Categotry Archives: all about me

by

Looking for Feminism in the Texicanic World

Categories: all about me, buffy the sexism slayer, evil willow

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas/Fort Worth airport, where my Texas sojourn is finally at an end!

I usually like to take a day to recover after having my face electrocuted, although given the relatively light workload nowadays I don’t really need to. For recovery, you may read “sleep til noon, make a Starbucks run for breakfast, and then take a swim in 100-degree weather.” It also means a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon on Hulu!

I’ve mentioned how much I’ve come to love Buffy. The characters talk like I want to, except even cooler! And they’re all so cute! And I really like Willow, who like yours truly is a redhead. I’m even a bit like her–bookish, intensely interested in learning new things, convinced that knowledge is power.

There’s another side to her, of course–as the series develops, Willow become interested in magic and witchcraft, and later comes out as a lesbian. (Not at the point I’m at in the series, though; right now she and Seth Green’s Oz make an adorable couple. And then there’ the Evil Vampiric Willow, from the episodes The Wish and Doppelgangland–the inhabitant of an alternate world where Buffy never came to Sunnydale, and she and Xander are two of the meanest vampires in town.

I watched both those episodes on this trip, and maybe it’s just that I recently decided to try going off my antidepressants, but I really felt like Evil Willow for a while yesterday–that is, I seemed to be channeling my inner Bad Girl, someone who’s probably dying for a workout right about now–she sees so little sunlight.

In this mood, I decided to run out and find some books on feminism.

I’ll admit that for somebody who writes a blog largely about theoretical issues, I’m not nearly as grounded in feminist theory as I’d like to be. So, having time on my hands, I drove over to the local Barnes and Noble to see what I might be able to turn up in the way of anthologies or Large Omnibus Editions. Of course, I thought that my location might have some difficulties that I might not have in the Great American Metropolis–but Dallas is a surprisingly progressive city, I had been seeing Obama/Biden bumper stickers, and I figured what the hell, Barnes and Noble is homogeneous, that’s what everyone complains about.

As it turns out, I did end up finding bell hooks’ Feminist Theory, but it took some doing.

First I had to locate the Women’s Studies section of the bookstore. This was not immediately apparent, and I wandered through Fiction and Literature, Self-Help, Literary Theory (which in a really incongruous bit of geography, was right next to Westerns) before I found the single half bookcase that was my goal–wedged in between Gay and Lesbian Fiction and African-American Studies. My initial assessment wasn’t promising–there was a guide to mystical female symbols, a copy of Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Other Women, and The Feminine Mystique, which would be good reading from a historical standpoint but not what I was in the mood for.

In contrast, there was a four-bookshelf deep Christianity section, a whole table devoted to Twilight (vampires! cool! with Mormon values! yikes!) and a book called Surrender, wherein a woman whose husband re-enlists in the Army (without telling her) and gets shipped off to Iraq learns how to avoid temptation but submitting to God (and, presumably, her husband’s) will.

By this point I wanted to be wearing my vampiric leather corset, mutter “bored now” in my Evil Willow voice, and start flipping over bookcases.

I didn’t–like I said, bell hooks saved me–but it was a good thing I found her book before I browsed the magazines, because “women’s interests” always grates on my nerves. I mean, seriously? Besides, there was a time I wasn’t a woman, and let me tell you, I was interested.

It didn’t help that on my way to get dinner (Whattaburger: must take advantage of the cuisine de terroir), I passed a Halliburton office.

I think I’m going to adopt Evil Willow as the mascot of this blog. She’d be useful as a counterpoint to, say, Maureen Dowd. I always have such hope for Maureen–I mean, she’s a snarky redhead with a voracious sexual appetite and a ton of power; that’s pretty much my mission statement. Yet she writes stuff like this:

As in all great affairs, Mark Sanford fell in love simultaneously with a woman and himself — with the dashing new version of himself he saw in her molten eyes.

In a weepy, gothic unraveling, the South Carolina governor gave a press conference illustrating how smitten he was, not only with his Argentine amante, but with his own tenderness, his own pathos and his own feminine side.

He got into trouble as a man and tried to get out as a woman.

Way to go, Madame Dowd! Thank goodness sexism is over, or else I might get upset that even rich and famous women feel the need to practice it!

Sheesh.

