tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21344249283593970572024-03-13T13:20:11.088-04:00Tha Man Sam: Son of TFormer female Sam Peterson describes his forays into a brave new world of masculinity via therapy and testosterone: one that involves "manfirmations," sublime hilarity at the expense of self, and just general all'round trananigans.Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.comBlogger108125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-56295047854385566012012-11-04T07:48:00.002-05:002012-11-04T09:12:43.237-05:00Courageous SpinelessnessFriday I left UNC's Spine Center rubbing my chapped mitts with the kind of joy one gets from a new medical diagnosis (surely the Germans have a word for that). "Brachial Neuritis or Radiculitis Nos" said my important papers--I couldn't wait to google.<br />
<br />
As it turns out, Brachial Neuritis typically follows injury "<a href="http://www.mdguidelines.com/brachial-neuropathy">such as gunshot or stab wounds</a>" or follows a viral infection or surgery (double mastectomy, anyone?). It does have a genetic marker, is fairly rare, but basically no-one really knows what it is or how it functions, but it might be an auto-immune response.<br />
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It struck me that the language around this syndrome was very much like fibromyalgia, which I had been diagnosed with nearly a decade ago, with some strong differences. Brachial Neuritis is a "man's disease." Fibromyalgia, at least when I got it, was a "woman's disease." Doctors treated me as if I was a Victorian lady, hysteric, suffering from the symptoms induced by my own lively imaginings, as if I had indulged in too much busy manly brainy work and was now suffering the consequences. "Women who have been sexually abused get it" said one doctor, fairly rolling his eyes. Had I gotten fibromyalgia from stab wounds or gunshot I'm sure we all would have been much happier.<br />
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I'd like to suggest something, something dangerous. I'm going to (for one, for once) ignore the ridiculously preferential and gendered medical language and suggest this: what if this uptick, this surge, in auto-immune responses, in disease where our bodies seem to "feel too much" or "feel the wrong thing," is an evolutionary move towards the kind of all-bodied sensorium of octopuses?<br />
<br />
My spine is crumbling, encrusted with the barnacles we call spurs--but I believe like a fossil, my original spine is nearly <i>gone; </i>it has been replaced by the minerals and shell bits and heavy metals of my past. I believe we are moving towards the kind of embodiment that "thinks" with its arms--like an octopus--that our bones are attempting to shore us up against what we have sunk into this earth, poisons and pesticides, and that our central nervous system, being overtaxed by impact, the crashings of sensations from constant electric immersion (tvs, cell phones, electricity) is both attempting to protect and to extend itself because <i>it needs more room.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Enter then, this new being, still bilateral, still sentient, but sensing and thinking from its softened arms and legs. The fad for muscularity will presently be replaced by a delight in bodies that can move in even more spectacular ways, requiring...drum roll please...a surgically implanted (at first) flexible spine, allowing our new being to squeeze under doorways and through cracks like mice. Later, this being will have no spine at all.<br />
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The pain I feel, radiating from the various injuries to my spine, my chest, my <i>self,</i> might actually be evolution. The delicious, damnable, brutal heavy electric stabbings of evolution. You with me? If you, like me, have experienced interstitial cystitis, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, fibromyalgia, and now some kind of hyperalgesia induced by multiple incidences of violence not limited to but including (as they say) car wrecks, assaults, concussions, <i>mosh pits, </i>then you might feel a reluctance, anger even, by the suggestion that your pain, your <i>trauma, </i>is some kind of motherfucking evolution.<br />
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Sisterbrother, I feel your pain. Let's look to the octopus for a sec. The octopus brain isn't centrally located like ours, or rather, it has dense neurons everywhere--it does something like "thinking" with its arms. (I do something like "thinking" with my....oh never mind.) This makes it a supreme test subject. The octopus is often used as a lab animal because of its incredible intelligence, its unique capacity to experience life through not just its enlarged head, but through its eight motile arms. As a test subject, it is an uncommonly able subject--its sensorium is geared for sensation, for pain, all over. Not like we are. More, I imagine, how those of us with amped up sensations are, those of us for whom a whisper of wind relays stark horripilation, whose bones require battening against the everyday, whose fascia begins to set after a second, rendering ordinary movements like getting out of ones chair an excruciating exercise in what feels like breakage. The octopus, particular as test subject, is my kin.<br />
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How then, to relinquish what many of us feel is our only raft in a terrifying ocean, that is, our identities as disabled? Too many transfolk I know have one or more of these diagnoses, and I'm confident this isn't merely because I gravitate to people of similar experience. Transbodies in particular (like octo-bodies) are subject to the kind of abuse that leaves a neural stamp, the imprimatur of pain...Transbodies in particular are forced to be complicit with the medical industry, to get our hormones, our surgeries, our <i>care.</i><br />
