Tha Man Sam: Son of T

Picture What Will Be - So Limitless and Free

2011-02-05T09:07:00.000-05:00

This has been an amazing ride. Writing this blog has not only been a great source of relief for those transitioning times that were especially challenging – unbeknownst to me, other people actually read it too! And so I made some friends here, forged some relationships I have come to value as we bolstered one another through some stormy seas, told one another how freaking adorable and hot we are, teased and tickled, and otherwise bonded in this strange interwebbed vitreous cyberland. I made a couple videos and got published in Bear Bergman and Kate Bornstein’s ground-breaking anthology “Gender Outlaws – The Next Generation.” It has been deep and silly and fun and heartbreaking, this tour-de-trans.

Now, with the help of my mentor and Papa, J. Megel of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Performance Studies department, I am writing a show. I’ll let you know how it goes – or – you can see it next year when you come visit me in NC! I hope it beams back the love I’ve been given, from you and from the Great Blue Horned Salted Octopus that made me. The salted part is actually taken from all this chocolate I’ve been eating, with sea-salt and cayenne. Because that’s how I ROLL.

Anyhoo, I may come back to this space in a week, or this project may have ended. We’ll see! Meantime, much love from me, the kittens, any deep sea creatures lolling about, and D.

Namaste Beloved Friend!

Sam

"Monsters Meet Such Interesting People!" - B. Bunny

2010-12-15T14:29:00.000-05:00

Don’t ask me to be the spokesmodel for trans-etiquette – when it comes to gendered language, I’m just as dick-fisted and cunt-mouthed as the rest of you. There’s something about the presence of a gender non-conformist in the room that incites an outbreak of trans-tourettes, and there are some inelegant slang words I’ve been accustomed to using since before I was even noticeably a girl, much less a boy. “You guys,” for instance – it simply won’t leave my vernacular, even though every time I utter it I experience the noxious fumes of its jet stream backwashing my face. “Guys,” like Bugs Bunny, simply had no gender whatsoever for me for the longest time. I remember asking myself, “is Bugs Bunny a girl or a boy?” It seemed like the kind of oracular conundrum of classical literature, or like those obnoxious smarty pants riddles about the hanged man and the water puddle. Bugs seemed to inhabit a space between those clearly delineated outcroppings of “boy” or “girl,” at least for this five year old. I could only distinguish between genders by play, both forms of which – either brutality or dolls –repelled me. My love for Bugs began with a purely dopaminergic response to a being who playfully donned, mocked, trounced and flounced gendered presentations in a way I’ve yet to experience – but work to emulate – in real (non-animated) life.

I find myself “Madame-ing” the blurry, and “Sir-ring” the lady. I am as awkward and as prone to subterranean blurtations as someone who doesn’t know better. I have experienced and invoked the sensation of falling like Jimmy Stewart down a vertiginous rabbit hole of disassociation, the place where deep shame can take you, the place of no voice. Shame from either side is rarely a helpful emotion, I find. I’m sure it has value, I’m sure it’s larned me a thing or two, but more often it’s clipped my wings, or merely stuck me in a cage and left the door open and laughed as I believed myself too disabled by it to leave.

I’m going to try to look at this phenomenon another way. What if, when people mispronoun us -what if, when I trip all over my big clown feet in room full of transpeople - what if I’m experiencing an outburst of confusion, one that perhaps I do well NOT to suppress? What if gender-confusion is WONDERFUL? The very fact that I’m being so neurochemically disrupted is FANTASTIC! Of course I don’t wish to hurt anybody – there are only about two people in this world I’d like to hurt intentionally, and one of them likes it. But I see this phenomenon, in me at least, as part of the neurochemical rewiring process, one which must begin with interference and disorder, a static intrusion violent enough to force my brain to its default setting. Which, again in my case, is sometimes idiocy.

Gender non-conforming people change space and time. We queer everything. Just yesterday a young person came up to me with tremendous sincerity and asked,“is this going to be part of your one-woman show?” after I had literally just invested ten minutes performing the heartbreak of being misconstrued as female. I’m going to revisit these moments as being ecstatic, as serving as part of the architecture of Awakening, for both of us. Whenever a human blurts something, the thing they’re trying to avoid saying, the thing they may be subcutaneously grappling, the gendered stutter of the mind that is attempting to do something new against an ego that is mired in the old, perhaps there is something healing in it. I’m not speaking about the resolute, those awful humans who will not pronoun you correctly because it “goes against their belief” (in their own absolutism, their superiority), or who repeatedly “forget” because they’re too self-involved to really care about how you feel, or even your benighted family members, although it could end up working on them too: I’m talking about the Trickster Tic, the mischievous brain spasm ejaculated from the mouths of We Who Know Better, who stand frozen in our tracks as the leaden word balloon leaves our mouths and thuds to the floor, or the feet, of the transperson we’re addressing. The Trickster Tic, or Trans Tourettes, is simply a symptom, some gas expelled from a depth that has been newly churned.

I’m going to embrace this idea, to save myself another shame enema, and to witness neurologic/shamanic alterations in others. Loki dances everywhere, but especially where there’s need – a signifying monkey in the lair of the lion. This is what Trans does, this is our job, I am an ambassador (I wrote ambassODOR first, which is more accurate) of interstitial mischief, a messenger from the Gods, so if I think I’m going to be exempt from humiliation it’s only a sure, short amount of time before I’ve got to display my humbled rump for the masses.

So “she” me, “he” me, what can you do me? I love you.

I Forgot I Had Gills When I Got Here

2010-11-18T11:19:00.002-05:00

After a panel discussion last night, someone in the audience leaned his head in close to mine and said “So. You were pretty vague about your gender up there.” I said “’transman’ isn’t vague” but he was insistent. “Well, later, you were saying something about this other space…”

Oh yes, the “other space.” The interstices. I imagine bodily gender as a cellular structure, within which floats two, oh, let’s call them mitochondria. These objects, "male" and "female," in their solidity, have been mistaken for the entire organism. Trans, using this metaphor – I know, bear the fuck with me – is the cytoplasm. In this way we can begin to see the fluid as having substance, of being substantial. I haven’t been around here much lately because I have been hella writing for dumb school – every class I’d chosen requires what amounts to a paper a week, of the kind that demands a works cited page – the creation of which takes more of my time than the actual writing. I’m that guy. Works cited is like algebra to me. Anytakepityonanancientundergrad, I recently wrote a paper about consumer identities vis a vis transgender, in which I suggested that “transition” become a gender placeholder.

Transition, as typically understood, is a deceptive verb because it relies upon moving between fixity that exists only as an idea – that is, as an idea of gender as two poles (no pun intended). It’s not that these two genders don’t exist – male and female are not “constructs” entirely, they’re real, they have substance, right? But whatever they’re composed of makes man/woman appear different depending on where you’re standing. Nonetheless, as subjective and illusory they sometimes seem, there they are. They are floating in the buoyant and balmy jelly of transition. If gender were a map, then Male and Female would be two delightful (if demanding) little islands. Rosie might take her cruise ship there, and, depending on which side of the island the liner landed, shipmates might be greeted with jeers or joy.

I’d like to offer transition as a place, as a “sea of possibility,” if I may quote my beloved Patti Smith, and I believe I may. I might on occasion hoist my anchor and harbor myself in the Bay of Manlitude, but I don’t have til sundown to build a lean-to and find water because there’s no need to stay. It’s not that I don’t feel some relationship, a kinship, with man – I do. But I think my kinship makes me more of a cousin than a brother. Man is something once removed.

Does trans longing ever cease, ever cede to something else? Whatever alterations I make, will I always ache for something else, something more? I like my body just fine – and having a “mussy” (you can break that down yourself, Smarty) seems like the best of all possible worlds sometimes…but I would be lying if I said I no longer suffer phantom limb syndrome. Do bodies born with penises ever long to experience what it might be like to have a vagina? To not have this mess of giblets always cluttering their plates? How strange must it be to have one’s insides enclosed in a drawstring purse between one’s legs! It’s like being permanently at a Renaissance theme park somehow – oh, there’s my clove orange! It seems obtuse and archaic…and yet…

Well. I can visit the island, but this transperson can never stay. It’s up to me to embrace the ocean – less defined, indefinable, peppered with terrifying, wondrous creatures; it’s briny, moody, and capable of scattering me like hermit crabs on the shore. It’s so way bigger than me, so way bigger than anything I know – those two islands for instance, and anything else that may emerge from its depths, I’m incapable of fully understanding it. Nevertheless, I know it’s real.

So swim with me, transpeople, nontranspeople too. Let’s join, let’s link, and be tossed by these waves. They’re feisty now because they’re disgruntled with those islands – the ones that think they’re all there is. But the islands are really just toddlers – they haven’t matured enough to understand that an entire universe exists around them, with them, in them – not for them. It may our oceanic mission, to wash up upon their baby beaches, and let those island dwellers ponder what else might be out there beyond their carefully limned, yet ever shifting shores. They fear a return to the sea, my friends, as do we all. We’re just lucky we live there already.

Kard Karrying Kweer

2010-10-11T19:41:00.000-04:00

Several things distinguish humans from other beings – three that come to mind immediately are the making of art, morality, and fixity. Or maybe it’s the combination of these three: octopuses make art but they don’t register time, even when wearing eight swatches. These things are sometimes at cross-purpose - for instance when I want to get my homo on and fag out at Urban Outfitters but can’t because someone told me (the internets) that UO is E-vil. One of these is not like the others but seems to be a hearty human urge, indeed, can feel like the only thing between one’s staying intact and one’s pixellating into a human solvent -and that’s fixity.

Identity seems to be a profound human need – I have some: artist, feminist, transperson, alcoholic. Change or mutability vexes most humans; for me this has looked like putting up with some serious shit in relationships (although I reckon a partner or two might choke on that one, having dished out more than my share of partner-poopoo). I guess we could pin human intransigence to psychotherapeutic clichés like “fear of abandonment,” or “fear of success.” Whatevs. It intrigues me that identity is so crucial. I remember meeting a transguy in my early days who told me he was a “femme fag pillow-queen tranny bottom” which seemed like an awful lot to remember. But look, I did. As a mutable fire sign Sagittarius (look, there’s another identity!) I feel more comfortable outside of groups – AA’s the only club I ever joined and believe you me it was under duress.

When I read people saying things like “I’m a man! I am a man and that’s that!” I’m always a little surprised by their vehemence. Buck Angel comes to mind – now I don’t know him and he seems like a perfectly nice guy - he’s always affirming to journalists especially that he’s a man. To which I say, “hats off to you, Sir! You are indeed a man! And a very manly man as well!” He’s a man. Maybe you’re a man. Maybe you’re a woman. I’m sure it’s just me and my mutable fire sign but these sorts of declarations always feel a little frantic – understandable in a world that often looks at us down a very judgey cis-nose. But let me be clear – I don’t feel that way, so “normal” for me is not “feeling like a man.” I totally get that your baseline allows for this feeling that I cannot experience. It may be a flaw in my design, I concede that. And I would like to share also that I need to be “seen” as a man. I need my outside to appear masculine. Why this is I could no more tell you than why I like toffee in coffee ice-cream so much more than cookie dough. I need you to read me as male, but I do not really in my testosterone-enhanced heart of hearts believe that I can be a man. And here’s maybe another critical difference between me and someone else: I do not want to capitulate to what I’m convinced is a social grouping that has done ever so much more harm than it has good.

Yes, this posture is easy for me who doesn’t think they are a man anyway. I’m not doing yoga here. I don’t know how I came to be born to this body that confuses the mind, or this mind that has some other ideas about the body. But, and sometimes it grieves me to say this, I wasn’t born a man. The state of trans – “for me, today,” as my friend Sheila loved to intone – is an acceptance of the mutable, the dynamic. It is, for me, not the rugged embrace of Paul Bunyan but more of a dance with the blue ox Babe.

ANYTRANSMASCULINITY, what I’m really trying to say here is that identity policing is pissing me off. Of course, in this I run the risk of alienating all the police, thus creating more us’n’thems, but here goes…

If you’re an activist, you’re probably a bit of a control-freak. I will suggest to you that you probably have alcoholism or mental illness in your family. I say this because it’s true for me, and many, many, MANY of the activists I know. When you combine this sort of chemical askance with the human instinct to identify oneself against another you get the kind of person (myself) who is unutterably convinced of both their best intentions and their superiority.

Neither of these things is entirely true.

What’s really jacked me up is the pecking, the regulating I see coming from my trans/queer community. The nit-pick and the scrutiny, the “you’re not doing it right” and the “you don’t speak for me” is craven responsibility-denying. My understanding of queer and trans is that they are the essence of inclusivity - especially queer. I know many transpeople are very committed to a gendered status quo; that’s fine by me, but I’d appreciate if you’d stop blaming your lack of freedoms on those of us who speak out. Really, I don’t know why I even fight for equality for you people.

Okay, so here’s what I’m suggesting. Let’s stop micro-managing one another’s message. Let’s let “our community” be where they are. I promise not to check your ID for “queer” if you promise not to weigh what’s twixt my fleshy thighs. If I’m going to critique your message, I promise I’ll offer my own version, framed with love and compassion, and only a soupçon of snarkery. Let’s leave queer enough alone. And know this: my shop is open for any of you, all the time. I don’t care how you identify, if you’re straight and white and male even. And have dreads and like Eminem. I don’t even care. I love you Brother, I love you Sister and I loveloveloooove you Sisterbrother. Welcome, everyone. You are all loved here.

Is This Microphone On? or Konversations Kill

2010-08-29T14:28:00.002-04:00

In an ongoing effort to extend my tentacular reach, I’ve been having chats about the impact of language and symbol on the disenfranchised at large. For instance, when I began my transition, I used the word “tranny” a lot. It seemed to mitigate the seriousness of my decision, and the flippant, and I hoped insouciant, way in which it fell out of my (full-lipped, sensuous) mouth helped those closest to me feel less threatened. I was being, in a Tom Cruisian sense, “glib.” This wasn’t calculated; it was initially unconscious. You could say I used my own transphobia* to bridge my transition, for myself and for others. It was useful for a while, and then it began to chafe. This was because as I began to fit in my own skin, I felt genuinely less pejorative about it. “Tranny” seemed less and less enchanting, and hearing my (non-trans) friends use it began to feel awkward. This I could not articulate until I began reading that some transwomen take real offense at transmen appropriating language used specifically to diminish and dehumanize transwomen.

Being as old as I am and having shown my ass on entirely too many occasions, I was willing to concede I had been thoughtless in my word choice. I mulled over the “t-word” conundrum, until I could finally feel some compassion, and then of course what I’d been avoiding all along, shame for having so blithely embraced such a rubber-bullet word. Aaah, so here is the crux of the biscuit, as Mr. Zappa used to say! The “S” word! One must avoid shame at all costs, even at the expense of others! The moral of this story is that I always have things to learn, and I must be vigilant with my own ego to do this.

Crap.

More recently, a friend of mine was edited from a Pride-Fest lineup because she has dreadlocks. She’s white, so dreadlocks are challenging for some people. I had forgotten this myself, until it was brought up by the group that snipped her off, if you will. It seemed dated, this posture, unhelpful, emotional. I wasn’t there so I don’t know what happened, but I can tell you what happened for this transguy: I had to do some deep dish diving. When our soi-disant “own community” censures us, it’s unsettling. It seems counter-productive, fascist even, an attempt by the marginalized to wield whatever watery power they feel they hold. It was absolutely none of my business, but the conversation kept sticking – I needed more information. I made pilgrimage to one of the wiser, more judicious persons I know, someone who wore dreads for a very long time herself, Shirlette Ammons.

I intuitively understood that Shirlette would not hold with white people sporting dreads, but I also knew she could shift the dialogue for me enough that I would see it from a new perspective. I am extreeeeemely lucky to have friends and colleagues I can ask to extrude my being into some new space/time dimension, like I’m play-doh and they’re the template; I relish this sort of travel. Also, I enjoy being Technicolor spaghetti dough but this is neither here nor there. I said, “I get it – it’s like ‘this is one of the few things I can call mine and you white people are taking that too, for a fucking fashion for godssake!’” Shirlette retorted, “I wore dreads as a symbol of struggle, rebellion. They had deep significance for us, those of us striving to keep our culture from this kind of liquidation.”

I responded with a possibly weak analogy – race is deep, but I was seeking a foothold. “Tattoos were like that for me! When I was getting them, they were so meaningful, they were like thoughts and dreams I had about myself coming up through my pores. We were this tiny little gang of artists and visionaries reacting to being suffocated by our culture, our political system.” In 2004, when I briefly apprenticed again at an Austin skin shoppe, I was appalled to see how much had changed in two decades. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what tattoos are now; they signify various things, but mostly they seem to semaphore a capitulation to an external pressure, not an internal one.

“But Shirlette, I think we’ve had this conversation, this dreadlock thing. I don’t feel it’s helpful.” She pulled back, clearly agitated, and then sat up in her chair. “This is just the third or fourth tier of us not having this conversation!”

I believe she’s right. Clearly, at least to this transguy cuttlefish, race – and gender inequity - is a conversation that needs having, all the time. We will keep attempting to have it until we have it. It requires openness, the possibility of experiencing deeply unpleasant feelings, it means becoming able to see one’s part in a social/economic system that absorbs the meaningful and renders it for market.

I would also suggest using trans as a lens for re-imagining these conversations. “Life,” as my good friend E. would say, “wants to make life happen! Life wants to explore all its possibilities!” Transgender is one of those life “possibilities,” an evolutionary high note in a soaring aria. If we can envision ourselves as a racial, ethnic, sexual (or non), speckled (or not), gendered (or no), shoot of Life’s curling tendrils, then we are simply another (spectacular) branch on a tree. Trans exemplifies this desire of biology, of God via nature, to create. And create and create and create – exploring every possibility, every permutation, without fear or judgment, simply creation for creation’s sake.

Nonetheless, our capacity to eat our own is also a symptom of the sickness suffered by the societally tortured. When white people critique others for wearing dreadlocks it feels, well, a little like privilege – maybe like when non or even trans people critique transpeople’s fashion choices. I’ve done it and so have you. Who else gets to make these decisions, these excisions, but those of us marginally empowered by our righteousness? We are all activists, and we are all in different places at different times. Jockeying for position to the top of the Activist Heap by elbowing others, critiquing one another’s commitment to fight The Power, means we have gotten lost somewhere, we’ve diluted the Nectar of Connexion we receive when we awaken to our trans/queer/ally/otherness.

My dear, beloved friend, may we always keep the conversation open and flowing, the way life moves after a rain, hither and yon, over and under, but always to the deep bluegreen sea. I will practice being aperture instead of right, soft instead of brittle, maceration rather than laceration. Put me in your mouth, friend, and let your enzymes diminish the shell I have made around me; that which protected me, now keeps me from others. Amen and atranswomen. And always, never forgot that I love you.

*although I think “transphobia” is too neat a package. I found the word itself, “tranny,” to be delightfully playful and archaic, like “fanny.”

Buy Me Some Peanuts & Cracker Jack, I Don't Care If I Never Come Back

2010-08-09T14:08:00.002-04:00

There are entire economies devoted to the belief that humans are the ultimate life form, the pinnacle of creation. The survivability of the lowly cockroach in a nuclear storm renders that courageously upbeat faith moot, but what of it? I happen to think we are one more step in evolution’s grand trek, a stop along the way like Stuckeys where we can get our pecan-log on. Bill tells me that all great evolutionary change is precipitated by catastrophe. He reminds me that prokaryotes evolved from eukaryotes for whom oxygen was poison. Those early anaerobic eukes were well adapted to living in our highly nitrogenous, cO2 rich atmosphere, and living in water kept them safe from the ultraviolet radiation of our sun. But that had to change, didn’t it? My own smaller universe’s great shifts have been punctuated not by ellipses but by several loud, comic exclamation points. And catastrophe is of course merely a word describing a big event; to an alcoholic those seven DUI’s are the thing that got her sober, not just a series of tragic-comic inabilities to put her finger on her nose before an officer of the law.

Our economies and ecosystems are currently anchored to the binaries of him/her, us/them. Public systems and institutions are rarely ahead of the curve, so we can’t really fault them. From my perspective at least I see all current social dialogues – about marriage, about immigration, about social policy – as the dying grip of the tribalists’ attempts to force reality into a “manageable” package. What’s painfully evident in the arguments for things like “traditional marriage” or “keeping America American” is how they are not grounded in any sort of logic or even actual history, how they are excruciatingly emotional and even childish. As raw as it is for me to feel persistently ejected from social discourse by virtue of being a queer former woman must it be mind-numbingly painful to feel that all the structures holding your universe together are falling apart, or being blown up by pansy, homosexual, unpatriotic terrorists. I can relate, believe me.

All forced conflict is by nature absurd, but catastrophe on the other hand can be exhilarating and generative. At the heart of any argument for war, whether on the battlefield or in one’s own kitchen (“If I spill one more jar of honey from a jar you have left improperly sealed you are exiled from this kitchen!” Those of you who have roomed with me may pause now and shake your heads in sweet nostalgia) is something absolutely ridiculous, like “this here is mine.” The great gift of transitioning is the molecular understanding that not even your own body is yours – everything really is just energy we shift from shelf to shelf, kicking up dust mites and memories and hope for some room. The creamy center of catastrophe is maybe “there seems to be some sort of logjam here – maybe it’s time to move some tectonic plates around!”

We can see the transgendered as biology “fucking up” or we can view ourselves as ahead of the social curve. We are a genetic error, a mutation - or - we are the budding beginnings of evolutionary tendrils. Or both. It doesn’t matter to me – it doesn’t change what is, for me personally. Either way it was a wonderous catastrophe that shifted me from Samantha to Samuel, a starfish beginning in a Spongebob sea. To be literally cut open from port to starboard, a wanton cicatricle twist of scarring and fate – to have imprisoned the hormonal body in testosterone only to have it escape its ordained estrogen death and mutate into something beyond the imaginings of its inhabitor, is to fucking know some evolution.

I try to sidestep my own obsession with the “why” - technologies avail themselves to me only as I live in my present moment. I can now view my own past through the lenses of addiction, transgender, spirituality or vis a vis misogyny, pop culture, 70’s blockbuster films, the slow food movement, tramp art and more but I had to stay more or less in motion to be able to really look behind me. Any discipline I may use to update my understanding of history is just another place holder on the landscape of the cosmic dinner table.

But know this: you are not a biologic cock-up. You are here with reason and purpose and cunning and calamity. You are here with some really great shoes. You are here to take me out to the ballroom, take me out to the crowd. You are here to exhibit your tentacular disaster, your twisty limbs, your sass and frown. You are here to get down, sisterbrother. Don’t truck with the naysayers – tell them you’re just the next babystep towards God’s great genius and you can’t help them if they won’t leave the crib. Come slither beside me – what everybody knows but will never say out loud is that in the race between the tortoise and the hare, it is the stopwatch who wins. Let us then be cuttlefishies and leave the racing for the quads.

Knights of the Iguana

2010-07-21T19:24:00.004-04:00

In the abstract, transgender men having babies seems a little like having cake with your frosting and eating it too, if only because transitioning itself is already like making a really big baby. To carry a child in this baby seems rather like an infant carrying a fetus, if you can follow my logic. But of course, in reality, this is the most mundane phenomenon of all – pregnancy. Yawn. I know more people these past 9 months – trans or not - who have had babies and I know a shocking number of currently pregnant people as well. Since I’ve lost several friends this year, this must be the Imax 3-D summer of the whole life-death cycle thingum. It seems rather extravagantly generative and almost oppressively Spring-ish however, like, having concluded we are indeed careening towards the Endtimes, the seasons are throwing themselves a White Party on Fire Island with Marianne the Maenad.