Bored now. Wanna hunt.

by

Adventures in Transition, Special North Dallas Forty Edition: Face the Pain

Categories: all about me, beauty mythology, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Greetings, ducks, from Dallas, where today it didn’t crack 100 degrees Fahrenheit. That actually made the news. Today, we continue our unintentional Trans Week (good week for it, though) with yet more about body modifications:

In the 26 months since I decided to transition, I’ve made a number of physical alterations to my body, both to make me feel better about myself, and to make it easier for me to blend in the world as a woman. The vaginoplasty you already know about; I’ve made oblique mention to the fact that I had breast implants done at the same time. (The rumors are true about that: the augmentation hurt more than the GRS; it’s one thing to not be able to sit up for several weeks, and quite another to not be able to move your arms for four days.) And seventeen months ago, right when I went fulltime, I had plastic surgery to trim down my jaw and chin, which were quite heavy once upon a time.

None of these visible surgeries were to make me more conventionally beautiful, not even the breast implants–it was always about just trying to have something resembling the female body I feel I should have had, if things had only turned out differently. (Seriously, Scout’s honor, and you know, I was a Boy Scout once.)

But my longest investment in time and money has been electrolysis, to remove what’s left of my beard.

Getting rid of my facial hair was actually a project I began long before I began to seriously consider transition; I started laser treatments about a month after I separated from my wife. Even though I wasn’t really thinking of it as a step towards transition, I still had a lot of trepidation about it–after all, ti was the first thing I had ever tried to permanently feminize my appearance, and as such it became a mental Rubicon of sorts; if I crossed that barrier, would I inevitably start on a transition path? (Er–yes, but not because of the laser.)

Unfortunately, I have light hair and light skin, which is only one half (the light skin) part of the ideal candidate profile for laser treatments. While it definitely helped somewhat (I was fairly quickly able to stop wearing heavy foundation and switch to tinted moisturizer), laser was never going to be the final answer for me. So two years ago, after I had started hormones, I began getting electrolysis.

Ducks, you need to know this: I am a wimp about pain. Sure, I can take it when I need to, but in general I try to minimize it as much as possible. And since I also had the disposable income, I decided to go to Electrology 3000, in Dallas. I chose them not only because they are really good at hair removal, but because uniquely amongst electolyisists in North America, they use anesthetic during the sessions. That is, they inject your face with lidocaine.

This has a lot of advantages–since you have to let your hairs grow (so they can tell which ones are active) for several days, there’s an advantage to having your whole face cleared in a single day, something not really possible without anesthetic. (I’ve felt electrolysis without the lidocaine–not something you’d want to sit through for a couple of hours.)

The problem is, the lidocaine hurts: it gets injected at a shallow angle, multiple times, and it burns like acid under the skin. Sure, it’s just for a few minutes, but those few minutes are pretty hellish–I cried the first time.

I still think it’s worth it. Not because I couldn’t be a woman with some facial hair; I’ve known plenty of women like that. No, it’s worth it because of what it does for me–because shaving was the most masculine thing I did every day; because the things I had to do to cover up my beard were so frustrating and annoying, and such a reminder of who I wasn’t; and because stubble is one of the things that remind me most of who I was.

So I keep coming. After a while, the lidocaine gets hurts less. And so does my past.

by

Adventures in Transition, Special Zeitgeist Edition: Where No Trans Has Gone Before

Categories: all about me, gender oh eff me, let's hear it for the ladies

This post, ducks, will be a bit different in that it’s going to be personal and I won’t just be using my personal experience as a way to make a larger point. (Well, not much, anyway.)

I went to my first bridal shower on Saturday. At least, my first one as a woman; I seem to recall showing up to my fiancee’s shower back in the Pona Time before I transitioned.

Like a lot of women, I suspect, the prospect filled me with emotions, most along the lines of “do I have to do this?”

Not initially, though.

I found out that my friend Joanna was going to have a shower when I called her from Thailand, a few days before I left for home. My friend/lackey/McDonald’s wallah had returned to the States, and I finally decided to spend a small fortune and use my cell phone to call folks at home. Joanna was one of the first I called; we’ve known each other since high school, albeit with a nine-year interregnum between graduation and accidentally running into each other in a grocery store.

I wasn’t expecting her to have a shower; she isn’t having a bridal party (dashing my last, best hopes of being a bridesmaid; oh well), but her mom wanted to throw her one and she gave in. I was simultaneously glad to hear that she was having one and bracing myself to not be invited.

Except that I was.

I was very touched, because I felt so–well, accepted. Not so much by Joanna, who’s always been supportive and morphed from friend to closet girlfriend with ease. But it meant a lot to me that she was willing to bring me into such an intimate family occasion, especially one as highly gendered as a bridal shower.

That feeling lasted a few weeks. Then the dread set in.

