Art and Gender

2004-03-09T13:23:00.000-05:00

A Time and Place for Everything

So here we are again, a little less than a year later. I'm feeling better now, and I miss putting my thoughts down on something. Somehow, doing it here makes my writing live in a way that I like. I just think that it's important for me to avoid the pitfalls of the past.

I hope to be just as candid at ever, but also leave room for myself. I'm a naturally open person, and I don't really have a sense of keeping a private life to myself, but I think that it's ultimately important to do that.

Important Things that Happened Since I Last Posted

* Art has been going well. Doing less photography and more installation/performance stuff, but also working on a book of photographs of past work. Getting published in a photography journal, which is exciting.

* Another serious relationship has come and gone.... Oi, I seem to be going through them at a rapid pace. I'm used to being in longer-term things so it's strange to be with someone for five months. I think I want to wait a bit before getting seriously involved again, although this doesn't seem to stop me from dating.

* Not really enjoying San Francisco, and haven't made many close friends here. Planning to move back to the East Coast after grad school.

Hmmmm.... I have an urge to write more but I really need to get going....

2003-05-23T18:58:00.000-04:00

Blogging Out

So I've decided not to blog anymore. I'm going through a really tough time, and I think doing it in public makes the situation more difficult. I feel like my life is spinning out of control, and I'm trying to reign it in. So I'm trying to focus on things that I can control, and it occurs to me that I've been having a difficult time dealing with the fact that this particular representation of me is out in public, and I reveal so much of myself in it.

So right now, I just want to crawl into a hole for a while. I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read this, and hope to continue to be in touch with the friends I've met here. The e-mail address above is going to work for a little while but not forever, so do e-mail me if you want to keep in touch. I'm probably going to archive the site for my personal purposes, and then prevent the rest from being publicly accessible, so if you want to keep any of it for yourself, I suggest printing it up now since it may be gone in the next couple of weeks or so.

And who knows? I may come back. I'm known for being unpredictable.

2003-05-13T19:32:00.000-04:00

Ah, yes

School is over and I guess I'm updating again.... though I'm seriously thinking about not blogging anymore. I'm having a hard time motivating right now and I'm trying to shrink my life into pieces that I can actually manage. I'm not sure if blogging is enough of a priority for me to keep. I'll see how I feel in a couple of weeks....

2003-04-09T01:39:00.000-04:00

When It Rains...

I just found out that a friend from MIT committed suicide. I hadn't talked to her since I came to San Francisco, but she's another one of those really talented people, and the thought of her being gone leaves me reeling once again...

2003-04-08T17:37:00.000-04:00

Life and Its Inadequacies

ok, first of all this isn't a cry for help. it's simply one of my classic rambly entries that's going to go all over the place, but probably not anywhere nice or pleasant or happy.

to put it simply, life really sucks right now. there are way too many things going on at the same time that i'm having a tough time dealing with, and sometimes i feel like i'm on the verge of shutting down. i'm not really sure how this happened. i used to be this really strong person, and right now, my coping mechanisms are being stretched to their limit and i'm not sure how i'll come out the other end.

a lot of this of course has to do with joe and feelings of loneliness and guilt and mistakes i've made in handling that situation. then there's the fact that i'm in a new city without the close friends i had back when i was on the east coast. and then school is also not a particularly good place for me right now. then there's the background of the war and how depressing that is.

complain complain complain.... it all sounds so silly when put down on virtual paper... i've been in these kinds of moody period before, but i've never been so neurotic about it. like, for instance, i've always known myself to be a person who likes being with other people, having close friends around, and being in a relationship. it's kind of hard-wired i guess. but now, it's like i have those feelings but i find myself shutting down. i used to generally like people when i meet them, but now i can't help but mentally point out their deficiencies. i'm taking active measures not to engage, and i'm not really sure why i'm doing that but i am.

my snobbish tendencies are rearing their ugly head. i'm finding it impossible to engage in lengthy conversation with people who i don't think have a lot to offer in terms of ideas, and i seem to be finding a lot of people like that recently. and the people that i do meet who i find interesting and would like to pursue friendships with have so far not panned out on the whole, except for the couple of people in my program that i really like. i guess the business of being in school makes it difficult to make time for friendships, yet i'm somehow finding school really difficult right now.

ah well.... what was the point of that rant anyway.... i saw "different for girls" the other night, a movie with rupert graves (who's yummy and who i like a lot), about a post-op transsexual who finds love with a motorcycle messenger who she went to high school with. i've seen the movie before, except that when i saw it the first time i hadn't transitioned yet and had no idea that i was going to. it's funny that when i saw the movie the first time, i had no real sense of identification for the trans character, but that i now find myself in pretty much the same position as she was at the beginning of the movie: a year post-op, single, lonely. the movie ended up being pretty traumatic... i should have turned it off when i saw the first scene of her riding on the back of his motorcycle for the first time and being terrified, because joe and i spent many hours riding around on his motorcycle, which was also initially terrifying for me. but like a car crash, i couldn't avert my eyes and i ended up alternately watching and crying through the whole movie.

oh god, does this mean that i'm going to have to see a therapist? i've managed to avoid regular therapy up to this point, but it's feeling more and more inevitable at the moment. argh.

2003-03-19T21:13:00.000-05:00

When Bodies Matter and Words Count

A friend asked me to contribute a short item in a zine she's publishing about digital v. analog technology. This is what I wrote:

-------------------------

I recently lost a man I loved, suddenly and unexpectedly. He is my first lover to have died, my first close friend. I still can't think about him for long without coming close to tears when I'm in public, and actually crying when I'm alone.

I constantly yearn for his physical presence and, when I allow myself, use objects as markers of his trace. I have some pictures, a lighter, a candle holder in the shape of a house. I wear his favorite shirt to bed sometimes, or envelop myself with his old bathrobe, pretending that the cloth is his body. I realize that this is sentimental and self-indulgent, but I do it anyway.

Yet it occurs to me that I don't own anything he wrote with his own hand. I barely even know what his writing looked like. He wrote me wonderful letters, but they were all over e-mail. He wrote me songs on his PalmPilot, which he promised to sing for me someday, but never did.

Doe "I love you" count when I'm looking at it on a computer screen? I wonder how much it matters that those words were sent by him when I can cut and paste them over and over again, when I have no original to hold on to. I remember each time he said those words to me. And the date and time are stamped on every e-mail from him in which those words appear. But I still yearn to see marks on paper that have a direct connection to his body, the body of the person I loved.

I wish that bodies didn't matter. But I think they do and will, as long as we have them.

2003-02-27T01:03:00.000-05:00

There

hmmm... wrote a long post that was eaten up... oh well.... that's computers i guess... ummm, i just pulled an all nighter for the first time since undergrad, to finish a paper that kinda got away from me... it was supposed to be five pages but ended up being 15, so i had to shrink the font down all that... ah well....

moving on with life to the best of my ability... went out on a couple of dates with a guy who's not working out, so i'm going to have to have a little talk with him, maybe tonight maybe tomorrow, which i don't like to do.... maybe i'll just blow him off but i might feel even worse.... there are times when i feel like i'm going through the motions, that i'm clearly not ready.... but i seem to lack the ability to cope in any other way but to move on... i somehow feel at odds with myself.... guilty for dating again, but then also guilty when i continue to mope and do nothing....

i've been having crazy dreams.... not directly about joe but somehow related because i seem to cry in the morning right after i wake up... part of me still can't believe that he's gone, that he was in my life for such a short time... i don't regret having been with him even though it's really painful right now... at the same time, i feel this keen sense that someone has been stolen from me... i've survived more heartbreak in the last two years than i have in all the time before that. part of me feels stronger for it, and part of me hopes that things be all right for a while...

although maybe heartbreak is just a part of being in the world, of participating in its activities. i certainly dealt with far fewer people as a boy, and far fewer complications, so maybe all this pain is just a byproduct of living the way i do, being invested in people the way i am...

aimee mann's "save me" is in my head all of a sudden.....

