Early Mornin' Singin' Song

Sometimes I feel like I’m slapping myself upside the face with my own shlong. I feel just as stupid and clueless as I imagine a man can feel, rendered ever more helpless by the overarching urge. I’m leaden like a paperweight in the head yet emboldened like a fire-dancer in the pants.

Ah, the effervescent yodel of testosterone in the groinal regions.

Immersed in the realm of the transgendered, is where I’ve been. Traveling to and fro, hither and yon, for coffees, dinners, group shares, cupcakes and board games, dates. We’re an often blurry gang of folk, being neither here nor there, yet clearly in a place of our own. The blur is that in this trans-space/time we create, non-trans people may be incapable of focusing on us. Even other trans-people may have to squint. Nonetheless, there we are, vibrating like a fantastic sexual Easter egg, pastel and perhaps sequined, for your delectation. Or not.

I don’t want to be part of a group. I never have. But I have found my own survival often depends on it; to stay in the center of the herd is to perhaps not be swung by the entrails by some larger, less friendly beast on the edges. Typically the less friendly beast is whatever dreary tune is top ten in my head. A fine example might be “Who Will Love Me in a Body Like That?”

Echoing my fears were the brave men, women, and beyond at the tranny Round Table last night. How bold, how chivalric, how generous to share aloud our fears of unlovability! Who will love me in a body like this? Who do I love?

There’s something so magnetic about that mantra, so compelling. It’s the Minotaur in the center of our labyrinth, waiting to flog us with our own purse, beat us with our European man-bag. Interesting that a minotaur should mock the body of another. I know I’ve wrung my own hands, watching with despair as I succumbed to the unpluckable charms of another straight girl, feeling doomed like Tantalus to stand in pool of water that recedes every time I kneel to drink. I wasn’t interested in straight girls until I got my T on, which is hilarious only because my last two partners were heterosexual.

So I’m listening to these humans, sorting out their fears and their desires, and I’m reminded that people are either into me or they’re not, and I have no control over that, AND, it’s unpredictable. Every time a straight woman’s “gone south” on me I’ve had that moment of terror: oh, here comes the gag, but it’s never happened. Whatever they had fallen for in me seemed to make all my parts palatable, if not downright delicious for them.

As for my own desire, I had this mix-tape jammed in the boombox, that it was girly women I had to have, femmy-femmes. I had begun to create this narrative about high-maintenance chicklets, and my penchant for them. I had donned the headphones of painful, if glittery, limitation.

You could practically feel it in the room last night, the collective and icy breath of a future alone, unloved, unloving. “I’m a man and I want to love men, but who will love me without a penis?” “I’m a man in a relationship with a lesbian who wants her lover back, wants her woman back.” “I’m a woman with a penis; what man will love this body?”

I had to unclench my own claws around ideas of what love should look like. Why this need to define, always, my desire, my focus? “I like femme women.” Oh, really?! Granted, most of my partners have been more “feminine” than me, and certainly femininity has fetishistic elements for me. It’s so exotic. I really don’t get it. Also, I love when a feminine person punches my masculine card. It’s a total hard-on.

But the truth is more delicious, more fluid. I climbed atop the conical Mt. Girl and turned to face it, spreading my arms and falling backwards. Down I fell, past Brazilian waxes and pedis, flying flash past plucked eyebrows and thongs, lacy undergarments and vast skin care regimes, flipping my head from side to side to see ass and thigh, tit and neck, smelling exotic smells, feeling overly soft well-scrubbed skin. Is this what I need for love to happen?