What I had not anticipated by transitioning was becoming an entirely new person. The narrative of transgender is that we get to be “who we really are.” I held to the string of that flighty balloon – the bladder of Becoming More Deeply Oneself – and looked to it to lead me somewheres. Where is a balloon going to take you but to the troposphere where you shall surely get sucked into the jets of a Southwest 757? Transitioning did not free me to find myself, like a divorce or a week with Outward Bound – it put me in a genetic splicing machine like The Fly and created something new, wondrous, horrible, as humdrum as pregnancy. I can tell you I am not more purely myself; I am something new entirely. As with a child, I can taste the flavor of my parents in everything I do but my parents are the boychild and grownuplady Sam. And they have about the amount of control and impact on me as Ward and June did on Eddie Haskell.

Snakes and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, hormones and name change and chest reconstructions – these are what little boys are made of. Are you still finding your voice? Do you know who you are? As a transwoman, as an ftm? My condition (Gender identity disorder? U.S. artist?) means I shall ever be standing next to myself, observing, critiquing, wincing. I meet people of many persuasions who at least appear to be inside their own skins, but if I asked them I suspect I would learn they are a potato twice baked and terrified of being eaten. I myself feel rather underdone…but I’m closer now to something…

Disorder doesn’t touch it. I am nothing but order. My orders come in magnetic waves, a magnet wand moving iron shavings around a face – look, a Van Dyke beard! Now a Fu Manchu! I’m at the mercy of the magnet, people, I’m Wooly Willy. Only I wish I had that kind of facial hair. Transitioning is in the hands of people best suited for Etch-A-Sketch, Wooly Willy, Mr.Potato Head, our childhood selves who are imagining our adult beings. When I was six I used to roll up my pants legs and pretend to be a “Gridiron hero.” I didn’t exactly know what the “gridiron” was but its masculine significance captivated me. I confess, I rarely watch sports of any kind, and as I’ve grown older the sort of masculinity attached to the NFL has little appeal. I pine for the lace-up knee pants of yore, with leather armor and an actual pigskin.

So my boychild infects the adult. I make a fetish of ties and cufflinks and if it didn’t smell so much I might VO5 my hair like my father did. The man I’m becoming, and when I say “man” I mean quotey-hands man, is an amalgam of testosterone, surgery, and Bobby the camp counselor when I was nine. My library of manlitude is one ludicrous and scratchy reel after another – my godfather Gary Belt and his amazing, perfectly tanned, Mark Spitz-type body, or Mark Spitz himself, with that flagrant seventies soup-catcher and excellent bangs. Let us neither mention nor forget the Speedo, come to that. Stuffed with nuts, a banana hammock – stars and stripes forever, Ma! It was treacherous, to linger too long there; the effect of a man’s package on my pre-teen brain might have been enough to expose my inner longing, but alas I had no tongue (!) for it and I dared not give it name.

Today, who are we? We mutants, who has created us? If I were a woman I would be Ava Gardner in Iguana, Ingrid Bergman from Notorious, Butterfield 8 era Liz, Nico, Violette Leduc, Gerty Stein – but I’m not, so I won’t. Once upon a time, when I was a lesbian, I hosted a “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Party” and wore stilettos and a silk slip to my suite at the Plaza Hotel and left bright red lipstick on everything. My head pounded with red wine and Percocet because I knew the truth even then: I was Big Daddy in drag.

So from the head of our childhoods we issue, now Yul Brynner, now Speed Racer. What gets mashed in these templates is up to your cocktail of choice: estrogens, testosterones, accessories, plumage, fiberglass hulls, pantyhose, tricorn hats, or powdered hoof. We think we get a choice – and perhaps in some karmic, celestial way we do – but in the here-and-now, Baby, you’re lucky if you’re more Willy Aames than aimless willy. Surrender Dorothy, to the amalgamated tramp art of transition, all hand-madey and hobo, slapped between slabs of neutered silicon and stitches. Be grateful you are less of your own choosing; let the magic fingers (a quarter a pop!) of JesusMaryandJosephlizard massage your cortex into a gendered submission. The gods are going to have their way with you, trust. Please, my sisterbrother, should you see me senescent and ambling down your garden path, know that I have become most truly myself - ineffably, righteously, magnificently me. And I will be wearing a pair of red, white, and stretched out blue speedos.

My New Firmament

2010-06-30T19:50:00.006-04:00

A week out of chest reconstruction surgery and I'm washing half a flexiril down with a cup of coffee. I wish it was an oxy, but I have a history of eating those like tic-tacs, without any apparent effect on my breath, and so I am allowing them to sit safely in the closet, high up like a citadel I won’t in my weakened condition assault. My days of drug marauder are done, but like a battered one-eyed king I flip through pages recounting my younger antics with an arthritic finger and one gimlet eye, mostly rolling it skyward but occasionally letting it mist with frothy memories, and the dreamy buzz I am allowed in the afternoons I do swallow said pill feels like a hotly whispered solicitation from the hottest ex I never laid.

Fortunately, my real life, unadorned with chemistries and without a constricting vest, is waiting patiently off-stage, reminding me that absolutely none of this is real - this nipple-weeping, compressed, gluey bandaged time – and that my Actual Life is better than anything I might imagine here in post-surgical la-la land. Ah, but what might my Actual Life be, now that I am breastless!? “Do not expect surgery to ‘fix’ you,” I hear my post-sutured and scalpel’d friends mutter, “Beware your expectations!” Indeed, the bright red balloon of expectation springs a mild leak when I drape this new, more classical torso with fantastic shirts only to discover the boob bulge has been replaced with a belly.

Sigh. And even this morning, at the Jiffy Lube, where contrary to suggestion I am not looking for surgical aftercare, I am “ma’am’d” for an indiscreet sentence. Such is the life of the barely bearded, even sans breastesses.

I dreamed last night of fathomless obsidian waves crashing over the hull of my hospital bed cum sloop. It was exhilarating, like those weekends spent with Mom and Dad on the Chesapeake, standing on the bow as she took giant steps through cresting foam and jellyfish. Once, I fell in the drink like this, and despite my father’s stern “prepare to come about!” and “hard a’lee! ” as he masterfully cap’ned the vessel for rescue - head abob in the Maryland deep I laughed and laughed and laughed. Two weeks ago now I came out of anesthesia in real life, saw the bandages, and was filled with inexplicable joy. I am so powerful; nothing can stand in my way now, except my own mind. I try to make this mind like I make the bed, somewhat tidy and presentable, and that way when I return to it I feel a sense of order and ease. Unmade, irrational, I am anxious and sure of failure.

Transitioning is complicated. I walk to the courthouse (change my middle name from “Leigh” to “Lee” or keep it?) and smile g’morning to women who feel contractually obligated to respond aloud. Every fucking interaction is a magnum loaded with gendered obligation, every fired shot like the call/response of a frenzied preacher demanding an “amen” from the parishioners he’s entrapped with a promise of salvation – social masculinity is Kurtz in the shadowed corner and every woman must walk into his cabin with an interrogator's light in their eyes facing black. Only a former woman can know this – this daily submission to the male at large. It’s repugnant, ferocious. This cabin is piled high with skulls and everybody is welcome.

I am learning to live off the grid in another way entirely. I am completely unconcerned with my paper trail, my electric bill, my ss# and my dl. Instead I am wanting to become a vaporous presence, a scent maybe, that passes through the pedestrian and gives her pause. Claws, even. This carved out body, with its overly fleshy hams and sags atop a former athlete, is a kite to fly in an electrical storm. My born body was like a “boyfriend pillow” that I could hold in the night and snuggle up to – always apart from me in the middle of the bed. It is a condition of my transbeing that I may never be “satisfied” to be in this body ever (which makes me in many ways fundamentally American). I’m a baby transperson – these experiences, of testosterone, surgery, are a well-worn path I’m merely following generous and glittery signposts on. My advantage is I’m crafty and old to boot, but those two things line up to remind me that sharps and age don’t equal experience. The surgical removal of my breasts has been an encumbrance dissolved with stitches, and the breasts themselves were but the least of this dissolving.

Two holes were carved, like a Halloween pumpkin’s face, in my chest, for the same reason: to let the light shine out. You and I are the trick and the treat my sisterbrother, your scars between your legs magic glowworms and mine under my ribs too give the light and then the meaning to the form.

Should You Return To Me, We Were Truly Meant To Be

2010-06-03T13:11:00.001-04:00

I came home from a magnificent trip to California to find out a friend of mine is dying from cancer. She’s got the kind that’s going to take her out in a matter of weeks. This is what happens when you’re alive. Back in April, another dear, old friend of mine dropped his body for his next great adventure. My life, on the other hand, is a near embarrassment of living riches. Always, when this happens, I look out from my windshield and remark querulously that this doesn’t appear to be the ideal system, this extravagance and dying. “It’s this sort of nonsense that’ll make me a nihilist before I drop!” I say, wagging all kinds of fingers.

Part of it is being a recovering addict: I’m around a lot more death and dying than your average, non-alcoholic joe. My partner’s seen me through six and counting in eighteen months or less, six more than D’s ever witnessed pre-me. The people just drop. (It’s smoking as does it sober, more than not. So you there, dinosaur with the ciggie-butt: stab that stick OUT.) On the road to Ojai, where we will laze at the Blue Iguana Inn, decompressing from the raucous, over-stimulating Los Angeles - the arrival at which we witnessed the brutal highway fiberglass punch of one car into another, then another, parts peeling off and flying directly in front of us before we tremously rode off, shaken and dazed – I consider the story of our high school teacher, Mr. A.

Mr. A, a very engaged educator and young man himself in 1975, took his class on an ambitious camping trek over the summer. Benny, whose blond mop resembled Shaggy’s from Scooby-doo was a lanky, gawky, likeable teenage boy who fell off a cliff during the hike. At this point in the story, I often remember seeing a turtle that fell from a height (Or had he been dropped by a wicked classmate? Alas, my childhood is filled with children and torture and some memories I’ve concealed in a narrative haze). His shell was fractured like a gruesome mosaic, with the white flesh you’re never supposed to see between cracks limned with thin blood.

Mr. A clambered down the cliff somehow. I imagine his heart pounding wildly and his body filled with that sickening silver of adrenalin; I imagine the surreal color and stillness wrapped perhaps in tunnel vision as he picked his way over boulder and dirt. He sent some boys back and he stayed with Benny and watched him die. When we returned to school that fall, all the kids said, “Mr. A isn’t the same since Benny.” It changed him utterly.

I haven’t been with someone as they died, yet. But the deaths of others - a few in particular - have changed me utterly. My own death continues to absorb me, but those of us dying to some gender we’ve inhabited to lease another die in a way I imagine is more insect than human. Bear Bergman remarked that the quantity of butterfly analogies he waded through after soliciting submissions for his anthology of gender writers was, well, overwhelming in an underwhelming kind of way. I am inspired to recall the Monarch butterfly migration from Mexico to Texas, a season during which one is non-consensually co-opted in the slaughter of clouds of Monarchs, simply by driving to work. There’s something ridiculous, sad and exhilarating about driving one’s Honda hatchback through a butterfly storm, one wing of each left glued to the windshield to taunt and chasten the driver’s murderous vehicle. This meander aside, there is something compelling about the caterpillar/pupa/butterfly metaphor, however hackneyed. The trouble with trans is we don’t actually get a pupal stage, unless moving to another city and changing your name can be considered pupal.

My chrysalis is the internest, the interwebs. Here I can hide covered and golden, hanging from my hindquarters in your doorway – you can’t see me here encased, but I dangle the promise of my realized future before you. When and if you see me emerge I’ll be post-surgical, bearded, unrecognizable from the soft and wriggly Samantha. I tried to kill that being many times – so many times I now have nothing but sorrow and shame for the way I abused her – but she had to surrender everything before she would go. In my more Italianate moments I feel like a queered Pieta, a hairy engorged mother cradling the body of her broken daughter-son. Some of us – not all – must clamber down that cliff to cradle our own pre-transitioning form and watch it pass. Others of us – not all – absorb the pre-trans body as nourishment for the new, and turn our own selves inside out like the surgeon does the penis to the vagina. Me? I’m just a sock puppet for my own, and hopefully the heavens’, amusement.

I do not believe this life-death cycle to be the best system. I would arm-wrestle God for a chance to change it, but I had rotator cuff surgery in January and besides, God would play by some rules I’m not privy to thus just pissing me off and destroying my bursa. Like It always does. My own life, however fraught with the illness and death of others, is also packed with the sort of love a barista bestows her espresso grounds; I can anticipate the smoothest of brews and the most savory top-notes. I may be (always) grieving – it does seem like a rather perpetual state – but I’m also consistently surrounded by love. Look at Benny - he lay at the bottom of a cliff with his hand held by a man who whispered, “I love you, hang on” in those final minutes. I have dropped off so many cliffs I stopped counting, but you have always been there at the bottom, whispering in my ear. Your whispering turns to soft gusts, until like paper I float from side-to-side falling down the next precipice, the soft breaths folding paper to origami, until I am a winged thing, floating out into the freeway, watching coyote and cactus. I hope I don’t meet a Honda is all.

I read that every breath we take has a bit of spider leg in it – that’s how many spiders have risen and fallen on this planet. I believe that every inhale also holds a bit of me and a bit of you, too. I don’t always like it and I certainly don’t understand it, but isn’t it wonderful? You, living and dead, are my sigh of relief.

In a Little While From Now, If I'm Not Feeling Any Less Sour

2010-05-17T19:17:00.004-04:00

“It’s a lonely road you’ve chosen,” muses Bill, “I mean, it’s not like you have a room full of 30 alcoholics welcoming you to your new life.” He’s right about that – being trans is not like recovering from alcoholism where any number of people are there to greet you with embraces and then drive you to your community service obligations. But it hasn’t been lonely. After all, it’s been in transition that I met my sweet dear double D, atop “Doopie Ridge” I like to say, which is my name for D’s expressive sternum. It was in transition that I gathered an assortment of faces for which I feel nothing but unfettered joy when I see - ck, Ethan, Melissa, Mo and Adrianne; it is here I met K. and M., my stealth buddies, mentors, my brothers. Here is where E. resides, my newest, deepest friend, and right here, on these internets (I typed “internest” and I like that a lot) is where I’m so often buoyed by Amrit, or Rafe, Carson, Joshua, and Aeron.

There was loneliness in the beginning. I think of the narrative that I’ve been entertaining, the one where I’ve been a female who’s becoming male – I have the best of both worlds, I’ve seen it from all sides - but I wonder if that’s true. Perhaps what’s closer to the truth is that I’m incapable of experiencing gender as anything but a trope, that I was never-a- woman who will never-be-a-man. E. calls this “unwoman.” I like trans. I like to think I had a flavor of the gender, the way someone whose Scandihoovian parents moved to Guadalajara and lived there for 40 years has a flavor of being Mexican. The loneliness of transitioning was perhaps the disambiguation of a connection I understood myself not to feel, and that was with a gendered body of any kind.

Last week a local reporter attempted to interview me for a “human interest piece.” Maybe it’s my testosterone-induced paranoia but “human interest” seems like margarine on the dry crust of journalistic sideshow. “Human interest pieces” are always about “overcoming the odds,” succeeding in the mainstream despite one’s unique flavor of, oh, let’s say, limblessness, or homelessness; it’s always about triumphing over some “lessness” however subtle, like “whitelessness.” Yeah, it’s my paranoia. But how to talk about being-ness, how do I describe my incarnation, how do you describe yours? Could he, the reporter? My embodiment is a dark liquor I sip in the night, and I do it alone in a field under a cloud-strewn moon. Maybe spells and incantations might reproduce it for others, pull it from this absinthetic ether I travel in, force it into a shape like Harry Potter’s wand might, but I would tread lightly here: the figure you conjure might swallow you whole.

Shirlette states emphatically, “I will not deconstruct race for anyone, anymore.” I’m shocked and delighted to hear that; once again, smitten as I am with my own experiences, I have forgotten how non-white people live in this world most of the time. The ridiculous, outrageous, innocent and egregious things people seem to think is okay to say to me are the sort of things black folk have to put up with every day. I entertain fantasies of an empathetic technology, one that allows the speaker full brunt of the impact of their words on others, but we might all stay in our houses then, shaking with shame, recovering from wounds we were neither prepared for nor worthy of receiving.

Meantime, I’m swimming with my fellow (!) fishes - you know us’ns – we’re the ones you read about, changing gender to meet the need of the river. That’s all we’re doing, Ladles and Jellyspoons. The river requires this. We can’t say why, or, like Cassandra, when we do you may be cursed to not believe us. But some of you know - you suspect - and you are all aboard, even as you have no desire to change yourself. Thank the River God for men and women like you – you’re the white woman marching with Reverend King in the 60’s, you’re the straight dude cheering his best friend at Gay Pride; you’re the committed Christian baffled by the uncharitable views of your brethren; the father that won’t buy guns for his children, the mother painting her son up with Maybelline. I got thrown out of bed but you’re waking up on your own.

Alone? Yes. Lonely? Only by choice. I can swim with my school, diving through your open legs as you cool in the water, minnows nipping at toes dug in clay and mica, or I can heave myself ashore and gasp for oxygen while others wonder with bemused laughter why it is I don’t breathe air. So just for today, as we ex-loners like to chant, I’ma stay right here. The water’s fine.

So Not Kidding

2010-04-22T08:20:00.003-04:00

I’m puzzled, vexed even. I appear to have this compulsion, this desire to transition in flagrante delicto, levolors pulled up tight, leg canted cheekily in the window like I’m in Amsterdam or something. This is a tricky posture, not simply because after two years of not doing yoga my hips have fused, but because evidently I’m a terribly sensitive tranny, and when you remark unkindly on said proffered parts I am stunned like a cow at her last meal. I have begun to understand prima facie (boy we’re frontin’ some latin today! Wassup!) the pleasure and pain of activism lived aloud. I forgot that when you put it out there, the people will have their feelings. And feelings are often what transpeople have left, after job, partner, school, friends have tossed us out.

Until I’m in a gang of t-folk, I forget how raw-boned, how flayed some us of are. My partner and I recently hosted a workshop titled “How Transgender Can Save the World” at UNC’s Unity Conference. It was upstairs stuff – fusing Jesus and Spongebob, transformers, nudibranch and Lady Gaga in a trans-envisioned world of interstices, of journeying, of having all eight limbs planted firmly everywhere or anywhere at any time. My experience transitioning has torn some hymeneal membrane in me and left me accessible to sensations of collective consciousness with other creatures. In this unanticipated unity I’ve lost my capacity to eat meat, even my beloved staple tuna fish; we’ve taken to feeding every stray in the neighborhood and sometimes that includes the guy looking for “bus fare to Raleigh to see his poor baby girl at Rex Hospital because her mama too sick.” Suckers aren’t only on the arms of octopi. And I want to share this, this dissolving of my own binary, the binary of us v them, and how powerful a force trans can be for softening all these social sausage casings.

If I have a message, and I guess I do, it’s that some of us may be forced to fend in a tragically cruel world of abuses and horrors but we don’t all have to live there in our brains. I have seen groups of LGBTQETC folk cross their arms over their collective chests when they aren’t hearing something they think they want to hear; I see their collective antennae scoping for hidden insults, agendas, probing for potential hurts. This is natural, in a sorely marginalized community. It’s the pathology of the disenfranchised. We’ve got collective PTSD and we’re pretty fucking jumpy. But we KNOW THIS. We know isolated and marginalized groups tend to peck at our own – who else will feel us; for the rest of the world we’re spectral or worse: television entertainment. Oh baby transchicken, I feel you! Your feathers are the sweetest softest down and your eggs pure nectar encased in luminescent mica – one sip and blood turns to ichor, divine and poisonous to mortals. I adore you transperson, I mean you no harm.

And I will not capitulate to peer pressure. I will not tell you anything but how powerful you are, how huge, how like a natural force – I will not ask you only to fight for your space, your “rights.” You are evolution at its zenith. Who else can alchemically transmute poison (hormones) into gold (your body)? Who else takes mammoth wounds, surgeries and corporal displacements and creates a new being? Who, having been rent asunder, turned inside-out, excoriated, cast out, asked to leave, don’t-let-the-screen-door-of-your-childhood-hit-you-on-the-ass-on-the-way-out -- turns around and comes back, like a boomerang starfish? You, dear. That’s who. You have forced me to imagine you on your own terms, so don’t ask me to redact the text. You are the fire asking me to call you a match. Well I won’t do it, I cannot.

I’m a sensitive guy and my feelings get easily hurt. But I wed you somehow, I’m wearing your ring, and goddamn it, Mama told me to STAY. If we’re going to be in this union together, let’s get one thing sort of straight. I believe you hold the twinkle of God’s great grin in your bosom or manchest. I’m convinced you have strength beyond a thousand bridges, and the gentleness to merge one with another one, so Babyboygirl, make me a sandwich sans tuna; I aint going nowhere.

For my non-trans friends – I’m blowing out a candle on a cupcake of hope. My hope is that someday soon, we all intuit how meaningless any of this actually is, this body form, these social filing systems and hierarchies. Someday we’ll wake up and realize, like this morning when I lost a tooth and drank a rich dark beer and ate a stale scone while watching a band fronted by a 65year old nurse, that it was all a dream.

Salad Days

2010-03-24T20:45:00.003-04:00

One of the unanticipated consequences/gifts of hormone injection is that I feel a new kinship with other species. My friend E. offers her suggestion that MtFs used to take Premarin, the hormones of which were synthesized from horse urine; therefore these Premarin transwomen are part horse. I understand testosterone was “gathered” from bovine testicles and tested on dogs, but in 2010 the version I inject is made in a lab. Nonetheless I feel a brotherhood with these animals, both because they took part in the creation of meta-monster-sam (for monstrous I am, shunning this given body and rejoicing in a series of mutations) and because the hormones have restructured my brain. I “feel” connected to animals. My loss of a certain empathy, of information I received in my “female” brain is maybe not a loss at all, but another transformation. (any time I use a “trans” word I’m positively itching to separate it with a slash like I did in all my 80’s poetry. Trans/formation. Did I mention I was raised on Patti Smith and French symbolist poetry? Yes I wore a beret in high school – shut up.)

Now more than ever, I feel related to all things. I feel the elegance of photosynthesis with the humility of a mammal who has to eat light-eaters to get my nourishment – it puts me in my rightful place as a barbarian next to the fashionably outré dandelion or the voracious and steamy Night Blooming Cereus. It’s humbling enough to make me wonder why we don’t worship more plantey things, as opposed to these inelegant variations of humans – more monstrous than me even! – not one of whom has the superpower of converting light to energy that I know. I have always loved animals, and now I’m certain I am one. While I have no way of knowing if this is actually related to hormone injection (could it be a gift of age? A spiritual leap conferred to me by My Little Pony?) it suggests itself as a new conversation, a new aperture, one of the neat presents TrannySanta popped in my stocking that took time to unwrap.

Maybe it’s just me showing up late to the party. Skinny jeans hold no appeal for me now, but mark my words in two years when they’re done and done I’ll be stuffing my wide receiver in tight pair. Maturity is something that often eludes me, no matter how fucking old I get. Maybe this is just me coming to speciesism 35 years after its etymologic invention – I always feel like the last guy on the block, still stepping on pronouns, still devolving into a gruesome chauvinism in a butch heartbeat, only I don’t find it erotic. Certainly every other intersection has begun to chafe and bore. But it is clear to me: we’re just another bozo in the taxonomy, and all our touted superiority resides in that strange organ that also makes people think they’re Jesus or like my friend’s aunt, married to George Bush Senior (they’re insanely happy together, by the way), or consider clothes made by Lohans. (Would Jesus wear Lohan leggings? Not likely, but you can bet she’d be on RuPaul’s Drag Race.)

