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.