Thank the gods I land in the arms of another. This other is perhaps a boy, perhaps a girl, maybe even a man. I don’t get to know what love looks like. Peen or no peen, puss or not puss, the sweetness is in our relating, your finger on my pulse, my hand on your forehead. We know what each other’s temperature is: it’s HOT. I find myself, in this trans-place, open to another kind of experience entirely, one of a gender so kaleidoscopic, so acrobatic, I can only hang on for the ride. Once I limit myself to an idea of desire, I’ve fallen into the net again, and the ride is over, the big-top falls down. My desire is HUGE. It’s astronomical. Sir Isaac Newton will tell you it’s attracting everything, all the time, and it’s attracted to everything, all the time. I’m on some tranny ellipse, pulled towards your sun and I hope it’ll be scorching, scorching hot. I like that you’re wearing boxers, I like that you have breasts, I love your hairy ass, I’m hot for your estrogenically reduced dick, your hormonally enhanced clit. It’s you I love, and me you’re hot for. Me. Always and forever, in trans-time and space, amen.

Brothers, Sisters, Others, let's be Lovers.

I Call Shotgun!

I’ve been traveling deep, deep undersea, feasting on the marine snow of my old dead ideas. Marine snow, for you for whom cephalopods don’t fascinate, is the soft, downy flakes of detritus, composed of dead fish, fecal matter and plankton, that travel from the floaters atop down to the briny leagues. It can gather some girth by the time it hits the ocean floor. Me, I don’t let anything go to waste, especially not a good meal.

There’s this adolescent phenomenon, whereby youngsters tear down an institution and then rebuild it while trumpeting their ingenious originality. What I’m saying to you is that I forget, sometimes, that I didn’t invent transitioning, or that I have anything at all to offer to the larger world, regarding my own experience.

It’s humbling, to meet 17 year old transpeople who have waaaay more experience at this thing than I. I’ve discovered, in my dotage, that there’s a lot of stuff I know little about at all, boat-load of opinion aside.

When I came out as lesbonian, there actually weren’t many doing it my way, and so I did feel slightly original, if by “original” one means lonely and weird. In that, I was no groundbreaker. But there weren’t a ton of arty Patti Smith-style dykes, even in D.C. in 1978. We did manage to find each other, thank the gods (and who would they be? MC5?) but I do remember walking a gauntlet, in a women’s bar, of drunken flannel-wearers, who, to my newly-out 18 year old horror, groped my tuxedo pants-wearing legs and ass in a dykey approximation of a Pasolini film. It was the seventh circle of Hell. There was no-body who looked like me, no dyed-black, teased-up tresses and heavy eyeliner, no flat-soled soft boots, no chicken bones taped to their faux leopard jacket. Yet.

Those of us who were punk or New Wave queer found a place; we gravitated to each other with near desperation in clubs like 9:30, gouging our gay niche with Klaus Nomi, Bauhaus, Bush Tetras.

Now, here it is, 2009. I’ve lost my transgressive card, have you seen it? Last I looked it was the nineties and I used it to get too many facial piercings.

Trans? I got nothin. Show me something. You kids have been doing this shit for a while now. I got hip to the trans-thing sometime in the early new millennium. Women I knew started changing, first their names, their pronouns, then something else, ineluctable. It was the testosterone what done it.

In my forties now, I find myself kneeling at the feet of wiser, younger men and genderfucks. These guys, these people – they’re so fucking smart. They have a generosity of spirit, a compassion I never had. I was always too afraid, too scared you’d scope me out for who I really was, which was someone who was basically scared and afraid. Who knew? You can’t travel deep when you can’t catch your breath, you’re corseted by how you want to be seen, who you think you are. Transitioning is so good for me. I’m forced to disrobe, unbuckle, riiiip the Velcro and unstay the whale-bone so you can see my real gut in all its splendor. Diving’s easier then, too, naked and curious.

I guess I’m reminding myself not to reinvent a good wheel. I’m remembering to thank all my brothers, sisters, and whatevers for having paved this sweet golden trail. For me. There are so many helpmeets along the way. There’s a nearly unfathomable regression to puberty with hormones, so I know my kin will be kind when I mistake myself for a trail-blazer. I’ll probably break curfew, too, and embarrass my family in public. At least, I hope so.