Events like this play merry hell with my insecurities. It’s times like these when I feel most acutely my lack of a girlhood, the huge gaps in my socialization into ordinary female society. Normally, that doesn’t bother me: after all, I’m not exactly unhappy that nobody told me I shouldn’t study military history, or challenge my teachers, or be bad at math. (I took care of the last one all by myself, ducks.) But times like these, so encrusted with (ok, stupid) tradition and drenched in (ok, ridiculous) mores–these leave me feeling exposed.

Or worse, leave me fearing that I’ll be exposed.

I mean, what am I supposed to bring? What’s the etiquette? Will I make a huge faux-pas? Sure, I can (and did) ask my mom about this stuff, but I can’t help but feel a little foolish: for not knowing, for needing to ask, for feeling that I needed to ask.

As it turned out, I had no worries. Most of the people who came already either knew me or knew about me and were all really lovely. A few had no idea (as I didn’t) what the hell the wishing well was for. I had a pretty good time. Except. (You knew there would be an except, right?)

One of the women was somebody I didn’t really know. We talked and as it turns out she knew my background, and we had a…well, sure, pleasant…little talk about some of my trans stuff. But sitting across from us was a woman I had never met before, a nice lady from Oklahoma. And at one point I noticed her listening to me and the other woman talking.

The next time I heard her refer to me, she used male pronouns.

This sort of thing happens occasionally; my official rule is to give people three screwups before I correct them. But this one put me in a fix: either say something, and draw attention to it, or ignore it and let her think that she was right. (But seriously: there weren’t any men invited, I was wearing a dress, I was wearing high heels for fuck’s sake–how do you think I prefer to be addressed?) I let it go that time. But it wasn’t fun.

I rode the train home with several women from the shower. One of them talked about her boyfriend, and we all chimed in with advice and opinions. It was the very stereotypically female-gendered end to a very stereotypically female-gendered day.

My head was in a bit of a whirl. Part of my transition has been to finally put some distance between me as a trans person and me as a woman. That is, after all these years of being trans, of having that as the most important part of my life, I really want to try and just be for a while. I’ve done a gradual retreat from trans-only spaces, including a message board where I had been a long-time commentator.

But. I had been out with these other women, all or almost all of whom knew, and it wasn’t a big deal; they didn’t treat me any different than any of the other women at the party. So maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, maybe I shouldn’t care who knew and who didn’t? Maybe it didn’t matter.

But why did that make me feel so bad? Was I trying to be something I thought I had to be? (That worked out so well the last time I tried it.) Would I be happier not having anything trans in my life anymore? And if so, what about this blog, which gives me great pleasure to work on, even as it draws me back deeper into a world I am ambivalent about.

I still haven’t figured it out yet. I hope I do. Because being stuck in the twilight zone of genders got old years ago.

by

The Second Awakening: Special Retro-Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, posting at the speed of Amtrak, silly blather, teh tranz, This Was My Life

Sgniteerg Skcud! I mean, greetings, ducks! I’m on my way home again and blogging at 50 mph, after spending a weekend teaching myself to play the theme from Love Story, listening to my niece read to me, and finally catching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Hulu. Which, along with my return homewards, has me in a retrospective mood.

I didn’t watch Buffy back when it was on TV–oddly enough, I had seen (and even liked) the movie, and maybe that kept me away at first; I remembered the film as harmless fluff. By the time I heard that Joss Whedon had taken it in a very different, darker, and (as usual) beautifully-characterized direction, it was too late to catch up on things and I didn’t want to try to come in late. So I missed it, until now.

I’m not one of those trans peeps who regrets not having a girlhood, per se; I know how lousy my adolescence was, and I really don’t think having been female would have helped much. (Or would it? I’ve become such a different–and better–person since I transitioned, maybe it would have worked out…) But that doesn’t keep me from occasionally getting blue about–about the tremendous waste involved with my early life, the years of being strangled with doubt and confusion, the horrific amount of mental baggage I carried around. And then too there is the consciousness of not having had a girlhood, of not having had to deal with being a teen ager, of all the ways my history separates me from other women.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t compensations; I was raised to believe that all things were possible for me, whereas sadly far too many women I know were raised to believe that they could be only those things that were proper. I might have been drowning in dysphoria, but I was never stifled by sexism, never silenced by society. I might have struggled with my assigned role, but it was a lot easier role to deal with than being an adolescent female.

On the other hand, though, try being the boy in sixth grade with a stuffed animal collection that covers his bed. That hill ain’t so fun to climb either.

