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.

The Perfect Storm

I think it may be time to embrace the next wave of feminism. “Do we actually need another wave,” ponders D, “or have we evolved past the need?”

We need another wave. Feminism has absorbed most of its tail and is hopping towards a verdant central isle but we’re still just frogs, really, aren’t we.

4^th Wave feminism is distinctly trans. I think when we no longer need gender identification at all we can thank the waves that washed us and our tender, rubbery limbs ashore, but until that time let’s surf this together, shall we?

Even I find myself, on occasion, thinking “just pick a motherfucking pronoun, will you!?” at my friends who refute this generic convention. I’m confused and that makes me feel small and small makes me act, well, incomprehensibly angry. Good, noted. So I engage my adult and tell myself: “Self” I say, “Self, your non-pronouned friend’s not responsible for how you’re feeling right now. You like to be clearly right and anything less than that is sort of challenging for you. Where you are clearly right is in your support for another human being’s desire to be whomever they chose.” And then I pat myself on the head for being such an evolved human and practice using that friend’s first name in place of a pronoun.

It gets cumbersome. I wish we could default to one sex. I don’t care which. In my head I call nearly everyone “he” because I’ve gotten accustomed to switching it for myself. So basically, in my head, you’re transitioning too.

Back to 4^th Wave Feminism. The 4^th wave is not generational. I was born in 1960, and was steeped the womyn-cast cauldron of 2^nd Wave witchery; my first science-fair exhibition was a planet being explored by “all-women astronauts.” In space, no-one can feel the glass ceiling. I’ve absorbed the lessons of those important decades, and then sat at the feet of my younger, knitting sisters of the 3^rd wave, gleaning wisdom from them as we needle-pointed Nico on a pillowcase while bending over our boyfriends. Even we codgers can move to the next phase, the dance floor where boi and grrl merge in a beautiful disco kaleidoscope, becoming something whose meaning resists translation, is so inscrutable it defies category, but whose moves, whether spastic or elastic generate the warmest rays of light.

Activists need to be Sagittarian by nature, always looking to hoof it, ready to trot to the next, better place. The dance hall beckons.

This new place requires a regular scan. Like the 70’s exhorted self breast-exams, 2010 urges intolerance appraisals. I am constantly mortified by what old, bad ideas have managed to creep back into my cupboard, or worse – prejudice gets like sugar ants in the kitchen: they find a miniscule leaving from a disgusted fruit and there’s a swarm. All of the sudden it’s okay for me to talk smack about fat people, or fags, and the next thing I know I’m having to Hazmat the entire storeroom.

3^rd Wave feminism expanded the landscape, embraced kink, scraped off the mold of dogma, and explained how someone could dress like a little girl in public, be a Daddy in bed, and still be a feminist. Like the 3^rd Wave adopted Betty Page, 4th Wave looks at the Daddy/little girl construct with hot nostalgia. We don’t discard - we use everything because we’re green like that. I’ll bust out my Daddy when appropriate, but my sexual gender is a mutant cephalopod, has more limbs than Kali-ma, and they all want to embrace and caress and beat you into a delicate froth of submission.

Transpeople are either mutants or the next evolutionary stage: either way it looks like it’s gonna be great TV. We best pay attention now and not tivo for later. Trans is here to blow the lid off, off the Tupperware container of marriage of any flavor, off the top of our sex-toy chest, off our insistence on four able limbs and two well-spaced eyes; it’s messing with our dick AND our pussy, the most mistaken-for-sacred idols the world has ever known, so if we’re scared, it is totally okay. We should be. I’m scared, and I have no idea what to wear to this shindig.

What I will do, however, is don some Capezios (the eighties ARE BACK, shut the hell up) and moonwalk (badly) out on the floor. You will slide out beside me, and take me for a dip and a spin. Then we’ll all open-eye meditate with each other and watch with delight as our upper lips grow moustaches, then split open and reveal full Marilyn mouths, pursed and sibilant, expressing a divine juice from a beyond-yonic mango in our foreheads, dripping down, coming on our eyelids, noses and cheeks, all good nourishment in preparation for what’s coming.

And what’s coming is something only you and I can create – so let’s make it with mercy, and compassion, and kindness, and beauty, and love. We’re all of us going to need it.

El Diablo Está En Mi Bigote del Fuego

It was a festive weekend of folderol and faggotry. I traveled with my nancyboy and the Cuntry Kings of Durham, NC to the great, unrelentingly hot, city of Austin to watch them perform their glittery magic at Freakshow-a-Go-Go.

