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.”

They Mostly Come At Night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Ryan Pinion, Ladles and Jellyplugs.

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

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

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

Nothing. I got nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Dream As Clear As He

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

Warm, Worn, Leatherette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Loose Shoes And Such A Bargain!

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

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

But you didn’t know me then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Own Private Guernica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



*Check out the Sylvia Rivera Law Project site.