I adore Buffy so far. I love how the show manages to have empowered female characters, to show the human side of everyone, all without denying the ordinary pressures of adolescent society: Buffy might be a superhuman being with an awesome responsibility, but she worries about being popular; Xander’s sly self-deprecation reminds me of someone I used to know (Ahem. It was one way to deal with always being picked on.) And I love Willow, even if she hasn’t become a witch yet.

Plus, Joss Whedon’s pitch statement–“high school as a horror movie”–pretty much sums up my recollection of those days.

Even so, watching it can’t but help stir the pot of my memories–if part of my tranisition has been learning about how unhappy I used to be (without even knowing it), then high school was me at my most miserable–tormented by my strangeness, my awkwardness, and the horrible feelings I had that I feared were at the root of everything. Watching Buffy can lead me to those “if only” moments–if only I knew that I could be a woman, if only I knew how happy it would make me–if only I could have just been born female and avoided all of this pain.

I can’t change that. I’m not even sure I would if I could; the person I am today was forged on the anvil of my transness, and I would be a very different person indeed without it. And I like that person, more and more every day.

So I shouldn’t regret the past. If only I could.

by

The Second Awakening: Special Mobile Edition!

Categories: all about me, silly blather, travels with CL, your rda of misogyny

Welcome again, ducks! Today’s post comes to you live from Amtrak! I am on my way to visit my parents, and as we are a Green outfit here at TSA, we’re riding mass transit. I am writing this on my trusty blue Acer Inspire One, which I bought for the trip to Thailand and has become my indispensable travelling companion–it fits in all my purses, and with the wireless broadband modem, I can blog anywhere!

Speaking of that trip, I passed through a large swath of Asia during it, and in honor of the first post I’ve written at 50 miles per hour, I thought I’d share some impressions of sex roles and segregation I gathered on the way.

Our first stop was Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. We only were there to transfer flights–if you’re flying to India or Thailand, I highly recommend Etihad Airlways; they spare no expense, the planes are comfortable even in coach, and the food was actually good. But even that brief layover gave me a sense of the character of the place. There were women working, but mostly as servers; the salesmen we saw at the various stores were, well, men. Abu Dhabi is a crossroads in the Persian Gulf, so we saw all varieties of dress, from full burqas to women in completely Western dress. (The flight attendants on Etihad, though, wore these odd combination pillbox hats and veils.) The bathrooms were a bit different; there was an attendant/chaperone, and they follow the British custom of having full-own rooms with doors instead of stalls.

One definite difference: the metal detectors were sex-segregated, to make sure that you were only touched by someone of the same gender. (This was to be a recurring theme, we shall see, and one that usually left me pretty worried.)

India: Saying anything authoritative about India is an excercise in futility; it’s too big, too varied, too everything. Our tour was exclusively in the northern part, so there were more Muslims there than other parts of India; again, there was a lot of variety in how Muslim women dressed, though when we visited the Jammu Mosque in Delhi, I saw quite a few people in burquas.

Indian standards of modesty are different than those found in America: bare bellies are fine (and an artifact of wearing a sari, as I know now–I bought two), but shoulders and knees should be covered. Both my boyfriend and I had to don ceremonial, wildly-patterned caftans when we visited the Jammu Masjid; once again, the metal detectors and clothing attendants were strictly sex-segragated.

Indian business and commerce are far more completely dominated by men than I was used to. We did meet several businesswomen, but almost exclusively in hotels; in stores, and the various “local craftsman” factories we were taken to by our guides (so we could be browbeat for 20 minutes in the hope of buying a rug/inlaid marble table/block printed cloth–the guide got a commission, of course), the people who did the talking were always male. As were all our guides; come to think of it, I think all the Indian guides I saw were male, as were a majority of the servers in restaurants.


Plate 1: The Author contemplates that the most beautiful building in the world was built for a dead woman.

Moreover, the quintessential picture of Indian poverty, I am sad to say, is a woman with her children. While I’m sure I saw some men begging–I certainly saw many, many poor people of both sexes; in India, if a space is flat, somebody’s living on it–the people who approached us were almost universally women. (On the other hand, the people who tried to sell us overpriced trinkets while we waited on various lines were exclusively male.) Every public bathroom I went to in India had an attendant; I’m not sure if that was always true for my boyfriend, but it was for me. These were very poor women (or heartbreakingly, little girls) who handed you a napkin to use to wipe yourself in exchange for a small tip; we usually gave them 50 ruppes, around a dollar. I can’t speak with any sure knowledge, but I would hardly be surprised to find that these women were Dalits.

On our way out of Indira Gandhi Airport (the first place I ever saw a traffic jam of luggage carts), we once again were run through sex-segregated metal detectors. These were more elaborate than the ones in Abu Dhabi; you were in a completely screened-off area, where you got wanded by the guard. Of the proper sex, of course.