To paraphrase my friend Tanya: In a cruciform world, I am an asparagus. Solitary, isolate, yet grouped in an overpriced bunch at the grocery store. But I feel broccoli. Or better yet, a spore, part of the Mushroom Mind, the Mother of All Mushes casting me southerly with a wind that I may populate and spread on this moist log and that. Maybe it’s not the testosterone per se, but the very momentum of transitioning that has taken me to a place of oneness, of serious relationship to every living thing. We can isolate hormonal phenomena, like hair growth and fat migration, but what about these vaguer vagaries, these nuanced neurochemical chimeras? I suggest to you, Dear Transperson, that you too, are a spore, are riddled with spore. How yours manifest may be unique to you and your lovely personality – me, I’m wired for connection with others, I’m swimming in a sea of Divine interstice, canals that connect me chemically to others. And by others, I mean OTHERS.

What I mean, in all that salad, is this: I think the trans-brain map is chartable. I think there are phenomena that simply occur, for all of us. But how it looks varies from trans to trans. I’m soul brother to dogs now; I feel kinship in their canine agitations. Two years on testosterone I can sense animal fear down the block– I believe this is a truly masculine brain function, an adaptation of male neurochemistry only I don’t have the science to prove it. I’m curious about the brains of other transpeople: how do these gendered chemistries revise us, alter our senses? I know in my skin why dogs roll in dead things but much like certain cousins, I can see and feel our blood union and it doesn’t make me like them better.

What I can share with you is how amazing life forms are of any kind, how brilliant and sacred in a non-Christian, non-hierarchical way. There can be no judgment in taxonomy; there should be no ontological one-upmanship. My maternal empathy seems to have been trans(/)mogrified into a different understanding, one of a literal interpretation of cells and their transcendent vibrance. This transmale flesh is clay, the clay of river beds and bentonite that leaches these heavy metal sins of ownership from my stomach. I certainly hadn’t anticipated these lysergic expeditions into Oneness – but what the hell. Maybe it’s here that guardianship is born, a masculine leaning, the desire to protect one’s sisterbrother asparagus or soulmate.

Think about it, Sibling. We’re all of us equal. Snakes, snails, and puppydogs’ tails. I’m as kin to a squirrel or sorrel as you, my dear. How tender! Maybe this is the place we can reclaim, heal our sick and suffering masculinity and his bitterly abused and traumatized twin sister. As I turn my head to meet this new sun warming this sweet earth and my all my newfound fellow creatures, I hear the sagacious echo of the only living Saint amongst us, Sister Ru: “Don’t fuck it up.”

Let Me Eat Cake

2010-02-28T17:21:00.001-05:00

The day began like any other day, with me putting on my sweatshirt backwards. I do this nearly every time I wear it and am equally baffled to find my face in my hood. I trust this is an effort on the part of my higher self to keep me humble via mortification; if so it works. In Biology class that same afternoon I was seized by an irrational fear of this dude in my class discovering I’m actually some kind of lady. This particular fellow reads me as male, and it’s no small props: he’s one of those walking penis guys - a professional wrestler and obvious cocksman. There’s something so penile about his breed of masculine -like Christian Bale when he’s not starving for a role – their skin is taut and shaved over a topography of ridiculous musculature and hypertense vascularity. One imagines that as they sleep, they contract and tumesce, now a sleepy slug in a jowly skin bag, now a rigid angry tube.

I have my random trans-panics. In this place of (ironically masculine) paranoia I am sure that I am about to lose points by being exposed as “really a girl.” Dudes like this one – hell, I doubt I even register for him most of the time. His radar’s set for threats and tits mostly; I know this because we have had conversations. He’s a smart kid and can certainly handle me being a transguy. It’s me sometimes that can’t.

I’m not sure when it happens. Maybe it starts with me putting my hoodie on backwards. Being read as male becomes extremely important. I forget in that moment that I am politically, spiritually and corporally above anything else transgendered. It reminds of when I used to be a lady (you know I’m cracking myself up every time I type that) and people would mistake me for straight. I know, that’s even more hilarious, but you know how the people are: they will see what fits their landscape. You and me? We’re lucky that ours includes minotaurs and blue monkeys. So I would get read as heterosexual and all of the sudden I’m editing my language. I would drift into this dreary narcotic numb, believing that whomever was talking to me would (what? Vomit? Kill me? Cease to love me?) change their mind about me if they knew I was queer. Suddenly, I cared what they thought. I was ashamed to be homosexual.

If you’re queer like me you know this comes from the outside. I’m looking for outward validation, right? When I deconstruct my homophobia, I can see how it was given to me, a gift from an insecure social structure. Have a bouquet of snakes? Why thanks I will! The transphobia is more complex, has less woodsy notes and more sulfurous emanations. It has to do with a inhabiting a body, one’s relationship to something that most people have the luxury of taking for granted – their gender, their form. How does one feel about this…this thing one lives in when it is constantly rebelling, endlessly thwarting one from admission to The Club? I was at the physical therapists’ the other day, performing my medieval rehab on my rotator cuff surgery, and my therapist referred me as “her.”

I watched myself retract energetically as I was doing truncated pushups against the door, like a hasty telescope. I plummeted from whatever endorphin height the exercise had initiated, wax wings spitting feathers the whole way down. The room was clueless to my crash, although my own ears were full of keening. I saw as I dove down past it, the landscape of my childhood. To be a transchild is to enter rooms of people you know and are happy to see but who don’t appear to recognize you at all. It was nightmarish. Boys would not see me as a boy, nor could my parents – although bless their hearts they let me play like one. Some girls saw through the mirage of the body to the essential Sam; the masculine signature beamed like a light through smoke for those in tune, those whose sonar bounced against the inner being. They helped give me meaning, shape. But they couldn’t give me ingress to The Club.

Waking up to my gender is phenomenal. It’s fantastic and delicious, rich with more insight and expansion than I could dream of. It’s also bitterly, sharply, achingly sad. But that place, that sad place, was a long time ago. I just have to visit it now. It is imperative to connect with this child-place, to observe what damage was wrought, to take inventory. I don’t know yet what I’ll need to mend and what needs throwing out, and I’ll never know if I don’t look. But it is not fun to go there.

E. relates, “I remember feeling like their eyes were always looking, appraising, judging, getting stuck in my skin like glass shards that I would have to extract at the end of each day. The shards left a poison that was less easy to extract, and it sickened me. Eventually though, the alchemical magic took place and I developed an immunity from these inoculations.”

Her “eyes always looking” were outside of her mostly, I imagine. My eyes are inside me, as arbitrary and thoughtless as jellyfish nettles brushing the inside of my skull. I am a transperson. I am not now a man nor shall I ever be, unless I want to. The pressures to be one are powerful, both externally and inside and the rewards are as enticing as a field of poppies. Oh to lay down and dream! But then I hear you whisper, I feel your lips in the skin shell of my ear, chin moving against my lobe, “wake up wake up wake up!” I am an extraordinary being who will someday notice but not feel the sting of the poison of the asleep and their careless cruelties, who will be done crucifying myself on some cross of normalcy. Maybe the world must doze and dream but we don’t have that indulgence. The cake is right here right now with you beside it and maybe even in it and I can’t wait to put it in my mouth.

You Really Shake What You Got, And Girl You Got A Lot

2010-02-07T14:06:00.007-05:00

Desire.

I dreamed I was watching amateur porn clips. There was a woman fucking her husband. He was attending to the business half-heartedly while she whimpered, pulling him closer. At last he got up to go to another room, to find the thing or image or toy that would enable him to finish the job.

When he came back moments later, he was holding the hand of an Indian man. The woman was shaking her head and whimpering in a completely different way but the man was insistent and bade his lover to lay on his wife.

The camera pulled jarringly, abruptly close, as it will in terrible homemade porn. The man was atop his love sandwich, thrusting deep into the ass that we could now see was riddled with Kaposi’s sarcoma, buboes, pustules, lesions. It was the terrible, horrible, spectacle of desire: I choose to bareback my AIDs-ridden beloved over you, this convention. He is what gets me hard.

In envisioning a trans-world, I can’t discount desire. My desire is that we leap atop talk of intersectionality, of oppression, of convention, and try on new hats. My desire is that we appreciate gender’s layers, and wear them according to our desire. My desire, sexual at least, is for soft femmes, androgynous boi-women, and big, fat men. It wilts in the face of aggression, even if aggression is a hot woman in pursuit. I begin to feel like a long, lean and terrified hare on a field with large determined dogs – if I’m going to be a jewel in someone’s crown, I’d like to pick the crown and I kind of like DIY these days anyhow so if it’s sculpey and wrapping paper you’re on the right track. This kiss will decidedly not begin with Kay's.

“I-mag-i-nation!” I hear Spongebob marvel, and I couldn’t find a better guru for my vidya. Across his rainbow I see us swimming, pulsing and kissing like shiny fish, fish who understand: it’s all in the presentation. Sure we have a body gender, and it is defined by chemistry, by hormones, by surgeons, by everyone else sometimes if you’re me and you evidently can’t be seen with any clarity without special tranny field glasses. And even then you have to pull your eyelid tight over your eyeball.

Oh ye of weekly cocktail, ye of muscle-site injection, ye who have joined the hordes of tricksters, mudangs, berdaches and bearded ladies, and often diminishing faith! – what happens to you is out of your hands completely! Choose well, coyote-manqué, as you may find yourself estranged from everything you knew and thought you loved. Which is the point, really, isn’t it?

Lest we forget: the transgendered are the militarized dolphins, who, having acquired human technologies, can now swim off to do other forms of mischief. You carved us out of testosterone and scalpels, and gave some of us even your “privileges” but beware, Daddy. Don’t forget whom you asked to disarm the mines.

But we do forget, as we become these other beings. Particularly t-men – we forget, in the narcotic joy of becoming “a man,” we forget the greatest gift we were ever given: to have lived as a woman. We forget that it is cisgender technologies that crafted us, that our fantasies for ourselves flower from their consensual delusion of masculine/ feminine/ other. As we bend towards the sunlight of their hormones, their surgeries, their GQ and their Vogue, we may begin to mistake them for some last word, some final destination, some gendered Olympus.

Brother, it is your gift, it is your DUTY as a MAN, to bring what you know forward. This is what we have to model for our cisbrothers. We have lived in a very foreign land – some of us even adopted its customs – and at the very least we can share cuisine.

Transwomen, too – she who was once he knows: she was given the bittersweet poison, the Apple of Urge. Transwomen get this in pharmacologic purity and distillate in a way transmen may not – she bears the full force of misogyny from men and women and lesbians and “feminists,” and transmen too. My sisters bear the shame way out loud. Shit, Tranny, you and I get to share even our surgical scars! Our sisters close their legs as once I did, fearful that my stuff was ugly, that yours would reveal mine as hideous and unnatural. Our trans-sisters learn to bear the same grief and pain and blood that we carried as female-bodied men; can’t we honor them for that?

Desire asks me to become you. I desire another body, although in my mind’s eye I think it was more like Christian Bale’s, or even Russell Crowe’s, than this roughened-skinned, open-pored, bellied, hairy-assed being. Although believe me, I gladly relinquish my flawless skin, my fulsome hips – take my thighs, please, and even my pretty face I will give you, Rumpelstiltskin, to find my way home.

Desire shifts, like bodies do, with age, with experience, with hormones, in accidents and illnesses, in childbirth and with surgeries. You can’t see me because I’m never still. My longing was still for an instant, long enough for me to hear you whisper in my ear, “I want you.” I will never diminish YOUR desire, transman, nor yours, transwoman. In fact, I am kneeling before you, with so much wonder, and gratitude, and exposure. You were cast out in the snow naked, and you came back a glorious crystalline snowflake, and so I honor you. I don’t know how you did it, how you do it, woman-who-is-man, man-who-is-woman, but someday this world will know how extraordinary, evolutionary, ordinary we all are.

That is my greatest desire.

The Aisle At The End, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

2010-01-24T18:34:00.001-05:00

“I finally understand what ‘the binary’ means,” I muse aloud on the way to Target, where we will break all our promises not to buy more shirts. My pardner and I are like magpies to tinfoil when it comes to a good sale, immodestly erasing all affirmations to “ignore the clang of the will,” as my Buddhist buddy mentors. But maybe a good, cheap linen stripe actually does help feed my soul – I mean, what do I know?

Louise, whose newborn is now nine-months and says “gulak gulak” like an adorable Hungarian frog, asserts that she can no longer watch Dexter. The creation and birth of her child have rendered her incapable of whatever pleasure or schadenfreude one receives from watching serial killers murder each other, however delicious. She insists that no-one could possibly bear a child and engage in war, and I tell her about the double-winners who survived both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They all shared the terrible shame of the knowledge that they “were, in general, the people who ignored others crying out in extremis or who stayed away from the flames, even when patients and colleagues shrieked from within them.” One such two-time A-Bomb survivor, when asked how we might avert the use of warheads said, “the only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers, those who are still breast-feeding their babies.”

Louise has lost her taste for blood and only wants to watch and protect. Me, I’m full of testosterone sangfroid, and can evidently watch all manner of horrors, thinking, “I’m glad that’s not me.” I think that men are better poised for survival and I think that’s a damn shame. (I read too many endtimes novels, and sort of exist in this parallel state of post-apocalypse – I’m convinced I would survive for about two minutes before I got the shiv. I’m too civilized.)

For so long I lived in the outlier realms of gender, preferring to do my interpretation in some Outback, naked and with paint and shells, all breasts and cunt and defiance. Fine, you gave me this body so now we’re all going to have to live with it. Fuck you, I’ve got tits and an attitude.

For the first time on this journey, I feel slingshot into some other field. I also see how I was a woman, the way I was a woman. I worked really hard to be whatever that meant to me at the time. Some transguys, you know, you never see them as chicks. They were really never women. But I’m not that guy – I lived there best I could, and I found some real warmth and beauty too.

I fear the language, the technology I’ve been given is limited, and I’m afraid to share some things, lest they seem too Twentieth Century Man, too pat, too Men are from Mars. I haaaaaaaaaate that shit, you know. But in truth I am watching my energetic connection to others shift, one microgram at a time one molecule at a time. Who has always chosen mercy can now see justice. And note I do not say “feel.”

My old spiritual teacher used to say something ridiculous like, “women are seventeen times more enlightened than men,” but now I understand how this might be true. Nonetheless, this world at this time does not seem particularly hospitable to the enlightened of any gender.

And yet.

My experiences are mine. I know I don’t speak for the hordes, hordes I tell you, of empathetic, receptive men and Justice herself, while supposedly blind to your race or economic status, is also deaf to your entreaties, your pleas for mercy. She’s a mother, all right. I’m nervous about committing a stereotype. But you, hear MY plea. The endtimes could come at any minute, while you’re eye-groping that fantastic plaid in Urban Outfitters (and why are you there again!? Did I not tell you they give their money to support your extinction!?) and what will you grab? Will you cradle that child next to you, tucking it beneath your curled torso, or will you clamber over mannequins and children alike, fashioning spears from sales racks and claws from hangers? What kind of man are you?!

As I watch my blood freeze and my veins harden, I reach for your hand. As always, it’s warm and dry and a little rough. Like my brain now, furling into itself, no longer snail nor oyster, but cruciform and coral. I can still feed millions this way. It’s just going to be different. But you and I are forever the same, whether man or woman or any conflagration or variegation. You and I, cold or warm heart, are love.

A Vision Softly Creeping

2010-01-01T19:57:00.000-05:00

So what are we doing this year, this bright decade of biomechanical promise, of merging disciplines, of factory dismantle, of capacious conversations and learning how to really listen, really hone in, on what our cats, our dogs, our groundhogs and dolphins, are saying to us?

I guess I just answered my own question.

Oh ye of little faith, for whom transition feels like an awake but cooking lobster bursting from its exo-skeletal seams: listen to your sisterbrother Sam. There is absolute joy in the chaos, bliss in the interstitial. We who fuck with gender have the capacity to be way more than the sum of our sexes, and we taste better with lemon and butter.

The transitioning, the genderfuckers, queers, nears, and furbelows: listen. Listen to the whispering. I was so afraid, I heard it and I was so scared…I was afraid once I paid attention, the whisper would become a roar and carry me away in a violent sandstorm, eroding everything I knew or wanted to believe in.

This is precisely what happened, but littler. And, in fact, it was the most beautiful thing ever. Your whisper to me, you didn’t even know you were doing it. You don’t even know how you’re whispering to me now. But I heard your dreams, your prayers as they stirred up in my head – your prayers were mine too.

I held your sleeping face in my hands and I lay full length against you. All of your sex pressed on me – your skin and your tiny mammal hairs tangled with mine. Our cells split to merge in a wonderful new reality cooking show, “The Bottomless Sex Pot,” and we featured a stew, savory, rich, complex and nourishing, full of carrots and cocks and lentils and vaginas. I don’t even know how it happened, but I know you were so delicious, so pungent, I can roll the memory of your taste in my mind’s mouth now.

Thank you for speaking to me, even if you didn’t know you were. You sent me an S.O.S., a message in a bottle and I got it, because I was meant to, and because after all, I may be the shore but you are the ocean.

Since this is an absolute fact, we can proceed. This means we have the capacity to alter the landscape. Never forget, in those moments of fear and doubt and terrifying loneliness, that this is your power. But unless we link with one another we’re lost to it.

And unless I stay linked to my former mind, even as memory, I may be lost to me, too. I was watching the etiolated queerness of Jake Gyllenhaal, mesmerized by his strange, personal masculinity, as his character in Rendition watched a man be tortured. As the narrative diverted me from my Jake scan I watched myself watch the torture. A shift has taken place.

I’m convinced women receive – because I did – vast amounts of information from a variety of dimensions. It was wonderful and overwhelming and hideous, to be moving through the gelatinous psychic residue of others, all the time. Women can be suspended like carrots in bad church jello, trapped by their own accumulating information, the reception of which is autonomic for most. I’m also thoroughly convinced that the world is not run by men because of greater upper-body strength – I’m confident as a man can be that men rule this roost by their capacity to focus, to hone in. If they’re lucky, sensitive men they may receive a tenth of the psychic and emotional effluvia that women must ford every waking day.

As a hormonally-different being, I see myself stripped of an empathy – my dendrites follow the alpha sun, the job at hand – that was nearly crippling for me as a “woman.” I may feel moral horror, and I certainly have empathy, but gone are the chills, the cellular identification with the pain of another. I watch torture and I think “this must happen all the time,” which is distinctly different from the “fuck oh my god oh my god how can this be happening” which used to cycle as a soothing mantra during my lady time. Other people’s pain barely touches me, it seems.

I tell this to Jessica who relates that men don’t wake up to sounds that wake women up, like babies crying. I can feel how I have hormonally become That Guy.

These subtle shifts are important. They teach me about The Other. I want 2010 to be about communication, about hearing people and being heard. I need to understand the language you move to, and by shooting hormones every week I am beginning to learn some new tongue. It is sparer, has more clarity, is even visually less diffuse than my old language, my old vision. I understand alpha in new ways – it’s deep and compulsive; I watch the neurochemistry of transguys be pulled like iron to the magnetic and repulsive Top Dog, we’re at its mercy if we’re snoozing or not paying attention. I watch my transmale friends be assholes around women, with utter sincerity.

Let’s keep one another from the narcotic trap, the hormonal lure attached to the forehead of an angry social construct. Let’s watch like hunters, follow our own spoor, chart our changes. We can nudge this thing, turn it off-course, shift the shore and sail into a sweet, sweet sunset if we link, wake each other up from the dream of gendered superiority, honor the mother/father/sister/brother/other in us all.

Hush now and listen. Our brains are calling.

A Love There Is No Cure For

2009-12-16T20:08:00.007-05:00

I’m hot for trannies right now. I’m so hot for trans I could punch it in the face. You know that kind of love that makes you want to rip it open, disembowel it? You know how sometimes you look at your lover’s sweet punim and have to stop yourself from digging your thumbs in their eyeballs because you’re so overcome with a mad joy? No? Okay, well what about when you want to shove your hand in their diaphragm and rend their skin open and just climb in. No? Who am I talking to!!?

Love is a profound, dear, heady, vertiginous place for the transperson. In love I can reveal genders I never even knew I had – genders I find against your moveable feets, your shape-shifting skin, the mouths of your face and your anus, grinning and spitting and chewing on hair. Love refracts and collides me on me, on me on you on me, on you on you, like a dazzling sequined 70’s butterfly stuck in a kaleidoscope against your grandma’s handmade afghan. Trans bodies hold as many mysteries as Mary of Magdelena – our body’s relationship to our genders is like hers to Jesus – we may never know its reality or its importance but we intuit a meaning and we long for it to be true.

The body of my Beloved has more keys than doors. I look at his gendered torso and I think, “what about that makes me hot?” The masculine muscles, trapped in the feminine like a fly in ice, or vice versa, the feminine extruding herself from the butch hairy legs – the vitreous humor from my eyeballs feels like the jelly between the skin and the ultrasound, scanning the body for change, for movement, to detect gender difference.

I went to an allergist today. As previously discussed on these here pages, I’m a lazy, bureaucracy-phobic tranny, so all my ID read “Samantha.” Sometimes, when I feel particularly indolent, I think “I’ll tell people it’s an Indian name, like Yogananda – yeah, that’s the ticket!,” but humans are crafty and have a fox’s nose for subterfuge.

The receptionist ID’s me as “she,” and I commence to have this conversation with myself that I always have in public forums, about how my gender reading differs from ethnicity to ethnicity. I’m convinced African Americans often read me as a “woman” because, at least at a particular socio-economic level, there’s a precedent for variety. Really masculine women are not uncommon, nor are breasted, pony-tailed, soft men in my neighborhood, which is my sampling distribution. Indian people see me as male – again, I theorize it is because culturally they are accustomed to less hairy men. I also speculate that some people don’t really know what a white man looks like – much as I didn’t understand the culturally accepted variegations of the black male (and probably don’t). What I’m telling you is my brain is full of crazy, possibly racist, shit as it attempts to find sense in the subjective interpretations of others.

With The One I Love, however, I am fixed. If my gender is mutable for s/him, s/he doesn’t clue me in. But for me, mine and hers/his are time/space travel – we are everywhere, all the time. Which makes my gender like a Renaissance-theme restaurant. Which is decidedly NOT sexy.

What is sexy, all jousting aside, is any gender at all. Hot hot HOT. I love your boy’s treasure trail, your womanly thighs, your stubbled chin, your girl’s giggle. I adore your bodacious tatas (whether you take them on or off) and your swinging balls (whether or not they go back in a drawer); your hairy ass is perfection and your sweet shifty hips divine.

We create our own language, every time we make love, you and I. It’s a language only the well-versed in fluid can even hear, and you have to be in fluid to hear it.

So that’s where you’ll find me, this strange holiday season, me and mine. Not trapped like gas in a colored bulb, nor the hard sweetmeat of disappointing fruitcake (great name for a band, “disappointing fruitcake”) but liquid. Blissed the fuck out and dissolving in the light of trans-possibility. Here’s to a sweet shimmy shake of a season and to getting wet, wet, wet together. C’mon in Tranny, this water’s FINE.