2003-02-05T18:29:00.000-05:00

Here

The past few weeks since I've written have obviously been really difficult, but I'm slowly recovering and making sense of things. I want to, one of these days when it isn't too painful, write more about Joe and how he affected my life, but for now I think I'm going to write about other things.

Although again, I'm feeling a bit gratuitous because I don't know what to write about. I moved at the beginning of the month, with a couple of friends who are in school with me, and that has been quite good, although I still seem to be drowning in stuff.

I'm cutting my hair, I've decided, significantly shorter than it is now. I'm planning to take at least three inches off, but I might just be courageous enough to get it bobbed. I've never had short hair as a woman before, and I'm kinda wondering what it's like.

2003-01-19T18:04:00.000-05:00

Sadness

I don't even know how to begin. I guess I can only start with the facts and talk about the emotions later. Joe committed suicide. He was found on Friday after he had been missing for several days, after being released from the hospital where he was checked in for depression before that.

I had been visiting him in the hospital on a regular basis, where he seemed like his old self after seeing him distance himself from me. At the time, I didn't know to what extent his depression was fueling his distance... I don't think I would have broken up with him if I did. Maybe I should have told him that.... I don't know. Maybe I should have told him a lot of things. Maybe there wasn't anything else I could say. I just remember that the last time I visited him, we talked for over two hours, as if nothing had happened between us, as if those two weeks when he withdrew into his depression didn't exist. We laughed a lot, joked with each other, flirted. At one point, he mentioned that his ex-wife had visited that same day and said, "I can't believe my ex-wife and my girlfriend visited on the same day." Then I touched his arm softly and said, "Ex-girlfirend."

What I didn't tell him that my mind and my heart were torn, that I couldn't bring myself to accept that I regretted breaking up with him, and that in my gut I wanted to be with him still. I wanted to wait, not knowing that there wasn't going to be another opportunity. Before I left, the last thing I said to him was that I was glad to see the Joe I know and love. And then he hugged me and kissed me.

What is most difficult is that so much of how we connected to each other was physical, and therefore leaves no trace. I remember how he touched me, how he kissed me, how he held my hand. He is the first man I was intimate with as a woman, the first man who loved me as a woman, the first that I loved. The littlest things send me into a fit of crying.... today I was going to do a load of laundry that he left but I couldn't bring myself to do it, because his smell clung to his clothes and it was the only trace I had left of his physical presence.

I know that things will get better. But right now, I can't help but regret, ask myself what I could have done differently and realize the ways that I was selfish and irresponsible. But most of all, I just want him to hold me. And part of me still can't believe that it isn't possible for him to do that anymore.

2003-01-16T23:51:00.000-05:00

Aaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!

i haven't blogged in over two weeks.... really bad of me.... life is both hectic and dramatic right now.... things are just volatile and really busy.... the good part is that i've been getting a lot of positive feedback on a photo book i'm putting together of pictures related to my gender transition, and am probably going to send the book dummy off to publishers by late spring/early summer, to see if anyone's interested....

lots and lots and lots of reading this semester.... it's going to be fun but a *lot* of work.... god, i'm being so banal... this always happens when i'm dealing with things that i don't feel comfortable talking about here... i feel like i'm just taking up space.... um, hmmmmm.....

2003-01-02T02:01:00.000-05:00

Father Figure

just got back to san francisco two nights ago... went to a party with a friend from school for new year's... gave somebody my number.... i seem to lack the self-control not to date when given the opportunity... just haven't figured out how to do that i guess... it annoys me that i feel this way, but it's something that i find myself not having much control over. it's at least partly my filipino catholic upbringing, where it's been ingrained in me that one isn't truly happy unless one is part of a couple... i also have to admit that part of me, although the part gets smaller and smaller as time goes by, still seeks the positive reinforcement of being found attractive by people. i guess i haven't completely gotten over that hump. though i'm progressively getting better about it.

i had some really great talks with my dad over the holidays. during the time when i was preparing for my operation, he kept a lot of his feelings hidden from me. but now that time has passed and he isn't as concerned about me feeling like he has to be 100% supportive all the time, he's started to open up more. he spoke to me about his feelings related to losing his first son and what that means to him, and letting go of his expectations of me. my dad hasn't had nearly the same opportunities as i have, and like many parents, considers my achievements part of his own. he doesn't speak english very well, so even though he's really intelligent, he has had a long list of not particularly intellectually stimulating jobs, like working as a personal assistant and doing security. so he was really proud of me when i got into and eventually attended harvard, as well as the various things i've accomplished along the way.

and to his great credit, he stood up for me when i did things that caused other people to give him a hard time, like when i came out as gay and then when i eventually transitioned. he's staunchly defended me to various family members and friends, and has been ostracized by some conservative family members as a result.

so over the holidays, he was much more open in talking about the things he has had to go through to come to accept and respect my transition. it's good that he doesn't feel like he has to keep things from me anymore.

2002-12-17T11:41:00.000-05:00

Just Like My Daddy

ok, i once again have very little time to blog but i'm doing it anyway... i'm in boston at my friend emmet's house right now, after having spent a few eventful days in new york. i was visiting my friend fiona, who is in graduate school in visual art just like me, except she's at columbia and i'm at california college of arts and crafts. it was her program's open studio on saturday so i was able to see the work that the people in the program were doing, which was a lot of fun.

and then there was this really crazy party afterwards where the chair of their program got totally smashed and did some pretty outrageous things. another really funny thing that happened was that this fairly well-known artist and i spent a fair bit of time dancing that night. ironically, he spoke at my school a couple of months ago and was really aloof actually. he wasn't really talking to the students at all. but he was totally different in that environment, so it was really funny when he asked me if i was in the columbia program and i told him i was at ccac. he was like, "oh, i lectured there last month." and i was like, "yeah, i know. i saw your lecture." then he said, "i can't believe you saw my lecture." then he kissed me.

i suppose things could have gone further except that my friends fiona and noah swooped in at the end of the night and we all went home. i felt really ambivalent about that. this whole girls getting a reputation thing is new to me, and i still haven't figured out how i feel about it. i think that at a fundamental level, it wouldn't have bothered me to have a one-night stand with the guy, mainly because i thought he was really attractive, and also because i generally like him and his work. on the other hand, he apparently has a reputation for being a ladies man. but that's really not an issue for me because i'm not particularly lookikng for a relationship anyway. but in that context, it appeared to be more prudent not to go to bed with him, as i would apparently be judged in some way as a result. i do resent that double standard, but i wonder how it's possible to escape it, given that people i respect seem to abide by it. so anyway, it's the first time i made out with someone who was in the whitney biennial, which i suppose increases my starfucker credentials, not that this is necessarily a good thing.

