Whatever Your Heart Desires Part 6

The most touching – and disturbing – chapter dealt with what girls in transition had to do to survive on a day-to-day basis. The truth was, unless a girl was completely 'unreadable', had iron-clad documentation, or was just plain lucky, she was likely to be locked out of the job market by prejudicial hiring managers. Even menial, minimum-wage jobs would be difficult to secure.

Sometimes the fields of Fashion and Cosmetology would offer opportunities. The author herself had gone that route and become a licensed Cosmetologist and Esthetician in the course of her 'research'. Not all the girls could get into those fields and not all had the talent for it. That left more creative methods of support. Finding a 'husband' (male lover) was a preferred path, though often perilous. A 'Sugar Daddy' was considered Heaven on Earth, but real Sugar Daddies were few and far between, and not every girl could attract one. Check fraud, supplanted by credit and ATM card fraud were traditional favorites. Dealing drugs – almost always at the lower echelons – was another, although the girls all too often got mixed up with the 'product' themselves. And then there was 'dating'....
I almost died as Danni wove a graphic description of 'dates'. There was no way she could have known those intimate details without having been there. I had fantasized about Danni being with men and what a turn-on it would be to watch. My experience with her at Gotham had been everything I had ever dreamed, and more. Now, this new, darker vision of her 'working it' was firmly fixed in my head, in the form of my sweet Danni having sex with some anonymous guy so she could eat that day or save up some money for the rent on the little roach-motel studio apartment she described. The thought chilled me to the bone.

Throughout the book, the level of hate, loathing, suspicion, and casual, horrific violence directed against the girls on an almost daily basis numbed the senses. There were beatings, stabbings, shootings, mutilations, rape (until then, I had not considered a girl fortunate to only be raped) heaped upon them, both from the outside and within their own community. I felt like beating my own head against the wall to think of my own Danni immersed in this cesspool. Then I thought of the others who lived it every day with her.