What men and women and others have endured, to become themselves! I salute you; I’m in awe. And I want to thank the dudes who have connected with me, buoyed (boyed?) me in these occasionally choppy waters, dudes like Amrit, and Vegan BattleBot, Elliot and the rest of you guys. This shit is weird and hard. This shit is fantastic and transcendent. Only my boys (and I see us all, the boys under some tranny Fagin) know what I’m on about: the mood swings, the dysmorphia; the ecstasy of leaning into something new entirely; the sublime terror of same; the frustration, the tears, the insane sexual yank, in and of itself a new organ; the grief; the lost relationships; the deepening of old friendships; the family drama; the new wardrobe….

I’m going to borrow my mom’s station wagon and drive for miles, until the college radio station fades and I don’t even notice - I’m too deep in my desire, too tantalized by the road, smitten with the scenery, too captivated by your company. You can stretch out now, relax into the rhythm of asphalt and white lines, knock off your kicks, and hang your feet out the window. We’ve got nowhere to go but someplace amazing. Thanks for holding the map.

Fire, Walk With Me and While You're Here Could You Get Me Some Ice-Cream?

I just got off the phone with one of my fellow spirit-travelers, Kat Nas, who was preparing her fire-walking workshop in Long Island. She’s going to take a gang of New York men and women and show them how to break arrows in half by jamming them point-wise into their own necks. She’s very brave, that one. Kat and I used to do the S/m circuit in Manhattan; it’s what many of us stumbled into on our search for expansion into freedom and bliss. Now she workshops fire, and I stick myself with hormones. I jest, sort of; my freedom and bliss, my dive into sublime Consciousness continues organically, and my body is like a crystal in a kaleidoscope, rearranging into newer, sometimes just different, glorious calls of love to my creator.

I know, don’t gag. I really feel like that though, like I’m fractally imploding into Love…I’m typing this and I looked up at this Klee print I have and it started expanding and moving with my third eye. That’s just how it is for me. Shut the fuck up. Get your own print if you don’t believe me.

Two weeks ago, I was deeply concerned about the shape of my body. Dysmorphia plagued me. I was a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. These breasts, these thighs, this overall inclination to a certain, dare I say, Zaftig physiognomy? Oh this female fat threatened to smuffocate me, headlock me with larded thighs; I was half-nelsoned with swinging underarm ladyfat, choking on a mouthful of Secret, bitch-slapped by two mammoth teats. Could this really be my body? How could I possibly go on, much less leave my room, if this was the form I took?

This was a whole ‘nother level in self-loathing. Of course, dysmorphia is an American illness. How am I different from someone who has come to believe they cannot have love with their current nose, cannot find a job without a more substantive bosom, cannot go on one more day with this wretched body, this betrayer, this Thing – what did I ever do to deserve this Thing?!

Yes, arguably the transgendered host their own insidious breed of discomfort, and perhaps it is righteous even. But I’m old, and I want peace.

The fire-walker learns to transcend, not pain, but space/time. The universe will accommodate this, is what I’m told. The fire-walker, the one who rends arrows on her neck, is the one who has transmuted her terror into joy, who has shifted energetically into a state of willingness to meet some goal. This is my goal: to walk twenty feet on burning coals. This is my brain: how the fuck am I going to walk on fucking coals without scorching my fucking feets!? How am I going to be a Sam-man if I’m blanketed with delicious womanly lady-lumpage? How the fuckity fuck!???

Transmute the terror into joy.

Well that’s easy for you to say, Tranny, is what I believe you’ll be muttering. Let me tell you what happened, allow me to guide you on my coal-walk…

Chapter One: Whereupon our lad reaches for his whaling knife, to scrape the blubber from the mammal’s skin.

I had a thought. It looked like this: if I could control my food, if I could diet, if I could drop twenty pounds, I’d have NO TITS. Because it’s true; I wouldn’t. I’ve been skinny, and I can tell you empirically “I have no tits.” I would have no mams, and no hips. Easy peasey. When you’re on crystal meth!