Perhaps nothing captures the attitudes I encountered in India better than this: I was the one who booked the trip, who paid for it, who had negotiated with the tour company. When we arrived in Delhi, my name was on the card the tour representative held up at the airport exit. Yet when we got in the car–I was sitting right behind the rep–he turned to my boyfriend and said, “So, sir, is this your first time in India?”

Invisibility and being pushed around by men were the hallmarks of the trip for me.

Cambodia: Once we left India, we noticed a marked change in the presence of women in business–in that we actually saw several. Men still did most of the jobs that involved talking, including guide to foreign tourists. Like India, my boyfriend was spoken to first and more often.

I have no idea what the rules for the separation of the sexes are in Cambodia, but there seemed to be something subtle going on around us: our guide, Mr. K, constantly talked about the pictures of the apsara, or dancing girls that you see in bas-relief everywhere on the Angkor temples. He was often wistful about it, whispering: “Aspara. Dancing girls. Very beautiful girls.” We suspected dating was pretty complicated in Cambodia.

Plate 2: Mr. K wants you to know he feels nothing for these women. Nothing!

Thailand: We passed through Thailand twice, actually: once, very briefly, on the way to Siem Reap in Cambodia, and then of course of the Purpose of the Visit. Thailand, least in Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport is huge, and more modern than LAX or Newark Liberty; if not for the presence of signs in Thai, you’d hardly know you weren’t in America.

Plate 3: It’s like Los Angeles, just with worse traffic.

In Thailand we finally saw something approaching gender equity. Women were firmly entrenched in the workplace, at about the same proportion that you find in America. Men talked to me–sometimes even first!–and women were definitely assertive, at least to me.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t a lot of sexism; there was. Thai (or at least Bangkok) culture has something resembling a mix of 50s-style mores, plus a thousand years of Buddhism, plus modern capitalistic ruthless. My nurses told me, for example, that it was still considered somewhat risque for women to smoke–I mean, holy Mad Men!

But at least in Thailand (and Cambodia) I could pee by myself; there weren’t any bathroom attendants. And the metal detectors were unisex.

This is the face of progress, ducks: a man being wanded by a female security guard.

by

Except I Am

Categories: all about me, bitterness, teh tranz, vive le feminisme, why i blog

Reasons I Am Told I Cannot Be A Feminist
Culled from Books, Message Boards, Web Pages and Conversations by, for, and against feminists

  1. Because I shave my legs.
  2. Because I color my hair.
  3. Because I wear skirts.
  4. Because I wear dresses.
  5. Because I wear high heels.
  6. Because I had plastic surgery.
  7. Because I had breast implants.
  8. Because I had vaginoplasty.
  9. Because I am attracted to men.
  10. Because I still am attracted to women.
  11. Because I’ve read a few books on feminism.
  12. Because I’ve only read a few books on feminism.
  13. Because I have a vagina–now.
  14. Because I didn’t have a vagina–then.
  15. Because I don’t have a cervix.
  16. Because I had a penis.
  17. Because I had male privilege.
  18. Because I had white, male, middle-class privilege.
  19. Because I still have white, middle-class privilege.
  20. Because I wasn’t raised as a girl.
  21. Because I look like a dude.
  22. Because I look like a woman.
  23. Because of who I was.
  24. Because of who I am.
  25. Because I dare call myself a woman.

by

31 Days Later….

Categories: all about me, milestones, teh tranz, why i blog

Greetings, Ducks! Today, it turns out, is the one-monthery (strictly speaking, an anniversary refers to a year. Yes, I took Latin! Yes, I am a shameless pedant!) of this blog. Which I seem to have celebrated by taking the day off (well, to be fair, that proposal I wrote the other day blossomed into further proposals and some discussions with the potential client, so I was busy.)

I want to thank all of you who have dropped by, and especially all of you who left such nice comments here. Starting a blog again was something that I did with some trepidation, and your encouragement has really been so lovely.

I had trepidation because part of my “process” (no, thank you, Anonymous!) is figuring out exactly how much my transness is going to be integrated with the rest of my life, and starting a blog where I was so open about it (albeit with personal details obscured) seemed to have the potential to swallow my life up again. After so, so many years where my transness was a constant, overriding distraction to my life, I really wanted to just try being a woman for a while.

But it’s clear that I have things to say about transness, and especially about how transness intersects with feminism. So I say them here, and so far it hasn’t consumed me–in fact, it’s acted as a safety valve, letting me work on living a life not always dominated by where I’ve come from, but by where I’m going.