The sum of the gender presentations there was greater than their holes. There were versions of humanity I hadn’t known existed before, beta-versions of neo-tranny perhaps, untried until that night but there for your assimilation, should you be so inclined. Only in a Dot Com city like Austin would the people trot out some just-constructed transware for the delectation of the masses. Be careful what you download, Friend, you may find your commitment to some aspect of yourself blurring or disappearing entirely.

I joined up with my friend Archer, a super hot gay man with a queer spirituality and sensibility, to watch the burlesque of tap-dancing, cat-identified, klezmer-benders. We’re the same age, meaning: twice everyone else’s, and had the same sense of our gay corset being unlaced. “The kids are bringing the next thing,” he observed, “and it’s beautiful to watch.” We talked about the spiritual evolution of trans, how we’re not really “male” or “female” spiritually, and these kids know it. Or at least, they embody (literally) this evolution intuitively.

Archer and I were in a “spiritual community” (or The Cult, as I called it, to watch the elders panic) together, and we were shown the truth of this, that there is no gender in greater consciousness. What I call “God” doesn’t have a body, much less a gender, and neither do you, Mamsirmam. The kids are breaking it down, but as Arch and I noted, the rest of the world feels slooooow on the uptake. If we would stop slamming triple lattes and chicken fingers for a second and breathe, we might discover the new taste in town is trans and it’s already in our mouths.*

At some tender point in the evening, Arch looked at me plaintively and asked “would a transguy be interested in a guy like me?” No matter who we are, or what’s in our pants or head, we’re sure we’re no-one will like us. He loves the t-guys. I had to be an asshole and bait him: “How would you feel about being with a man with no dick?” – because I wonder myself, laboring under the prejudice that all gay men are dick-identified and cock-centric, but he doesn’t disappoint. He walks the talk, and will take pussy with the cock – as he pointed out, this body is just a dream anyway.

He went further and asked me if I’d be in a relationship with a non-trans guy. My knee-jerk is “of course!” because that’s my Sagittarian party line: commit to everything and everything is possible. He’s my kind of gay - rugged, whiskered, un-edited. My aversion to the gay male is that too-tidy, tip-toed presentation, the uber-manicured, depilated, skin peel gay. Maybe this is because I can’t even approach tidy myself, I don’t even have baseline tidy. I am physiologically incapable of keeping a neat appearance; my shirttail will untuck, my soup will slop, my tie will skew, and my hair will awry. Thus it has always been. Neat and pressed is not a look I admire in others either, so good for me.

But a rough, rugged, dirty man? Hells yes! I think that a relationship with a man might be achievable, if I’m more of a man myself. I’ve always liked sexy-times with the mens but the off-screen power imbalance was more than I could stand, and so a relationship was out of the question. The implied superiority of the male does not elicit a hardon for me, and if you’re thinking “what ‘implied superiority’?” about your own relationship with your guy, then you are not paying attention. But if I am a guy, maybe parity is possible; therefore maybe love would be too.

So keep on taking us higher, Children of the Corndog. You, with your Heidi wig and your soft-packer poking askew from directly below your belly where it should not be, I bid you take me by my hand to this begendered Eden where you, and your second-bedroom-now-walk-in-closet, reside. Let us recline together like Cats on Broadway in a softly warming sun, and stretch like snakes in springtime and burst our skins. Crinolines and neckties will spill out of these rents, like entrails from a hope chest, only we don’t need hope, see, we have it, and it’s wearing your mom’s vintage cocktail dress and your daddy’s suspenders. If you were blind, and you felt it, your description would vary to a man. But everyone who feels it and describes it can say emphatically “that’s mine.”


*for some of us, trans is exactly what’s stuffed in our delighted mouths right now. Lucky us.

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.

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?

Sworn Enemy of the Smurf!

The problem with transitioning, and depending on who you are it can be a big one, is that at the end of the day you’re you.

I am always, ever, snorting surf against the riptide of my own personality.

Par example: Last night I was with a semi-organized gang of homos in a meeting of same. We convene in what I imagine a Rotary or Lion’s Club might meet in, a high-ceilinged outlier building, possibly made of cinder blocks, with an enormous central fireplace adorned with a crest, naturalmente, because it can. The meeting is chock-a-block with ritual, Robert’s Rules kind of things; nonetheless, because it is an unwieldy gang of gays, there are little “extras” thrown in, asides and gang-chanted rejoinders. Because we can.