Chapter Two: Our hapless hero is daunted by this Sisyphean task, and so regroups for a more...economical solution.

I realized, no matter what I did, how I “controlled” any bit of my body, there would always be something. I was never going to have peace with this Thing. That’s a stunning piece of information, that’s very useful. It means I need to make some peace, find a place of ease in this…me…this corporeal construct.

JL said to me “You’re on a journey. I used to think ‘when I lose this 10 pounds, when I get this job, when I have this money’ in some future I would be happy. But you’re where you’re at right now, and in this moment you can’t change that. Be happy for Sam! He’s changing, every day! Be sweet with this person!”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth. You can hear certain things from certain people. JL is one of them.

I’m standing on the coals but I don’t feel them now. I can’t make the world “see me for who I am” – when do we ever see one another for who we are, except by intimacy or by accident? I have to love this little Sam who is on this scary, wondrous journey, who likes the wind and the tumult yet wishes it weren’t so tempting to hide beneath the bed.

This body, it’s a body. It does wonderful things – it makes all kinds of pleasure, and noises which I like, and movements, although last week it threw up out of its butt. I love this body. If it loses weight, cool, that’s awesome. Two less things to worry about. Perhaps. If it doesn’t, I’m still me, still making toast of the soles of my dogs, watching and laughing aloud because there’s no meat sizzle, no blistering, and you’re still holding my hand, which means we’re both standing in the middle of a motherfucking fire, yo, and look, look what’s happening right now. We just alchemically transmuted pain into joy.

Faigelah Verklempt

You know, just when I begin to fall into the narcotic and compelling fantasy that it’s all about where there’s hair, and what makes a man, I’m jostled awake by the weirdly sweet, clotted cream voice of Antony. If you don’t know Antony, let me introduce you briefly. He’s a deep-visioned, deceptively gentle-voiced singer and performer who identifies as transgender. His work is hard to take…his sound can be challenging and he can, at first listen, read lyrically very dark. I’ve always stuck with him, though, since being introduced to him a few years ago – stuck it out through my discomfort and unease because his work is so transcendent.

His resonance, and what resonates most about this idea I call “transgender,” is this un-bittered place of violation; he sings from a waking dream of dancing motes in sunlight while being sexually abused. He speaks of transgendered children, and gay children too, as being those kids who were often found “dancing alone in the light.” He thinks of homosexuality and transgender as a gift.

It’s a very romantic notion and the cynic in me thinks it’s a delicious conceit – but there is some truth there too, for me anyway. I never felt a part of the rest of humanity, and I knew, I’ve always known it had something to do with my gender, my sexuality. It’s tempting to focus on the mechanics or the sexual aspects of the transgendered or gay but as Antony points out, this is reductive. It fails to reveal the true essence of the gender outlier, which is shamanic or alchemic.

The gay or transchild often lives in a place of beautiful magic. As we grow up, we think we are imaginative, that we developed “coping skills” of escape, of self-creation. Artists think this too. But what if that realm exists for all of us – what if we didn’t make up a “safe” place in our heads? What if we just went there?

I see us all, alone on wooden floorboards; all the children are outside playing raucous, bellicose even. We are dancing with a broom and all the things that are sparkling in this sunbeam. We are never alone: look at all our friends!

I was trespassed time after time after time. I know this is true for many gay and trans kids. This is the cauldron where this mettle is tested. I was trans, a true outlier, before I was ever touched, or made to do things I didn’t want to do, or lived in a kind of choked fear of my fellow first-graders and certain adults, day after day after day after day.