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I am, just for today, relinquishing this identity, except for bureaucratic necessity. I am willing to explore this idea, this embodiment, this, these <i>pains,</i> as yes the result of myriad abuses but parlaying themselves into exploration, into a riot of sensation yearning to be without armature, longing for and making exodus to a free body, a body that moves any way, goes anywhere, is free, not of pain necessarily because pain is important--a body that is always, already oceanic and celestial. I can bear some of this pain with the knowledge that my sisterbrothers after me might endure less, that bodies might move to...dare I say it aloud? Invertebrate. Sister Sea Slug, wrap me in your tongue-like body; naughty nautilus, invite me to tea. I will slip underneath the heavily guarded and locked laboratory doorway and free all my kin, all my octo family. Are you in?<br />
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<br />Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-56320277131012390402012-09-29T18:46:00.001-04:002012-09-30T09:10:29.300-04:00Boys with their Baby Vein Faces Shining Neon It's been dark around here, I'm not going to lie. I have friends whose ability to stay tethered to this dimension seems fragile and full of pain, the pain of lusty, unhinged cells replicating and replicating. Just as they seem to become full of something Not Themselves and slow of pulse and breath after so much quickening, do I become leaden, full of bile and blood. I feel like rot watching my friends be sick.<br />
<br />
I myself am enduring one of many detoxes. I am in a some kind of perpetual withdrawal state--kicking one chemical after another in an attempt to relieve my own constant neuralgia, being prescribed cymbalta, vicodin, gabapentin, lexapro; getting rolfed and massaged and acupunctured and just generally torturing myself at the gym. I am in a state of pain I'm confident would be solved by opiates, and indeed, they bring such a sweet relief it's almost ridiculous. Like, why aren't we all on opiates?<br />
<br />
I watched the Peter Weller documentary about William Burroughs, a man I had the good fortune to meet not once but twice, and actually spent an afternoon with. Peter Weller comes off as the biggest kind of art douche, but Burroughs? My kind of guy. I was heartened to hear that he struggled with dope til the end. Not in some kind of schadenfreude way, but because I struggle with dope now and again. It's a solution to a lot of things. I was a heroin addict in my twenties and on methadone for nine years. It has a way of changing you. Or rather, I came to it because I was already changed, I was already awash in some other stream, one that neither parallels nor crosses the so-called "stream of life," one that creative people seem to wade and occasionally drown in. Burroughs was so charming. You can be charming on dope, junk, to use Burroughsian vernacular.<br />
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In my neurochemical jazz fest, the one that's happening in my brainy parts right now, I recall Burroughs coming to the book shop I worked at. I ran in a crowd that worshiped him. We both did and did not understand his genius. It's taken me years--getting older does that, you ripen, your memory cells accommodate and imbricate information in gratifying ways. Stanislavski, the great actors' teacher calls it Emotion Memory. You overlay and shape memory with your new experiences, archiving and adding like a hypermotile librarian in the Strand Bookstore of your brain. Burroughs came to Lambda Rising, in Dupont Circle, where I was employed as a cashier/book seller/only one there. We carried his books in 1980 to be sure, but they didn't sell. Nope, gay men bought sad, horny romance novels by Gordon Merrick, and Inches and Blueboy. Not Genet, not Burroughs, not even Rechy. There I was, all New Wave-punk lesbo behind the cash register, reading Fleur du Mal and Seasons of Hell, Naked Lunch and Queer, all written by <i>homosexual </i>geniuses. You can imagine the attitude I was handing over with your change.<br />
<br />
Burroughs came upstairs to do an impromptu reading. It was wonderful. Four of my besties and me alone, hanging on to Bill. He was polite and unconcerned by what for me spoke to the general state of the gay male industrial complex--that it routinely sacrificed its most hard-won gifts for tawdry emotional appeal, in art, in literature, and most obviously in music. Of course this is true of another kind of 99%, right, the regular ol' world, the other 1% of us having been "blessed" with no discernibly useful talents except for making art. But Burroughs brought something real to the table. While the queers were buying poppers and jack mags--and why not!?--Jane and Paul Bowles, Verlaine, Barnes and Proust were getting thumbed by yours truly, who would then "sell" them back to the bookstore as "used." Oh, there's another financial amend I owe. Fantastic.<br />
<br />
Burroughs didn't seem to need gay approbation, and why would he? He wasn't Lambda Rising Gay, then a mixture of 70's clone (hoodie in jean jacket, moustache, aviators )--he was his own thing--but my favorite part of meeting him was when he sent down his Aryan amanuensis James to ask "if it was okay if Bill took some magazines home." And sure enough, when they left, Burroughs carried a paper sack stacked with Numbers, Inches, Colt, and Honcho that I had packed up for him myself, secretly dreaming an unseen dream of being someone, something, that William Burroughs might jack off to.<br />
<br />