2002-12-13T12:14:00.000-05:00

New York New York

I'm leaing for a plane bound for New York in three hours, with a planned side trip to Boston. I'm sorry I couldn't call everyone beforehand but if you're reading this and you'd like to hang out, please e-mail me at the link above.

2002-12-10T13:36:00.000-05:00

Reality Sets In

this is another one of my classic rambly no capitalization entries, since i have eight minutes before i have to run off to class. you're probably wondering why i haven't written one of my ponderous essays in a while. well, it's because things haven't been the best in meredithland, which makes it more difficult to write.

joe and i broke up last night. i actually don't feel too bad about it all in all, even though i still feel deeply for him and have to get over that. i think reality ended up encroaching on our little bubble: his kids, him getting a job, me probably not staying in san francisco after i graduate, me not being stepmother material, stuff like that.

one thing i've definitely found is that it's like i'm learning a whole new way of dealing with relationships. i can't rely on too many of the patterns i've developed as a man, which is both exciting and frightening. i suppose i don't have too much point of reference, since i have a sample of one in terms of dating as a woman, but i guess one thing that's definitely the case is that there's a bigger gulf to bridge between a man and a woman than with two gay men, who tend to be more similar and see more eye to eye. and then there's the whole commitment business, which is another can of worms altogether.

yes, i'm not making any sense again, but that's what happens when i have eight minutes to type. the funny thing is that all this was happening while the two of us were watching dvd's of "sex and the city," which sort of mirrors this blog in odd ways sometimes. he thought the show was funny, except that he thought that mr. big was misunderstood, and that he identified with him. i thought that was a pretty bad sign.

on aggregate, i think i'm going to enjoy being single again. i've actually come to a point where being single doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to. i just think that given that i don't know where i'll be in a couple of years, it's probably the wisest thing not to get too involved with anyone right now. i don't know how to deal with the sex part yet, but i guess i'll figure that out as i go along. i'm not underestimating the adjustment to being single again, because it's going to be an adjustment, but i seem to have become confident enough in my own self-estimation that i'm not intimidated by singlehood as i used to be. i seem to have gotten over that hump, which actually feels quite good.

2002-12-09T15:40:00.000-05:00

Fetish Transsexuals in Ballet Slippers

If you type this on google, this site is the #6 result.... on ixquick, it's #1.

2002-12-06T19:38:00.000-05:00

A Different Kind of Toe

My friend Diane thought that since I now have a vagina, I should be introduced to the concept of the Camel Toe.

2002-12-03T13:51:00.000-05:00

If George W. Were Trans

It wouldn't be pretty.

2002-11-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

From Fag to Fag Hag

My friend Richard, who's a big RENThead, came over last night for a little while with three of the RENT castmembers in tow. We hung out at the loft for a little while and then went around the corner to The EndUp, where we danced until the wee hours of the morning.

While The EndUp caters to a variety of people, it's mainly a queer club, and I was mainly surrounded by gay men, and it occured to me that I seem to have become more or less one of those straight women who hang around gay men. And I experienced both the advantages and disadvantages of that position. I got the ego boost from people telling me how fabulous I am, without the attendant sleaze factor of being rudely approached by men that usually happens at straight clubs. At the same time, gay men have this tendency to think you're great to hang out with, until they see a cute boy, and then they leave you to your own devices.

But all in all, it was a really fun night. The RENT people were of course amazing dancers and it was a real treat to be around them. Although as I mentioned in a comment on my last post, I felt really old being around people who were all 24 and under, being a grandmotherly 27. Thankfully, everybody seems to think I look younger than I actually am.

2002-11-22T14:54:00.000-05:00

All My Children

Seeing as I'm never going to have biological children, it's heartening to know that I have children in other forms. One of them is having blog children. In the past two days, I've been in touch with all four of my blog children: Robin, Caitlin, Mandy, and Joe.

It's funny how I myself don't really have a blog parent, unless you count the New Yorker, which is where I heard about blogging a couple of years ago. Although I suppose I have foster parents in Dave and Sarah, who inspired me to write voluminously after my blog was dormant for a couple of months last year.

The only person among all the ones I mentioned whom I haven't met is Mandy, but I've spoken to her on the phone and IM'd a lot. I met Caitlin for the first time last Wednesday during the San Francisco National Day of Remembrance ceremony. I was late so I didn't get to hear everyone speak, but the part that affected me most was when 27 people representing the 27 documented cases of transgender-related murders last year came up on stage and described the people who were killed and how they were killed, speaking in the first person. I thought that speaking in the first person was really effective in conveying how all transgendered people live with the threat of violence every day because of their gender expression. Caitlin and I were sitting next to each other and we were both crying.

Caitlin, Robin and I went out for sushi afterward. It was too bad that Joe couldn't be there, but Joe and I went to see RENT on Tuesday, which was opening night for the tour, through the good graces of our friends Richard and Moe, who lined up for tickets for 17 hours beforehand. It was my fifth time and Joe's first, and the performances certainly ranked among the best I've seen. I also hadn't see the show in about four years, and my perspective has changed a lot. Joe is still in his RENT discovery phase, whereas I pretty much know the score backwards and forwards, and still enjoy seeing the show a lot. I'm seeing it again tonight actually, because Mo has once again lined up since 11 last night and has an extra ticket. Joe isn't coming though. Boo hoo.

2002-11-18T00:26:00.000-05:00

Operation Journal, Part 3

This is the last installment of my handwritten journals from my sex change operation. Next time, it will be back to your regular, chronologically ordered programming. I appreciate the positive comments from people. It's always nice to hear that my writing affects others. If you haven't read the previous two installments, I suggest that you scroll down first and read the two previous entries before you read this one.

6/17/02, 8:30 a.m.

The surgeon has just removed the tape that was covering my genitals as they were healing. I'm sitting up for the first time in six days.

I look down and there's nothing there, no trace of the body parts that used to hang there so proudly. It feels strange. Not alien or scary, just strange. It'll definitely take me a while to get used to having a vagina.

The doctor touched my new clitoris today, and I could already feel sensation there, which is apparently unusual.

I'm really dizzy. That's what happens when you lie in bed for five days. I'm not in any significant pain right now, which is good. I don't know how long that will last.

3:30 p.m.

I'm sitting at a table for the first time after having walked around the room for a bit. It feels really good to be upright again.

I was thinking today that it would be cool to write a performance piece based on this experience, maybe call it "The New Vagina Monologue" or something like that. I actually have a lot of material to work with: e-mails, my online journal, etc.

On an aesthetic note, my breasts seem to be benefitting from the lack of hormones...

6/18/02, 9:00 a.m.

I'm not going to say the worst is over, because I've said it before only to be beset by another hurdle.

I had my first bowel movement in seven days today, which of course felt really good. I also had my first shower; my hair is drying as I write this.

I'm also sitting down for the first extended period, though I don't think I can keep it up for long because it's still uncomfortable.

But this is obviously good news. No complications so far. The surgeon says that everything is going according to plan.

6/19/02, 10:00 a.m.

The doctor took off the last catheter today and I'm dilating for the first time. It doesn't hurt actually, but that's probably because I'm so numb from painkillers.

So strange to have this new hole in my body that didn't exist before, six inches deep and quite wide. It just, I dunno, feels really odd right now somehow.

Oh, so it doesn't hurt necessarily but it's definitely uncomfortable. I was planning to do some reading but I don't think I'll be able to. I'll probably listen to music instead. I need to buy a Gameboy; they're great for passing the time.