So thank you all for dropping by, for your encouragement and support, for giving me a reason to write every day–something I thought I might never do again. And here’s to the start of our second month!

by

Fine Feathered Foul?

Categories: all about me, mailbag

Hello, du…hmm. I nearly used the common English word for a member of the family anatidae. Which, it seems, would be wrong, at least according to Anonymous:

Here’s the deal: gay men call people ducks; women do not. Consider it part of the process to remove that word from your vocabulary. Please.

Now, I got defensive when I first read this, but then I thought: hey, maybe Anonymous has a point; I mean, I’ve gotten all sorts of good advice from anonymous folks before, from “Duck!” (oops) to “suck my…”–well maybe that last wasn’t such good advice. But you get the picture.

As I said in my response, I do all kinds of things on this blog I don’t do in regular life, from talking about my vagina to using complex analogies about the kyriarchy. (I do, however, bore folks with feminist analyses of French peri-impressionism.) I’ll confess to adopting Winged Water Fowl as a greeting as part of the quasi-folksy style I affect in the lighter posts hereabouts. At the very least, I figured I might be remembered as that “crazy lady who calls everyone Mallards.”

But I’d hate to slow my process; I’m not sure what that means, but it sure sounds bad! Seeing as it’s a slow day here at TSA (I spent most of it writing a proposal for a–I hope–largish client), I thought I would put it out there for you, du…er, wigeons: should I stop using That Word and call everybody something serious, like Fellow Denizens of the Feminist and Transfeminist blogospheres? I leave it to you!

Unless you consider it a wild goose chase.

by

Sandcastle Virtues

Categories: all about me, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tv (trans)

Once I knew a crossdresser named Monica. This was several years ago, when I was a regular in the transgender demimonde–the curious collection of repurposed-for-a-night bars and “safe” restaurants we frequented on the weekends. Given that most people in this world were closeted, or like me, semi-closeted–I was out to all the important people in my life, but the idea of going out in public during the day was still too frightening–and this was their one chance to “go out” (that’s how we said it, too: “I’m going out this weekend” meant going somewhere crossdressed), after a while you got to know the regulars, the ones that were there every week: that girl who always wore pleather fetish outfits; the married couple that dropped in so the husband could dance and flirt with guys while the wife got wrecked at the bar; the very pretty, I-can’t-believe-she’s-forty crossdresser who had once run her own trans themed party but now was limited to a few nights out a month because she had a young kid.

Over time, Monica and I became close friends; I even saw her male self a few times, and later on she got to see mine when I invited her to my birthday. We both agreed that these “parties” were nothing more than an extension of the closet; we deplored together the awful dance music the hostesses played (not that it would have mattered much: it is a curious fact that most of the white, middle-aged CDs I knew didn’t like to dance); we longed for something more than the desultory anomie of these Saturday nights, but neither of us was ready yet to try to do anything more.

Not everyone who came to these parties was a crossdresser. Some wives and girlfriends came, whose expressions ran the gamut from pie-eyed terror to exhilarated joy. We always looked at these women with curiousity, scarcely allowing ourselves to believe that it was possible to find a woman who could deal with–with all this. There were also the trannie chasers. They were a hard crew to figure out–perhaps because most of them were having a hard time figuring out their own attraction. Some wanted to crossdress but couldn’t face their own fears; some wanted to suck a dick attached to something feminine, to mitigate their attraction to male genitalia; and a few just seemed to be turned on by trans bodies. The greater part of them were very shy, standing with their backs to the wall or the bar, always looking just slightly uncomfortable.

We all looked down on the chasers.

There was one group that we looked up to, though: the transsexuals. Relatively few ever came out to these nights, which somehow made us respect them more–they had done it, they had transitioned and they didn’t need an extended closet to be women in. A few did come by, though, out of nostalgia, or maladjustment to their new lives; out of friendship for other transgendered people who hadn’t transitioned, or out of a need for a safe space as they first began their transitions; out of curiosity or empathy or condescension. They fascinated us. These were people that were more than just women for the weekend; they were women period now, and their stories haunted and attracted us.

For a lot of crossdressers, the idea of transition is something that you never really ever let go of. I think this may be because as a transgendered person, you want to be the opposite sex, even if it is only for a little while; so to deny that you would want to transition is to deny that you want to be a woman, which is what you really do want to do. It’s all highly confusing, and I think that was one of the reasons we sought out transsexuals: to find our boundaries, to compare stories and see where they were different, to listen to the struggles they had undergone in order to transition and silently do a secret accounting of our own lives and wonder if the price we’d pay would actually be worth it in the end.