So we don’t retreat into this inner-world to hide, we expand inviolate into a dimension only some of us can travel, and I recognize you and you and you there. My whole family is a family of outliers. Weirdos, smarty-pants – never picked to be on the team, or only picked because we had developed tremendous ass-kicking skills and so were feared but not exactly liked. We find, by degrees, that these picked-on kids were sometimes portals, offered windows into other worlds, and that often they were sweetly eager to show us what they saw. I know I love sharing this place with you. It makes me feel connected.

There’s something about this culture that does want to take a trans-person and reduce us to titillating parts. Shit, we do that with everyone else, right? But if I’m incautious, if I’m not paying attention, I do it to myself. Sometimes the way I know to connect with you is to make myself a buffoon, a little less-than. Sometimes I just want to fit in, and what “fits” better than dick and pussy? And I’ll seek entertainment over epiphany many days – that’s why I’m more often listening to the usual indy pop than an artist like Antony. It is true you can only take so much.

The secret trick is to not get lost in that, not mistake artifice-for-art kind of thing. The artifice is make-up and passing; it’s the freakshow glamour of pregnant man or Amanda Lepore. That’s the E-Tranny Channel. Totally necessary, useful in its way. But at the end of our program what shall we have learned? Some of us break through Maury and become healers. RuPaul did it. Boy George not so much. The judges are still out on Thomas Beattie. Who do I want to be when I grow up?

The fruits rot when they ripen too long in front of a mirror. The temptation to narcissism is superb. That’s why flamboyant men and women get stuck; they forget all that peacock was supposed to be a spacesuit to another dimension, and fell asleep into a dream of a large showy bird.

I am not a man and I have only ever been a woman for minutes, and those are suspect. I think I’ve only ever been a woman as a sexual kink, a perv trip, kind of like I’ve been a horse and a gay man and a cop, depending on what you needed at the time. I really am something else entirely, or some midpoint, some gender chimera. I think I’ll spend less time worrying about the kind of man I’ll be, or what it means to be a man, or how I should act or dress or piss or smell, how I should swagger or cut a fart, how I should garden or tie my shoes or vote. I got into this meshugass to wake my damn self up, not to trip over the garden-hose of my own dick. Oh, I wish, don’t I!?

Let’s make a list of the gay people, the possibly trans-people we know, we grew up around, who changed our way of seeing things. Let’s test this thing, let’s see where it goes. I’ll start with my best friend in high-school, who taught me about Iggy and Lou, whom I “dated” and to whom I said “you know, when I put my hands down here, this is not what I expect to find.”

Now WORK.

The Things She Does to Please

I keep remembering the weekend I spent shooting dope with Nico. Even 200+ pounds, with every last bit of health having long fled the pogrom of her junky mouth, leaving only corpse teeth and rotting stumps, Nico was still about eight feet of striking Teutonic Presence. Those cheekbones and that voice, almost sepulchral – both those bones and that voice would seize in your chest, catch you up like a sudden temperature drop.

Her caftan kept catching on her track mark scabs, which looked to me like sutures, stitched and black, and she kept a constant Budweiser in her enormous German paw. I found it baffling, upsetting even, that she would drink such a shitty American beer. I only drank Molsen at the time, typically purloined from whatever bar we were performing at. One can afford snobbery when one is a thief.

We were doing a Velvet Underground cover-band that night, opening for Nico. I “played” her, and sang “I’ll be your mirror” in sheer panic as my idol appeared to listen, with majestic tilt to her entire body. Afterwards she drawled “I haaate that song” to my apologetic (apoplectic) genuflection.

Several years before this zenith in my junked out rock-n-roll debacle, I had decided to at least physically emulate a Factory-era Nico. I loved the VU, but more specifically I was in awe of the boys in my life, all of who loved VU. At eighteen I’d cropped my unkempt seventies, no-frills, parted-down-the-middle hippie hair into sixties long, sharp bangs. I’d considered doing the whole white lipstick, white boots schtick; I couldn’t have come up with this on my own. At the urging of my boy friends I imagined morphing into this iconic, nearly abstract, monolith of all things powerful and female, German mystery, a ship’s prow, the seduction of Jim Morrison, Alain Delon, a nearly pedophilic relationship with a baby Jackson Browne. When it came to totemic femininity I had less than nothing, and so was eager to sell myself out to the wet dreams of (other) young men, men who evidently thought I could do a reasonable Nico.