The Ring Around Your Finger Is From My Sucker

2009-11-30T09:47:00.011-05:00

I’ve been having these conversations with my new best friend Eva Hayward about the effects transgender is having on culture, now and tomorrow. Eva is super smart. Eva is even smarter than I think I am. After gnawing the bitter, hollow carapace of Transgender Remembrance Day and finding it indigestible (because violence against transpeople is so vicious and baffling...and I will mourn for our dead but I will not set aside a day for it, choosing instead to celebrate our variegated, nuance-sensical, challenging, tentacular deliciousness) these conversations are a sweet birdsong after a week of rain.

Eva sees trans as the movement that will take us to interspecies communication. The minute she spoke that aloud, it was as if she had unlocked some cellular memory, the reason for my itchiness perhaps – that or the whole “I live with cats and I’m allergic to them” thing. A canal flooded, interlocking pieces dissolved entirely – I have always viewed trans as literal, as “across,” as the interstitial fluid connecting solidities to solidities, and its possibilities were present but blurred as if constant, ecstatic motion. My friend gave me a lens with which to view our movement, and we are the meaning of “activity."

No wonder people find transpeople so confronting! Our very presence invites the idea of flux, of impermanence, of possibility. The social need for order, the paper-shuffle, the hierarchies, race, gender, class, abilities, are all challenged by creatures who cannot be still, whose existence illustrates the body in continuous evolution. My personal preference is to not neglect the “T” in the FTM, after all.

Looky here, transpeeps: you are MAGIC. Do not underestimate your godgiven powers, Tranny. Here’s the real deal, from your Uncle Sam and bring a spoon. Consider the octopus. S/he is spectacular and monstrous, full of biologic juxtapositions no mere artist could envision. S/he has a razor sharp beak in her soft soft maw, full of toxins that can paralyze. S/he is ancient, Grecian in creation - her tentacles reproduce themselves when broken, the skin of her mantle changes pigmentation to camouflage – she could be a Barhamut or a Barbegazi in origin, but no, this strange and extravagant creature lives in our seas. The octopus inhabits a place in our psyche, too, once we had witnessed its horrible, mesmerizing arms, its hypnotic push through the ocean, once we have seen it squeeze its bulbous, water balloon body into dark crevices, bursting out with astonishing alacrity to seize its prey. Our gills go grey at this apparition, and yet we’re magnetized, strangely moved…

Transpeople inhabit that same, mutable space, we are harbored in the grotesque and set sail into a world of waving, suckered arms. Only Kali-ma understands us, only a Jesus who is at once an infant and dead in a cave can be our personal Savior. It is our job, with our queer, elderly, disabled, and colored friends, to start a new conversation, and the conversation must include EVERYTHING.

Clearly, our modes of communication are antiquated. We still talk with one another as if we were defending ourselves from invading Mongols. The Dalai Lama has a message, and it’s the message encoded in transgender: let’s think long term. So how do we communicate with one another, with an eye toward a future of luminosity and invertabraed dreams? Assuming you want a luminous, expansive world?

Kindness, ladles and gellyspoons, kindness is key. In this practice, my personal yoga, I drop my ideas about anything at anytime. It is more challenging, I am quicker to fail, than a new gym membership on January 2^nd. But I believe in us, and I believe we are part of a spiritual zeitgeist that can shatter this frozen fascia of social construct and open us to movement and even grace.

The practice begins with me. How can I be kind, gentle even, with this awkward, aging, girlyboy, who often hold ridiculous opinions aloft for an audience who is just there to renew their library books, get a cup of coffee, buy a loaf of bread? How do I forgive this rowdy, loud, soul for having destroyed or at least avoided, a huge portion of his own life with alcohol and drugs and human hostages?

Sometimes I look into your eyes and I find the love there. I find forgiveness, compassion, and humor in your generous, capacious heart. And then, and sometimes only then, can I find it for myself.

So let’s give one another that gift, the gift of a softening human heart. Let’s bring one another to a sweet cove, our secret, octopuses garden of our message center, the seat of intuition and grace, and transmit (see, I said “trans”) our so-way-beyond-a-mere-gendered sonar, radar, love. People are dying, and their deaths are urging, “more love, more love, more love.” When I look into your sweet, black, shining eyes and see the light is dimming, that’s what I’ll whisper to you: more love, more love, more love. And I’ll use all eight arms to hold you.

The Unbearable Rightness of Being

2009-11-08T18:42:00.000-05:00

It is autumn outside but it’s Spring on my face. Only the fiery leaves speak to my hot, hot, man-core, the center of which is now the molten lava of the hormonally revved. It is Springtime on my face, ladles and gellyspoons, new growth shooting through the weak, fine, lady-mammal hairs, each like a sturdy thickening trunk around which grows trampling grass. “Niiiice,” admires Renee, stroking my scruffy chin. Few are bold enough to acknowledge the change in their pal Sam, but when they do they are sweet and generous enough to be excited with me.

Because it’s Spring in this body, all I want to do is revel. I want to bask in the sun of testosterone-induced magnificence, and yours as well. I’m hot for all things trans; I have found a new glory in the masculine, and a deeper sadness too.

“I think if I find myself telling a story more than three times I’m going to drop it…” I muse aloud at D. “I think I get wedded to a narrative, a good story and then I think it’s true well beyond its expiry date!” Like, for instance, I had told myself I liked the femmes. I liked “Girls.” I used this to explain my last two lovers, two heterosexual women whose presentation clearly fell on the feminine side, particularly when juxtaposed with me, who regarded myself as “transvestite.” I had this strong attraction to men’s clothing I JUST COULDN’T FATHOM.

Well, the mind likes order, it likes to stratify, structure; it’s inordinately fond of genus and specie, family and class. Even my mind, which is Aquarian in its untethered gambol – I cannot predict what tree it’s going to land in, all helium and hot air – ends up in definition, defining for eternity what are flavors in time.

I tasted femme and found it bright and crisp and exotic to my palate. Against its fruited plains I could flex and pop a bicep, I could fuck like a man while making love like a woman seamlessly, again and again and again. I found it easier to navigate my inherent chivalry, my almost fetishistic compulsion to tend the lawn, fix the sink, take out the trash, be a dude. I never could find comfort in this as a dyke; butch felt more aggressive an identity than I could handle and I never did find the consolation and ease I felt an identity should give me. But being with a “womanly” woman – that was a sweet opiate drop of oil in my stormy gay tub.

To transition from female to male is to allow myself to love, in all ways possible, the most forbidden fruit of all. Men, manly men, sweet men, ugly men, hairy men; men that are penile and erect with turgid, oily muscle, men with guts that push against their tee-shirts; men that smell of b.o. and cigarettes, men that have their babies in a wrap over their heart to keep their hands free; men who laugh loud and talk shit, men who can be stupid and heartless one minute, then gentle and paternal the next; men who wear pink and lipstick and eyeliner, whose every step is the twist of lamb’s tail, who sleep with men or women or nothing at all, who drive cars and make cars and flip bitches off with their suntanned middle-finger, and above all, above everything else human and inhumanly possible, men who are women.

Here’s the thing. I feel such new compassion for my benighted hetero sisters. I love the men but goddamn! They make it difficult. They are, in the main, really, truly, genuinely clueless. I can tell you firsthand, having passed for such creatures: they know not what they do. Sure, some of them do, some of them get, deeply, their participation in a very, very sick social structure, that grants them the privilege of invisibility, the privilege women, most non-white people, and many, many gender-nonconforming people do not have.

I for one am sick to death of being patronized, gagging in my mouth from the aftertaste of the cock-like supposition of authority from this man or that man, and I’m as sick of the women who take power where they can, and from whomever, screaming insensate at shop-keepers and valets and children; I’m vomiting as I listen to black men and women make fun of me as I walk past them, mocking my walk and my voice and even my friendliness, on my knees curled from an indefinable pain even my hierarchical mind can’t stratify, can’t wrap around, except to retch and retch and retch again.

And this is my imponderable, impenetrable sadness.

So I will set us all free. Me from my stories, me from my mind, me from the critique, the judgement; me from my deep, deep human hurt that pings around my heart’s hollow, hoping to land or hear a ping back. I will tell a great many stories, for ever and ever, because once upon a time I believed them.

But none of them are true.

Little Peepee, Little Toes

2009-10-19T17:59:00.002-04:00

“Men are pussies when it comes to pain!” a pal of mine insists.

This begs a word-by-word deconstruct and is nearly pure Dada in juicy ridiculousness. Are we implying that men are women’s pudenda or sweet, madcap furballs? And what, if anything, does pain have to do with this?

Ha. I jest. It’s a shibboleth of sorts that men are pervious to pain, and in fact will revert to toddler in face of same or illness. My own family was uniquely stoic in the face of any illness or trauma – I’ve seen my father pick digits off the garage floor beneath the table saw and laugh that he guessed he had to get to the emergency room. I remember opening up my own hand with a hand saw (and that’s why they call it a “hand saw” kids!), watching yellow globs of fat slide out from over tendons and cursing my bad consumer luck for having to now test the “urgent” in “Urgent Care.” I hate more than anything, having to wait.

I have been held hostage, for over a week now, to the mordantly exquisite pain of a fractured, cavitous tooth. I loped around it for nearly a month, gobbling ibuprofens and eating to one side, but it bested me last Thursday where at 2a.m. I woke up thinking the devil had exposed my dentistry and was digging through my teeth with red-hot claws like Madeline Kahn at the sale bra table at Macy’s one forlorn Christmas. The Madeline Kahn reference is true, by the way – according to an ex who used to work there, Maddy snapped a bra from another shopper with the kind of triumphant zeal only the holidays can evoke.

On the other hand, I always thought of my brother as a “lap baby,” one of those children who have figured out how to get nurturing from the immaternal by being consistently ill or in crisis. Here was the child who was allergic to everything: dust, wheat, dairy, chocolate for godssake, for whom we had to line mattress and pillow, drink powdered milk, eat carob, who had to go every week to Bethesda to our weird, basement cave-dwelling pediatrician for every child’s nightmare: the shot. My brother managed to tease a tenderness from our mother - a woman whose answer to my questions about what menopause was like was a strident, “I don’t know - I was too busy” - that I have never seen from the same woman who told me once, “I don’t know why people like to hug me when they greet. I rarely even see these people.”

Nonetheless, I hear from my besties that their husbands and boyfriends are big babies when ill. I suspect my own intolerance for discomfort and pain is linked to years upon heaping spoonfuls of opiated years, and that persistent painkiller addiction has sucked dry the well of serotonin for this ex-junky. I will attest that since detoxing off of methadone in 1994, I have occasional ingress to an experience of pain that would make Pinhead from Hellraiser moist with pride. (I just envisioned a Top Chef-type scenario involving Hellraiser minions as judges but have chosen to edit this fantasy to this aside…)

What do pain and illness have to do with gender?

I’ve been considering the difference between hating one’s body and true dysmorphia. Most of us who have been women in America know firsthand what it’s like to hate, or at least be disgruntled with some part of our body. I just gave in about my thighs – even when I was a skeletally thin Screaming Skull coke-head you could still spot the random thigh dimple. And my ass looks like an infant’s, no matter what exercise I enslave it to.

Dysmorphia, on the other hand, feels less like loathing and more like confusion. What is that and how did it get here!? It’s like – well, imagine waking up one fine morning and discovering you’ve got a tail. And not a cool, Nightcrawler tail – a freakish, fleshy tail of no aesthetic value whatsoever. Dysmorphia is the reverse of the phantom limb syndrome- it’s the itch of a living thing attached to your body, it’s the itch of being trapped in a body, like a cast, that isn’t actually yours yet you cannot escape.

The doctors at my local hospital won’t do my top surgery. It’s perceived as cosmetic, elective, and they "don't do cosmetic." The difference between “I can’t live with this nose” and “I can’t live in this body” is the difference between someone looking outside for validation, and someone who cannot even know the meaning of the word validation. There’s been nothing to validate but an immaterial longing, as if heartbreak was something one was born with. I understand how poignant both desires can be, but comparable? I think not.

Anyhoo, these are my thought when I’m not thinking “tooth.” Which is all I’m thinking these days, until tomorrow at least, where the good dentist shall scrape this wanton, shamelessly attention-courting nerve from my fractured face.

Men, women, and some of us interstitial: we’re all big pussies. At some point, for something. Let’s jump in a big pussy pile, like Max and the Wild Things; let’s howl together in righteous indignation to a god that would give us this strange neurochemistry, and let’s thank it for something too. Pain tells me to change a situation, and dysmorphia tells me to change the world. Together, we can do this thing, a tooth, a gender, and let us not forget a haircut, at a time.

I’m Just a Boy Who Can’t Say No

2009-10-04T15:59:00.002-04:00

Since I got sober, really sober, less than a decade ago, I often feel like I’m coming up from under ground, post-apocalypse. If you’ve ever been on the metro escalator in Dupont Circle, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

There’s a whole world talking, and it’s articulating faster than I can listen, much less process. This sometimes feels like a brutal contrast to my own personal life, including my transition, which seems to evolve rather slowly and even begrudgingly, like a teenager asked to pick up her room. Time and time again, I watch (and with undisguised joy, I might add) guys sprout Amish beards, get surgeries, swagger on in to the men’s room – while I hunch and cave and compress the breasts, and curry my tiny face hairs, urging thickness in the one and diminution in the other.

This is how it goes. And I promise the next person who lets “it is what it is” fall unexamined out of their gaping maw shall be subject to an “it is what it is” tranny fine payable to me, Sam Peterson, in the currency of the realm. If you’re my friend, you can just turn around and come back in again. If everyone is saying it, it’s not deep anymore.

I was at a grueling meeting of the transpeeps last week, where two guys were expressing their fears about getting clocked as “non-actual-dude” in the men’s restroom. Frankly, it’s hard for me to empathize with that. They’re getting in the men’s room. Another gender-vague person and I had to emphasize that we don’t use the room of our choice. We fear outing, we fear violence. “I could probably take a chick on if I had to,” I assert with my usual sensitivity, thinking that if it came to fisticuffs around bathroom decisions, I’d fare better with my birth kind. Much of this fear is between the ears, too – nobody’s in the men’s room, checking the direction of someone’s feet; conversely, I doubt anyone would even give me a second glance if I went to the men’s room at school. I only don’t go there because so many people there know me as a “woman,” and I chafe at the thought of having to explain to my fellow DTCCers what me and my micro-penis and testosterone-flaccid boobs are doing in “their” bathroom.

My friend exists in a state that would be intolerable for me, who is a loud, gregarious, non-secret-y Sagittarian. They (I find ze and hir troublesomely academic, but in 6 months time I’m sure I’ll be ze-ing and hir-ing all over the jernt. See above for “begrudging evolution.”) work in a rather conservative environment, and have done so for years. They let other co-workers choose their pronouns for them. They’re not “out” at work. They live the double life we’ve come to recognize on Maury and Oprah - but when it’s up close and personal, it ceases to be entertainment and becomes unyielding heartbreak and humiliation. At least, for me, watching it. My friend is quiet, private. They conceal their life with every unspoken sentence, or reveal with the easily quashed quiet of the shy. If I have a thought, it’s out of my mouth like a gumball in a penny candy machine, no censor, sweet, cheap, delicious and possibly stale.

But I know the ignominy; my ears burn red at slights - strangers may never know they injured with their gendered assessment of me, who is now weirdly caved in from an indignity I can carbon date to the birth of my brother, who had something substantial by way of his diapers and proved me a girl. “This is your sister,” said my father to my baby sibling; I choked on it then and I’m still gagging now.

It is what it is. I embrace, with varying degrees of success, my gendered presentation. We’re all somebody else in our minds, anyway, aren’t we?

I think about a double life. I’ve cheated on partners, and I’ve been a drunk “sober” person – those lies made me sick like a steady cold drip from a window on a perfect fall night led to pneumonia one October. And I was drunk on those lies, too – they were mouth-watering and at the expense of another, an innocent one. But the double life of a transperson costs everybody. It’s a backwards cheat. I’m sitting here thinking “why am I denying anyone my fabulousness? Everyone needs a little shotglass of tranny!” – and while this is a truth for the ages it would be ingenuous and even criminal for me to insist that transpeople rub themselves on the eyeballs of the half-awake world. Much of the world has a violent, even lethal response for people who challenge their shibboleths.

Still, what’s the reward for silence? Like nicotine produces a toxin of euphoria, what’s my prize for keeping the good news to myself? What am I so afraid of? Is this my transphobia, or my default to people-pleasing? Yes and yes and I’m a little ashamed.

So I’m counting on you, Sister-brother. I am going to lean heavy on your broad back, and let you fireman carry me at least a bit of the way. I can’t do this alone. I need you out there. Help me be an honest transman – and if honest requires I bide my time and bite my tongue I will but help me. I’m not in this thing to be a dilute version of me – I know when the time is right they’ll want all my verve and zest and snap, a reduction even, sharp and savory and sweet. So take me by the hand please; push those doors open like a cowboy at the saloon Sweet Friend and let me in. And lastly, after we’ve washed our hands at the sink, careful not to look at one another, you’ll bravely remind me to zip.

Don't Be Mad Once You See That He Want It

2009-09-25T09:38:00.002-04:00

I’ve been experiencing a lot of grief and loss for The Dyke Sam recently. Unlike ThaManSam, The Dyke Sam isn’t anagrammatic of anything, although the internet says it can reconfigure to “Shamed Tyke” or “Hated Me Sky.” So I’m having the sads a little, and missing her (which is interesting – it begs the questions: where has she gone?). I wish I could get some therapy, for this and the litany of sadnesses and horrors I’ve participated in, but I can’t afford it right now. You may add poverty to the litany of sadnesses if you like.

Narratives about who I am or who I might have been had the world been good and kind and fair are gripping, magnetic even. Several years ago, I stood up into a metal shelf bracket and found myself with a business class ticket on the Fatal Ferry of Fibromyalgia. No, fibro ain’t fatal, although one might wish it were, but to stay on that boat for long could be. I have heard the sirens’ song of any number of compelling disabilities – I identified as “chronically depressed” for so long it very nearly came true.

Fibromyalgia was a gift, a fruit basket given to me by an amalgam of drunken car totalings, sexual assault, an abiding need to shoot drugs to near seizure and/or overdose, et cetera, et cetera, all calculated to disrupt my neurochemistry. It was just wonky enough, when I kissed that metal bar with my skull, to easily slide over to some sort of horrific schizophrenia, where all my neural impulses told me to (via migraine, twitching muscles, fatigue, unremitting neurasthenia, and a non-stop train wreck of agonizing pain) assassinate Gerald Ford, or at least, hurl this bowl of cherries at the backdoor in a tantrum of hurt and frustration.

I’ve been blessed by a ridiculously optimistic personality. You wouldn’t necessarily know that – you have to sieve through my snarkiness - but you will find, among the shark teeth, some candy corn and daisies. But armed with a diagnosis and a deep, dedicated love of drama (yes, Jessica, I am a drama King) I lay upon my sickbed and calculated the losses. I began to meet with others who inhabited this realm of adamant pain. Quickly, it was revealed: this is a world of Us and Them, it was a world of believers and unbelievers. The martyrdom to this diagnosis, however, was unbelievable. This made me sicker than the sick itself.

I watched an acquaintance turn her will and her life over to her multiple diagnoses and identities: bipolar, fibro, assault victim, rape survivor, alcoholic. Thank god it didn’t look very appealing – vanity probably has as much to do with my own survival as optimism or even access to clean water – and my own litany became less of a “who I am” and more of a “things that happened in my life.”

It concerns me that I see a number of transmen identifying as a “survivor” of this or of that. I wonder about the proliferation of disability identities I find on the interwebs. It’s a part of our process, to wade through pain, to pore over and attempt to find meaning in our tragedies. I salute the openness, the refulgent honesty my web siblings shine and I believe our secrets can kill us; I see the importance of frank discussion, of our abuses, our fears, our beliefs, the things that we feel fettered or broken by.

But I worry about us getting stuck there. A brotherhood of survivors is fantastic television but what feeds and nourishes and sustains this trannyboy is my unending, luminant gratitude for those very things that felt like curses. To land on the open sheet you’re all holding and be trampolined, buoyed above my low laying clouds – to see, even briefly, that open, sunny expanse, and then drop down, hard, held by your loving and splendid arms – to know, and I mean really KNOW, that we are legion, and we are loving and loved, and in this is a special place of sanity, the sanity only the gender-fluid can know and that is that we expose the ridiculousness of “him” and “her” even if only for a second and even if only for ourselves.

That luminosity you reflect, sister-brother, THAT’s what I want to hold on to.

I see catalogues of our fear, inventory of our pains – I can share first hand they’re just another bureaucracy. I find the sweetness in the details, the “mundane:” we are kitten-owners, child-birthers, cereal-buyers; no longer are we hanging by a thread of survival, we’re not eating cold out of cans – we’re catering the motherfucking party, we’ve transcended, we’re a celebration!

Know this, Handsome, Beautiful One. You are so much more than your cystic fibrosis, your cane, your Zoloft, your incest, your addictions, your overweight, your longing, your grief and your loss. You are The Sun; you are the most powerful light shining on Earth; you blind me with your radiance. Go out now and blast thee motherfucker, fucking torch down Target with your brilliance. I can’t wait. I’ll be there, shopping for shades, looking fierce in hats, and waiting to be awed.

Love,

Your brother in addiction, prostitution, sexual abuse, rape, poverty, domestic violence, fibromyalgia, IBS, IC, depression; making art, making love, finding hope, kissing kittens, brushing unicorns, painting pictures, meeting for coffee, calling you on the phone, meditating and praying, laughing until I pee myself, drinking the best cup of coffee, playing Fireman with Gus, reading a genius writer, loving, loving, loving and dancing with every sweet and open human generous enough to post their version of Beyoncé or Shakira on youtube now and now and forever amen.

Oh, the Things I Do For England

2009-09-10T19:22:00.001-04:00

“Sam, Sam,” I hear darkly whispered. “Sam, c’mere man!”

I trudge up the hill to meet my friend halfway. “What’s goin on man?” I puff as I walk. “I saw your video, man, the one you posted…” “Well thanks for watching,” I say, preparing to be humble in the face of oncoming accolades. “It was really disturbing…I found it really disturbing!” he says, looking perplexed.

At the risk of being too self-referential, I’m referring to the video I’d posted to the right there, about fears around transitioning - which I’d also shared on the Book of Face, thereby exposing myself to a heap of barely–known pages - people who call me their “friend.” You know we don’t all KNOW each other, actually.

We continued to chat; I didn’t really get any more insight, and I did ask him directly what chapped him. I was moved that he felt he could have a conversation with me - him an assigned- at-birth male and me just super fabulous - and express this discomfort, and he took pains to let me know it wasn’t about me, personally – “you’re clearly a level-headed Dude” – that it was his stuff.

I live in my own little Warsaw. If it were in Manhattan it could be called “Little Trannytown.” My chosen interactions are with my chosen tribe: people who are generally socially conscious, certainly open-minded, and typically loyal. So I forget how challenging this gender stuff is, even as it has challenged me my entire life. Like most humans my default state is an intermittent narcosis, fueled by cookies, electronic over-stimulation, and a tendency to spiral down the dark side when faced with overarching human cupidity.

Gender is so fundamental, so deeply and immediately inculcated by society, that threatening its construct can fuck up your entire world view. We’ve all experienced those “floor-dropping moments,” when everything we’ve believed, up ‘til now, has been revealed to be, well, different than what we’d thought. I recall the first time I realized my parents were weird, were unlike other kids’ parents. It can be a deceptively simple moment. I remember Michelle Marcy and John Wilkinson talking about “heavy coats.” It was fall in Northern Virginia, and probably time to pull out the wool.