2002-11-15T00:22:00.000-05:00

Operation Journal, Part 2

Second part of my sex change operation journal. Scroll down for the first part.

6/14/02, 5:30 a.m.

The middle of the night is the hardest part. I sleep so much during th eday that I find it really difficult to sleep at night. There's only one position that works for an extended period of time, which is to lie flat on my back, except that after a while, my lower back starts to really hurt, so in fact there is no comfortable position. I fall in an dout of sleep, awakening as soon as one position becomes uncomfortable. And of course, even with the painkillers, there is still a constant pain down there.

The most frustrating thing about this time is that I can't really do much of anything. I'm too drugged out to read and I can only write, listen to music, or watch TV for limited periods of time.

I know that right now is the most painful part of the recovery process, so I just have to take it moment by moment. I was in agony at 2:00 in the morning, unable to fathom how I could possibly get to 8:00 after my surgeon arrives.

8:45 a.m.

The two things I'm fighting right now are pain and boredom. There's a catheter in my urethra that (painfully) filters out liquid waste, but there's nowhere for my solid waste to go; it has to sit in my body for two more days until they remove the surgery packing. I am right now feeling severe constipation along with everything else.

Though right now, the main thing really is boredom. Things wouldn't be so bad if I had a steady stream of visitors, but I don't. I can only write or listen to music for so long before I get a headache, but I can't read at all. It would have really helped to have another person here, but there isn't so I'm just going to have to suck it up.

It's only Friday. I have to lay in bed for at least two more days before they remove my dressings then it's going to be another kind of pain. What did I get myself into?

12:40 p.m.

I want to talk about something else other than the pain, even though it does tend to take over a lot of the time. It's not too bad right now; I just finished a light lunch.

I guess at this point I can talk about what going through this process means both for me and in terms of people's perceptions of me. Right now, I have to be honest and say that I'm really not sure. I certainly don't miss my penis. I'm not sad that it's gone nor do I yearn for it to come back, but I'm not sure what having a vagina means yet.

I've had a number of arousing thoughts the past few days, and it's strange not to feel the typical signals of male sexual arousal. At this point, that area is in too much pain to know what the female equivalent will be physically. But I think I can already tell that there are things about having this new body part that I will find completely unexpected and surprising.

9:00 p.m.

Night is the toughest time for me. I know I shouldn't sleep until midnight, but what am I going to do for the next three hours to pass the time?

6/15/02, 9:25 a.m.

I think I've gotten over the hump. I'm in significantly less pain now than I was two nights ago. But it may also just be the painkillers, because earlier today, I felt a sharp pain down there right before the nurse gave me my pills. So things are far from over.

I'm also feeling vibrations and a little bit of sensation there but I'm trying to prevent myself from having erotic thoughts because the sensation also comes with pain. At least I pretty much know that the area isn't numb.

I'm getting used to the routine here: surgeon's visit at 8, painkillers, meal, sponge bath, etc. It's annoying being an invalid. I just want to get out of bed and jump around. But I'm also a good patient. I do as I'm told.

1:45 p.m.

A bit groggy from painkillers, but trying semi-successfully to read "A la recherche du temps perdu" in translation.

2002-11-13T01:37:00.000-05:00

Operation Journal, Part 1

So I finally found the time to transcribe my handwritten journal entries from the time of my sex change operation. I will publish them in three parts over the next few days.

6/11/02, 3:40 a.m., less then six hours before the operation.

Oddly enough, I'm not really nervous. I've been waiting to be nervous for a while, like that pitter patter I get before performing. But still, even now, nothing.

Though part of me still can't believe it's actually happening, and how relatively easy the process has been. I skipped a lot of the normal steps, a combination of my confident nature, the support of loved ones, and the fact that from the moment I chose to identify as a woman, I didn't have trouble convincing the world that this is in fact a better means of expression for me.

I weighed the options in my head several times on the plane coming over, which gave me the sense of confidence I'm feeling now because the decision seemed really clear after that. First, live as a man, which is absolutely intolerable. Second, remain preoperative, and continue to feel that there's something funny about that part of my body, continue to feel unsafe walking down the street, continue to feel either apologetic towards or fetishized by the people I date, not to mention numerous other small indignities. It's true that I to some extent am towing the party line, making myself conform to gender standards I don't necessarily believe in. But that's just an unfortunate byproduct. The fact is that my body already feels that part of me as a vagina. I'm no longer psychologically and spiritually attached to my penis, so why be attached to it physically?

So, the last option is to take the risk. What's the worst that could happen? I could die, but that doesn't frighten me. That's really more of a problem for other people than myself. If I die, I would at least die knowing that I wasn't afraid to do what was best for me.

My biggest fear, I suppose, being a really healthy person, is finding myself beset with health problems. That is the biggest risk I've decided to take, because it's the only way I could potentially regret having gone through the operation. But given that a vast majority of the people who go through this do not experience significant complications, I think the risk is worth it.

I'm not even terribly afraid of the vagina not working optimally, of it being too shallow or looking odd or not being particularly sensitive. The fact is that an inferior vagina is better than the body part I currently possess. I don't really understand why it's relevant to compare my new genitalia to those of genetic woemn, or even other TS women. As long as it's a clear improvement over my current genitals, I'll be happy. It's not a contest to see who has the best genitals. The only goal is to be happy with what I have.

Now it's less than five hours before the operation, and my day begins in less than two hours, when I will take my shower and have an enema, and then proceed to a consultation with my surgeon at 7:00, and then surgery immediately following at around 9:00.

It's actually going to happen.

6/13/02, 8:30 a.m., the morning after.

Around this time yesterday morning, I was wheeled into the operating theatre and put under general anesthesia. And then time did its usual skip when you go under, so I woke up in the operating room at around 3:00.

It's done. I don't have a penis anymore. It's both the strangest and most natural feeling int he world. I tried to summon up nervousness, ask myself questions, but I never really doubted that this was the right thing to do for me.

2002-11-11T16:06:00.000-05:00

Invitation Accepted

Meredith has requested that I post to Art and Gender. So I feel a bit like a guest speaker at a seminar where the topic is both outside of my experience and also very close to my heart. I am a heterosexual man undergoing radical life changes. Meredith and I live together. I think our transitions represent crossings of different rivers yet there may be parallels worth discussing. I have created my own blog, Fantastic Journey for the purpose of bloging my own thoughts about my own ... uh ... journey.

I thought I might start by throwing my two cents worth into the discussion on the moral responsibility to be "as out as you can". My two cents worth might be more appropriate as a comment to a previous post, but I have been given the podium ... so Meredith. I fall back on my own rather academic assumption that we are not born obligated to do anything and we are born without our choosing to be born. In my own accounting system every obligation we carry in life must then follow from our own conscious decisions to take them on. Gender, along with sexual orientation seem to fall into the basket of traits we are born with and not assumed along with obligations later in life. I would propose that the discussion of "obilgation to be out" you refer to might be better framed as a discussion of the consequences of being out or not. Those consequences seem very real and tangible. I say let each one of us self determine our degree of being out just as we self determine our gender.

2002-11-09T16:16:00.000-05:00

Blowing Out Candles

Today is my blog's second birthday. It's funny to think that I've had my blog for longer than I've been a woman, but there you have it.