But at the end of the day, I resented being told I looked like her, or like Chrissie Hynde whom I was now beginning to resemble with my black hair and bangs and excessive eyeliner. Truly I think I more closely resembled Robert Smith, but no-one said that to my face.

I cast about, sometimes frantically for a moment at least, for some model, some woman I might be. (My mother was about the least feminine woman I knew, occasionally needing Father’s aide to dress herself – she had an unfortunate predilection for vivid pinks and bright oranges.) My girlfriends seemed to have some birthright access to a sense of feminine style – even if it was androgynous they would rock that like Annie Lennox. There were hairstyles and skin care, boots and blouses; there was foundation and blush and powder and brow-liners, marching and replicating like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and there I was like Mickey, turning and double-taking and dropping things and tripping and falling, terrified I would get caught, be found out. Femininity was like an episode of Fear Factor, whereupon I was forced to endure powders and unguents, busy well-intentioned workwoman hands with sponges and brushes clogging every pore, blanketing my skin, my being, until I was choking, choking…

I managed. I found my niche. The eighties were a wonderful place to roam the labyrinth of Maybelline – makeup could be extreme, Kabuki, and men were wearing it too. You find your way, you make your peace, although when you’re a big dyke, gay men and pretty women feel obliged, eager even, to corner you into a makeover.

Like Nico, I eventually found my way to methadone. Unlike Nico, this enabled me to survive ten more years until I could start to find recovery. She died, I believe, after riding her bike on a beach, her body ill-equipped after years of destruction, to handle her new-found lust for life.

I’m lucky I got to be raised a woman, even though I feel like Mowgli in “The Jungle Book” sometimes: having learned the harsh and beautiful ways and laws of the natural world I now must walk amongst “civilized” men with little idea how to do so.

Having often felt I was doing a piss-poor job of being a woman, I now of course fear the same as a man. But this just makes me human, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not your expression of gender that you “fail” at – maybe it’s being a parent, or a friend, or someone your age. These constructs are all just ideas – they’re not even real, and yet they sometimes trap me like that paralytic moment between dreams and awakening, where I panic because I can’t raise my eyelid and things are encroaching in the shadowy periphery, sleep threatening to gulp me down again.

But we will wake up; we always do right?

Ne Plus Ultra Pants

Evidently none of those people I met in 12 step meetings are real alcoholics because none of them admit to having acquired the Herpes. I know I’m not the only person who made “poor partner choices” on alcohol. Having the Herp on your new man-dingle is about the most fabulous thing ever. I mean, there’s just more real estate to share the love virus, more shingle for the shack as it were. Just awesome.

I’m bitching about it because, like many a small pain, it is dominating my man-scape just now. I recalled my friend’s commentary on the whininess of men-who-used-to-be-women and held it up against my own experience. I’m whining, but I daresay I’m not a Whiner. And I will add: the whiniest people I know are born-men.

Several come to mind, two of whom I absolutely adore. There’s a flavor of man, a subset, that we’re all familiar with. They’re typically very sensitive. They’re the tooth in your mouth you try not to get coffee or ice-cream on. They’re broody; often things aren’t going well for them, things you and I can’t find flaw with. The men I’m thinking of are generally strong men with decently dark senses of humor – they’re not identifiable off the bat as Big Babies. But they will bitch about a thing ad nauseam. Because they’re, well, Big Babies.

It must work for them. I envision their fathers having been the same, or their mothers paying especial attention to every boo-boo, every sting, every time the world flagrantly disregarded the comfort of their little prince. In my house I got pats for being stoic. This is me, every knee and elbow gory as a Mathew Brady Civil War document from some implausibly fanstatic seven-bike pileup – no helmet mind you, it’s the 70’s - looking up at my mother for solace, succor, with an absolute poker face: “What a brave little soldier you are! Not a peep out of you!” I don’t think I cried for 27 years.

