Winter 2022 | Stephanie Burt Reads "Cinderella" – MQR Sound
The trans story is the heroine has to be trans
because nobody else in the capital shares
her size. The prince must roam from house to house,
from mansion to cottage to townhome, trying to find
the one girl who came to the winter solstice ball
in glass slippers (they must have hurt like hell
by the end of the night, even rightly sized) with heels
at least 1 1/2ʺ high, and (more important)
in ladies’ 13 1/2. But the longer
trans story is the prince was already
kissing and sharing secrets with his footman:
raised as a boy, the prince’s favorite footman
was really a girl named Cindy, but only the prince
knew her chosen name. They could never marry:
the kingdom wouldn’t accept it. So he told
her. And he wouldn’t want anyone else. So when
the king insisted he choose, at that ball, a bride,
the prince arranged for Cindy to show up, splendid
in tiara and heels, all starry like Andromeda
viewed from a moonless mountaintop. When
(the plan went) the king asked the prince the next day
“Who was that girl you spent the night with?” he’d tell
the king to scour the town for Cindy,
the one who got away. Except that Cindy
didn’t get away: instead she arranged—
of course, of course, unbeknownst to him—
to pop out from a family friend’s garage,
then pop the question. And the prince said yes,
I’ve changed my mind; we’re not going to hide anymore.
That’s the version we give the cis, and it’s lovely, but
the truth is almost nobody gets it right:
the trans story is that the prince herself
is the trans girl in the story, and like so
many of us, she spent day after day—
before the party, after the party, maybe
instead of attending the party—crossing the town,
ringing doorbells, trawling message boards, scouring yard sales
and barging into shopfronts right before closing
to talk to the tired clerks, never giving up
her search for the one, the terrific, the just-right shoe.
For more from the Winter 2022 issue of MQR, you can purchase the issue here.
