Tales From the Vanishing Lip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aint I a Woman?

Okay, so seriously. No, really. Think about this. What is it that makes you the gender you are? What made me a girl for all those difficult years, and then a woman, and now a…what? I started with the “requisite” arsenal of biological determination, the vulva (as far as I know anyway – - now we’re finding all kinds of things out about what we’re all born with, and what happened -and still does I’m sure- to parts that didn’t conform to social standards of gender). Women in particular get riled about genital mutilation in Africa and other countries, and we should, right? But what about the infants in the supreme country of the U S of A, whose genitals were lopped off, medically mutated, whose genital presentation was “different,” for whom doctors decided their gender because the doctors weren’t comfortable with the infants’ tiny danglers? Hold me closer Tiny Dangler. It blows my mind that children were forced into a genital decision, had to endure repeated and horrible surgeries to correct blocked urethras, remove nascent ovaries or testes, sculpt whatever they had into something that “looked like” the sex the medical industry and their parents felt might be “comfortable” for them. I understand that we were all capitulating to social pressure, that parents didn’t want their kids to endure the teasing, ostracizing, perhaps even violence that can come from being “different.”

I know women whose vaginas can’t be penetrated, have atrophied, were surgically removed, who have little or no breasts. Are they still women? I have seen men whose junk mine is beginning to rival, with tiny D battery pokers and wee little labial nutsacks. Are they less than men?

Some transpeople posit that what’s beneath the skirt or kilt makes neither the man nor woman. Science now can argue that the brain is the seat, rather than your seat being the seat, of your gender. So what is it that’s in the brain that distinguishes us?

Two of my closest friends here in tiny D battery Carrboro are chicks. When I get close to people, I begin to blur out gender- like I don’t think of Jessica and Judith as chicks – they’re just THEM. Sure, they have cute hair and wear girly things, but I know dudes that do that. If I asked Jessica what she thought made her a woman she would likely respond with “Did you know a human being grew in my uterus and then sprang out of my vagina?!” – a stunning visual she is fond of sharing for any circumstance, much less the deconstruction of gender.

Judith is a beautiful woman. Clearly feminine in presentation. She also has more balls than most of the guys I know. I call her “the hot knife through my buttery opacity” because she GETS TO IT. She doesn’t exhibit what I think of as a female brain thing – that 360 degrees of processing everyone’s feelings, scanning energetically, particularly as relates to one’s own. She’s a fucking mental ninja. If my thinking is an inefficient, in-the-red beauty salon, she would be Tabitha from Shear Genius, dressed like a John Galliano version of Pinhead in Hellraiser. There would be some serious remodeling happening, is what I’m saying to you.

During the opening of an NA meeting their literature reads “you are an addict when you say you are.”* Am I simply the gender I say I am? What on god’s green earth makes me think I’m not a woman? I used to see my masculinity as intrinsic to my sexuality, that my soi-disant “masculine” behaviors were a parcel of my attraction to women; they didn’t seem to exist outside of my perhaps fetishized urges for chivalry, obeisance. But if that were true, the parameters of lesbianism would be sufficient for the likes of me. And they are not. Lesbianism does not explain why, at age 3, I was obsessed with shaving my face (see adorable photo at right). Lesbianism doesn’t fully explain why I was creating moustaches to stick on under my nose, pretending to don a suit, and jauntily strolling ala Dick Van Dyke** in Mary Poppins, replete with boater and cane***; appreciates but does not enlighten as to why wearing dresses of any era makes me break out in cold sweat; and finally, lesbianism does not begin to understand the isolation and even panic I have experienced, in a room full of “other women.” I don’t fit in, y’all!

I’ll end on this happy, uplifting note. My fat is finally migrating. The body looks markedly (to me, who gets to see me nakedy) different than it did 4 months ago. I only wish the lard was tinted, so I could see exactly where it was traveling to. Given the fact that the testosterone has yet to make a substantive difference where it COUNTS, meaning my ALGEBRA CLASS, I’m inclined to believe it’s all making its gloppity hijira to my brain.

*to which everyone in my homegroup in Austin would respond “YOU ARE!”

**DICK. Van. DYKE. Snicker!

***Lesbianism certainly doesn't explain this behavior and I cannot think for the life of me WHAT DOES. I can only share that in my mind's eye, I'm not only male, I'm exceedingly dapper.