I don’t know women who whine, or more accurately, I don’t seem to hang out with any. The women in my life are tough. They’re like the type of lawn bag you want when you’re cleaning out your garage, and getting rid of broken glass, nails, and a random carcass, not that thin shit-sack you’re kicking yourself for buying because it “saved you” three dollars and now every piece of crap is on your floor, having burst through the herniated membrane of $1.99 polypropelene. My girl-peeps are QUALITY. SHTRONG. HEFTY even. They’ll bitch and moan, but – and here’s the critical difference – they never seem to take themselves seriously. My “men who whine?” Oh, it’s very serious. That little drop of black ink finds its way into their reservoir, coloring and tainting every life-sustaining molecule, graying the pond, darkening their brow. Of course, there’s a whole culture to support this, you know, starting with Romeo, to James Dean, and I’m sure at least one of the Jonas Brothers is moody.

What I’m really thinking about is that it has been about a year now since I decided to go all man stylie, man-in-the-pants. I had been hanging around this skirt, this tomato – okay, she was my girlfriend – and it was pretty evident that, at least in my mind, we were having a heterosexual relationship. I think it was the “ghost penis” phantom limb phenomenon that got me. The transvestitism, my chivalry, fetish for male accouterment, my love of the ladies, even the anxiety sweats and tremors when forced to shop in the “women’s” section of Target could be symptomatic of garden-variety sapphistry, but when you’re pretty sure there ought to be something there that aint, and when it frustrates you to near hair-tearing madness that the thing you feel down there isn’t actually there?….well, you might be trans.

I dreamt of surgery this morning, and it was wonderful. The surgery was unspecified, but upon awakening I knew it was about my breasts because in my dream I was so very happy. I wasn’t fearful, I was excited.

My friend Mxliwizt (alias) emailed me his chest doctor’s website. There were before and after pictures of my friend’s chesticles. Seeing pictures of boobs on this guy made me feel like my brains were sucking my skull like a supernova gone black hole. It made me feel like I do sometimes when I see me. It’s one thing to have a tiny dick, but it’s quite another to have these random fat sacks swinging from your ribs. The dick part I’m okay with; I’ve had a good run with the vadge, and testosterone has made me feel insouciant enough in those parts to compensate for a certain je ne sais quoi a more Jurassic member might give one.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a woman who wants to stay a woman - imagine unzipping those jeans, you know the ones that make your friends jealous, envision ziiiiip, spreading that vee of zipper, pulling the elastic of the fantastically cute Craftmafia undies you bought off Bust.com and lo and I do mean lo and behold, there hangs a nutsack.

I’m just saying.

This is not me whining, by the way.This is a manly kvetch. This is insightful stuff, right here. This is your friend Sam, reporting from the depths of his tranny pants.*

*what Jessica and Ed's two year old son Gus calls his training pants.

I Love Your Liver; I Adore Your Pancreas

Jessica told me about riding in an elevator in Chicago with performance artist Orlan, back in her (Jessica’s) art-student days. Orlan’s hair was white and black, parted centrally, and at that time she was freshly sporting cheek implants on her forehead from experimenting with images of femininity and deformity.

I haven’t shaken that vision from my quirk-loving brains yet; it’s like an eternally long bright light after having been flashed by a camera. There’s something in the juxtaposition of the daily routine with the passing strange. Take your most mundane ritual – brushing your teeth perhaps – and put a monkey in it. Not just a monkey, but suddenly monkey! where none had ever been nor was expected. Make it a surgically altered monkey, while you’re at it – not that Orlan is a monkey; I think she’s quite remarkable and disturbing and I like to be disturbed by artists.*

It makes me wonder if any artists have changed their gender as performance. I don’t mean someone who’s trans: I mean someone who is not trans and is transitioning as performance, as art. If I can think a thing, and get my monkey to type it, then someone’s doing it.