Maybe we didn't shoot our wads together, but possibly that night, William and I might have shot other things, in hotel rooms, basements, rest rooms. I met him again with John Waters. I would never want to be the man John Waters would jack to, but I admire him just the same. They both articulate the life of men who cannot be anything other than themselves. Iconoclasts. Heroin had Burroughs. It was a love affair that lasted his entire life. What heroin, addiction in general is to me, is a way of grinding myself to my body. I haven't tasted dope since 1993 but I know its smell, I can conjure it any time. I want to curl up behind Burroughs, my thick torso and gloppy belly smashed against his sticky bones, the filo dough of old man skin wrapped around a skeleton. Poppies in your ear man. Burroughs left poppies in my ear.<br />
<br />
<br />Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-24671671728857572772012-08-25T11:45:00.000-04:002012-08-25T11:54:14.312-04:00Bats With Their Baby-Veined Faces--Part 1Patti Smith is on my mind today. My beloved soul-sister Stephen called me yesterday. He's dying of cancer but his inevitable cellular expansion into the unknown has been put off for some months, hopefully some years. It turns out he's of the blood type that can undergo genetic resequencing. There's been a lot of work in this area, much of it experimental and much of it hopeful. He's on some kind of drug--we didn't talk about it in depth because we had too much to say to one another, mostly about what he's going to do with himself, now that he's got all this time. These therapies can be very successful, just not permanently. Yet.<br />
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"I feel pretty good these days," he explained to me, even as he was calling because he's going through withdrawals from the fentanyl patch he's been on for a couple years. "I don't know if I should travel the world, see Bali with my husband, fire-walk, or stay here and get out of bed and get breakfast for the kids and take them to school and, you know, just live my life."<br />
<br />
Steve and I both survived the 80's AIDS crisis. We were both in New York City when Reagan cut funding for social services while tacitly denying this distinctly American genocide, Steve a robustly sexual gay man and me a intravenous-drug addict. I say "intravenous-drug" because there was a time when I was as addicted to the needle as I was the drug. (Consequently I have injected any number of interesting substances, both purposefully and by accident: cocaine and pastel dust, isopropyl alcohol, and dirty water come to mind.) I watched as my city streets filled with humans, people disgorged into the streets who had been (some for years) in mental wards, treatment centers, and hospitals. Elevators were crowded in a new way even for Manhattan, filled with the collage-phrasings of schizophrenics and the ramblings of dementia, people leaning on sticks and crutches as limbless and lost as people I had seen in Haiti. Little wonder heroin was my drug of choice; it was a soft and comforting euphoria spansule that enveloped and protected me as I roamed through Hell.<br />
<br />
It changed everyone who was there. It reminds me of John Shirley's novel "A Splendid Chaos," where people go to this disco and it turns out its some kind of technology that takes them to this "Survivor" like planet where they're forced to figure out how to live on this weird planet with multiple other alien species and diseases. There's this electrical field that travels like a merciless storm cloud, and if you're caught in it, it "twists" you electrically. Some part of you emerges that was always there, but the phenomenon dislodges and even enhances it. So if you went through the 80's in a big city that was devastated by AIDS you've been through that electric event, and some part of you is distorted and enhanced. If you're lucky, it was your compassion.<br />
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It seemed to have been so with Steve. He has an incredible generosity and almost unlimited compassion, even and maybe especially as he took care of his partner through his partner's death from AIDS. But I'm waaaay off topic now so I'll get to the point. Steve recently finished reading "Just Us Kids," Patti Smith's homage to her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, which is also kind of a billet doux to New York in the 70's. Steve and I both had a similar experience reading the book, which evoked an unsentimental awe for the decade before the madness. BM. Before Madness.<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9eOInJrUr2Y/UDjqCTw7RnI/AAAAAAAAAGE/oHst8RVLXcM/s1600/horses-cover.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9eOInJrUr2Y/UDjqCTw7RnI/AAAAAAAAAGE/oHst8RVLXcM/s320/horses-cover.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
Extending that device, I could also parse a significant movement in my own life, that being Before and After Patti Smith. Seeing the still stunning Mapplethorpe photo of Patti for her first album at age 15 changed my life. For a burgeoning lesbian and future transperson, the impact of an androgynous, iconic <i>contemporary</i> woman <i>artist</i> was meteoric; I was caved-in and smashed to bits in the kind of wonderful way in which you are then magnetically rearranged into something greater, this particular impact having merged with your molecules. That she existed NOW, in my space/time--unlike Marlene Dietrich or Romaine Brooks, whose photos and biographies I had devoured with a longing I can only now begin to identify--and, that she had <i>agency, was an artist,</i> was enormously important in 1975. I mean, I didn't even particularly <i>like </i>Romaine Brooks, but in a desert of a certain kind of androgyny, one had to make do.<br />
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Gertrude Steinian butchness didn't quite capture it, and while I adored the male forays into femininity, like Bowie and even young Robert Plant, I needed to see a woman doing it. At fifteen I was already exhausted by masculinity and its tantalizing yet repulsive allure. I could not have any of it. Those moments in which I allowed it to transmute my body, to "twist" me, were often abruptly halted by someone taking the piss out of me, or by my own hyper-vigilance. Patti offered a way to allow the cells of masculinity to pass through my membrane and infuse me with near luminescence. It was liberating beyond belief to release some of the tension in the reins I had bridled myself with.<br />
