So Not Kidding

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Salad Days

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.)

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 that I know. 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.

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.)

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.

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 and it doesn’t make me like them better.

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.

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.”

Let Me Eat Cake

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.

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.

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?) change their mind about me if they knew I was queer. Suddenly, I cared what they thought. I was ashamed to be homosexual.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

You Really Shake What You Got, And Girl You Got A Lot

Desire.

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.

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.

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.

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 and 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 not begin with Kay's.

“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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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, ordinary we all are.

That is my greatest desire.

The Aisle At The End, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

“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?

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.”

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.)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

And yet.

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?!

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.

A Vision Softly Creeping

So 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?

I guess I just answered my own question.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hush now and listen. Our brains are calling.

A Love There Is No Cure For

I’m hot for trannies right now. I’m so hot for trans I could punch it in the face. You know that kind of love that makes you want to rip it open, disembowel it? You know how sometimes you look at your lover’s sweet punim and have to stop yourself from digging your thumbs in their eyeballs because you’re so overcome with a mad joy? No? Okay, well what about when you want to shove your hand in their diaphragm and rend their skin open and just climb in. No? Who am I talking to!!?

Love is a profound, dear, heady, vertiginous place for the transperson. In love I can reveal genders I never even knew I had – genders I find against your moveable feets, your shape-shifting skin, the mouths of your face and your anus, grinning and spitting and chewing on hair. Love refracts and collides me on me, on me on you on me, on you on you, like a dazzling sequined 70’s butterfly stuck in a kaleidoscope against your grandma’s handmade afghan. Trans bodies hold as many mysteries as Mary of Magdelena – our body’s relationship to our genders is like hers to Jesus – we may never know its reality or its importance but we intuit a meaning and we long for it to be true.

The body of my Beloved has more keys than doors. I look at his gendered torso and I think, “what about that makes me hot?” The masculine muscles, trapped in the feminine like a fly in ice, or vice versa, the feminine extruding herself from the butch hairy legs – the vitreous humor from my eyeballs feels like the jelly between the skin and the ultrasound, scanning the body for change, for movement, to detect gender difference.

I went to an allergist today. As previously discussed on these here pages, I’m a lazy, bureaucracy-phobic tranny, so all my ID read “Samantha.” Sometimes, when I feel particularly indolent, I think “I’ll tell people it’s an Indian name, like Yogananda – yeah, that’s the ticket!,” but humans are crafty and have a fox’s nose for subterfuge.

The receptionist ID’s me as “she,” and I commence to have this conversation with myself that I always have in public forums, about how my gender reading differs from ethnicity to ethnicity. I’m convinced African Americans often read me as a “woman” because, at least at a particular socio-economic level, there’s a precedent for variety. Really masculine women are not uncommon, nor are breasted, pony-tailed, soft men in my neighborhood, which is my sampling distribution. Indian people see me as male – again, I theorize it is because culturally they are accustomed to less hairy men. I also speculate that some people don’t really know what a white man looks like – much as I didn’t understand the culturally accepted variegations of the black male (and probably don’t). What I’m telling you is my brain is full of crazy, possibly racist, shit as it attempts to find sense in the subjective interpretations of others.

With The One I Love, however, I am fixed. If my gender is mutable for s/him, s/he doesn’t clue me in. But for me, mine and hers/his are time/space travel – we are everywhere, all the time. Which makes my gender like a Renaissance-theme restaurant. Which is decidedly NOT sexy.

What is sexy, all jousting aside, is any gender at all. Hot hot HOT. I love your boy’s treasure trail, your womanly thighs, your stubbled chin, your girl’s giggle. I adore your bodacious tatas (whether you take them on or off) and your swinging balls (whether or not they go back in a drawer); your hairy ass is perfection and your sweet shifty hips divine.

We create our own language, every time we make love, you and I. It’s a language only the well-versed in fluid can even hear, and you have to be in fluid to hear it.

So that’s where you’ll find me, this strange holiday season, me and mine. Not trapped like gas in a colored bulb, nor the hard sweetmeat of disappointing fruitcake (great name for a band, “disappointing fruitcake”) but liquid. Blissed the fuck out and dissolving in the light of trans-possibility. Here’s to a sweet shimmy shake of a season and to getting wet, wet, wet together. C’mon in Tranny, this water’s FINE.