As we adjourn, and members push outside to fill the glorious near-Spring dusk air with smoke, I overhear a guy spit out, “I’m just not gay enough for all that!”

I’m intrigued, so of course I cup my ear and lean in.

Dude is really angry about all the furbelows and frills that come with our group, the commentary and chants. “I’m not gay enough for this shit!” He’s really angry, sucking his fag hard, pacing like a tiny lion. He’s saying that the gayness of the group pisses him off. What’s really hilarious and touching and heartbreaking about this particular tableau is Dude is possibly the nelliest queen of the bunch. He actually IS gay enough.

Now, I’ve been body-slammed by another human kind enough to show me my internalized homophobia. Queeny, angry Dude? C’est moi. The world is a gentle place this night, and thus he is allowed to rant, suck and rant. Perhaps his awakening will come later, some other sweet eve; it will, eventually and it will sting.

I’ve been hanging out with a lot of transpeople recently. It’s time. It’s the best thing for what ails me, which is basically terror. I couldn’t even really put a finger on exactly what’s so terrifying, but I can share with you a protracted history of judgements and harsh asides muttered by me about people and whatever it is they’re doing that irks me. To this very day I have a knee-jerk revulsion for a certain breed of butch. Now it’s quickly followed by an acknowledgment of my homophobia, my fear of my own female masculinity, but for years, and by years I mean YEARS, I was just another dyke h8er.

Hanging out with a bunch of trannies is a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s like being in soft, snuggy blanket printed with spaceships and cowboys with a gang of sweet children, and other times it’s like being in the center of said blanket, while the mob from Lord of the Flies throws you up in the air with it as they consider whether or not they will catch you, and if they do, how to best disembowel and cannibalize.

It’s comforting to be with dudes in various stages of whatever, who want to share, are eager to discourse about this or that. To see the gendered spectrum, its nuances and delicious complexities, loud and proud, a rainbow with a swagger, is to rejoin the human race in a spectacular way. The flip is in fears and agendas writ bold in our speech and dress. Guys have often created or acquired rules about transitioning, how it should look, what needs to happen. Other dudes look really good, and one cannot help but hold oneself weakly against their flaming masculinity without feeling at least slightly singed. As with any social group, to be there productively means submitting to some discomfort, as my failings are highlighted by the success of others, while allowing myself to be elevated by the energetic, enthusiastic bonhomie of my peers.

I want to cradle some men in my arms. They are suffocating in a cave of their own design, one in which they might have explored as a small boy, that initially offered sanctuary, a pile of comic books, Playboys, some candles and milk cartons and maybe even a sleeping bag and flashlight. Somehow this place of supreme joy and haven has become solitary confinement, and now these boys have so many rules no-one else is allowed in. One “must” pack to be a good transguy; one must have short, masculine hair, a manly job; one mustn’t be a fag; one must never ever no never let one’s guard down lest one be “read” as less than a man even ‘though most of the world can’t even access scrutiny so detailed as to have clue one how to identify a transperson. Sweet brother, you have fallen prey to the Gargamel of Masculine Social Construct and his Sorcery of Shame. God bless you Beautiful Boy; someday our love will penetrate your cave and you will be compelled to exit, led by your nose to the smell of our delectable cupcakes, the transperson’s dessert of choice.

On a rough day I’m destroyed by the overarching presence of my breasts; I’m ashamed of my soft hairlessness, my dykiness. But other days, and these are more frequent, I see myself in that multihued dimension, a facet of an infinite crystal that is expanding exponentially even as we speak. And while I can revel in my deepening voice, my thickening torso, the added muscularity, the presence of other transpeople is humbling. Our sincerity and commitment in the face of mordant demons, external and within, is nothing short of transcendent. And so, my brothers, friends, and even my enemies: I bow, deeply, to you. You remind me to stay “right-sized” and present for the ride of a lifetime. You remind me who I am: Tha Man Sam.

Pickin' the Pear of the Big Pawpaw

I had trannyguy coffee with some of my elders yesterday. It’s remarkable to me how willing guys are, even guys who are “stealth*,” to share their experience, create a tribe. It does, on the other hand, seem like a manly thing to do: give a brother a leg up. I caught a ride with my friend and ringmaster M, a charismatic, bearded, hairy guy about my age, with the little potbelly most of us have by our 40s. I always search for the dyke in these guys, and in M I see it most tellingly in his eyes, which are deeply communicative, darkly lashed, and always seem to be sharing an in-joke. Women must have been, and probably still are, captivated by those eyes.

