Page 79 of Puppy on a Leash

Subs at the club were way more subtle about wanting praise.

Speaking of subs… “What made you think this warranted a call in the middle of your class?”

I appreciated it. I’d give them a visit to show them how much after I was back up north.

I hated Madrid with a passion. There was a BDSM club on the outskirts of the city I kept meaning to check out, but it was the only positive I could come up with about the capital.

“Um. Well.” Jaime cleared their throat. I bet they were scratching their arm, too. It was too bad I couldn’t beat the habit out of them right this minute. “So, you know how all you professors sometimes give us bogus tasks when you don’t wanna think too hard about homework and shit?”

“Yes?” I frowned.

People were starting to move toward the auditorium where the panel was being held. Tardiness was not something I accepted in myself.

“Well? Gerlach made us submit questions to that panel. Which I did.” More rustling in the background—probably from Jaime pacing. “The people attending hadn’t been announced yet, so I didn’t know it was you. Or him, for that matter. So, yeah, just so you know, I wasn’t stirring the pot or any of that.”

“What was the question?”

And why did this guy know he was attending weeks before I did? The names on the panel were announced almost two weeks ago, and there was no way he’d picked this panel at random when he gave that homework.

I’d been there. If I thought a panel was not going to gather a lot of interest, but I wanted it featured more, I’d make my students do the same.

“Y’know, something about trans rights. Obviously.”

Obviously.

The panel was on censorship in journalism within EU walls. I supposed it wasn’t too farfetched, given all the noise fromItaly refusing to sign the treaty warranting LGBTQ+ people safety. Knowing Jaime, though? I bet that wasn’t the angle of the question. They actually had a sharp mind, but they tended to take it three steps farther without building up to their point. Theyhada point. The delivery just didn’t work at times because of it.

“Thanks for the heads-up, Jaime.” I really was itching to drop the name, but someone overhearing me call them pup or boy was not worth the short-lived reprieve the protocols would provide. “Now get your ass back to class.”

It didn’t matterhow many times I tried to tell myself I was biased because of my connection to Jaime. Their professor? He was a fucking piece of work, and we hadn’t even gotten to anything actually juicy—such as Jaime’s question.

“We have another interesting question from one of the students watching us online,” Mercedes prefaced. I knew it was Jaime’s question the second her eyes twinkled when she looked my way. Thankfully, not everyone southward had heard about the article inadvertently outing me, but some had. Mercedes had been one of them. She’d tried to talk to me about it a few times, and I’d evaded her, but it seemed my luck was running out. “The question reads, what’s your take on erasing nonbinary identities when reporting on a gendered language and under an institution that rejects gender-neutral pronouns?”

I sighed. Gerlach took the question before anyone else could, making a joke about how he knew a few students in the last few years who could’ve asked that. I kept my face blank and let hiswords roll past me. In through one ear and out the other. There was nothing of value in what he was saying or what the others on the panel were commenting. Some tried to soften his words, but I didn’t care to bother.

“What is your take, Tony?” Mercedes asked. “You’ve been quiet over there. Anything to add to Gerlach’s words?”

I scrubbed a hand down my face before I repositioned the microphone in front of me.

“Having anything to add would imply I agree with any of what my colleagues here have said.” I focused on Mercedes as I spoke. Her shock was oddly gratifying, but it wasn’t why I kept my gaze on her. Looking at the others would misguide them into thinking I wanted a rebuttal of some kind. “So, if I may answer the question with a clean slate? We all know the Royal Spanish Academy is an outdated institution filled with dinosaurs who still think women should be shot in the head if they don’t conform to their gaze. Even if we ignore that, I don’t know one single journalist who hasn’t broken at least one of the Academy’s rules at one point. We understand that language evolves, and this isn’t a bad thing, so I don’t think the Academy should be a concern when it comes to using gender-neutral pronouns or language.

“That said,” I continued, doing my best to ignore the myriad of flashes that hadn’t been there before. I could already see the headlines everywhere. Jaime was going to pay for this. “I do think there are issues when it comes to reporting accurately on nonbinary identities, and I don’t have a clear fix for them.”

Mercedes gaped. I assumed the others wore similar expressions, but if I turned my head in either direction, I risked being blinded by the flashes. “Can you elaborate?”

“Gladly.” Not really. “As far as I know, nonbinary people in Spain use one gender-neutral pronoun, elle. I think there’s another one ending in i. However, other languages, like English,have at least a dozen neopronouns. More, actually. So, of course, we agree that using gendered pronouns to refer to a nonbinary person is erasing that identity, and misgendering, but what happens when the person we’re reporting on uses a neopronoun that simply does not have a translation in our language? Isn’t it erasing a part of their identity to default to they/them when describing them? And, can we consider that censorship, when it’s a result of our language’s constrictions?

“Personally, I think that’s a more interesting and productive question to answer, instead of the pointless and tiring debate on whether or not a reality is or isn’t a reality.”

The silence that followed was almost oppressive in nature. I sat back in the uncomfortable, worn-down chair the organizers had provided.

Not surprisingly, Gerlach was the one who recovered first. “Surely, you can agree that all this talk on gender identity is just noise to distract us from what really matters.”

It was a close call, but I managed not to roll my eyes. This was going to be bad, especially if anyone ended up learning about my relationship with Jaime. After the stolen pictures last year, I wouldn’t put it past the realm of possibility.

Which meant I had to tread carefully. “I agree trans people, and trans issues, are the first thing to be leveraged, by all parties, when fascist ideologies arise. But the fact that they’re being leveraged and weaponized doesn’t take away from the fact that they exist or that they are victims of an oppressive, violent system.”

I wasn’t an expert on anything that had to do with trans policies, for fuck’s sake. Most of what I knew about trans anything was thanks to Plumas and the people in the club. But because I’d quickly become the token queer person on the panel, every headline was going to champion me as the number one advocate for trans rights now.

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