A Love There Is No Cure For

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

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

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

“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

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

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

“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.