“Heavy coats?” I wondered. “What on earth could that mean?” In a blinding flash I saw Michelle and John around their respective, homey, breakfast tables, participating in the kind of conversations, ordinary and accessible, that the Petersons didn’t have. We didn’t speak of clothing; we talked of art and politics and I’m talking about the second grade here. I knew, I saw in that instant, the disability that would plague me for the rest of my school days: I was marked; we didn’t know about anything that mattered; we were smarty-pants freaks; it was a miracle my parents hadn’t been eaten alive by the parents of these children.

My life changed in that instant. My carefully crafted Mom and Dad origami drinking cup, now challenged to hold water, went soggy and failed. To pry open the eyes of another may feel like torture to them. I liken it to nudging your parents’ bedroom door open, you with your binky and blanket agape at the tangle of limbs and sheets and indescribable sounds. While that’s a fine example of a horrible awakening, there are moments in our lives that are wonderfully, painfully, opening and transcendent. What book did you read as a teenager that utterly destroyed your world as you’d known it, and wasn’t it delicious?! Is it just this ol’ Sagittarian or have you not experienced relief, or joy, or balls-out liberation when such a perceptual shift happens? Movies like The Matrix hold such resonance because we’re always making the blue pill/red pill decision, preparing to be slaughtered, hoping to find freedom.

I have got to remember that the gender thing is like that for the people, it’s primary, feels sacred. I have got got GOT to practice a little more empathy – after all, I have an agenda, and I want to persuade, right?

First it was the gays and their zany sexual confusion; now it’s those madcap ftms and their hair and clit growing antics! “In a world, where men and women change their genders at will…” I hear the announcer intone. (gift for the reader: say “In a world, where…” and fill it in with whatever you want, “kittens make breakfast” or “my ass no longer looks like a lunar landing site” – also, do Sean Connery imitations on anything. Hilarious for EVER. You’re welcome.)

In a world, where I am sensitive, touchy even, about my transition, about transgender, about the continued oppression of women and consequently the continuous suffocation of men – in a world, where I am about to be eaten alive by my neighbors, always, it’s Peterson status quo – IN A WORLD where I learn to stop serving myself up on a plate...Well, the transgendered are a tasty snack treat. You can’t fault us there.

So I bid you, go forth, transperson. Go shatter someone’s paradigm. Maybe you’ll get thanked later. Probably not. Nevertheless I bid you, go forth and scrawl some shit on the bathroom doors. If there’s no risk to your being, tell people who and what you are. There’s a whole bunch of us out here ready to love on you, when those other suckers can’t. Well, at least, Moneypenny, there’s me.

Hymn to Him

2009-08-20T08:18:00.003-04:00

If you’re looking to be “himmed” and not her’d” there’s a tranny hierarchy, FYI. Some of us have heard this, and even the best of us might have experienced the sour taste of having to “him” someone who hasn’t “earned” it.

By this I mean there are some transguys who feel that you can’t be a “him” if you ain’t on the T; I’m given to understand there’s some sort of ranking by surgeries, too. I have wondered on occasion, if assigned-at-birth-men feel that, that “hey, you didn’t live male, Shortstuff, so how dare you pad your panties and call yourself a man!”

I don’t think cisgender men give two scrotal hoots about transguys actually, and therein is the heartwrenching difference between us and them. If they only knew.

I have been surreptitiously scoping the masculine for YEARS. Practically out of the womb. Since I can remember - and I can recall the hiss of the black and white television and the palpable devastation of the adults around it during the first Kennedy assassination and that, mothersuckers, was less than a month before my third birthday – I recollect an already ripening love for the male.

This love of mine was very specific however: I did not care for male children. They were loud, gratuitously violent, and inclined to force me to remove my panties. My best friend, David Lindsay, was a gentle creature who, like me, shunned the boys and the girls, neither of whom seemed to play at anything really fun like “Radio Announcer” or “Variety Show Host.”

But the accoutrement! The boys’ blazer had a pocket on the inside! This made me inexpressibly covetous. I could see myself wearing the handsome dark green wool, tucking special rocks and paper with secret code inside. I was more Christopher Robin than G.I.Joe. I longed for real collars; everything for girls was softened and blunted or darted and pleated. I wanted boxy pants with lots of pockets and…and belt loops by golly belt loops! A belt even! The treasures I beheld in my father’s jewelry box soothed this unnamed, unspoken anxiety, the anxieties of being a Samantha when I felt so SAM.

Men, I have been watching you for years. Your slumps and your slouches, your insouciance, your insecurities. I’ve let my envious eyeballs explore every inch of your solid shoulders, your clavicles, the goose-flesh dappled skin of your dense necks. With something akin to love and certainly within the realm of passion I’ve counted hairs, noted like a scientist the areas in which they are more likely to congregate. Because I am so visual I drew you again and again and again. “What are those?” asked an innocent of my attempted sketch of Reggie from Archie Comics. “Breasts” interjects my mom nervously, who does not, who cannot, understand: I would never, EVER draw a female body. Why would I when it is the male’s that I worship? “Pecs,” I say, because I have learned their proper name, because I care, “they’re muscular pecs.”

Men, you are as foreign and as terrifying as a giant squid – and the waters are yours, always have been. I’m bouncing around in a purloined dinghy marveling at my good fortune in sighting such a creature, before realizing I’m about to be its lunch.

I have done everything I know to get you to look at me. I’ve been your (in)equal, in bands, on teams, at jobs, and in love. No matter how I tried, I was always second-tier. Bros before, well, you know. Men have always been among my closest friends, and yet I always felt your distance. I could be relegated to a “honey” or a “sweetheart” in less than a slap. When I call someone “Honey” it’s with the love of a mother. Women taught me that. I’m not sure I even like men, but then again, I’m not sure I like women either. As the immortal Johnny Mercer sang "I don't like men/ Women I don't like too/ Sometimes I don't even like myself, but I do do do like you!"

I am your stalker. I am up your pants leg now. Me and every guy in transition – we’re in your pen pocket, we’re tucked in your hatband; when you whip out your wallet we dash for a compartment; we’re on your jock, in your cologne, in your shaving mug, your class ring. We’re comparing size, and heft; we’re studying how you stroll. And while we’re jealous of your dick, we’re not jotting love-making skills from you, nor do we need your flirt. But mother goddamn, to have that confidence, the thing that can only be born of privilege!

Ah. So. There it is. I watch and I envy (penis!) and I covet and I long. But at the end of the day, I’m reminded: I really can choose to have the best of all possible worlds. How lucky am I!? I know what it’s like to be a woman. That may be the greatest gift I’ll ever have been given – to know what it’s like to be the most globally downtrodden of the human species teaches me compassion, right? It connects me with a worn, silken thread to everyone. And as I cast about for male role models I find, by and large, my male role models are women:

My neighbor Mixon broke up a fight between a pit bull and a herder, helped a guy in a wheelchair, and held the whole neighborhood together IN ONE NIGHT.
My friend Alex shines the sort of strong, wise paternal love-beam that pulls you in its wake to your higher self.
With greater and greater frequency, it is women who are modeling the kind of leadership, courage, and ambition I admire, the kind I think of as “male.”

Gay Christian mystic-activist Andrew Harvey believes Jesus’ was the ultimate masculinity, the perfect union of male and female. I can model a prissy control-freak, have a tantrum of sexual entitlement, or I can help someone without asking anything in return. I think of true, transcendent maleness as uniting, not dividing.

And of course, I’d sure like to unite my thing with yours. I’ve got my eye on you.

44 (not nearly) Questions for the Questioning Trans, or, You Might Be Trans If...

2009-08-10T16:42:00.003-04:00

You know, I’ve been transitioning from female to male for well over a year now, but I still occasionally have unsettling WTF moments. Maybe it’s the hormones, or maybe it’s a really stunning sale on Bust.com, but every once in a while my head will break the surface of what in the moment feels like the scary, weird, murky Sea of Transition, and my (in this scenario) breasts will heave, lungs choking for air, legs churning in the waters, arms grappling to find purchase where there can be none. “What am I doing!” I gasp, a woman adrift in a hostile, manly deep.

It is for precisely these moments of confusion and doubt that I have taken a soggy cocktail napkin from AA’s “44 questions” brochure and crafted my own: “You might be trans if….” helpful checklist. Rub whatever facial hair you have as if you were Aladdin and your chin a lamp, adjust your crotch thusly and read on. These are mine, and they’re intensely subjective, but I urge you to find your own, if any of these plays like the icy transfinger of death on your questioning vertebrae.

Do you have “the phantom-limb syndrome?” You might be trans if you know exactly what I’m referring to.

Does the department you’re “supposed” to shop in make you break out in cold sweat? Do you experience unexplainable allergy symptoms (hives in the shape of the symbol for Mars) when merely tromping near the undergarment display?

Does being mistaken for the other gender make you feel tickley and strangely elated? Conversely, does it really fucking piss you off?

Do you eye-grope smokin’ hot representations of your “opposite sex”, in magazines, on tv, the internet, all the while recognizing you don’t necessarily want to sleep with them, but you like their style?

Do you ever say to yourself, “I’ve got this woman (or whatever your born gender is) thing down!” like it’s a job or a shtick?

Do transpeople of either gender make you unaccountably queasy? Do you feel an urgent need to express your opinions about transgender men and women, possibly in a blog?

Have you spent any amount of time at all, researching surgeries, hormones, ftm/mtf sites, drag kings, queens et al just because you’re “curious?”

If you’ve managed to read through these questions without your eyeball twitching, your lizard collar flaring, your fur at end, then sister-brother, move on. You’ve achieved some level of comfort in whatever skin you’re in. Me, I’ve printed this on rubber so I can stretch the letters large to recall that the skin I’m in is changing, every motherfucking day, and with various degrees of ease or pain.

It can be textbook Jekyll and Hyde up in here: one day I’m skipping (butchly) through fields of curling thigh hair, twirling under musky skies of pit-stank, gripping my newly arrived back fat with happy hands, thanking the dear Lord for the migration from my ENORMOUS working-class Euromutt thighs to this more masculine destination. Other days my facial hair makes me extremely nervous, each hair like an ant on my clean kitchen counter; the secondary sexual characteristic of thick-necked goiter fat is galling – I miss my pretty face.

The other list, and again, it’s entirely subjective, is my hormonal gratitude list, also perhaps stolen from twelve step groups (I wonder if there’s a 12 step group for thievery?). It reads like this:

I am so happy with the way things have…erm….changed downstairs. Who knew what a sigh of relief that would bring?
The thought of returning to my previous body makes me feel like I’ve been trapped overnight at Ann Taylor.
I love that I don’t have to buy pants to fit my ENORMOUS Euromutt proletariat thighs anymore. Waists actually almost work now, as do belts!
I actually kind of like masturbating seventeen times a day. “When do you find the time!?” you, a more reasonable person might ask. I make the time.

I recognize these may read as rather superficial, and don’t speak to the myriad ways gender gets forced down our collective gullets, one way or t’other, and how being perceived one way or t’other is vexing, painful even. When I get read for male, it’s like Jesus is giving me a scalp massage, but when a someone gives me the boob-scan and slots this into their “Ma’am” compartment I puke a little in my mouth.

So if ever you are in some sort of trans-panic, some freak-out about who you are and where you might want to go, feel free to use my list as a template. The mind, as I “understand” it, wants order, likes to create form and meaning (“oh look, there’s a monkey pushing a wheelbarrow with a pig in it!...Oh…wait, shoot…it’s just a bush growing over a trash can…”). Residing in the elastic, the lava-lamp of transition, can stir up a little terror.

I know a guy who, one day in trans-panic, shaved off his entire bushy beard and put on make-up and a dress. Sometimes we have to re-boot, hard boot even.

So before we shave our legs with that Daisy razor let’s linger on the list. Remember: God gave us a penis to use our brains with, or something something. Relax, tranny, relax. Believe me, we’re all gonna end up who we are anyway so let’s take a deeeep breathe, put our boots up on the coffee table, wipe our hands on our shirtfronts, and peel that paper off our begendered cupcake. All together now: lick! See, in a world where NPR insists “Sarah Palin has a following” we’re really not all that outré. And if you’re not going to finish that, hand it over to me.

The Perfect Storm

2009-07-28T18:48:00.004-04:00

I think it may be time to embrace the next wave of feminism. “Do we actually need another wave,” ponders D, “or have we evolved past the need?”

We need another wave. Feminism has absorbed most of its tail and is hopping towards a verdant central isle but we’re still just frogs, really, aren’t we.

4^thWave feminism is distinctly trans. I think when we no longer need gender identification at all we can thank the waves that washed us and our tender, rubbery limbs ashore, but until that time let’s surf this together, shall we?

Even I find myself, on occasion, thinking “just pick a motherfucking pronoun, will you!?” at my friends who refute this generic convention. I’m confused and that makes me feel small and small makes me act, well, incomprehensibly angry. Good, noted. So I engage my adult and tell myself: “Self” I say, “Self, your non-pronouned friend’s not responsible for how you’re feeling right now. You like to be clearly right and anything less than that is sort of challenging for you. Where you are clearly right is in your support for another human being’s desire to be whomever they chose.” And then I pat myself on the head for being such an evolved human and practice using that friend’s first name in place of a pronoun.

It gets cumbersome. I wish we could default to one sex. I don’t care which. In my head I call nearly everyone “he” because I’ve gotten accustomed to switching it for myself. So basically, in my head, you’re transitioning too.

Back to 4^th Wave Feminism. The 4^th wave is not generational. I was born in 1960, and was steeped the womyn-cast cauldron of 2^nd Wave witchery; my first science-fair exhibition was a planet being explored by “all-women astronauts.” In space, no-one can feel the glass ceiling. I’ve absorbed the lessons of those important decades, and then sat at the feet of my younger, knitting sisters of the 3^rd wave, gleaning wisdom from them as we needle-pointed Nico on a pillowcase while bending over our boyfriends. Even we codgers can move to the next phase, the dance floor where boi and grrl merge in a beautiful disco kaleidoscope, becoming something whose meaning resists translation, is so inscrutable it defies category, but whose moves, whether spastic or elastic generate the warmest rays of light.

Activists need to be Sagittarian by nature, always looking to hoof it, ready to trot to the next, better place. The dance hall beckons.

This new place requires a regular scan. Like the 70’s exhorted self breast-exams, 2010 urges intolerance appraisals. I am constantly mortified by what old, bad ideas have managed to creep back into my cupboard, or worse – prejudice gets like sugar ants in the kitchen: they find a miniscule leaving from a disgusted fruit and there’s a swarm. All of the sudden it’s okay for me to talk smack about fat people, or fags, and the next thing I know I’m having to Hazmat the entire storeroom.

3^rd Wave feminism expanded the landscape, embraced kink, scraped off the mold of dogma, and explained how someone could dress like a little girl in public, be a Daddy in bed, and still be a feminist. Like the 3^rd Wave adopted Betty Page, 4th Wave looks at the Daddy/little girl construct with hot nostalgia. We don’t discard - we use everything because we’re green like that. I’ll bust out my Daddy when appropriate, but my sexual gender is a mutant cephalopod, has more limbs than Kali-ma, and they all want to embrace and caress and beat you into a delicate froth of submission.

Transpeople are either mutants or the next evolutionary stage: either way it looks like it’s gonna be great TV. We best pay attention now and not tivo for later. Trans is here to blow the lid off, off the Tupperware container of marriage of any flavor, off the top of our sex-toy chest, off our insistence on four able limbs and two well-spaced eyes; it’s messing with our dick AND our pussy, the most mistaken-for-sacred idols the world has ever known, so if we’re scared, it is totally okay. We should be. I’m scared, and I have no idea what to wear to this shindig.

What I will do, however, is don some Capezios (the eighties ARE BACK, shut the hell up) and moonwalk (badly) out on the floor. You will slide out beside me, and take me for a dip and a spin. Then we’ll all open-eye meditate with each other and watch with delight as our upper lips grow moustaches, then split open and reveal full Marilyn mouths, pursed and sibilant, expressing a divine juice from a beyond-yonic mango in our foreheads, dripping down, coming on our eyelids, noses and cheeks, all good nourishment in preparation for what’s coming.

And what’s coming is something only you and I can create – so let’s make it with mercy, and compassion, and kindness, and beauty, and love. We’re all of us going to need it.

I'm Not Particular as to Size, Only One Doesn't Like Changing So Often, You Know

2009-07-21T18:24:00.003-04:00

Jessica says I’m a lazy tranny and I suppose that may be true. I believe I have a pathological dread of bureaucracy (I actually just typed “bureaucrazy” – should’ve kept it.).

I’ve been on those wacky hormone-y injection thingums for well over a year now and I’ve yet to get my name legally changed. Or rather, I finally went to the courthouse today – this on the heels of repeated interactions like these - nurse, upon being handed my medical ID card: “Who is Samantha in relation to you?”

Now that’s a fantastic question, isn’t it? Who, indeed? I’m sure I don’t know, at all, or very little. It’s all very Lewis Carroll if you ask me, or maybe more Bataille, if your flavor of trans leans less to zany British comedy and more to French decapitation subculture. There’s certainly something here for everyone. Having mostly lived a life morally scripted by Genet, I’d happily subscribe to something a little more light-heartedly surreal. Benny Hill even. Mr. Bean. (and there’s something distinctly trans about Rowan Atkinson, isn’t there? Or is it just my longing for his brotherhood, me a Black Adder aficionado from too far back.)

Anyway, I was waxing philosophic.

Early on, during my requisite twelve sessions with a mental health professional, my therapist questioned my lack of enthusiasm to traipse over to Hillsborough for the name-change forms. “It’s the first thing most guys do” she said, tonally arching her eyebrows at me, “it’s the easiest change you can make…most guys are eager to do it.”

Not me, I said. She seemed to think this was indicative of a reluctance, a lack of commitment, a digging in of my boa-trimmed Candies. I was quick to assure her I hadn’t actually owned a pair of Candies since high-school, and they were anathema then. No, no, I merely have good ol’ fashioned American dread of anything paperwork. I’m terrified, having begun this process, that I’m now on an inexorable road to lengthy lines, forms that may as well have been written in Klingon and which are always described as “self-explanatory,” mirthless clerks, scowling management, and the assumption that only a stupid person couldn’t figure this out, wouldn’t have done A B and C already. I just threw up in my mouth a little writing about it.

As clever as I am, I drop a good 50 IQ points when I’m in a line and have a form to fill. I just do. I cannot decipher their dream text; I do not understand the language as it is being spoken to me; I am absolutely confounded by the linear. Case in point: at age five I weep in terror as our teacher makes a newspaper hat and asks us to follow along. I know at the outset it is beyond my capacity, this folding and refolding, beyond my ken to make such straight and wonderously crisp lines; something inside me cracks and releases the deepest brine. Already at this tender age I have subterranean caverns of sorrow and shame, acquired by observing and participating in the sexual depravities only a child can – but nothing feels quite as penetrating as this blinding stupidity.

It blocks me from completing the most innocent of things sometimes, but I’m much better at it now. Nonetheless, there hasn’t been any urgency around the name change. Everyone’s always called me “Sam.” I hadn’t been reading as male until very recently, so, well, so what? Why should I? But now the credit cards and IDs are galling. Jessica reports that whenever I call her cell, “Samantha” comes on screen, and she’s forced to say, in her best Tony Danza, “Samant’a! Samant’a!” This hardly seems fair, to ask of a friend, to have to repeatedly do a Brooklyn accent on your lady-name in your honor.

And so I manned up and drove to Hillsborough.

Before I left, Miz Marva, the seventy-something year old lady next door waylaid me. “Sam, Sam, come over here Sam,” she called with a senior’s urgency. Miz Marva and her sister think I’m a man, and flirt with me accordingly. “Sam, my sister has some eggs for you…Kara, come on here, Sam’s outside!”

Miz Kara, who is not someone I would ever want to mess with – as Miz Marva says, she works with the retarded, and she can handle it – coyly hands me a basket of enormous, nearly Jurassic-proportioned eggs. “Sam,” Miz Marva makes it have two gentle syllables, “you got two black ladies giving you gifts. I bet that’s your dream, isn’t it!”

Well pretty darn close. If they can fill out forms.

Equally abashed, I thank them for the eggs and for all their hospitality. It was unnerving at first, to be so baldly flirted with, particularly by strangers, simply because I’m a “man,” but I’m settling in to it.

I suppose there’s some hesitation, some cling, to my old me. I had chosen “Samuel” but in the end, stuck with “Sam.” The more formal felt biblical, rabbinical even, and implied a vigorous commitment to doctrine that belied my essential laziness. So I stayed with Sam.

She’s fading, the girl who never was. More and more I remember, recall feeling uncomfortable, adopting postures that didn’t fit me, discarding some that did, because they weren’t congruent. I was never actually a girl, as it turns out, and may never actually be a man, either. As it turns out. As long as I don’t have to pay taxes on it, do an assessment of it, or complete it in triplicate, I think I’m gonna be okay. But let me put you on hold; Kafka’s calling.

My Little Transsexually Fabulous Pony

2009-07-13T16:36:00.004-04:00

Unicorns, ladles and gellyplugs, I give you Unicorns: sexy, cheesy seventies tattoo, perennial favorite of pre-teen females and gayby boys, bringer of crystals and ceramics, beacon light of every emo and ironic indy tee-shirt.

What is it about this sleek, snow white filly, upon whose golden mane glints moonlight and whose bewitching tail snap kills nary a fly, but transfixes all who gaze upon its hypnotic splendor? Who is adorned by God’s Own Paperweight, the divine slice of the Sun Himself, affixed to its very forehead?

Oh transmen, are we not Unicorns? Here we frolic, stamping playfully in your sunlit meadow, snorting fire and ice, our horsey tranny thoughts impenetrable and infinitely mysterious to the masses. They seek us to capture us, use our special god-given gifts to enhance their own paltry libidos, bolster their flagging self-esteem. Like the Unicorn, we are a rare and lovely pleasure, an omen, a signifier of something terrifyingly beautiful come to smash your handmirror to bits.

Okay, maybe not. When you’ve earned your own entrance at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival you’re hardly a dying mythological breed. I mean, we have our own flag, don’t we? And we can’t always be tamed by a maiden – I have empirical data for this bit of science.

But riddle me this: are we not some sort of divination or omen? Don’t transpeople seem to be popping up all over the collective lawn like…like…freaking dandelions? Would that we WERE unicorns, people. How fantastic would that be, to see singularly horned creatures everywhere, at the Citgo, the market, bitching at their children sotto voce at the library, making cheese in a goat farm, a be-horned forehead peering into your mouth at the dentist? What does it MEAN!?

I’ve always ridden English, very formal and elegant, but I think with this particular mount I shall go Western and ride hell for leather. Unicorns at your marks.

I think transpeople are a literal gift from God. I also suspect that a number of the newly (and I mean since the sixties) gender dysmorphic are the result of the effects of hormones and other chemicals that have found their way into our medicines, foods, plastics and even our water on our very receptive fetal neurochemistry. Just as the unicorn may have been a beautiful freak, so may I be.

Nothing alters the bald fact of my balding reality so it doesn’t, at the end of a long, boyish day, matter where the fuck I came from, to me. But in the larger scheme, transpeople portend not only the death of the destructive cancer of a strict binary gender system, we may signify the end times of pollution, one way or another. Transpeople are the bleach cake on the inside of society’s toilet: we’re here to clean your shit up.