I went to a candlelight vigil last night for Gwen Araujo in Newark, her home town, and then to a perofrmance of The Laramie Project, a play about how the town of Laramie dealt with the killing of Matthew Shepard, which has since been adapted as a movie.

Going to Newark obviously brought up a lot of things for me. I thought it was really important to go because I wanted to understand the people there, undrestand the pain that they were going through as their community was singled out as a site of the murder. It was important for me to make the people there human, to get a physical sense of the town in which Gwen's murder occured. At the same time, I was of course obviously nervous and scared, because I didn't know what to expect and also because I clearly identify with both Matthew and Gwen, having been both a gay man and a preop transwoman, being physically small and therefore more subject to physical violence, and outspoken about both being gay and being trans.

I didn't stay for all of the vigil because I had to go see the show. The part that I did see was mostly positive, though not all of it. The mayor of the Newark spoke and during his entire speech he kept referring to Gwen as Eddie, even as the crowd, me among them, were asking him to refer to her as Gwen. Gloria Alread, the spokesperson for the family, and Gwen's own mother spoke, and referred to her as Eddie-Gwen, and used male pronouns to describe her.

I think it's important to recognize how courageous Gwen's family has been and how supportive her mother has been especially. But I also think it's important to note that they did not do what Gwen would have clearly wanted, which was to be called Gwen and gendered she. During the vigil, her mother said something along the lines of, "Eddie came to me and said that he wanted to be called Gwen all the time." I think it's customary in memorials to honor the wishes of the deceased, so I was disheartened that Gwen's wishes weren't honored in that regard. I certanly hope that my family wouldn't refer to me by my birth name in a similar circumstance.

The play itself was quite moving, and the cast did an excellent job. I found it a little bit strange that aside from Robin, who was with me at the vigil, I only saw one other transperson there that I could identify, and I didn't see any transwomen in the audience. I thought there could have been some effort made for transpeople to see the show, though I suppose it's understandable that some transpeople might find it difficult to go. There was a question and answer portion afterwards, in which I asked a question and also identified myself as trans, just to make it clear that while the audience saw itself as having a kinship with the townspeople of Laramie in the play, there was at least one person in the audience who identified with Gwen and Matthew. Another person there made some really excellent points about honoring and respecting difference. We talked for a little while after the Q&A, and he told me that he thought it was really brave of me to identify myself in that setting, and how important it is for people who are different not to let the majority squelch their spirit. That was really heartening to hear.

On another personal note, I said hi afterward to Moises Kaufman, who wrote The Laramie Project. I met him before because I did a workshop with him at MIT, which I talked about in a previous entry. He was really sweet. He gave me a big hug and told me that he remembered me as soon as the lights came up on the audience. I then introduced him to Joe, and he said the funniest thing, which was, "Yeah, I met her at MIT. You know what these people at MIT are like. There were all these geeks and nerds, and then there was her." Of course Joe then pointed out that he's an MIT grad, which made the moment even more amusing. All of this was caught on some news camera, so Joe expressed slight trepidation about being introduced as my boyfriend on the 11:00 news.

2002-11-08T02:13:00.000-05:00

When Worlds Collide

There seems to be an unusual amount of cross-pollination between my Internet and real-life friends recently, happening in both directions. Robin and I have met in person and have been hanging out, and I've been talking to Mandyabout her hormone situation and generally trying to help.

At the same time, my boyfriend Joe has set up his own blog, which doesn't have anything in it yet, but I hope this little plug would induce him to write something. I've also given him permission to write entries on this blog, just to give you all a heads up. We've also been talking a lot about the role of Internet technology in artmaking recently at school, so I've actually given out this URL to a fair number of people at school.

I'm not sure what to make of this interbreeding between my virtual and real selves. It makes me think about how I'm different online compared to in real life. Most people I've talked to who have interacted with me in both situations say that I seem colder and more cerebral online. I think it's probably the fact that my analytical side tends to come out in this medium. I tend to be goofier in real life. Also, my real life self is I suppose more multifaceted than my online self. Most of my online persona is built out of my transgenderism, whereas people in real life get to experience way more aspects of my personality.

Oh so hey, if you're a real-life person I know and you're reading this, would you mind saying hi in the comments box? I'm curious about who in my real life is reading....

2002-11-01T17:25:00.000-05:00

Back to Basics

The discussion below is getting a bit out of hand, so I hope I can clarify a number of my positions with this post.

First of all, I don't mean to blame stealth transwomen for the murder of Gwen Araujo. I apologize that my post before the last one has been interpreted that way. It was unclear writing on my part, but I'll let it stand just because it served as a point of departure for people's responses. Gwen's death simply reminded me of the importance of transgender education because I see it as an extreme form of how misunderstandings and distortions about transgenderism can lead to violence against transpeople. That's all. I in no way think that anyone is to blame for Gwen's death but the perpetrators themselves.

I'm also not saying that in this social climate, every transwoman should be out to everybody. I'm certainly not out to absolutely everyone who knows me. I'm simply saying that in my opinion, transwomen who can afford to should make more of an effort to be out. In the gay community, it's pretty much accepted that being out is of greater benefit to all gay people at large than being closeted. I think it's important to foster that same sense in the trans community.

Now, why do I believe this? Let me try to get back to some really basic issues here. First, I agree with Caitlin that everyone should be as happy as possible. This means that people should be able to lead the lives that they want free from harassment or violence from other people.

Ok, so if that's the goal, then what's the problem with everyone being stealth? First, not everyone can afford to be stealth anyway, and pretty much everyone who is stealth now had to go through a transition process where they couldn't be stealth because they didn't pass. So being stealth entails a fair amount of sacrifice. People have to move away, turn their backs on positive parts of their previous lives, etc.

Even then, I think that pretty much everyone who is stealth is in danger of being outed at some point, except maybe in extreme cases where a person transitions really really early and nobody knows about it. So if the current social climate remains the same, and everyone is stealth, then there's still a lot of risk for stealth women.

So the goal then, in my opinion, is to live in a society where people can be out as trans without assuming great risk for doing so, just as gays and lesbians do in a lot of urban areas in this country. But the more stealth people there are, the harder it is to achieve that goal. And being stealth, because every stealth person runs the risk of being outed, can never guarantee a life that's free from harm.

So I'm not saying that everyone should come out. I'm saying that everyone should think about making the best effort they can to be as out as possible given their circumstances. If you think coming out to anybody at all is too much of a risk for you, then for goodness sake, don't come out. But I think it's important for transwomen to think about the possibility that taking steps, however little, to come out to other people, may benefit both themselves and other transpeople.

2002-10-28T03:51:00.000-05:00

Let's Go Out

I figured it would be better to respond to the dialogue going on in the comments box of the previous entry here, mostly centered around issues of whether and how out a person should be.

First of all, I think Lurker's arguments are ultimately illogical. According to her, coming out in an area that already has a high transgender population makes no difference, that one should be out in a rural area to make a difference. And yet, as Bec notes, coming out in highly transphobic areas risks harassment and violence, which I'm assuming Lurker also doesn't want (correct me if I'm wrong). So it seems like the message Lurker is sending is that no one should be out because it doesn't make a difference anyway. But if it doesn't in fact make a difference in an urban setting, then why would she go out of her way to hide her past?