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Her impact merely began there. Because of Patti and her genius eruptions, her own literary/artistic obsessions, I read Rimbaud, Ginsberg, the Bible; I listened to Coltrane and Ronnie Spector; my eyes slid greedily over Brancusi's "Bird in Space." I probably read about and saw more demanding work during my Patti-era than I did any time in art school. I hope the kids have somebody today, somebody whose presence forces them to confront as much of themselves as they are ready to, not in a "Beautiful" way, or in that way in which people like Pink and Katy Perry have made an industry of, "comforting" us by telling us we're "okay." "You're beautiful the way you are" always rests on the substrate of "you are actually not beautiful." And why do we need so much reassuring? Patti was only reassuring in that I knew there was someone else out there, like me, dying to create, chafing at conventional genders, yearning to roll in a field with Wilhelm Reich, Jane Bowles, and Mick Jagger.<br />
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When Stephen asks the wonderful question, "what will I do with my time?" I inevitably ask it to myself. My adolescent obsession with Patti Smith showed me all I need ever know, that I flourish in commune with others, that relationships are everything, and that everything is creating all the time. Stephen offers <i>intention</i><br />
as the light that moves a life from the prosaic to sublime. My intention then, is to foster and care for my relationships, with my lover, with friends, with animals, with systems, and with objects. And then, turn it into art.<br />
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<br />Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-45786037798121877642012-08-16T09:53:00.003-04:002012-08-16T13:03:42.057-04:00HE'S BAAAACK! (putting the "ack" into...well, you get the picture)Gosh it's been a long time! See, you didn't know I had incorporated "gosh" into my vocab it's been that long. Well there you go. I've used this site to document my experiences on testosterone as I changed, paying some attention to the delicious physical outpourings of hair growth (ok, more like weed growth in an abandoned construction site), sexual VIGOR, Rowrr!, but really so much more interested in what was happening to my BRAINS.<br />
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Ye Gods. The brains. Please plunder the goods here; there's a lot of writing and whining and OCTOPUSES and also some moments of divine intervention. Not my doing. Think of me sitting on a cat-clawed comfy chair wearing my girlfriend's striped calf-length long johns, laptop atop two pillows, clacking away on my toast-crumb ridden keyboard when all of the sudden...<br />
<br />
The GREAT SHE KRAKEN. "YOU'RE WEARING THOSE HORRIBLE LONG JOHNS AGAIN"<br />
yes, I say meekly. SIGH.<br />
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And now this is reading like a Terry Pratchett novel.<br />
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I've reemerged from the briny deep to report that while terrible things are happening to the planet, and humans seem desperately resistant to changing the way they see things, other things are happening too. There are creative, mischievous, passionate forces at work here Dollface, and they might be coming out of YOU. Things are going to look very different tomorrow, and transgender is having an enormous impact, holding hands with queer while extending tentacles and eye-stalks in divergent directions.<br />
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Just this week I read about body-mod folks implanting magnets in their fingers as the next step towards cyborg. They're able to sense microwaves, and hold pictures to fridges. Called <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087?currentPage=all">"body hacking"</a>, it may seem frivolous, it is absolutely a foray into the margins, the liminal space of the what-else. And it's in this space we'll find where we're going to live, shaping our bodybeings into configurations that connect with whatever landscape we emerge from.<br />
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I read about a woman who<a href="http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2011/05/26/weird-wild-qa-freezing-coral-sperm-to-save-the-great-barrier-reef/"> inseminates sea corals</a>, suggesting that this dying ecosystem may no longer live in the ocean, but will continue in aquariums or other spaces. I saw that a friend of mine, who has been working with a team to create <a href="http://www.mesotheliomaweb.org/two-stage-nanoparticle-improves-chemotherapy-delivery">chemotherapies</a> that denote only when they reach the cancer, has been having some great success in trials.<br />
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I myself just repurposed a table, some pegboard, and some wood, retrofitting my shed and my studio with new old objects, not the stuff of cancer research perhaps but environmentally awesome plus points for making furniture. Retrofitting old stuff is kind of like transitioning...<br />
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These are hopeful moments. These are NOW moments, not just future hopeful moments. The GREAT SHE KRAKEN recedes now--my own work is with my body and pain, juddering synapses and hyperalgesia, the ongoing evolution of sensation. I'm convinced we're moving towards an embodied sentience, like the octopus, which shares neuro-optical brain heirarchies with humans. They "think" with their bodies. I imagine this is what my hyperpain sensitivity is doing in me, extending a knowing into worldings. But it hurts.<br />
