scour from pharmacies. Some were smart in the early days and cleaned out retirement homes where they knew there would be a lot of menopausal women. I’ve heard rumours of a gang of femmes who knocked over a drug manufacturer and have many lifetimes' supplies of estrogen and use it to rule over vast territories. I just keep moving, looking for untouched pharmacies. Sure, estradiol meds have used by dates. But all that means is it becomes less effective, and a certain amount has decayed. I just take more pills as time goes on, but of course, that means more raiding for supplies.
I stick to the countryside, for a number of reasons. The first is before the cispocalypse, the country was a more conservative place. This meant most trans people gravitated towards the cities. So there will be fewer survivors out here in the bush, and less competition for resources. Lots of old farmhouses with overgrown vegetable patches for nutrition, lots of dams with clean drinking water. But most importantly, fewer trans people means fewer people clearing out pharmacies for estrogen.
It’s not without its risks out here. I’ve often heard rumours of roving packs of trans men in cars, roaming the wasteland. Capturing any trans women with intact testicles that they can in order to harvest testosterone from them. Makes sense; there’s not much more affirming and masculine for a trans man than marauding around the wasteland mad max style. Though cars are loud and roads are easy to avoid out here, so I don’t see it as too much of a risk. The real risk is the pharmacies. The one place guaranteed to attract people. I open my bottles of pills; only three left, not much choice now. I’ll head into town tomorrow.
I wake with the sun and pack up my camp. I turn on my phone. You might think that without the internet, phones would be fairly useless, and that’s true to an extent. But they have one useful feature: a GPS antenna. I had a lot of maps downloaded to the phone before everything went to shit, so it’s still useful for navigation. The satellites still seem to be working, for now anyway. Sometimes, my location can be off a bit; they must be drifting from their orbits, but it’s good enough for navigating around the bush, at least. I sometimes see fireballs in the sky at night, which I assume are satellites falling out of orbit. Probably a lot of Starlink; they were in fairly low orbit. Eventually, two will probably collide and cause a Kessler syndrome chain reaction, and everything up there will break apart, so it’s best to use them while they’re still up there.
The map on my phone shows the next town is only a few k’s down the road. I load up my electric bike, the battery fully charged from the camping solar panels yesterday. I have a small trailer, one designed for carrying kids, attached to the back, full of my supplies. In all, it makes for a fairly easy way to traverse the cispocalypse. I ride out of the bush where I made my camp onto a dirt road that will take me close to town. I sail down the road, thick bushland on either side of me. The forests are alive with birdsong as native animal populations have exploded now that most of the people are gone. Occasionally I have to stop for the odd kangaroo. As I make my way, I think how lucky we are that it turned out to be a quiet apocalypse, makes travelling through the wasteland a nice experience. I ride until the edge of the tree line. I’ll walk from here; the bike is not stealthy enough for a raid into town. I cover the bike with enough branches to hide it and lock it to a tree.
The town is, as expected, a ghost town. Luckily, most of the people here seem to have time to go home before dying; there aren’t too many corpses littering the street. I walk slowly and quietly, always keeping in range of some sort of cover if needed, carrying my pistol just in case. Apart from the risk of running into gangs of murderous trans people, it’s a nice walk through a quaint country town.
After a few more blocks I find my target. A small pharmacy in a local shopping centre away from the main shopping district. Far less likely to have been targeted. I find a spot in some bushes across the street and start watching through some binoculars to be sure there is no movement. As desperate as I am for some sweet estrogen, it’s not worth fighting over. I give it ten minutes or so, long enough that if someone was inside, they’d be finished with their scavenging and cautiously make my way over. I pull out my pistol, crack open the door, and a little bell goes off to let the long-dead owners know they have a customer. I curse my lack of stealth; I should have expected that. Oh well, if anyone is here, they know about me, so I can stop trying to be quiet.
I put my pistol away and look around. Aside from the rotting corpses, the place seems untouched; no one has raided it yet. Desperate and excited, I start ripping out draws from behind the counter and digging through the packs of pills on the ground. Eventually, I pull one drawer out, and it’s loaded. Nothing put packs of estradiol. Thank god. I pull off my bag and start grabbing as many packs as I can. Then I hear the bell of the door go off. Oh shit. Quickly, I duck behind the counter, hoping they didn’t see me. “Looks untouched,” I hear someone say. Means there are at least two of them.
“Be on the lookout for any of the fakes,” another voice says.
Shit. Of all the trans people to run into, not truescum. They’re trans people who believe the only true trans person is one who wholeheartedly tries to reach the binary. Who goes on hormones and has full bottom surgery. Non-binary people, trans people who don’t want surgery, are all viewed as lesser, fake trans people. Truescum won’t hesitate to kill you and take your estrogen stash. If they catch me here, it won’t take them long to figure out my penis has yet to be inverted. It wasn’t always this way. At the beginning of the cispocalypse, we all tried to work together, live in some sort of utopian trans society. But like all queer organisations, rifts began to appear. First, they came for the enbys. People asked, were they really trans enough? Would the trans virus actually have targeted them? Did they really isolate with the rest of us? Could we be sure they aren’t carrying the virus? And so the enbys were ejected into the wastes. Eventually, the criteria for being trans shifted until the truescum had ejected all of us from their supposed utopia. It was basically just the trans version of Animal Farm.
I hear them start to check shelves for supplies, won’t be long until they get back here. Maybe I could find a sedative in one of these draws, or some chloroform, instead of risking a firefight. No, that won’t work; they’ll have lost too much potency by now. With no other choice, I take the safety off the pistol. This is what all the practice was for. The shelves I’m hiding behind have a gap beneath them that I peek under. I see one pair of sneakers on one side of the room, before I hear a load clacking and a pair of stilettos emerge on the other side.
Heels on a raiding mission? Now, I’m all for looking fabulous, but sometimes living in the cispoclypse means forgoing fashion for practical attire. In this case, it will cost them their lives. Lying on my side, I aim under the shelves and take the shot. The bullet shatters the heel of their pumps, and they fall backwards. Before their partner can react, I’m up off the floor and several of my pronouns are lodged within their torso. I vault over the counter and kick the fallen one’s gun away from their reach before I stand over them. They spit at me and say, “You wish you were as woman as I am!”
I was going to apologise for ruining their heels, but after that outburst, I decide to put a pronoun between their eyes. I exhale, safe again, but I should hurry in case more are around town. I finish stuffing my bag with the pills I found, then check over the truescum. Both had a decent personal stash of estradiol. It’s been a long time since my supplies were this good. Means I can travel further into the interior, further away from any other survivors. I head towards the exit before I notice a display of nail polish. I grab a nice shade of pink and head back out into the wastes.