The problem with this argument is that Lurker is arguing from a position she hasn't actually occupied. While I've experienced being closeted, both as a gay man and as a transwoman, Lurker hasn't experienced being out except to people in her immediate circle, at least judging from her comments. And yet she seems able to make statements like being out makes no difference in an urban environment, even though she doesn't actually no what happens when a person is out.

So what I'm trying to do is to communicate what it's like to be out, and hopefully convince other people that being out may be a more viable and desirable way to be than they would otherwise assume. This doesn't mean that I don't respect the decisions of people who choose to be closeted. It just means that I have a certain moral standpoint that I care deeply about, and want to influence other people, especially those who find themselves believing that being stealth is undoubtedly the best way to be, without fully considering what it's like to be out.

It's true, there are a lot of uncomfortable things about being out. I've been called he a couple of times by people who wouldn't have done so otherwise. I have to answer uncomfortable questions. I live with the risk, which I perceive as minimal in San Francisco, of being harassed or persecuted by people who find out that I'm trans.

On the other hand, I don't fear that people from my past are going to come back to haunt me, or that someone is going to out me. I didn't have to turn my back on the people I knew and cared about when I was a boy. I don't have to hide anything about myself, or feel like the respect that I get from other people is conditional. I don't have anything to hide, and no one can hold anything against me.

I also don't have to feel that a person I care about has to "get over" me being trans when I tell that person. Being transfriendly is a condition of my close associations with people, not something that I have to conceal and then spring on a person later. For me, a person who wouldn't want me as a friend if I were trans can never truly be my friend.

And even though there are people I come out to who don't perceive me as fully woman, I wouldn't trade their perception for the perceptions of the people who tell me not only do they not mind that I'm trans, but that they have a higher respect for me because I'm out and trans. I also wouldn't trade their perceptions for those of people who tell me that even though they know that I'm trans, this doesn't prevent them from perceving me as a woman. I'm not out to convince the entire world that I am a woman. I know who I am, and being trans is part of who I am, just like being a woman is part of who I am. I don't see being trans and being a woman as mutually exclusive.

Aside from all this, I also know that by being out, I make a small but tangible contribution to forming an accurate and fair picture of transgenderism. To argue, as Lurker does, that it makes no difference for a transperson to be out in a place where there are a lot of other transpeople implies that all transpeople are interchangeable. It ignores the fact that each transperson brings her own unique experience to bear, and affects the people she interacts with in a different way than another transperson. And being closeted prevents people from hearing about a transperson's unique and valuable experiences.

2002-10-24T22:24:00.000-04:00

Gwen Araujo

In case people who read this haven't read about this story yet, here's a press release from the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition.

I was at a loss for words when I read about the murder, maybe because I've been in situations similar to the one that Gwen was in the night that she was killed. And while her death is certainly horrible, what's horrible in a different but possibly more pervasive way is the fact that there are countless transpeople out there, whether closeted or out, transitioned or non-transitioned, who spend a signification portion of their lives feeling unsafe because of their identity, even as many jurisdictions offer no protection for people because of their gender identity.

Even worse, I think that while I think a vast majority of people would concede that what those three men did was wrong, I think that a lot of people would consider it understandable, possibly even excusable. Because I think at this point in the development of transgender understanding in this country, people are so clueless and unaware about the issues involved that even well-meaning people allow their prejudice to get the better of them.

I sense this every time I come out to someone who hasn't met a trans person before. I see the way that the person looks at me, how s/he reevaluates me and sees me as other, an exotic, or worse, a freak. And often, when it's a heterosexual man, I see him look at me and then question himself in his gaze, question whether he sees me as a woman, could possibly even be attracted to me, and therefore ask himself what that means and whether he should be threatened by it.

Most of the people I've interacted with get over it after a while, but I'm pretty aware that there are many people who would be perfectly happy to date me and/or sleep with me if I looked exactly the way I do but wasn't trans, but who wouldn't do so because I am. And in many ways, that's an incredible amount of ingrained prejudice at work, a lot of social programming. It has taken a long time for the gay rights movement to reach a stage when a significant number of people in this country, especially in urban areas, to recognize that there's nothing inherently wrong with being gay. I think it's going to take at least as long for people to realize the same thing about being trans.

In the meantime, transpeople and especially transwomen like me walk the streets and go to public places feeling unsafe. It was a lot worse when I was preop like Gwen. I evaded every man who approached me on the street, because I knew that there was always that risk that he would read me and become violent as a result. I talked about an incident about a year ago in a previous entry, which I think could have easily gone the way that Gwen's did. It's a part of life as a transwoman that many of us choose to accept to be who we are.

Now that I'm postop, there's certainly less danger. But whenever a stranger in a public situation pays attention to me, the question of whether I'm going to be read and what the other person would do if he does read me still lingers. And I don't think it will ever go away. But it can only get better the more people become educated about the existence of transpeople.

And if this is the case, I think that transpeople have a direct responsibility for making people aware of our existence. Frankly, I'm tired of the argument from postop transwomen that they have no responsibility to the trans community after their operation because they are "women" and no longer trans, as if an operation can erase the entire history of their previous existence. Worse yet, this implies that they can turn their backs not just on the women who will certainly follow them, but on what they had to endure to become who they are.

For me, it's vital that I own my fear, vital that people know how I came to be who I am. I don't think of myself as inferior to genetic women. I think of myself as the same in certain ways, different in other ways, and in certain ways better. Better for having gone through what I've gone through and coming out the other side a more intact, happier, and more developed person.

And I don't know, I'm not making any sense right now, but I think that it's the responsibility of every transperson to be out to the best of their ability, because it's the only way that people in our lives know that we exist not as freaks who deserve to die, but as people who exist not only to be tolerated, but to be respected and loved. Joe (my boyfriend) said some really touching things last night when we talked about the murder. I don't remember exactly what he said, but he said something about reading about it on the news, and it affecting him in a way thats so much deeper than before he knew me. And in my head I thought, that's a lot of the reason why I'm out, because being out allows me to affect people's lives in a really tangible way, so that when they encounter other transpeople, they not only lack the desire to inflict physical or emotional violence on other transpeople, but also respect and admire people for making the courageous choice of choosing to live the life that best suits her, despite society's expectations.

2002-10-19T12:10:00.000-04:00

Draggy Drag Drag.

So I went to a drag party last night, dressed as a boy for the first time since the operation. Actually, for the first time since transition really. I introduced myself by my old boy name even, though that didn't last very long because I realized that everyone at the party wouldn't know what my real name was and would get confused.

I was wearing my old tuxedo from college, which I haven't worn since 1997. It's nice to know that it still fits, and is actually a bit loose now around the waist. I've lost a lot of muscle mass since those days and my weight distribution is different.

It was a huge party with lots of gay men running around, and a drag beauty pageant. I experienced a lot of vague feelings of discomfort during the pageant, which I couldn't locate. I find that odd because I'm so used to having a clear analysis of social phenomena, but I didn't this time. I guess I was reacting to the fact that these men were performing these hyperfeminine roles, which seemed to fit at least some of them quite well, except they all had these gym-built bodies.... massive arms and shoulders especially.

Also, the men in the party who weren't in drag had the whole annoying gay male hypermasculine act going. So it seemed to me like the men in the party who weren't dressed as women were in certain ways in drag more than the men who were dressed as women. That's actually the source of a lot of my frustrations when I was in the gay community. I just kept seeing all these naturally effeminate men constantly trying to butch it up to get a date.