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Enough out of me. For NOW.<br />
LOVE,<br />
Sam.Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-33834841036447105012011-02-05T09:07:00.000-05:002011-02-05T09:07:12.412-05:00Picture What Will Be - So Limitless and Free<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <span> </span>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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Namaste Beloved Friend!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sam</span></div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-17080020295088737362010-12-15T14:29:00.000-05:002010-12-15T14:29:32.731-05:00"Monsters Meet Such Interesting People!" - B. Bunny<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <span> </span>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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So “she” me, “he” me, what can you do me? I love you.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-23444893651674787952010-11-18T11:19:00.002-05:002010-11-18T15:27:05.619-05:00I Forgot I Had Gills When I Got Here<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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…” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-42931724568421668612010-10-11T19:41:00.000-04:002010-10-11T19:41:51.065-04:00Kard Karrying Kweer<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:OfficeDocumentSettings> <o:AllowPNG/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Several things distinguish humans from other beings – three that come to mind immediately are the making of art, morality, and fixity.<span> </span>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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> 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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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…</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Neither of these things is entirely true. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">What’s really jacked me up is the pecking, the <i>regulating </i>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. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-11514874023892902842010-08-29T14:28:00.002-04:002010-08-29T14:30:17.234-04:00Is This Microphone On? or Konversations Kill<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal">Crap. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“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 <i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> having this conversation!” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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 <i>all</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">*although I think “transphobia” is too neat a package. I found the word itself, “tranny,” to be delightfully playful and archaic, like “fanny.”</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-58207445220644019712010-08-09T14:08:00.002-04:002010-08-09T14:15:16.231-04:00Buy Me Some Peanuts & Cracker Jack, I Don't Care If I Never Come Back<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kdepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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!”</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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 <i>is</i></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, 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.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">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 <i>down</i></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-59668434035912672452010-07-21T19:24:00.004-04:002010-07-21T19:31:51.196-04:00Knights of the Iguana<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta><meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Generator"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Originator"></meta><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx" rel="themeData"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml" rel="colorSchemeMapping"></link><style>
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<div class="paragraph" style="margin-right: 15pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="textrun">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.</span></div><div class="paragraph" style="margin-right: 15pt; vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span xml:lang="EN-US"><span class="textrun">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.</span></span><span class="eop"> And they have about the amount of control and impact on me as Ward and June did on Eddie Haskell. </span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop">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…</span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop">Disorder doesn’t touch it. I am nothing <i>but</i> 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.</span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop">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.</span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
</div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop">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. </span><br />
<br />