The world is a filthy, filthy place and not in a dirty nice way, either. Do your research. Until the seventies, doctors gave women “vitamins,” diethylstilbestrol or DES by any other name, a synthetic estrogen thought to prevent miscarriages. DES has transgenerational effects, meaning, it can give your granddaughter vaginal cancer. It is also linked to hypodysplasia and malformations requiring surgical interventions. And that is what it does to the body. We can only guess at what synthetic hormones do to our brains.

By this I do not mean to imply that transgender is a malformation. I cannot express how deeply I understand transgender to be sweet magic from a generous Universe, a Universe intent on exposing us to our stinkin’ thinkin’ in creative, ecstatic ways. The sickness is in the society. And to kill the Unicorn is to murder the bringer of The Light.

We are sick, sick to the bone, rotten with bad ideas about men and women. It’s about time we dismantled all that, although it’s really collapsing in on itself, and yes, you can thank feminism and queer people for all that. You’re welcome. And we seem to bolster our spiritual sickness with crap food and additives, making it okay for nine year old girls to menstruate and ten year old boys to develop breasts before they ever see pubic hair.

It took being singularly shattered by my own bad behavior, multiple times, before I could even start to make any changes in my life. I respect the process of deconstruction and I feel it happening for us on a global level. It took us two terms of GW to get an Obama. We’re gonna bottom out on all this shit, and soon.

So mark my words, as a Transsexual Omen: the end times are at hand. Find you a Unicorn, motherfucker, and stay in the light because WE ARE HERE. And there will be more of us. And we will fuck with every idea about men and women and what that means to you personally that you hold dear. While you’re figuring it all out, maybe you want to start recycling too, and cleaning up your food; go do some volunteer work. There’s no telling what crap is in your body, turning you and possibly your offspring into the next decade’s hermaphrodite. It aint going to be easy, and it aint gonna look pretty, all of us detoxing together, so you might as well go get some glitter and ribbon. This is one pony that likes to have a little lift in his trot, some pepper in his prance. This is one hot pony you cannot take for a ride.

Is That a Sparkler In Your Pants (Or Are You Declaring Independence?)

2009-07-03T10:02:00.004-04:00

What kind of person changes their gender!?

Okay, here’s a better question for you: What kind of person gets their own name tattooed on them? There’s narcissism and then there’s narcissism. I have no idea what I’m talking about except that transitioning requests your audience, please. After yet another conversation (okay, monologue) with D about ass hair growth, observance and inspection of same – and I insist, absolutely insist, you look too – I have the grudging civility to inquire “are you bored with my tranny obsessions yet?”

Adolescence, for me anyhow, was a secrety, secrete-y, shameful affair. While occasionally one would be asked to share how many pubes one might be sporting, one never got to fully revel, fully GLORY, in the onset of menses, swelling breasts, armpit smells, changing stature. It was an odorous, odious event, lowlighted by the constant thrum of social anxiety sprinkled with sebaceous cysts.

I wish I could’ve enjoyed it, particularly my burgeoning sexuality, but everything, sexuality included, was so baby-fresh and tender, so easily stifled and crushed by another’s malicious or merely awkward, foot.Transitioning needs you to pull up a chair and sit a while. It wants to give you a cupcake on a china plate because it loves you and it wants you to feel comfortable in your own skin and enjoy this moment.

Somewhere, a couple months ago, I started getting clocked as a dude.

I don’t know what happened, what shifted these past 60-90 days. I’ve been sitting in a lawn chair with my cake and a hand-mirror, looking for any nuance, any move towards man. I don’t think I look substantially different. But something has shifted, something definable only to the naked and whole eyeballs of strangers.

If you’ve known me, these alterations are largely indiscernible, subtle and energetic, and, too, you may be resistant to seeing your friend in a new way. We’re all like this about all our friends. We’re the last to see weight loss, clearing skin, last to sign on to the upgrade, the latest iteration of something we’re so comfortable with. Me, I just added some more bass to this funk, and the people I pass suddenly want to dance. I’m totally the Tranny From Ipanema. I kid you not and D will vouchsafe: women and men are shining on me in public all the time. Women smile and stare as I beam back, and even men, clearly unsure why their faces want to do this, allow for a bemused grin. Transitioning is bursting at the seams like springtime, a three year old with a new Conductor’s hat that can’t wait grab you and push you onboard the “train.”

So why, people with a camera, why are you taking the same old picture, time after time? Every photo series of transmen I scan looks like this: Black and white, a punk’s portrait, maybe a little edgy, and then of course, the shirt off. Top Surgery pics maybe. A video of same if we can get some. How many of these do we need, when there are SO MANY STORIES? I’m not a photographer – this here is my shtick – but if I were, my pictures might look like:

Mo and Nolan knitting together at the Open Eye.

Cole ringing up customers at Weaver Street Market.

Danny and Terry calming the roiling anxieties of newly gay UNC students and faculty.

X and Y and their new infant Zee.

Red Bear riding his bicycle, shirtless and panting, all over Chapel Hill and Carrboro.

Me, forced to play an inflatable guitar while wearing batman mask by my “nephew” Gus.

My docu-drama is I have resisted, to the worst of my ability, the most visionary, most important, most life-altering changes I have been forced on my knees to make. Getting sober, falling in love with God, and transitioning are the best things that have ever, EVER happened to me. And I fought ‘em all, the whole time.

Maybe the best picture of me would be one where I’ve just punched one of those punching bag/balloon guys and it has come back up and popped me in the kisser. So the photo would be of me knocked on my ass with birds and stars tweeting and spinning a merry halo around my head, staring loopily and with obvious adoration and gratitude, at your face.

Happy July Fourth. This is one national holiday I'm going to co-opt for my own.

Ooh, I Bet You're Wonderin How I Knew

2009-06-26T13:13:00.004-04:00

My dick is shrinking. I’m sure of it.

“Honey, c’mere and look at it! It’s…little!”

D peers between, corroborates and prognosticates. “You’re on a lot of medication…maybe that’s why?”

I’ve been felled by the mighty woodsman of corona virus, or swine flu maybe, and have resorted to popping (in optimistic hopes of hearing again someday – my ears are that occluded) Sudafed, ibuprofen, and benadryl. If 2008 was the year of the Dark Night of the Soul, than ’09 has been the Dank Day of the Sinuses.*

The stuff that was so magnificent over the weekend, so virile, so…majestic, is now singing “Heard it through the Grapevine” with the rest of the Raisins. In this area I am evidently just like any other man, obsessed with size and certain that both my partner’s and my pleasure depends on it. Shrinkage terrifies me. This confirms a few things. One, that I am authentically trans, an identity that’s challenged me all muddy, febrile week.

Samantha has been demanding some attentions, insisting on living, ripping out all the IV drips, oxygen, feeding tubes I’d thought I’d so generously left her on: she’s not going gracefully, but that’s never been our thing. I was a woman of a sort for 47 years. I’d made some peace with that. I had little idea that in changing genders, I would lose any of her that I cared about. But there’s a death that’s happening here, a loss so vast, such an annihilation – this concurrent with the nearly inexpressible joy of finally allowing myself to be free – the best one can do is be bludgeoned by it occasionally.

All week long I’ve been looking at my scrappy, barely visible, adolescent chin scruff thinking “Really! That’s what you want!?” It’s so unglamorous, the facial hair development, for this guy anyway, whose overarching genetics seem to lean to the Scandihoovian side of the family. We are not a hairy lot, we Peterson men, and we are not a lot hairy.

I know a guy who talked about the death of him/herself, how unprepared he was to have to grieve the woman he had been, and how remote that person can feel to him sometimes. Our previous incarnations are like a dream, the opium smoker’s vision of something unreal, ephemeral. We lay in a den together and pulled on a collective hookah, conjuring up something feminine, some will-o-the-wisp or genie even to do our mothers’ bidding, be our fathers’ daughters when called upon, showing up for Prom, wearing heels to an interview, stepping behind our brothers and bosses and knowing our place.

It’s no coincidence in my life that Tim Burton’s version of “Alice in Wonderland” premieres soon. My world is richer with synchronicity than ever before – if as a woman I was intuitive, as myself I am constantly engaged with phenomenal reminders. Being Samantha was being Alice, showing up for social tableaus that made no sense whatsoever, except to themselves; it meant being prosecuted for disobeying random, constantly shifting rules that I could somehow never grasp. A real woman might’ve felt somewhat at home in this Wonderland, although misogyny makes it impossible for any person, man or woman to ever truly relax.

In those moments I think “what the hell ARE you doing Peterson!?” I ask myself: would you get off testosterone? And the answer is always, emphatically, no. At the very least I love being able to eat more. Lest I risk sounding completely shallow and cavalier, the truth is I reject my old body. Samantha was a fantastic construct that allowed me to breathe as naturally as I had the resources for. Sober addicts often remark that their addictions kept them alive, able to move about an overwhelming, difficult world, until this ceased to work. The saran wrap of Samantha that kept her freshness, retained something of her crispness, became a suffocating prison, a leaky reformatory, until I penetrated and broke free. Still, it’s sad to leave a delicious sandwich behind.

How does one prepare to grieve? I think a really good suit is an excellent place to start. And then maybe a practice of acknowledging who I have been, and what that’s given me. And some really spectacular wingtips to go with the suit, which I could wear while paging through old photo albums, immersed in all the hilarity and tragedy these documents evoke – and I’ll be sure to bring my sandwich, sodden and nibbled, but all the ham and cheese intact.

*seriously, I’ve been hammered nearly once a month by something. Maybe God is telling me to stop putting my finger up my nose.

When Will I Be Him?

2009-06-20T08:15:00.007-04:00

I’ve delayed writing about this, in part because it was genuinely traumatic, and it didn’t feel terribly “masculine” to “whine” about it.

I was taken out by a drunken dyke spider-monkey at the Peaches show Tuesday night.

Now, being the Bringer of The Diversity that I am, I have a vast array of lenses through which to view this fracas. I could write about this from a sober perspective; I could opine through the voice of maturity (Whippersnapper!). I have an ex-dyke take, a trans-masculine stance, and a pissed-off consumer who spent $40 he could ill afford to have to leave after 2/3^rd’s of a fucking song.

Let’s just do it all, a veritable Chex mix of anger, fear, posturing, and anxiety flavored with nauseating sprinkle of PTSD! YES!

D and I muscle up to the stage. He’s 5’10” but me, I’m stretched at 5’6” on a really tall, just-been-rolfed day. Neither of us particularly want to be there – we’re homebodies – but this is Peaches for godssake, THE disco-flavored “Fatherfucker,” a veritable margarine tub of gender-spread on your delighted prone toast. So we show up and try to see through a couple packed rows of baby dykage, general faggotry, and someone's dad.

The crowd feels hostile. I’m old and my back hurts. I have spent my day scraping, bleaching, and painting an antebellum porch and I’m as tore-up as the waitress at the Last Supper.

But I’m with friends, and I’m excited to see this performer I admire. I’m out of the house because Peaches is amazing.

Little chickie in front of me is angry. Later, D would tell me this baby had clocked me, checked me out with red in her eye. We’re all holding on to our dance floor real-estate for dear life, but it feels aggressive, antagonistic. The beautiful freelove queerspace of the Cat’s Cradle is feeling less Woodstock and more Altamont. The drum track pounds and we all stiffen like warriors. The woman in front of me begins to push, to throw her body back. She’s deliberately shoving me backwards, but I’m committed. I eyeball D; we’re like “what’s up with this crazy crowd?” but we’re dedicated to this spot on the floor we’ve staked in way that, in retrospect feels a tad…insane.

Chick’s still pushing, I push back. I’m shouting at her to cut it out – part of me is trying to argue rationally with a drunk – I’m yelling “what the fuck’s your problem” and “you’re going to hurt someone.” At one point D steps in; by sheer towering height and aggression he backs the woman down and we all relax just a little.

But up it starts again and this time it’s on. Every time she throws back, I spike her with my elbow now and it inflames her. She turns and attacks, going for, of all things, my hair, which, much to my almost galvanizing astonishment she is pulling. She is actually pulling my hair out. She starts throwing punches; I’m pushed back into a packed and baffled crowd; being a smart nerd my hand seeks my glasses as it occurs to me in that moment that they will go flying and be trampled, and I will be blind.

D hurls himself into the fray; someone is holding me back, and I see that someone is holding the lesbian primate too. In that moment, I make a decision, a decision hindsight tells me I would not have had to make as another dyke on the dance floor. As a sober woman, I would have moved long before the monkey caca hit the fan.

As a dude, the adrenaline is pounding in my temples and my fists are curled in the shape of a pitbull’s skull. There is something so primitive happening here – it defies description. I would like to sidebar and tell you that since I’ve been on T, I’ve become taller. Not literally. Everyone looks smaller to me. People I was convinced were bigger than me I now can see are actually the same size or smaller. I don’t know if being a chick shrunk me in my own estimation of myself, or there’s some testosterone-induced grandiosity, but boys and girls? You don’t look so big to me.

Anyhoo, in that second, I make a decision, and the verdict is in: I will not punch this cunt in the face. Plain as the blood hammering in my head is a vision of myself with the po-po, having to explain to them that some young woman was all up in my space so I hit her. That’s that masculine insanity, the flag-planting, leg-lifting, imperialism of My Space. And there I was.

The truth is, I’m not a fighter. This little chicken would have kicked my ass with her crazy spider-monkey, hair-pulling ju jitsu. So there was a piece of this that was totally emasculating, too, even knowing that I had made a tacit “gentlemen’s agreement” – and I also had the horrifying insight that all those times I thought I had “won” in a showdown with a guy - in a bar, in a parking lot, on the dance floor – maybe the guy was doing the gentlemanly thing and not punching me in the face. Because I was absolutely that dyke that would try to mix it up when there was masculine presence in “my” space.

Here’s the thing: I think I may have been perceived as male. At the very least I was perceived as a masculine woman. What I’m saying to you is that that male privilege we all read about? Transguys are fish-in-a-barrel for lesbians targeting men as the source of their ire, their frustration. Believe me, I even smell like a guy, but I forgot that. I wish I could say I was all “here we are in happy-go-queerland together” and this bitch fucked things up, but the truth is I was hateful myself at these three fags who were taking up more room than Kanye’s ego – they had masculine noblesse oblige and it was pissing me off big time. I haven’t learned how to take the space men do, nor how to hold it. Being read as male is so new to me I almost don’t know what to do with it. I’m also way more reliant on using my femininity than I ever could have known. The very characteristics that disarmed strangers when I was a woman - my puppy dog friendliness, my toothy smile - can seem weird and invasive from a dude.

I’ll summon the Muse, to end this one. With the help of the very sage, I shall quote:

you got them all
by the balls
causing water falls
stone walls
bar brawls
climbing stalls
at concert halls
to you they crawl
body sprawled
smoking Pall Malls
close call
stand tall
doll you make them feel so small
and they love it –

“Boys Want To Be Her” ~ Peaches

Let's keep it safe, have a great day, and stay out of the gender binary, shall we?

I Did (Surgically Remove) It My Way

2009-06-09T18:47:00.000-04:00

My horoscope urges me to use the pie-throwing model of conflict resolution, even directing me to a youtube snippet of Three Stooges. I am relieved to read this; it’s only Tuesday and there’s been hella conflict. One of my dearest friends wants to know if she needs to keep a little book with everyone’s sexual/gender preferences in it. Another near-and-dear blanches as I explain that the “I” in LGBTQI is for “intersexed.” It’s a lot, I get that. It is a random alphabet jumble that in a mere six letters defining merely six margins of humanity has the ability to piss everyone off. And you’ll get NOTHING FOR IT IN SCRABBLE.

All I can say is “it’s not personal.” Some people want to be Hispanic, some Mexican, some lesbian, some queer, some differently-abled, some crip. I’d like it if you called me Sam and sir and him and he. Four little words. It would be fantastic if you’d lose lady and girl (unless by “girl” you mean “GIRL!” ala gay homo stylie). I remember, not too long ago, as a dyke, having to school a man that when he calls out to a couple of butch-looking lesbians, it’s unlikely they’ll respond to “girls.” I was referring to myself and a friend, both tough-as-nails, short-haired, tattooed lesbonians, and possibly a little threatening a deux. I’m such a cupcake I forget my presentation sometimes. Oh well. (tucks finger in lip.)

More than this anterior conflict is the interior, the deeper, less definable, the smoodgy. I’ve been applying for a lot of jobs lately and I realized that this person who is filling out these applications, laboring over cover letters, re-writing for the macmillionth time the resume, is not the person who showed up for these former employments. I really feel like a different being. I’m not sure who is filling out this paperwork, sending these emails. I’m not sure what this worker is capable of. I suspect a piece of my brain believes that testosterone has conferred some new special powers that I’m unaware of. I may even believe that testosterone has redacted some as well, has edited my capacity to multi-task, smudged whatever small sensitivity to others in a workplace environment I may formerly have sharpened.

Well, the mind is a bad neighborhood you don’t want to go into alone, and yet, there I am, like a Norwegian tourist on Avenue A in the 80’s, all by myself, black socks and sandals, looking down at a used syringe on some badly cracked pavement, excited and optimistic. Being stubbornly ingenuous works in one’s favor sometimes; I don’t anticipate the worst and it rarely comes for me, but it does mean not always behaving like the sharpest scalpel in the lobotomy kit.

Nonetheless, here I am, kitted out with a pair of strikingly globular chesticles and a necktie, pretending I don’t look like a babydyke on her first date. I’m a man, goddamnit, now aside from viewing copious amounts of porn, how do I act like one?

Apparently the same way I acted when I was a chickity chick. With integrity and sensitivity. These are qualities that both define and elude me, depending on the situation and the amount of fear I’ve scooped in my little fearscape sandbox - you know – that little box of litter you go sit in when you find yourself faced with a fog-befuddled, impenetrable vista, like interviewing for jobs? The one you plunk-ass into when someone points out your behavior is less than stellar, that “manning-up” might mean being wholly and totally responsible for your own actions, without relying on some twisted “victim” entitlement? Just because I’m a tranny, and you’re mean to me, evidently doesn’t entitle me to kick you in the pussy bone. Being a man sometimes means jutting my chin out for the right-hook of an enlightening blow.

But the universe is not tapping me on the mug because it dislikes me – it wants me to wake up. It’s been trying, for years now, to get me to pay attention to who I really am. And while transitioning to male brings me closer to comfort, nearer to the being I have repressed and cordoned and otherwise 86ed from Club Sam, it is not who I really am. And I don’t want to forget that.

So when others ask me to call them elders rather than the elderly, or challenged rather than retarded, or open rather than slutty, I shall endeavor to do so. It is not, as my friend &*()$%^ (not his real name) explains, about being “politically correct” – it is about being sensitive to the needs of others. It is being kind.

If I had my druthers, I’d probably rather point out how difficult you’re making my life, with all your demands, but I’m trying to do better than that today. This is my attempt at strong, sensitive manlitude. I’m also reminded that much as it is impossible for me to appreciate my quad (gimp) friend Keith’s daily trials, is it impossible for a gender-integrated person to value the gender dis-integrated experience fully. The best we all can do is, and I mean THE BEST, is just try to respect each other. Which I’ll promise I’ll do, even if you show up on my doorstep having added a third leg through elective surgery, asking me to call you a Tripod.

El Diablo Está En Mi Bigote del Fuego

2009-06-02T11:47:00.005-04:00

It was a festive weekend of folderol and faggotry. I traveled with my nancyboy and the Cuntry Kings of Durham, NC to the great, unrelentingly hot, city of Austin to watch them perform their glittery magic at Freakshow-a-Go-Go.

The sum of the gender presentations there was greater than their holes. There were versions of humanity I hadn’t known existed before, beta-versions of neo-tranny perhaps, untried until that night but there for your assimilation, should you be so inclined. Only in a Dot Com city like Austin would the people trot out some just-constructed transware for the delectation of the masses. Be careful what you download, Friend, you may find your commitment to some aspect of yourself blurring or disappearing entirely.

I joined up with my friend Archer, a super hot gay man with a queer spirituality and sensibility, to watch the burlesque of tap-dancing, cat-identified, klezmer-benders. We’re the same age, meaning: twice everyone else’s, and had the same sense of our gay corset being unlaced. “The kids are bringing the next thing,” he observed, “and it’s beautiful to watch.” We talked about the spiritual evolution of trans, how we’re not really “male” or “female” spiritually, and these kids know it. Or at least, they embody (literally) this evolution intuitively.

Archer and I were in a “spiritual community” (or The Cult, as I called it, to watch the elders panic) together, and we were shown the truth of this, that there is no gender in greater consciousness. What I call “God” doesn’t have a body, much less a gender, and neither do you, Mamsirmam. The kids are breaking it down, but as Arch and I noted, the rest of the world feels slooooow on the uptake. If we would stop slamming triple lattes and chicken fingers for a second and breathe, we might discover the new taste in town is trans and it’s already in our mouths.*

At some tender point in the evening, Arch looked at me plaintively and asked “would a transguy be interested in a guy like me?” No matter who we are, or what’s in our pants or head, we’re sure we’re no-one will like us. He loves the t-guys. I had to be an asshole and bait him: “How would you feel about being with a man with no dick?” – because I wonder myself, laboring under the prejudice that all gay men are dick-identified and cock-centric, but he doesn’t disappoint. He walks the talk, and will take pussy with the cock – as he pointed out, this body is just a dream anyway.

He went further and asked me if I’d be in a relationship with a non-trans guy. My knee-jerk is “of course!” because that’s my Sagittarian party line: commit to everything and everything is possible. He’s my kind of gay - rugged, whiskered, un-edited. My aversion to the gay male is that too-tidy, tip-toed presentation, the uber-manicured, depilated, skin peel gay. Maybe this is because I can’t even approach tidy myself, I don’t even have baseline tidy. I am physiologically incapable of keeping a neat appearance; my shirttail will untuck, my soup will slop, my tie will skew, and my hair will awry. Thus it has always been. Neat and pressed is not a look I admire in others either, so good for me.

But a rough, rugged, dirty man? Hells yes! I think that a relationship with a man might be achievable, if I’m more of a man myself. I’ve always liked sexy-times with the mens but the off-screen power imbalance was more than I could stand, and so a relationship was out of the question. The implied superiority of the male does not elicit a hardon for me, and if you’re thinking “what ‘implied superiority’?” about your own relationship with your guy, then you are not paying attention. But if I am a guy, maybe parity is possible; therefore maybe love would be too.

So keep on taking us higher, Children of the Corndog. You, with your Heidi wig and your soft-packer poking askew from directly below your belly where it should not be, I bid you take me by my hand to this begendered Eden where you, and your second-bedroom-now-walk-in-closet, reside. Let us recline together like Cats on Broadway in a softly warming sun, and stretch like snakes in springtime and burst our skins. Crinolines and neckties will spill out of these rents, like entrails from a hope chest, only we don’t need hope, see, we have it, and it’s wearing your mom’s vintage cocktail dress and your daddy’s suspenders. If you were blind, and you felt it, your description would vary to a man. But everyone who feels it and describes it can say emphatically “that’s mine.”

*for some of us, trans is exactly what’s stuffed in our delighted mouths right now. Lucky us.

Tales From the Vanishing Lip

2009-05-26T17:05:00.001-04:00

In the dream I was one of about 20 in an algebra class. I understood everything. I had a beard that was shiny and thick, each hair delineated like CGI fur on an animated mammoth. It was one of those texture-dense, surface dreams; everywhere my eye landed was rich in color and dimension, a trippy evocation of smell and sound trapped in the wood-grain of my desk and the dirty linoleum under my feet.