The boy I'm dating actually made a really funny comment a couple of weeks ago. He tends to get hit on by a lot of gay men, to the point of once having someone kneel in front of him and serenade him in the Castro, maybe because he's around them a lot even though he's straight, but also because he does have this kind of hyper-heterosexual vibe, which I'll probably talk about at a later date. But a good description is that from the outside, he seems like a total manly man, although in fact he also has a really developed feminine side... I wouldn't be with him otherwise.

We were in bed at the time, when he asked me why all these gay men were hitting on him all the time. And I told him that it's because gay men tend to like straight men. And when he asked me why, I was like, well, mainstream gay culture tends to really value masculinity and being straight is a clear sign of masculinity, and also it's like straight men are forbidden fruit. Then he was like, "Well, you found a way to get a straight man." And I was like, "Yeah, I guess." :)

Back to the party: as far as I can tell, I was read as a woman. People referred to me and the friend that I was with as "ladies" a number of times, and we were presumed by some to be a lesbian couple. That was really interesting.

2002-10-17T01:30:00.000-04:00

Fallout Update

So things are still generally positive in terms of outing myself in school. I've become significantly closer to the queer people in my program as a result, and have I think gained the respect of a lot of people. Of course, there have been bad things that have happened. I've been "he'd" unconsciously by a couple of people in my program for instance, and have had to answer uncomfortable questions that come out of the blue about my previous name, the operation, etc. But I consider that the responsibility I took on when I decided to be out.

At the same time, a lot of positive things have happened. Just today, I was talking to one of my professors, a gay man who didn't know Ii'm trans, and we were talking about how goatees are all the rage in the gay community these days. Then he said something like, "Yeah, when I was younger people mistook me for a girl, and I grew it so that people would know I'm a boy." And I was like, "Yeah, I tried to grow facial hair when I was a boy but it didn't work." He was pleasantly surprised because he didn't know I was trans, and we had a moment of understanding, a recognition of a shared history that wouldn't have happened had I been closeted.

Then it's great to go from that bonding moment with a gay man to then chatting with my female friends in the program, who all view me pretty much as any other woman, except with certain twists. Like people get a real kick when I do impressions of men. It really surprises them how low my voice can go.

Speaking of female bonding, here's another funny passing story. I was hanging out with Anna, one of my friends at school, and we decided to go to Crate and Barrel because I needed oven mits. So I bought the oven mits and on the way out we passed by a bed. And, being the noncholant artists that we are, we just decided to llie in it and talk for a while, as I set the oven mits down at the foot of the bed. Well these two guys passed by and one of them said, "Well, we would definitely like to get you but judging from these oven mits, it looks like you're too hot to pick up." Anna and I giggled for a while over that.

2002-10-10T16:32:00.000-04:00

Terms of Privilege

Lurker asked me this question in my comments box, which I think deserves an entry-length answer:

You know I have to laugh about your thing about being passable. How is that a privilege? You talk about it like you are one of a very few who actually pass. Is this something you think about because you see a lot of non passable ts women? Or is it that you see a lot more than you saw in Boston? I'm just curious. this seems to come up a lot in your journal is all.

First of all, I don't question that there are many other transwomen who pass, and it's also really hard to quantify what proportion of the transwoman population does or doesn't pass. One problem here is that a majority of those who do pass don't hang out in transgender circles or make themselves known as trans, so it's just this automatic thing that whenever I go to trans meetings, support groups, what have you, the people there at least in my observation probably wouldn't pass as well as I do. But in general, if a large majority of transwomen who are either in or post-transition pass, then the transgenderism phenomenon wouldn't be nearly the big deal that it is.

I actually have had similar problems talking about passing with other Asian people. Because I pass as white and not Asian, I observe a lot of the ways in which behaviors towards other Asian people are different from people's behaviors toward me. But when I talk about the "privilege" of passing as white, a lot of Asian people I encounter either deny or are confused by that privilge. But they have no way of directly comparing, since they don't know what it's truly like to be perceived as white.

In the same vein, it's hard to quantify the degree to which I pass compared to other transwomen, but I just know that I pass very well, and it's something that I think about a lot, partly because I'm a really analytical person, and partly because I'm sensitive to the ways in which I'm afforded privileges in this society because of my extreme passability.

That passability has two important dimensions that I can think of. One is that my passability requires very little effort on my part compared to other transwomen. I am perceived as an attractive young woman pretty much regardless of what I'm wearing, whether or not I have makeup, whether or not I'm wearing jewelry. Aside from SRS and a tracheal shave, I haven't had any surgeries to make myself more passable, whether facial surgery or breast implants. I have hardly any facial or body hair, and the little that I do have is blonde. I have unusually small hands and feet, probably even smaller than the average woman's. I have a naturally high voice, so I didn't have to "work" in order for my voice to pass.

The other dimension is the social categories that I get put into. Passing isn't simply a matter of a binary between passing and not passing. Passing is this system of representation, where women get put into particular roles based on their appearance. I not only pass as a woman, I pass as probably the most privileged social category possible while still being a woman: that of a young, attractive, upper middle-class white woman. And because I have ambivalent relationships with all these categories, I tend to talk about them a lot and feel the weight of not having my minority, my "other" status be clear in my appearance, but at the same time taking advantage of that privilege automatically.

I find it difficult to engage in a lot of activities without thinking about whether or not I would be allowed to do them if I didn't pass. The guy I'm dating says that because he's heterosexual and is only attracted to women, he wouldn't be dating me if he didn't perceive me as a woman even though he knows I'm trans. I don't think I could have performed in "The Vagina Monologues" had the director who cast me not perceived me as a woman like the other women in the cast. There are a lot of little things that happen every day, from the constant stream of men who hit on me on the street, to the people who lift things for me, to the people who are friendly towards me, that happen because I pass. So it's something that I can't help but be constantly on my mind.

2002-10-04T17:20:00.000-04:00

Bloggety Blog Blog Blog

Ok, I'll try to update more often, I promise. Today was a good day. I had a studio visit with James Luna today, who told me that he thought my work is stronger than Nikki Lee's, which I thought was amazing givent that Nikki Lee is one of my major influences.

I've been thinking a lot about my relationship to the trans community recently, and I've decided that even though I've had bad experiences dealing with trans culture, that it is really important for me to be more connected to the community. So I'm going to start attending events and meeting transwomen again and such. Because I think that I really can't talk about trans culture without really being in it. I also spend a lot of time criticizing privilege, especially white men's, but I also have to come to terms with my own privilege as a passable transwoman. So there you go.

2002-09-26T20:47:00.000-04:00

Hmmmm....

ten minutes of hurried blogging before an opening... no time to edit... just type.... today was a good day. got started with organizing study groups for school. i was hired as a tutor, so i get to organize and be in study groups, but also get paid for them, which is really awesome.

things are settling down, which is good. i've gotten a lot of positive feedback from coming out, and not really a large amount of negativity. everyone has been telling me how brave i am, and a number of queer but not as forthcoming people in my program have voiced support and admiration, which feels really nice.

had a meeting with my advisor the other day where i showed him pictures from last year's transition that i had turned into a book dummy, and he was really positive, which is surprising because he's usually really critical.

and i'm also getting positive romantic reinforcement, which is nice. even though i haven't fully given in to the person involved, i feel myself getting closer, which is a good feeling. i just have to adjust to the fact that he is in some ways really heterosexual, and also that he has a lot of things going on in his life so he doesn't have all the time in the world to spend with me. not that i do either with him, but i don't know, i guess i still want to wait a while before i fully dive in to this one. i just figure it's good to be prudent.

