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.
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