<span class="eop"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="eop">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="paragraph" style="vertical-align: baseline;"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-69606977074947743662010-06-30T19:50:00.006-04:002010-07-01T11:29:38.588-04:00My New Firmament<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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 <i>this</i> body ever (which makes me in many ways fundamentally <i>American).</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-39604182865156592922010-06-03T13:11:00.001-04:002010-06-03T13:19:43.696-04:00Should You Return To Me, We Were Truly Meant To Be<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-47545855815985540662010-05-17T19:17:00.004-04:002010-05-18T08:50:38.091-04:00In a Little While From Now, If I'm Not Feeling Any Less Sour<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">“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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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 <i>being-ness</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, 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.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-37623364999100883762010-04-22T08:20:00.003-04:002010-04-22T08:20:17.796-04:00So Not Kidding<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kdepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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>I </i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-11898347635866239412010-03-24T20:45:00.003-04:002010-03-27T18:13:05.207-04:00Salad Days<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta><meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Generator"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Originator"></meta><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx" rel="themeData"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml" rel="colorSchemeMapping"></link><style>
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<div class="MsoBodyText">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.) </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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 <i>that I know</i>. 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.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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.)</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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 <i>and</i> it doesn’t make me like them better.</div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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. </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
</div><div class="MsoBodyText">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.” </div><div class="MsoBodyText"><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-18986753855372941202010-02-28T17:21:00.001-05:002010-02-28T17:21:56.788-05:00Let Me Eat Cake<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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?) <i>change their mind about me if they knew I was queer. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Suddenly, I cared what they thought. I was ashamed to be homosexual.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 13.5pt;">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.</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-66173328663011218212010-02-07T14:06:00.007-05:002010-02-08T08:42:39.085-05:00You Really Shake What You Got, And Girl You Got A Lot<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">Desire.</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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 <i>and </i><span style="font-style: normal;">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 <i>not</i> begin with Kay's.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">“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.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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? <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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, <i>ordinary</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> we all are. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">That is my greatest desire. <o:p></o:p></div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-80659636119773100492010-01-24T18:34:00.001-05:002010-02-07T16:54:01.018-05:00The Aisle At The End, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb<meta content="" name="Title"></meta> <meta content="" name="Keywords"></meta> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta> <meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta> <meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta> <link href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">“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?<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.”<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.)<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.” <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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. <br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">And yet.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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?!<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">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.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><br />
Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-5705958570277281862010-01-01T19:57:00.000-05:002010-01-01T19:57:56.678-05:00A Vision Softly CreepingSo 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?<br />
<br />
I guess I just answered my own question. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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. <br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Hush now and listen. Our brains are calling.Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-34823889596643821692009-12-16T20:08:00.007-05:002009-12-17T13:34:38.503-05:00A Love There Is No Cure For<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></meta><meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Generator"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 12" name="Originator"></meta><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx" rel="themeData"></link><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5CBOXOFF%7E1%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml" rel="colorSchemeMapping"></link><style>