As we pull into the parking lot, M points out this beefy, hairy**, topless dude, puffing away in the sweltering Carolina sun on a bicycle. “That’s C” he says triumphantly, flashing those eyes. He knows I’m going to be blown away by the sight of this dude, who will be joining our trannyfest. C is a big bearded bear of a man. It never ceases to amaze me, to behold the transman who’s been on T for more than a couple years. You just would never know they’d been born women. Even the more delicately boned, lithe ones, like my friend Cole, emit some strong male spoor, some inexplicable energy, almost an odor, that surrounds them like dust motes in the sun when you smack a pillow.

Their transitions differ tremendously, C having transitioned in the deep South in 1990, and M on the eastern seaboard in the last several years. Their differences also speak to the nearly unnerving cultural awareness brought about by the internet and the pregnant guy. Listening to them rib and engage one another I feel like Mowgli in the Jungle Book, seated across from Bagheera and Baloo. Sometimes it’s Disney Jungle Book, like when C talks about how he had no male vocabulary, wasn’t assimilated that way: “I’as talkin’ ‘bout some woman, and these guys were like ‘did she have big breasts?’ and I shrugged and said 'I guess so, yup' and they were like ‘did you titty-fuck’er?!’ and I was like ‘what!?’ I had NO IDEA what they were talkin’bout!”

M and I nod sagely; we both know what “titty fuck” means. M proffers this profound wisdom: “when men ask you if you’ve done something, just say ‘yes!’” But the point being, most of us, as women, did not experience these kinds of conversations with one another.

But sometimes the conversation feels more Kipling, more darkly, terrifyingly jungle, like when C talks about working with people who are blatantly homophobic, right here, right now, who are hard-core rednecks vested in UNC; who, if they found out who and what he really is, might actually kill him. Certainly they would harm him. I’m moved that this guy, who feels his life and livelihood is on the line, would meet with someone like me out in public, who looks like a tattooed, butch dyke - which is threatening to people in its own way - to share his experience, strength and hope. That’s a beautiful man, right there.

There was a passing exchange between my new mentors about who was voting for whom, with a little eyeball volley that stated, Eastwood fashion, “we are not getting into this, Brother, and by the way, you are WRONG.” Later M and I process this. It blows our minds that C is Republican. We think of other things: it blows our minds that a transman can be a bigot. “Where does your compassion for ‘the other’ go!?” But C, I point out, had been amazed to learn there were gay transmen. Man on transman ak-shawn. So we each have our ideas about what a transguy ought to believe, how he should behave in the world.

Later I find myself, as I am wont to do around men, talking shite about the womenfolk. “They’re freakin landmines, Dude! I spend half my time with women thinking ‘what did I just say!’ because somehow now we’re in a fight.”

As M busts me for misogyny, I abashedly recall that the common denominator in all my relationships is me. It’s me that donned my big ol’ clown shoes to go stomping about the mine-laden front yards of people I knew to be deeply insecure and highly sensitive. With the male v.s. female thing, I fall prey, again and again, to my own deep insecurities which I then mask in patently stupid ideas about men and women and how they all (mis)behave.

I’ve been having this reoccurring thought, that if I had been born a boy, or had transitioned earlier, I might not have had to get tattooed. All I have ever been doing is trying to claim this thing, this form, as mine. What it looks like, how masculine, how feminine, how hairy, is out of my hands. I just want, like every other mook on the orb, to feel comfortable in my own skin. And, of course, look fucking FINE doing it.

*passing as a guy, not being out as trans.

** much discussion of body hair would ensue. C scrutinizes my forearms and says “so you shave your arm hair?” The men in my family have like 6 chest hairs, total. We’re seals. C hastened to reassure me that I could end up as hairy as my two new brothers in a year’s time. I’m really okay with not being quite so hirsute, if it means I keep my head hair.

I am deeply indebted to M, and to C, to Cole, to all the men in my life. You want to bust up your sick ideas about men, try transitioning. There are amazing men out there, everywhere.

Unce, Tice, Tee Times a Mady

Being on testosterone is like having a V-8 engine in a V-6 frame. I feel like I’m revving at higher speeds, which, being as it boosts metabolism, I guess I am. This has the unfortunate effect of boosting my already jacked-up levels of stress and anxiety. Here’s the dramatic backstory:

In January 2008 I decide to clamber into the diving bell and drop deep into my wakening consciousness. Reports from the depths indicated that this human might actually be male. I decide to investigate these reports with characteristic zeal and curiosity. These traits almost always impel me into waters I will have heretofore found murky, impenetrable, even terrifying.