I let my gaze drift to my leg – the denim thick and dark. There was a frayed hole, about the size of a half-dollar. Through it I could see my dick.

I was frantic. Who’s seen it? Who’s spotted my dick?

It wasn’t until later that afternoon, having been up for a good eight hours, that I realized I’d dreamed I was a man.

In real life, I roam my chin for blemishes. I’m a consummate pick-artist. I love the face-poking. I should find it satisfying that my new skin cleanser is working so well, but what I’m actually galvanized by is chin hair. I think, “I’m losing my soft, hairless skin!” and I’m momentarily dismayed. You can’t pick and choose the effects of T, as any transguy blog worth its greasy skin will remind.

I love the migrant stomach fat- my entire lady life has been spent rubbing my fatty Italian sausage legs together. Now they’re thick with muscle, and the lumpy fat deposits have a retiree’s yen for travel, moving towards the middle, joining others in the gated community of back fat. My head seems to rise from my thick neck like asparagus; no longer does the ladylike distinction between shoulder, neck, and jaw beg for an adornment, pukka beads perhaps, or pearls. The testosterone enhanced neck and jaw is crafted by a clumsy giant who got bored half-way through.

I love my squarer torso; I adore my newly acquired forehead. Nevertheless, it’s shocking to find more face hairs. Even as I believe I desire them. This mind is randomly distressed by these changes. I wonder if we get the transition we need, meaning: mine has been slower, less obviously dramatic than others. The great Transsexual T-Gods seem to understand that this T-guy needed a gentler road, an easing into his masculinity, as opposed to the beard-at-three-months variety other guys seem to manifest.

I would’ve lost what presence of mind I had, if I had sprouted a beard at 3 months. I still wonder if I’m doing the “right thing,” and I’m constantly having to remind myself how much I love my new body, and how I never, ever want to go back.

My friend Sarah broke from my 1 tranny year celebration Moustache Party to help a friend fix her bike. She arrived replete with vaselined facial hair, a Stevie Ray, Texas flavored tuffy with her Allen wrenches at the friend's house. “God I hate drag” groaned her friend, an MTF. I don’t love drag either, frankly, although I adore a moustache. I used a sentence with the words “drag” and “blackface” together but I don’t really think drag is like blackface, because drag is a homage or parody (or both) to something that in and of itself is kind of a homage or parody. Many of us in transition have found - at the end of a long, hairless day - gendered presentations to be pretty hilarious.

As Sarah was debarking the Moustache Party Barge, she was bid adieu by our real-boy friend Manchoodle, who cocked his head in a particularly Manchoodlesque fashion. In full Texas guitar god/mechanic drag, she cocked back, imitating him perfectly, masculine in the extreme. Even those gestures we believe completely ours, the most nuanced, the most intimate and personal, are often our schtick. Where does gender end and schtick begin? And if you’re reaching in your pants for the answer, believe me, it’s NOT THERE.

I grew up in the sixties and seventies, which were moustache heydays of a kind. Facial hair was so alluring, so compelling, so…sexy…although sexy was conceptually not a part of my vocabulary…To this day I will sketch the outline of a man’s face, and then lovingly, nearly a whisker at a time, shape a hairline, sideburns morphing into muttonchops, an adolescent’s wispy upper lip fur evolution into full-blown Mexican Mustachio. It is an unbelievably soothing pastime.

There is a moustache on my house. I heard Patrick Starfish today, on Spongebob Squarepants, exclaim a yen for the ‘stache, which Spongebob drew for him with a magic pencil. It promptly flew off Patrick’s face, thus initiating full-blown anxiety attacks in several transguy viewers.

I fear the moustache, yet I crave it. I felt that way about sex, once upon a time, and now I want it every minute of the day. Will I love a beard, be a dyke with a Van Dyke? At eleven I would’ve killed for the kind of evil douche chin fur Robert Downey Jr. sports in Iron Man. At 48 the shit’s coming in white, my eyebrows are curling, and nostril vines are snaking out of the nose. This is what it means to be a man, yo.

I’m besotted, enamored, smitten with the ‘stache. Is it any wonder teenagers and budding trannies cultivate their seven chin hairs? Rub me with your stubble, transman, I’ve got an itch bigger than Pinocchio’s desire to be a real boy. But be wise – look: there grows your “nose.”

They Mostly Come At Night

2009-05-18T16:31:00.004-04:00

I am dutifully putting the “men” in menses. I am having my “mantime*” albeit a pink vapor trail of its former self, this after shooting a full dose of T for over a year now. It is a dilute blood memory, still manifesting “symptoms” of ladytime: larger connection to energetic phenomenon, violent nocturnal tableaus inserted in carnival dreams, a sublime, embarrassing tendency to weep at clearly manipulative advertisements, particularly those involving animals, children, people, long distance phone calls, submarine sandwiches, and Skittles.

I am crawling up a sanitary diaper, looking for the pee hole, and all I can see is red red red.

There’s this ridiculously obdurate part of me that refuses to acknowledge this is happening. I haven’t bought a tampon in 6 months, preferring evidently, to bleed in my Old Navy briefs, deliberately black so I’m not forced to concede that my man-panties are damp with shed uterine lining. Blood blots follow me everywhere, as, when at home, I am a tee shirt and no-bottom kind of guy. Did I leave that? Naaaaaw, couldn’t be! Somehow the combo ladytime/testosterone thing allows for a distinctly male flavor of denial, like the way guys can be completely oblivious to their twenty-pound gut-gain, still flaunting their former pecs, now furry moobs, beachside.

Masculine denial is a beautiful, beautiful thing, y’all.

I had these interactions with a couple men this weekend…it’s hard to tease the human from the distinctly male sometimes but here goes:

My observation is that a certain genus of men are exceedingly willing to throw a cold glass of vitriol on your shirtfront, and expect that you’ll agree that some other asshole made them do it. Then you’re supposed to be in some kind of angry alliance against that person, or institution, or idea that pissed them off in the first place, you with your now-soaking shirtfront and their invasive hostility.

These guys were really, really, REALLY angry about something and they could not wait to spread their oily ire all over my sweet toast. Now that I’m a guy(ish) I’m not as eager to sign on to another guy’s agenda. Maybe I never was, but certainly the delicious drug of testosterone amplifies a certain…self righteousness. My own back went up with a quickness. My instinct is to punch a bloke in the puss, but I’ve had too much 12step training to fall for my haywiring. But DAYUM. It’s a place in others I find difficult to have compassion for. I dearly wish your anger was none of my business, but now you’ve soiled my clothes, you bastard and I must participate somehow.

Often there’s a flavor of misogyny attached to the breed of man that wants to slime you with their bile, too – a mustard gas tang to the battery acid scrapings you’ve just been force-fed. I guess in GuyLand it’s okay, appropriate even, to march up to people you barely know and urk up some story about what a fucktard somebody else is. I should probably feel included, a part of – these angry dudes are wrapping a buddy wing around my shoulders, pinching my traps, punching my arm. I’m in the club, right?

I desperately want to be kind. I think this is the greatest thing of all and I want to live by the creed of kindness. T injections have raised the stakes. Just when I was getting the hang of it, as a lady, finding compassion, being present, making the numbers, the game changed up and instead of a My Little Pony and a Hair Beader Activity Kit, I’ve got to lumber around in a Thomas the Tank Engine with a miniature “just like Daddy’s” chainsaw.

By virtue of the props alone, I’ve engaged in a desperate, inimical game. My brand of “being kind to the angry mens” looks like me stating firmly my opinion (note Paul Bunyon stance), allowing them to shake their head at my idiocy and walk away. That’s pretty darn good, especially when the hormones are perversely urging you to “punch a bitch in the face.”

I see misogyny everywhere; this type of guy is often angry at a woman, only he wouldn’t put it that way. I don’t have the luxury of pointing a finger at a gender, or I choose not to; this one guy I’m thinking of is so pathologically ill with his anger at women – which mostly, as far as I can tell, seems to be a part of that curious cycle of the pre-emptive loathing men have for women who probably won’t like them – that it’s hard to take him seriously. Diminishing a person is almost worse than hating them.

This other dude I interacted with this weekend is a stellar character. He’s opinionated all right, but he’s willing to hear all the sides. His posture in an argument is “it’s entirely possible I missed something.” I find this extraordinary, and desirable. I’m casting about for role models. Part of the downside of men running the world is we’ve got this fantastically abysmal cast of manliness: Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, and not enough Bishop Tutus or even Jon Stewarts. But we do have them.

I don’t like to wish ill on anyone, but I do have this fantasy, and I don’t think it ill-natured, exactly. I wish Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh would get a period. I wish their breasts would swell and heat and feel about to burst when they walked up stairs; I dream their nights are full of visions of fetuses and home surgeries; I long for them to experience that unique ache and cramp that visits those of us blessed with female internal organs; I want blood to soak their drawers and their bespoke pants, smother the off-gassing of their fancy ergonomic desk chairs, run down their legs and pool in their Brooks Brothers wool knit socks.

But I don’t run the world, and neither, it turns out, do they. Thanks be to the Big Tranny in the Sky, my brothers and others, and thank you too. And please pass the Motrin.

*Ryan Pinion, Ladles and Jellyplugs.

You, You Could Be Mean, And I, I'd Drink All The Time

2009-05-10T09:08:00.004-04:00

Star Trek was, of course, sold out, so we ended up going to see Wolverine. Not a bad decision: I am absolutely crazy about men right now and Wolverine is crammed full of delicious Hugh Jackman – which is the best porn name ever, ps – and Hugh Jackman’s high, tight Broadway ass and utterly fantastic shoulders. There is also some very satisfying facial hair. If you’re a transguy, you’ll be feeling me right now.

I let myself simmer in this butch broth for a minute. Entertaining the notion of sexual attraction, I allowed myself to hold Hugh’s furred jaw, slide my hands down his neck, and caress his mammoth traps. I lay with him for a minute, teasing the pebbled abs on that perfect torso with my fingertips.

Nothing. I got nothing.

Okay, by “nothing” I mean “sure, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating lychee nuts,” – I’d wear a boy OUT – but the magnetic pull of the masculine has, at the end of a long, sweaty, locker room antic day, a unique flavor for the “heterosexual” transguy. Just as an aside: I’m totally that heterosexual guy that’ll get his dick sucked by another guy. Or, yeah, we fucked each other, but it was just nut-busting, you know? THAT guy.

Men fascinate on seventeen different levels, which is a lot if you’re a dude. Men really don’t have that many levels, or most of them don’t. I can state this empirically: being a woman means having access to an extra dimension. It’s ridiculously nuanced, and potentially maddening. The “Health” Industry has even medicalized this by insisting women need SSRIs for “that time,” by encouraging childbirths only a robot could love. We have not, culturally, transcended the Victorian idea of female “hysteria.”

(sidebar: I’m gimping around with a toe wrapped in a Lysterine-soaked paper towel. I read this helps the toe fungus, which I have on one outlier pinky toe. I have never, ever, EVER, had toe fungus before, even having spent DECADES in one gym or another. I’m embracing it as a revolting dude rite-of-passage. You have to spin these things somehow.)

That women operate in this space/time is not an advantage. We’ve all seen that Sci-Fi where the really gifted, empathic alien race is basically subservient to the brutish ass-kickers. I’m floating around this interstitial fluid, an undersea gender volleyball game, whereupon one is occasionally artfully volleyed like a gentle birdie. It’s sometimes difficult to enjoy the ride when one understands this to be a setup for a spike.

I know I will find many brothers and sisters when I say “men are captivating.” I have been observing them scientifically since childbirth. I have aped their ways, mimicked their manners, so I could shame myself later. Transitioning means never having to say you’re sorry. It means open gawking. It means I can overtly eye-molest the gang of joggers to the left of my car, note the musculature, delight in the postures, their tousled hair, how this one sweats and that one does not, the jocularity that infects all that ambition all that drive, their tiny man-nipples and sweat-drenched hair rivulets. I am the Humbert Humbert of man-stalking.

There is a sexual component, to be sure, but it is celebratory, communal. I avert my eyes when females come in scantily-clad herds, one because I’m a dirty man, and two because they are so foreign. I am a canine in a land of cats.

My friend Murphel (if you say his name and cover your mouth, that’s what it sounds like) recalls how he used to think he might be gay. He was so penis-obsessed. He’s come to understand this fascination, dive into it, become the penis. We’re all like that somewhere. We’ve been covertly or balls-out glomming our longing on to every guy and every guy part that sings to us. It is very near worship, although having lived as a woman for over four decades I feel a certain sang-froid about actual males. Maybe that’s because all my blood is now in my pants, driving me into me, Being John Malkovich bumper cars all full of me and my stupid lusts.

I heard some transguy on the National Geographic Channel say that transitioning is a “hero’s journey.” Whatev. We certainly get comfortable with masculine grandiosity right away. I’ll tell you what’s heroic: walking around with your little toe wrapped in a paper towel soaked with Listerine. Wrap that in your “Playgirl” and smoke it.

A Dream As Clear As He

2009-04-29T21:32:00.002-04:00

Has it been a year?! Goodness, how time does fly when your luxurious leg fat migrates to your uxorious back and abs! Where does the time go when you’re developing enough patches of hair to almost match every chick you know?! Time passages with tom-cat fat-face, crackity tranny vox, ½ inch of new real-estate on the forehead, with the biggest, the bestest surprise saved for your pants: the fantastic trouser gherkin! YAYASS!!!

I had wrung and wrung my hairless paws those first few months, abetted by a whimsical hormonal teeter-totter, as prescribed by my endocrinologist. Dudes, do not let the doctors prescribe a bi-monthly dose of T, unless you want to be at the mercy of the perverse plunge of the emptying gas tank of testosterone. A hybrid I was not, and those flips from T back to E were excruciating and suicidal. I’ve not “enjoyed” those moody swings since I insisted on shooting my dope every week, and I’m glad I insisted. I can be easily cowed at a doctor’s office; I suffer some sort of medical amnesia in which I am rendered incapable of recalling any symptoms or complaints in the face of an overly fluorescent, ill-decorated, acoustic tiled office. Particularly when wearing a “backless smock.” (if you ever need me to be docile, just dress me in a gown.)

Not knowing where I was going was a tremendous challenge. People are happy to tell you where you are going: you are going to be a man, right? but the truth is less…definitive. And I wasn’t at all sure that’s what I wanted, either.

But I did trust, intuitively, that the testosterone would tell. I believed it to be an oracle; I understood my body would, after some resistance, synch up with T’s rumbling vibe, if it was meant to. I believed the body would share with me what I was supposed to do, and I was right.

The hormones, after their initial jostle – it’s rather like being tossed onto a rugby field in mid-game and you forgot to change so you’re still wearing your “work heels;” and the hormones don’t give a shit that you’re in some ways totally unprepared for their masculinity, the back-slapping, head-cuffing, outright hazing initiation to this rough world – ease you onto the tarmac with a steady, light jog. They are singularly focused. They have a job to do. Testosterone doesn’t care if it takes months or years: it’s Japanese in its post-war reconstruction, and that’s almost soothing, particularly after the fucking war.

And war it has been, for this transguy. I had a long, intense convo with my sig.oth. at the Food Hole this evening. D was under the mistaken impression that I knew, I had known, my transgendered path a year ago, but the truth is I did not know, and I suffered and struggled and gnarled and gnashed; I laid on the floor and cried to God; I called 80 million people and especially Jessica and Judith who are neither gay nor trans but know heartbreak when they hear it and could be there for what felt like my brain exploding with uncertainty and even terror.

I didn’t know if I wanted to be a “man.” I was sure I wanted to “masculinize my body” was how I put it. No-one could have predicted how deeply I would fall in love with my new, hormonally enhanced genitalia, especially given that I’d had a terrible fear bordering on revulsion for that piece of transitioning. Come to find out my discomfort with my downstairs had more to do with that-there being “ladybits” and wotnot, and that its evolution to something else feels right and natural and as it should be. That should’ve been a tell, right? The more “male” my body changes to, the happier I am. Joyful, even.

And yet.

Even in the ecstasy of becoming this beautiful new sexy unicorn creature, I find myself in moments, doubting. Dreading. At a meeting with other transpeople last night, I heard a guy share that the terror of the unknown haunted him; he couldn’t imagine what he might turn into and he wasn’t sure he wanted “manhood.” We’re not sure. We just know something’s gotta change.

Anyway, I can report, after a year, I am (mostly) comfortable in the not-knowing. I’m surer that I will be a man, whatever that is, but what that will look like and how long it will take is impossible to predict. Today a woman told me I was in the “wrong” bathroom, and I said “no I’m not.” But I should’ve liked to reply “yes, I am, because we don’t make bathrooms for people like me.” And that’s the “bottom” line, really. I just want to be myself, whoever that is. Like I said to D tonight, it’s not always about T, and trans, and gender. Sometimes it’s about how we were crushed, and shamed, and oppressed, and not allowed to be ourselves – sometimes it’s just about getting in touch with that heartbreak.

And that’s just human. And heartbreak is the beautiful, dense, dark humus for the most miraculous growth, whether that’s in your soul or your pants. Happy new year Others!

Warm, Worn, Leatherette

2009-04-22T21:45:00.002-04:00

I’ve been feeling very hermaphroditic lately. Unlike many a transman, I heart my vagina. I have no intention (today) of tabling it, sewing it up, stuffing it with spare change, or storing my Allen wrenches up there. It gives me a great deal of pleasure and I shan’t part with it.

Nevertheless, it does not make me “feel like a woman.” (Except perhaps in a Grace Jones kind of way, but who can say, really?) I feel very lucky indeed to have multiple penetrable pleasure regions, and yes, I’m including my ear-hole.

Having inhabited on and off, for years, some gray area of kink, I feel rather mutable in many regards. The men I know seem pretty committed to their shtick, whatever it is, but I seem to bounce from Butch Top to fairy to straighty-straight guy to daffodil without any sort of motion sickness whatsoever. And when one is accustomed to being with partners who say things like “I’m the Jolly Green Giant and you’re Mr. Clean and you are going to mop the floor with me” one learns to default to the changeable, chimerical even.

I feel uniquely suited to the vast expanse rather than the finite, is what I’m saying to you.

And vaginas are a vast expanse. Okay, some are. Anyway I was just trying a segue on for size and it is a tad…capacious. I’d like a glass of your best “cavernous vagina.” Sidebar: I have a friend who was told that she had “a cavernous vagina” by a “health professional.” I was once told, by a similarly imaginative nurse person that my “uterus was as big as a house.” It is nowhere near any such size, being, in fact, utterly unremarkable in anything except that it is in a man.

Or is it!? For me, the best possible world would be integration rather than excision. I have the opportunity for successful emergence, for joining the genders, uniting the units as it were. I walk like a man, and I’m beginning to think like one, thanks to testosterone, but I’d surely be hurting myself to believe I ever will actually be a man.

I know this is difficult for some transpeople, and we all have our own row of tubers to hoe, but I feel it is incumbent upon us to not discard what we have been so generously, cruelly, given. To yearn to live in the world as a boy, but be socialized (read: forced) to “act” like a woman is a brutality and a gift. Like alcoholism. If one survives the chaos and unmanageability, one may even have an advantage over other mortals. Any hubris or spiritual arrogance that might attach itself to the idea of the superiority of transpeople is mitigated by the sheer bedlam of living in this bicameral brain in this binary world. To be trans is to be mad, y’all.

But the madness is transportation; it’s a clue. Get on that tranny train and ride around the binary block a bit. Let the wind lift your thinning hair, frolic in your newly wooly eyebrows and nose hairs. You can see now, the sad little snow-globe of gender. Let others be trapped by a winter nostalgia, see the unconscious insistence on imprisonment – the extremists who try to ex the gays or even the palpable discomfort of fellow diners as you enter the room with your equally gendervague partner – you can see the pain they cause themselves as they scan and find no solution, no way to tag, no context for you. Your presence is vertiginous, sinister even. You are Springtime; so funny to think that a couple of pansies such as yourselves could initiate such a response.

Transitioning is the LSD of gender. Turn on, tune in, drop out of confinement. I’m a dude with a pussy, you’re goddamned right. I accept that stupidity and violence are human nature, and I insist that expansion and evolution are equally urgent needs of that same nature. My nature may ensure I call you my new favorite curse word, “cuntsack” (a nice amalgam of cunt and ball sack, if I do say so myself, and I do.), when you forget to use your turn signal, but if we meet in person I should like to hand you a moustache or some fake boobs, and say “check this shit out; it’s hilarious!”

And really, check this shit out. It’s hilarious.

Big Loose Shoes And Such A Bargain!

2009-04-16T12:12:00.005-04:00

Man. I hate to be a whiney, always touching myself, tranny, but here goes. Will you people get on board with the motherfucking pronouns?!

Do I look like a “lady?” Seriously, do I?! Why is it so challenging? Inconsistency I understand, from you who knew, back in the day, when us transguys were stomping around uncomfortably in high-heels, our conservative wool camel blazer festooned with a gaily hand-painted scarf – oh how we tried. I had capitulated to female, and wore stockings and slips and Italian leather pumps, had until too recently an array of “men’s style” women’s shirts and jackets and pants, never quite daring to surrender – lest you bust me out – to my frozen, static, wooly mammoth-in-a-glacier craving to wear men’s clothes. “Craving” doesn’t begin to express my junky’s longing, my inner-child’s forehead and hands pressed against the window, my hot-blooded, Poison-infected, David Lee Rothian pelvis-thrusting desire to put on some men’s clothes. Amongst other things.

But you didn’t know me then.

Is the ejaculate of “lady” and “miss” and “she” and “her” from your maw to the transman you’re facing…is it similar perhaps to my own mouth’s commitment to using the “black voice” when around the colored folk, or its alarmingly persistent urge to opine about the Jewish faith with the Jew? I have watched my own conversation with horror, as it veers straight to the stereotype, climbs right atop the elephant that shouldn’t even BE in this particular living room – like, I don’t even usually THINK like that and now here I am saying the most calculatedly offensive thing my subconscious can muster.

A member of my family recently sent out a mass email sharing a list of names he’d found in his local paper, and how hilarious they were. It was an appallingly racist, classist, inventory of monikers - it made me ashamed to read it – but how to explain to my family, who justly pride themselves on their civil rights activism, who have worked long and hard with marginalized communities to ensure they have the same access to literacy, to health care, to a standard of living, as the “rest of us” that they, and I can still suffer from the disease of prejudice?

The transperson evokes for many, the same dark response as the disabled do for the same. You should like to put me on an ice-float, or jettison me into space, or simply pound the living shit out of me for so confronting and confounding your sense of “normalcy,” of safety even. I say this because I had the same response, once-upon-a-time, in the Grimmer version of the fairy tale – you know, the one where Cinderella’s step-sisters actually cut off parts of their feet to make it fit into the slipper. Which frankly, is what donning a camel hair lady-blazer felt like to me.

Just this morning someone said something about partner swapping and right out of my face oozed an “ick.” “Ick” I said, to the notion of partner swapping. I don’t actually believe or feel ick around this idea but I used to, and that’s what happened to fall out of my face. Ugh. This time I mean it. Ugh for being the lazy, reflexive human.

So the barometer, as D reminds me, is “would you say that if a fill-in-the-blank were here?” I’m not interested in policing my words, nor am I interested in “correct-ness” or not “offending” someone. I’m purely in it for me. Where am I frightened, selfish, self-seeking, dishonest? Good questions from the transguy. Personal growth-like stuff.

“What are the transguy stereotypes?” I ask D, the professional gay and avowed transguy-aphile. I love being someone’s sexual exotic; I don’t understand what all the fuss is about tranny-chasers, but then, I’m the guy that used this fabulous bit of exotic evidence: “most of the guys I’ve slept with were black!” to bolster my own liberal self-worth. Like somehow that fascinating bit of sexual racism made me a more open white person.