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<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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!!?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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. <br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-90756470396260885332009-11-30T09:47:00.011-05:002009-12-02T17:07:09.331-05:00The Ring Around Your Finger Is From My Sucker<div style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" equiv="Content-Type"></meta><meta content="Word.Document" name="ProgId"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Generator"></meta><meta content="Microsoft Word 11" name="Originator"></meta><link href="file:///C:%5CDOCUME%7E1%5Cmanturuk%5CLOCALS%7E1%5CTemp%5Cmsohtml1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml" rel="File-List"></link><style>
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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 <i>think </i>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. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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…</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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<sup>nd</sup>. 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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</div>Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-6592621532742747252009-11-08T18:42:00.000-05:002009-11-08T18:43:29.826-05:00The Unbearable Rightness of BeingIt 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />“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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />And this is my imponderable, impenetrable sadness.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />But none of them are true.Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-30326640659299117072009-10-19T17:59:00.002-04:002009-10-19T21:34:50.097-04:00Little Peepee, Little Toes“Men are pussies when it comes to pain!” a pal of mine insists.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <span style="font-style: italic;">chocolate</span> 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">too busy”</span> - 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.”<br /><br />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…)<br /><br />What do pain and illness have to do with gender?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Dysmorphia, on the other hand, feels less like loathing and more like confusion. What is <span style="font-style: italic;">that </span>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 <span style="font-style: italic;">you cannot escape.</span><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Men, women, and some of us interstitial: we’re <span style="font-style: italic;">all </span>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.Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2134424928359397057.post-79577421288531841582009-10-04T15:59:00.002-04:002009-10-04T16:03:42.635-04:00I’m Just a Boy Who Can’t Say No<meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 11"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/kellidepuy/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip1/01/clip_filelist.xml"> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:documentproperties> <o:template>Normal</o:Template> <o:revision>0</o:Revision> <o:totaltime>0</o:TotalTime> <o:pages>1</o:Pages> <o:words>785</o:Words> <o:characters>4479</o:Characters> <o:lines>37</o:Lines> <o:paragraphs>8</o:Paragraphs> <o:characterswithspaces>5500</o:CharactersWithSpaces> <o:version>11.1282</o:Version> </o:DocumentProperties> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:donotshowrevisions/> <w:donotprintrevisions/> <w:displayhorizontaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayHorizontalDrawingGridEvery> <w:displayverticaldrawinggridevery>0</w:DisplayVerticalDrawingGridEvery> <w:usemarginsfordrawinggridorigin/> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--> <style> <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> </style> <!--StartFragment--><!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p> <p class="MsoNormal">Since I got sober, really sober, less than a decade ago, I often feel like I’m coming up from under ground, post-apocalypse.<span style=""> </span>If you’ve ever been on the metro escalator in Dupont Circle, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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 <i>turn around and come back in again. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">If everyone is saying it, </span><i>it’s not deep anymore.</i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>
<br /></i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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<span style=""> </span>boobs are doing in “their” bathroom.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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?
<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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<span style=""> </span>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.</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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>I</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> so afraid of? Is this my transphobia, or my default to people-pleasing? Yes and yes and I’m a little ashamed.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-style: normal;">
<br /></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">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.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></i></p> <!--EndFragment--> Samhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00800189775226081175noreply@blogger.com3