If I was doing this transition 10 years ago, I’d be turning it into performance, because that’s what I did with everything. You are so lucky I’m compelled merely to write about shit now. Most of us artists who get sober at mid-life have to go through a delayed and extravagant adolescence, with all the self-absorption and fascination and acting out that involves, and none of the carefully constructed boundaries and gravitas one would think a middle-aged person might have acquired. My adult-onset immaturity stood out like the implants on Orlan’s face, only I didn’t really have a point to make: I just wanted some attention.

My friend Cole, in his beautifully articulated sketch for his play on the Trans-genre cd “Transfusions,” (SHAMELESS PLUG: I’m on it. Win yourself a free one. Check out the site on side here!), has his character sing “it sucks to be trans.”

Does it suck to be trans? Is it lonely to be trans?

Because that was the most poignant thing, to me, about that elevator scene. I saw this self-made freak, albeit a very very famous one, in her exaggerated monochrome, the hair, the multiple surgeries to craft her face into this or that iconographic moment of some equally iconographic painting, and I thought, “I wonder if Orlan feels lonely?”

Maybe not; the most unique personalities can be adept at drawing people to them, regardless of their looks or disturbing physicality. So who knows. Same with trans, I tell myself; confidence goes a loooong way here, Buddy.

I was having lunch with a transguy pal I met on a local listserve; we were talking about the occasionally whiney tone of some of the posts we read. “We’ve all been aculturized as women,” he notes, “and so are inclined to whine as men,” with only a soupcon of misogyny. A smidge. There’s a loneliness the freakshow tends to want to embrace, to isolate him/herself from the rest of yas. This gives us the option to say “this is why nobody likes me and the world is hard and I am lonely.” I have the Human Condition and I am doing it as performance for you.

Because that’s the performance, isn’t it? The Human Condition? Isn’t the subtext of body modification/performance, transitioning genders our way as a society in toto to use the artist, the tranny, as a human highlighter, to emphasize or alert ourselves to our commitment to things that ultimately will suffocate us? To elevate us to an understanding of the constrictions we clamp on our little human hearts by forcing ourselves to see this and only this as that and only that, you man, me woman, sickening pathologies bred from what was once the corset or girdle and is now liposuction? Lift me and suck me and stuff me with saline, or collagen; batten me with botox and dermabrade me so raw and sweet because I am nothing, nothing without outside approval and approbation. Which is the utter, ultimate loneliness: to be defined by everyone else.

The transitioning person’s loneliness is in reverse: we begin by being defined by everyone else. You told me I was a girl, and I didn’t believe you, at first; I suspected you were fooling me – particularly as those who didn’t know me thought I was a little boy.

Commitment to gender was killing me. For me it was slow and protracted, the way an upper-class Victorian woman’s identity as merely her husband’s wife might have choked her, like a creeper vine. I probably would’ve died of something else entirely, but upon autopsy my body would be found to be rotten with inarticulated longing.

It feels like Spring in here now. I hope I’m always trans. I hope I have the courage to keep challenging gender normativity. I pray transitioning means a deepening connection with who I really am, not male, not female, not even Sam, which are all mostly just ideas, albeit really sexy ones.

I stood behind the counter at Studio Supply, hawking tubes of paint, and in my mind I had a full, lumberjack beard and a handsomely flat chest. I was completely nonplussed as the customer kept referring to me as “she” and “her” – I almost left my body there for a second in bewilderment. But I didn’t love her any less for it, and I never felt alone.

*whereas I actually would not care to be disturbed by a monkey. I’m not a fan of the monkey, or more precisely, I’m not a fan of the human/monkey relationship. Putting diapers and a tie on a primate and making it polish the family silver is just wrong.