Yeesh, what a dickhead. Sorry, back to topic.

In response to my queery, D ducks his head and says shyly “Horndog. Transmen are horndogs.” Well shit, if I could get my hands out of my jeans I might respond to that.

I want to know what all the transmen shibboleths are. Let’s bust ‘em out. I can’t wait to state ignorantly, then vilify, then boldly reclaim, whatever the people are saying about the female-to-males. Bring it. Please tell me. I’d rather, at this point, hear from you that I’m a whiny ex-woman, a promiscuous male slut, a narcissistic man manqué, than listen to one more goddamn “she” from your indolent goddamn mouth.

Oh, and transguys have anger issues: did I mention that?

My Own Private Guernica

2009-04-08T16:59:00.001-04:00

On this day, says my online New York Times headline mash, “artist Pablo Picasso died at his home near Mougins, France, at age 91.”

On this day Kurt Cobain’s lifeless body was discovered dead in his Seattle home.

On this day, April 8th, my food stamps will be deposited in my Electronic Benefits Card. I will trot downstairs, in a bit, on this, a Wednesday, and jab my hammy thighs with 50mgs of male hormone. The elation of receiving money with which to buy manly comestibles is mitigated by the feeling that I should be doing a helluva lot better at managing my own life.

I sit on the long red couch, rapt as D recites transpeople statistics. He’s a professional gay person and learns these things on-the-job; me? I know this shit because I’m an avocational homo, a curious queer, an internet-traversing tranny. On my cyber-roams my digits have uncovered that:

Something like 10% of transgender people are homeless
Up to 40% are unemployed
Transgender and gender non-conforming people are disproportionately poor, without health care, homeless; are over-represented in prisons and institutions; are 7-10 times more likely than “normal” people to experience violence and even murder.*

Fabulous. I was a vocational homo in Austin for over four years, so none of this is particularly surprising to me, but it’s always heartbreaking. There’s something about the trans that’s particularly confronting to people, especially challenging; our evident “otherness” allows for easy dehumanization, if you’re the kind of human who needs firm ground to be the backs of his fellows.

My own poverty has more to do with my own choices, combined with circumstances. I wrassle with this. Frankly, veering towards Dude has made my reliance on The State and credit less and less comfortable. I feel like I should be able to support myself. Because I’m a Guy, you know, I’m the man. When the check arrives at a restaurant, I want it to go to me. It’s the little things.

I’m lucky to live in a place that accommodates transguys. I can’t speak for the women, but I can say empirically that transguys are not unusual here, and seem to find employment despite their sketchy facial hair and softened mid-regions. Maybe that’s just because Americans are accustomed to a softer Mc-softy version of the male. Maybe all those cheeseburgers are working in the favor of the tranny. Don’t judge: it’s my soft ass I’m talking about, not yours.

A gang of us T-boys watched Peterson Toscano perform a one-person play about transpeople in the bible. It largely referenced the Gnostic Gospels, the parchment palimpsest dug up by farmers in Nag Hammadi 60 years ago. I felt as if I had been unearthed myself, from some buried and sealed clay jar. Just as I am wired for some kind of bi-coastal gender, am I wired for an experience of God and I have always understood that this God loves me and my kind. Toscano is a recovered ex-gay, raised in that peculiar “Christian” orthodoxy that does not love its neighbor, whose Jesus I imagine, is like the Christ I saw on a billboard in Georgia once, a long-haired Rambo armed with an automatic, the Christ that understands homosexuality is like the Terminator: it’ll grab you by the balls even after you dropped a 2 ton crucifix on it and watched it die.

Me, I think gender is splendid. It is ganache, it’s buttercream. Let me spread it on generously with that big flat frosting knife, capping little waves of deliciousness with bi-colored sprinkles. I want it on my upper lip when I eat you, your gender, I want my hands to be sticky with it, annoyingly, sweetly everywhere. Not a threat. A treat. What playtime is this, that gods delight, making their mythologies with men and women dressing as each other, or neither? Surely they are bemused by a world where this is a struggle, where people are beaten and destroyed for being who they are. That’s the world Kurt Cobain had to leave, couldn’t take. Believe me, I know first hand the desire to not be here.

But here we are. Since I appear to be staying here, flaunting the argyle icing of my own unique gender presentation I think I’ll make a concerted effort to be more conscious about it. Nothing helps the people like visibility, like normalcy. I’m telling you out loud today that I am going to commit to kindness, and to living my life aloud as a transperson. You can’t stop me: don’t even try. I will spin you with my sugar like a spider traps its meal, only I will just kiss you with frosted lips, and cry for you out loud, in front of your face, so you can see your effect on me. I’ll set you free from your spun-sugar frosting bondage, hand you that spatulated knife, and then I’ll turn and walk away. What you do with that knife is entirely up to you. But mind, you’ve got some love on your upper lip.

*Check out the Sylvia Rivera Law Project site.

Choking On the Ashes Of Her Enemy

2009-03-31T17:26:00.001-04:00

Judith is insistent.

“What do we call this person you’re dating?” she demands. I give Jessica the side-eye and say “Shim. He-she. Jessica calls D my ‘ladyboyfriend’ but ‘ladyboys’ are those other kinds of trannys from Thailand,” I add injudiciously. Jessica nods, “You just try to keep up with the kids, Judith. Just try.”

I falter. I flail. I flatline. So here is the failure of a binary system. I had a friend who said she divided the world into “fuckable” and “unfuckable.” I attributed this dichotomy to her history of incest, and it’s too subjective to be a good system, although I wonder how many of us view our world this way. I think you can split the world up into “wipers” and “non-wipers,” meaning, “those of us who will wipe and wipe until we’re absolutely positive nothing remains – even if it requires bleeding a little” and the rest of you stank pigs. But (butt!) you can’t readily identify people as one or the other; it requires the kind of census-taking I certainly enjoy, but few others seem to.

In the new, ObamAmerica, binary just won’t cut it. Democrat and Republican didn’t really work, last election. Male/female is almost quaint in 2009, a throwback to 2004 or whenever Match dot com got started. In the new millennium 5 years is last millennium’s 25. It took me a while to figure this gendered thing out, but I was one of the last kids in the 70’s to buy Earth shoes. I’ve always been that guy: by the time I’m hip to it you can count on it pretty much being over. I mean, I still have a faux-hawk.

But let’s pretend transitioning isn’t a fad. Okay, simmer down, it’s not a fad. But it could be. Look at tattooing. Actually, don’t. You’ll only bring a tear to my unicorn’s eye. No, it’s fine – not everyone is interested in “meaning” the way I am, and thank God. Even on testosterone I can devote untoward amounts of dissection to every fucking little feeling I have, only having just learned (finally!) that sometimes feelings are like cigars. You know what I mean. Nobody, not even me, is that interesting. We’re just that self-absorbed.

So what I’m suggesting (and by the way, I’m quite ill, so caveat emptor) is that you people, meaning me and all of youse, are going to have to learn to accommodate the trans.

I started, in my head at least and quite by accident, referring to Judith and Jessica as “he.” I believe this was an unintentional byproduct of changing my own interior pronoun. It occurred to me we might just refer to one another as “he/him” and simply drop the whole “female” thing from the language lock, stock, and yonic symbol. Some nuanced or sans-gender people call themselves “hir” and “ze” but I think less is more, and so would rather just cast it all out entirely, like in those futuristic novels where everyone is called “Mr.”

I truly believe we’ll have to. Bathroom protocol has got to change. There are simply too many of us; more and more are cropping up each day, like alcoholics and drug addicts, or (ha-ay!) gay people in the 90’s: everyone knows at least one. I can’t shop for gluten-free pasta in this burg without my ass bumping into a transperson, and mark my gender-neutral word, we’re coming to your town too.

Judith’s query is fair – but how to answer it? Sure, I can blithely regard myself as D’s “boyfriend,” because I believe shooting testosterone entitles me to it. Like it’s an entitlement. That’s the other thing: I wandered down the road of tranny hegemony, hierarchy recently, just for grins and discovered for myself that I could rank people. Transpeople have been doing this for years, but I hadn’t, so I tried it on. It goes like this:

You don’t “get” to use a male pronoun unless you’re on T, or going to be on T.

You’re an even better transguy if you’re not only on T - you’ve had your breasts cut off.

You’re an even superduper transguy if you’ve then gone and gotten a metoidoplasty and had all your uteruses and knick-knacks removed.

Personally, I think you can call yourself any damn thing you want. I think that’s awesome, subversive even. I think when I do get my knockers knacked off, I’m going to show up on your beach with a mother-fucking pink bikini top, how-do-you-like-them-apples?

Jaysus, I have no idea where I’m going with this. I may actually have a fever. I’ll tell you this, though, I’m becoming more and more like a guy, every day. It’d be almost creepy if it wasn’t so cool. And notice I said, “like a guy.” I got a 99.5 on my statistics test. I have the capacity to progress linearly. I enjoy looking at cars, and who knows? I might someday enjoy sports. I wish “Kinging” was a sport. Colors look different on me, and I can now use a calculator. What’s new with you?

Come To My Arms, My Beamish Boy

2009-03-24T12:06:00.004-04:00

The past four days were spent sitting in a not-so-lovely grotto of statistical formulae. I had a Statistics mid-term; this is not a subject that is reflexive for me. If you want me to put pen to paper or write a song, do an interpretive pas de une, sculpt with found objects, mime, joke, cut up text from Paradise Lost and collage it into something new – in other words, be singularly right-brained, mutable, incomprehensible even – then fantastic: you shall find yourself Welcome To My World of Wonderment.

The margins of my school notes are populated by octopus and cuttlefish, with heads of roses, cupcakes, crab carapaces. Muscular men, multiple moustaches, ladies turned into gentlemen: these are my soothing companions to the summation of n squared times its probability. I’ve been patrolling my own borders with these characters since I can remember, and while they’re a comforting protection, they are also defensive, a diversion from whatever’s threatening me.

Mathematics is a threat. Rather, my perception of mathematics is that it is a threat. There’s something about the action of testosterone, however, on this former lady-brain, that has created, if not an opening, at least a beginning of an understanding. I find myself in less of a panic around all things algebraic, is what I’m saying to you. Now, you might posit that this is an effect of study, or of maturity even, and I will assent; these things have certainly abated my abject terror of calculation.

But the level of my dread, my incomprehension, my capacity for sheer dissociative terror, cannot be underestimated.

Nine months into hormone therapy, I find myself understanding what it is I don’t know. I understand how I need my information packaged. The free-floating alarm is contained by this new capacity. I am teachable. Some part of my foot is connected to earth.

Everything about being a lady, for me, was scattershot, gaseous, dilute. It was my version of the reknown female empathy, our relatedness to others, our Aquarian ability to merge air and make connections in space. The hormonal male has a heat-seeking capacity the hormonal female did not, at least in this body. I can zero in; I feel less pixilated. Untethered is the word that comes to mind, pre-T.

For observers the clarity and definition is less sure. I was having coffee with my sweet friend Sarah at Open Eye when she startled me by telling me it pained her to watch me interact with certain people, groups – that in these particular herds I was some kind of token, not truly accepted. This explication was very different from my own, admittedly block-headed, experiences. I can be mercifully unaware to the challenges my transition presents to others and I can definitely be ridiculously Sally Fieldian with the “you like me, you really like me’s.” Other times I’ve bristled, and challenged people to do better, better with the pronouns, better with their breezy invocation of the “tranny voice,” the parody of a deep, masculine attempt at femininity which I find painfully offensive, even as I am chortling at my own crackity-crack, T-induced, manvox.

But we’re all finding our way with this, right? It’s a huge social change, a shift like assimilating homosexuality, or racial parity, which we’ve all had to do at some critical juncture in our personal lives. Even as it occasionally offends me when friends call me “tranny,” (as often as it cracks me up, so how am I to police that?) I see the poignant attempts at intersecting, finding a place of comfort with something discomfiting or unusual as incredibly moving. I don’t need you to be politically correct, all the time, but I am moved to tears that you care enough to try, and are shame-facedly grumpy when you forget.

It’s interesting to try to field-note one’s own brain. These changes are so nuanced, such deft chemical rewires – they feel so natural – they almost defy observation. I have to dig deeper and deeper to connect with my pre-T neurochemistry. I like this guy brain. It’s very stolid. It will hold down the papers on my desk, which are everywhere. It also has sense enough to still be moved by every little thing; there’s always a moment in every English class I attend, that I have to suck in the tears urged from a tender short story, a tragic poem about the horrors of war, the artful exposition of race and class by Alice Walker. I’m a big crybaby. Thank God.

I wish the testosterone would make me super-fantastic at math, but a humble plod beats a frenetic anxiety attack any day. I’ll take that, and my new inability to not spit “Cuntbag!” at the glowering human trying to get around me in the parking lot. For some reason this feels really, really personal. Oh well. In other places I feel less bandied about by a mercurial wind and more like a kite, jauntily taut by a firm if possibly over-zealous youthful hand. I’d rather be sailing, as bumperstickers along the Chesapeake used to alert.

And I am sailing, although I have no idea who’s at the helm. Someone with a weird, sharp, but sweet sense of humor.

The Battle of Your Bulge

2009-03-17T12:18:00.004-04:00

So let’s review, shall we? Since the dawning of Testosterone, the little human called “Sam” has been observed:

Wearing the same shirt for days at a time, or at least desiring to

Ascertaining a heretofore unknown appreciation for AC/DC and Ted Nugent

Spitting the “c” word* at humans engaging in “poor driving skills”

Discovering that his eyeballs have their own dirty little agenda and that it requires all his new muscularity to divert their disconcerting predation on human parts, of which he has nothing to do with.

Thanks be to The Great and Wise Tranny Gods that I have stayed out of a relationship for a year. Almost exactly. My first 9 months of transition, my gestation, required a self-absorption and return to focus that another human would have diverted me from. The Gods, in their sagacity, withheld another from me until I had basted in my manly gravy long enough to be something savory. And a transguy, no matter how delectable, is not to everyone’s taste.

I wondered how it would be to make the sexy times on testosterone. Would I come a lot? Would I come once and then have to wait for it to get back up? Would I be an attentive lover, or would the urgency of my own overweening drive find me begging like a teenage boy for “just a blow job…no? Okay baby but touch it, go on, touch it…Please baby, please!”

For those of us who, as ladies, could have sexy times all day, T will not present all that much of a difference. My drive has always been high and I have always been able and willing to fuck the day away when given the opportunity. My therapist sees this as prima facie evidence that I was prehistorically a dude-in-the-making, that my sexuality has ever had a masculine flavor.

There is an…exigency, a demand from the nether regions, that distracts on occasion. I heard myself the other day, say with utter seriousness, “Baby, if I don’t come now I will die.” I do not recall any such utterances before T, issued with such fervor and conviction as I feel now. I feel I was rather more gentlemanly, BT;** there is pressure here that hadn’t existed prior. I meant it: I will die without release. There is a violence, or perhaps I’m surrendering to an already extant condition, in my sexuality, an athleticism and muscularity enhanced by the pressure-cooker of hormones, a cock-teased cocktail laced with spinach, an iron, heat-seeking depth-charge one must quickly find a barren island for its detonation.

I’d like to think it makes me a more interesting partner, hotter, but that may be more evidence of (delusional) masculinity.

Speaking of masculinity, it appears I have fallen for the charms of a sweet Nelly Boy. I assume this makes me a fag, but I know this is treacherous terrain for assumptions. Nevertheless, I heart faggotry, and so will embrace this construct, whilst hopefully ripping the sweet hell out of it. It, not s/he. How do gay men feel about dykes and trannys appropriating their culture, their desire? For whatever reason gay male culture is always the most marketable, the most fantastically designed, pre-packaged, hanky-coded bundle of semiotic hot mess – you can’t say that about dykery, really, which certainly has its own cultural signifiers. Dykes are to fag culture as white people are to black culture, only less successful at marketing. Dykes will assimilate fag culture, but it’s always too specific and marginal, too – dare I say – amateur, to be mainstreamed immediately. Don’t mistake the use of “amateur” as a pejorative: I have deep abiding love for the amateur, way more so than pro anything.

Take Kinging, for instance. Drag has been around forever, but Kings as Dyke Kulture are really recent. Lip synching men dressed like Vegas showgirls have never done it for me. Well meaning people have taken me by the hand to performances they regarded as “edgy” – queens yanking fetuses from their Hershey-coated loins; dragging to Yoko Ono or L7 – but I remain strangely unmoved. Kings, on the other hand, always seem to have a sort of boyish (!) exuberance, an Andy Hardy “hey kids let’s put on a show” vivacity that appealed to me, even if, again, I find most drag oddly unmoving. I love cardboard props, seams and strings, crowns of aluminum foil and commitment to “let’s pretend!”

I had a good friend in Manhattan who did drag, lived drag. His daily drag was Rock n’ Roll Bad Girl, Bikini Kill drag. I played guitar for him at the Pyramid Club one night as he sang “Sister Morphine” – we were both smacked out of our minds. It’s a performance that gives me The Shames to this day; I was that fucked up. He was brilliant, high as a kite, Marianne Faithful to no-one, not Mick, not Keith, and certainly not his own gender. He had AIDS, I remember, and every shot we took together made me feel like I was helping to load his gun for Russian Roulette. In those days I wanted to die myself, and everything made me sad.

Today nothing makes me sad for long. How sad can I be when I’m living this ridiculous, delicious, hilarious trope, this parody/homage to man/woman? Believe me, you can laugh or you can cry, or both: streams of tears and I am pissing my pants I am laughing so hard. It is riDONKulous to be a transperson. HIGH Larious. Be yourself in a gang of humans. Choose the group. Watch them. Observe yourself with them. Are we not funny? And by “we” I mean Every Last Manjack of us?

Dude, I’m a cartoon. Maybe that’s why drag never drew me in, although given my history of homo- and transphobia there may be more going on there than garden-variety ennui. I live drag. I’ve been dressing like a twelve year old boy since I was..well…a twelve year old boy. You should see me: I’m nearly 50 and everything I own has skulls on it. It’s ridiculous. I’m ridiculous.

So again, what have we learned today? Let’s see. I have a truly raging hard-on. I think I am very, very sexy, but have a nagging suspicion this may be the wonderful symptom of living in a T-bubble. I have a big freakin’ crush on a big hompin’ Pansy, with whom I yearn to dance and jazz-hand, between bouts of royal reaming and schtupping. I may actually be wearing a clown suit, RIGHT NOW. I tell you, I wouldn’t know it.

So laugh, Tranny, laugh. It’s the best medicine, better than porn even. Honk on your boobs, or your surgically tweaked boy-nips, sashay Shanté, do-si-do and make a left, grab a Drag King, turn her round, and plant a big wet one on her moustached mouth. You can do no wrong; just keep dancing. We’ve got a war to win, don’t forget, so let’s keep up the morale of the troops while we’re at it.

*thanks, Jessica, for reigniting a love of the juicy “c” word.

**Before Testosterone, for the uninitiated.

Sworn Enemy of the Smurf!

2009-03-10T08:48:00.008-04:00

The problem with transitioning, and depending on who you are it can be a big one, is that at the end of the day you’re you.

I am always, ever, snorting surf against the riptide of my own personality.

Par example: Last night I was with a semi-organized gang of homos in a meeting of same. We convene in what I imagine a Rotary or Lion’s Club might meet in, a high-ceilinged outlier building, possibly made of cinder blocks, with an enormous central fireplace adorned with a crest, naturalmente, because it can. The meeting is chock-a-block with ritual, Robert’s Rules kind of things; nonetheless, because it is an unwieldy gang of gays, there are little “extras” thrown in, asides and gang-chanted rejoinders. Because we can.

As we adjourn, and members push outside to fill the glorious near-Spring dusk air with smoke, I overhear a guy spit out, “I’m just not gay enough for all that!”

I’m intrigued, so of course I cup my ear and lean in.

Dude is really angry about all the furbelows and frills that come with our group, the commentary and chants. “I’m not gay enough for this shit!” He’s really angry, sucking his fag hard, pacing like a tiny lion. He’s saying that the gayness of the group pisses him off. What’s really hilarious and touching and heartbreaking about this particular tableau is Dude is possibly the nelliest queen of the bunch. He actually IS gay enough.

Now, I’ve been body-slammed by another human kind enough to show me my internalized homophobia. Queeny, angry Dude? C’est moi. The world is a gentle place this night, and thus he is allowed to rant, suck and rant. Perhaps his awakening will come later, some other sweet eve; it will, eventually and it will sting.

I’ve been hanging out with a lot of transpeople recently. It’s time. It’s the best thing for what ails me, which is basically terror. I couldn’t even really put a finger on exactly what’s so terrifying, but I can share with you a protracted history of judgements and harsh asides muttered by me about people and whatever it is they’re doing that irks me. To this very day I have a knee-jerk revulsion for a certain breed of butch. Now it’s quickly followed by an acknowledgment of my homophobia, my fear of my own female masculinity, but for years, and by years I mean YEARS, I was just another dyke h8er.

Hanging out with a bunch of trannies is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s like being in soft, snuggy blanket printed with spaceships and cowboys with a gang of sweet children, and other times it’s like being in the center of said blanket, while the mob from Lord of the Flies throws you up in the air with it as they consider whether or not they will catch you, and if they do, how to best disembowel and cannibalize.

It’s comforting to be with dudes in various stages of whatever, who want to share, are eager to discourse about this or that. To see the gendered spectrum, its nuances and delicious complexities, loud and proud, a rainbow with a swagger, is to rejoin the human race in a spectacular way. The flip is in fears and agendas writ bold in our speech and dress. Guys have often created or acquired rules about transitioning, how it should look, what needs to happen. Other dudes look really good, and one cannot help but hold oneself weakly against their flaming masculinity without feeling at least slightly singed. As with any social group, to be there productively means submitting to some discomfort, as my failings are highlighted by the success of others, while allowing myself to be elevated by the energetic, enthusiastic bonhomie of my peers.

I want to cradle some men in my arms. They are suffocating in a cave of their own design, one in which they might have explored as a small boy, that initially offered sanctuary, a pile of comic books, Playboys, some candles and milk cartons and maybe even a sleeping bag and flashlight. Somehow this place of supreme joy and haven has become solitary confinement, and now these boys have so many rules no-one else is allowed in. One “must” pack to be a good transguy; one must have short, masculine hair, a manly job; one mustn’t be a fag; one must never ever no never let one’s guard down lest one be “read” as less than a man even ‘though most of the world can’t even access scrutiny so detailed as to have clue one how to identify a transperson. Sweet brother, you have fallen prey to the Gargamel of Masculine Social Construct and his Sorcery of Shame. God bless you Beautiful Boy; someday our love will penetrate your cave and you will be compelled to exit, led by your nose to the smell of our delectable cupcakes, the transperson’s dessert of choice.

On a rough day I’m destroyed by the overarching presence of my breasts; I’m ashamed of my soft hairlessness, my dykiness. But other days, and these are more frequent, I see myself in that multihued dimension, a facet of an infinite crystal that is expanding exponentially even as we speak. And while I can revel in my deepening voice, my thickening torso, the added muscularity, the presence of other transpeople is humbling. Our sincerity and commitment in the face of mordant demons, external and within, is nothing short of transcendent. And so, my brothers, friends, and even my enemies: I bow, deeply, to you. You remind me to stay “right-sized” and present for the ride of a lifetime. You remind me who I am: Tha Man Sam.