But we were told–or at least we had heard–that there were real differences between crossdressers and transsexuals; that crossdressers never transitioned, that transsexuals were in such pain from their gender inconsonance that they had no other choice but to transition. And we believed those stories, crossdressers and transsexuals alike; we crossdressers told our wives and girlfriends that we weren’t destined to transition, and transsexuals told the world that they weren’t just men who liked to wear women’s clothing.

There was one transsexual who was a regular. I didn’t really know why Ingrid kept coming (and after a while, she just didn’t), but I guess she fit into the category of people who were starting transition and needed a place to get their bearings. We were friendly, and used to talk politics and Japanese martial arts and the American songbook–she had a lovely voice and sometimes would sing a few bars of Cole Porter.

One thing about Ingrid did bother me, though: she didn’t like Monica. Or rather, she thought she was a mess, directionless, and misguided. Now, truth be told, Monica’s hairstyle was out of the Marilyn Quayle school of immobility, her clothing choices were pretty drab and uninspired, and her shoes–well, it’s best not to talk about them. I had myself recently graduated from my evening-wear phase, when I would wear gowns and formal dresses out to bars and had started to dress in a fashion that I thought a woman of my age might dress. So that gave me license to be a bit of a snob, and I am ashamed to say that sometimes I snarked right along with Ingrid.

In the trans community, people tend to be judged on a scale that I will call–borrowing it from the world of drag–realness. This isn’t surprising, given that the very drive that defines us as transgendered is to be the opposite sex. Realness is a troubling term, though. It’s not that it’s inaccurate–it very accurately describes the attitudes I usually encountered. But we made “realness” mean the same thing as “authenticity”–we based our perceptions of you as a person on how close you were to this ideal of “womanhood.” Thus, people who wore everyday clothes were superior to people who wear fetishistic clothes; people who lived as women were better than people who only crossdressed on the weekend; people who had had the surgery were better than people who hadn’t, or didn’t want to.

Wearing pants was even somehow better than wearing a skirt–because real women didn’t wear skirts all the time. (Neither do crossdressers in their everyday lives, but making that point hardly helped their case.) In fact, it was a bitter joke amongst us that if you started to show up wearing pants, it meant you were bound to eventually transition.

If I would sometimes put Monica down, I also defended her; I would point out that she was one of the sweetest, kindest people I knew, and that went a lot further with me than her fashion sense; and in any case, the more she came out, the better she looked. But no matter; Ingrid thought she was a hopeless case, and Ingrid was a woman of firmly-held convictions.

Besides, Monica and I were both crossdressers, and so clearly didn’t know what we were talking about.

It’s been a long time since I was a regular in that world, and I’ve learned quite a bit since then. One thing that I learned is that I wanted to transition, that the bright lines I had drawn were a lie; crossdressers really did transition. That led me to question other things, to wonder if being a transsexual actually made you more real; or was it that, crossdressers were perfectly real crossdressers? And that somehow, that wasn’t wrong or something to put people down about? On one of my last trips out to one of these parties, I was sitting at the bar, silently smirking at this or that poorly-done outfit, when an elderly crossdresser came in. Her dress looked terrible on her, her lipstick was as crooked as a Vermont dirt road, and her wig was haphazardly clinging to the top of her head. But when I looked more closely, I could see the pure joy in her eyes, the incredible relief at being able to finally express this part of herself. And my smirk died a cold death on my face and I–I in my careful makeup and fashionable clothes–I was ashamed.

Since then I’ve learned much more about feminism and power structures; I see now that what we saw as realness was nothing else than judging people on their looks; that people have the right to define their own gender/personality/womanhood however they want to, and that makes it as real as anyone else’s. I learned, too, how often it is in underprivileged communities that heirarchies arise, tiny parodies of the larger, oppressive order. I learned that trans people were hardly alone in equating realness with authenticity; everywhere I looked among the various underprivileged communities I encountered–female, feminist, people of color–I saw the same pattern of holding other members of your group up to your own personal ideal, and then calling them out on how far they fell short of it. People complained about it; long and bitter struggles took place with each faction trying to prove their authenticity to each other. And yet the patterns persisted, over and over and over again.

I last saw Monica four years ago, on my birthday. She wore a tasteful leather suit, a short wig, and perfect makeup–she looked, in short, the very model of a still-rockin’ suburban woman in her 40s. She had begun to play electric guitar–she was a huge Kiss fan–and had even done her own drag act in Las Vegas. She was still one of the sweetest people I have ever met. And she seemed very happy.