I dive into this “I think I might be a man-thing.” Meantime, I’d made the decision, as an older lady, to go to college. I mean 47 aint even MILF-land anymore. It’s post-MILF. (Hey, I could’ve been a mother! Fine, I wasn’t even near that country; you get my picture, smartass.) I’m old and in frickin Community College, which frankly is also not a tad terrifying for me.

I’m starting full-time college, when the woman I’m pretty sure I want to spend the rest of my days with leaves me. Now, in her defense* her departure probably had nothing to do with my decision to go all trans-nova and such. But when one has committed to profound life changes with the implicit trust that one is supported by one’s partner…well shit. We’ve all been there – made the decision to go ftm and had our loved one dump us.

Anyhoo, so that’s happening. I’m literally waking up every morning thinking I’m going to have a heart attack and crying – nay, sobbing – at every mealtime, and this is before I start injecting the T. Fortunately, I’ve begun to connect with other transguys, and cling to them in what have become extremely choppy waters. I don’t know that I’ve met one guy who was in a relationship that wasn’t dumped when they decided to be themselves. I know that’s not unilaterally true – it’s just that the Universe put men in my life that I could relate to and draw strength from. The Universe is cool like that.

I begin gender therapy. It’s required: you must do 12 sessions of therapy in order to get your man papers** so you can get your hormones. In April my closest friend dies. In May my other dear friend gets gravely ill and I travel to be at what might be his death bed. I am fuckity fuck fucked UP.***

Buried beneath these successive heartbreaks, I’m also freaking out about becoming a man. I’m not sure I want to do this thing. Two months after being on T, I’m waking up going “what the fuck am I DOING!? I WANT TO BE A WOMAN!” This is unsettling.

In this place, I am completely alone. I meet people who are sympathetic, but no one is put in my path who has had this experience. I am praying for guidance, for clear signage, a billboard maybe with David Beckham and his enormous package on it (although how would I interpret that – I want to be him, or I want to do him?). “Please God, I’ll do whatever the fuck you want, you know I will – just fucking tell me if you want me to be a man or a woman!” That, by the way, is a typical and fairly effective prayer, should you need it.

I’m confused. I’m grieving the loss of my (me) woman, but it’s complicated by all these other transitions, passages. I think I might just die myself. I think I might just wake up dead one morning.

My therapist tells me that for me, being a woman is like staying in a bad relationship. You have a couple good days and you fall prey to the comforting delusion that it aint so bad, after all.

Going somewhere else, liberation, is too frightening. I’m clinging to the rock I know, even as it’s become increasingly slippery with seaweeds and goopy creatures, which as a guy you think I’d find interesting and indeed I do, but it’s time to loosen the grip. The water is actually fine now.

Jesus I’m scared. She tells me I should say these affirmations, that I am “a strong and courageous man.” She tells me to say them in first, second and third person. I wince; my personality balks at well, this kind of crap. But I do it. It’s a testament to just how miserable I was that I will say what I now call my Manfirmations. And by golly, something shifts. Within days of repeating my Man-tra, it occurs to me to create a checklist for when I’m doubting my transition, which looks like this:

Do you feel as though you have man stuff hanging twixt your fleshy thighs? Strangely, yes!

In your mind’s eye what does your body look like? Kind of…manly, actually!

Did you or did you not say that being a woman is “something you finally figured out how to do” like it’s a shtick? Aye, that I did!

Do you think real women have these thoughts, about their intrinsic gender, their body image? Nay, it’s unlikely Laddie, unlikely!

And there you have it, in a nut sack.

*and I did defend, sometimes! There’s this interesting phenomenon: when you’re heartbroken and devastated, sensitive people intuit that it’s ripe time to tell you how they really feel about your ex. I'm quite sure she received her share of "well meaning consolation." Bless us.

**this is a letter from your counselor saying that you meet the qualifications of “gender identity disorder,” that you’re – beyond being a big ol’ trannyman – of sound man-mind if girl-body. I was calling my letter my “man visa” in the hopes I could get it stamped at titty bars and NASCAR.

***Those friends that DIDN'T DIE are the best friends ever. Without Jessica, Judith, Kevin, Hadley; sans Betty, Jerilynn, Aakara, Keith and Eric I surely would've upended upon that rock. R.I.P. David Clay, the sagest, "zoomiest" most genius guy role model I've ever had the privilege to be in love with.