I ran into Ingrid about a year later at a Julia Serrano reading. By that point I was well into my own transition; in fact, outside of onsite visits to my clients, I presented as female all the time. Ingrid, on the other hand, seemed to be much as I had last known her; she was presenting as male that day, which surprised me–it had been five years since I’d seen her last, I thought she’d have gone fulltime by then.

I wondered if she still though Monica was a mess. If she, and me, were still wedded to our fantasy heirarchies, our own petite power trips. I still wonder that about myself.

Despite our internecine conflicts, we still manage to gain a victory and then all of us move forward: sissies can get married just the same as the straightest-acting modern Mattachinist; the woman who clutched her pearls until her hands bled got to vote the same as a bloomers-wearing suffragist; and maybe, just maybe, one day crossdressers and transsexuals will both be able to pee in peace.

We are like children on the beach, building little sandcastles, while above us the guns of a real fort threaten our lives. And yet, rather than march together on that fort, we bicker over how grand our sandcastles are, how much better they arethan other people’s, how beautiful, how necessary, how safe. And so we will stay until these sandcastle virtues are all swept away.

by

Me and My Vagina: Part I of an Infinitely Reductive Series

Categories: all about me, my pussy my self, teh tranz

In the first place, it’s not so easy even to find your vagina. Women go weeks, months, sometimes years without looking at it.

–Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

I suppose that makes me a bit different, because I see my vagina at least three times a day, and usually six, and can look forward to a long future of regularly saying hi to my down there.

My vagina is a bit different than other women’s, as a consequence of my not having been born with one.

One of the things you learn about, if you are transsexual and if you are thinking about having The Surgery (italicization was really unnecessary, wasn’t it? I mean, if I mention surgery I know where your head is going to go) is about the D-Word–dilation. It’s one of the aftercare things they don’t tell you about back when you first realize that you want to be female, not that you’d have told anyone, at least, not if you were me.

The commonplace that nature abhors a vacuum works on my neo-vagina as well: left to its own devices, my body would fill it in gradually, like silt in a canal. (Ick.) So everyday, three times a day right now, I have to–well, dilate it: put something inside to hold the shape and gradually convince my body that it’s supposed to be there.

There’s probably all sorts of ways to accomplish this–my surgeon’s instructions on the subject note that sexual intercourse is the equivalent of “only one dilation”–but the standard equipment is a series of four graduated lucite rods, rounded on one end, about seven inches long each. You start with the relatively small #1, about the diameter of a carrot, and eventually work your way up to the squat #4, which is wider than the handle of the flashlight I keep on my desk. Right now I use the #2 and #3 when I dilate, warming up for ten minutes on the first, and then a half an hour on the second. With time out for changing them, this lasts about as long as an hour-long television drama if you fast-forward through the commercials, so I tend to time-shift shows on my DVR to have something to do while dilating.

Because you can’t do much while dilating; as the dilation isn’t just about girth, but much more about preserving depth, you have to keep a constant pressure up with one hand. So typing is out, and even reading a book can be cumbersome. So, you watch tv, or maybe surf the internet one-handed.

When I first heard about dilation, naturally I feared that it would hurt, that every day I’d have to put myself through some sort of agony. It turns out that dilation doesn’t hurt, isn’t even all that uncomfortable: just a boring, repetitive chore. (You do have to stock up on lubricant, though.) On days when I am visiting a client, the first thing I do when I get home–before even making dinner–is to dilate, because I am overdue, and even then I have to do it again in a few hours. In time I’ll be able to do it less–most of the women I know who are several years out from their surgery dilate about once a week–but for now it’s an onerous duty. I am handmaid to my vagina.

But I do get to see it everyday. This might sound wonderful except of course that familiarity breeds–indifference. I no longer examine myself except to check that nothing looks inflamed, and to make sure I get the dilator in the right place. Maybe there are women who don’t need to use a mirror, but when I try I usually end up bumping something else instead, like my clitoris.

I do remember the first few times I saw it though–red, raw, inflamed, supperating in places and with ugly black sutures running inside it, Frankensteinian. But after the first few times of worrying about the discomfort of dilating, and the shock of this wound I had created, it became something else, a part of me, a long-sought for piece of the life I had always wanted and never had; my beautiful, glistening, gaping self; my other me made corporeal; my genitals, my wish, my pussy, my peace.

The last day I spent in Thailand, as I was getting dressed to go, I looked at myself in the mirror–lessened but made whole, no longer reminded by my reflection of where I had come from but only of where I had arrived. I smiled and happy tears welled up.

Then I lay on the bed and laughed, laughed, laughed.

1 2 3 4 5