2002-09-20T10:10:00.000-04:00

Ruminations

It's 6 in the morning here and I suppose I have some time to ponder and write another rambly blog entry, which is a luxury now since I'm so busy. My three-month postop anniversary has come and gone, and the funny thing is that I'm still a virgin, though I'm thinking of breaking that particular spell sometime soon.

argh.... fuck capitalization. ok, let me preface this by saying that once again, i'm conflicted about the fact that the blog as a medium is quite new, and the whole private/public thing is messing me up right now. i want to talk about certain private things i guess because this is where i keep a lot of private thoughts, but i also don't want people in real life to start pressing me for details.

so here's the deal: friends in real life, you're not allowed to press for details about what i'm about to write. i'm going to tell all as soon as i'm good and ready. i'm serious. i will hang up the phone or walk out as soon as you say anything about this particular blog entry.

all right, with that in mind, i've been seeing a really great person, who i like a hell of a lot. and the funny thing is that while we're experiencing the pull and tug of a new relationship, of me going forward and him receding and vice versa, i'm pretty sure that on aggregate, he's more into me than i am into him, which is kind of a new feeling since i'm the one who usually dives in deeper, at least initially. he actually even used the l word the other day, which i responded to by expressing appreciation without saying that i love him back, because i guess i don't yet.

and the funny and great thing is that he's so proud of me for being trans. i mean, he actually gets it. we've been having a lot of fun talks about it, because his attraction for me is understandably complicated. he's heterosexual, has never dated a transwoman before, has never sought them out, etc. but at the same time, he has spent a significant portion of his life trying to break out of the mold that his heterosexuality forces him into. most of his friends are either gay or part of some alternative scene, like bdsm. his business partner is a transwoman and he's been around transwomen. but he's not attracted to them because he's not attracted to masculinity as far as i can tell, and he still sees traces of hte masculine in the transwomen she's met so far.

so as far as i could tell, with me he finds this sort of rebellious kindred spirit, someone who lives a life that runs counter to societal expectations, largely independent of the heterosexual model and everything that goes with it. at the same time, the cues that my body exhibits he reads as "woman" in a way that he is attracted to. it's like, all his friends are gay and he likes being alternative, but his body is telling him something different, that he should be with a woman. and with me it's like he's getting both. he's getting someone who is bodily female, outwardly pretty much indistinguishible from other women, but at the same time has that alternative social role he's attracted to.

so what are my hesitations.... i guess after the neuroses of k. and poet boy, and just the general dating craziness of the past year, i lack the ability to dive in as quickly as i did before. also, i have to admit that i still don't completely know who i am and what i want, and it would be ideal for me to get a better sense of that. at the same time, these are not totally legitimate reasons for keeping someone wonderful at bay. i mean, we're all in our various stages of development, and just because we're works in progress doesn't mean we shouldn't be in relationships.

so there you go.... i am slowly acclimating to the idea of being with someone again. but i'm still going to be taking it a lot more slowly than i have in the past, and even though i know i'm capable and willing to fall in love with him, i'm consciously keeping my emotions under control, whereas i had previously just let them run wild. ah, life's twists and turns.....

2002-09-19T10:27:00.000-04:00

Out and About

So yes, I came out to my entire grad program two days ago, and so far, things aren't entirely different from what they were before I did. People seem to be generally cool about it. The discomfort I sense comes mainly from the young men, maybe because I threaten their sexuality in some way. Actually, I'm sure that's what it is. But I'm sure that things will eventually settle down and things will be back to normal again in a few weeks, except that I don't have to carry around this burden of being closeted. It's definitely a challenge, though, both for me and the people around me.

One really really funny thing that came out of the whole coming out is that I found out that the girl I had a crush on (well, I still have a crush on her but have since found out that she's attached, though the crush isn't so substantial that I feel hurt or anything) is actually ftm, but identifies as a girl at school. So it seems that while I've been triumphantly declaring that I am in fact attracted to women, the woman that I was attracted to turns out to be a man. Go figure.

2002-09-16T22:32:00.000-04:00

Sigh of Relief

Things are finally settling down. I moved into my new place yesterday with an awesome, transfriendly roommate who has awesome friends who all seem to for some reason like me a lot, which I find really flattering. Californians just seem to be so much more effusive than Massachusettians.

I'm going to be coming out to my entire department tomorrow, when I do a slide presentation of my work. I decided to come out to everyone at the same time, rather than telling people individually. That way, everyone gets the same information. We'll see what happens.

2002-09-06T15:07:00.000-04:00

Delayed Reaction

Wow, I finally have time to talk about this whole business of two kinds of mtf transwomen, those who are aroused by men (androphilic) and those who are aroused by the idea of being women (autogynephilic).

First of all, I think that this model is overly simplistic. I think a more general account would be just generally transwomen who transition because they perceive themselves to be more attractive to the people they are attracted to, and women who transition purely for their own sake, independent of other people. Because I certainly know lesbian transwomen who fall more in the androphilic profile, and straight transwomen who fall into the autogynephilic profile.

But in any case, I think there's a lot of credence to this view, in the sense that it certainly makes a big difference whether one transitions with other people in mind or not. In my case, I definitely started out thinking that transitioning would make me more attractive to men, and that has in fact turned out to be the case. And sexual attractiveness leads to a lot of social advantages, and better feelings about oneself, etc. I also felt that my particular personal characteristics were much more amenable to womanhood than manhood.

I'm actually reminded of the conversation I had with my future roommate a few nights ago, where he asked me whether I was "biologically in between genders." He said later that he wouldn't have asked the question had I not written stuff about being queer in both gender and sexuality in the ad that he found for roommates that led him to me. He also looked me up on the web and found references to my artwork. He even sent the picture on my MIT web site to a couple of friends and asked what they thought. "Definitely a woman," was apparently the response.

So when I told him I was trans, he then told me that his business partner is also trans, but then he went on to talk about being "fooled" by transwomen before, which got on my nerves somewhat, and I told him that. I said something like, well, I just lead my life, I'm not out to fool anybody. And he said something like, "Oh, if I met you as a stranger and found out, I wouldn't think you were fooling me. I'd just think you're a woman."

What accounts for this? I'm not sure.... I guess my behaviors have become so consistently female that my history has disappeared, at least on the surface....

But to return to the distinctions in question, I think one issue is the fact that there are far more autogynephilic transwomen in this country than androphilic women, and the system is definitely geared towards their needs. For instance, the Benjamin Guidelines are I think set up with the autogynephilic women in mind, with these rules about therapy before hormones and then therapy during hormones to have the operation and such. How does that make sense to someone who passed and lived as a woman before she started taking hormones.

More importantly, there are ways in which autogynephilic transsexualism clashes with feminism, and this is an important area to study and take into account. I think part of what drives a lot of transwomen to transition is the sexualization of the idea of being a woman around women, whereas feminists have for a long time been trying to cordon off women's space at least partly to desexualize it, relieve it of male sexuality. So as both a committed feminist and a transwomen, I've run into situations when the feminist in me has definitely gotten rankled.

Here's the paradox: a transwoman presents herself to me and expects me to treat her like any other woman, which I try to do to the best of my ability. However, that transwoman then hits on me and/or touches me in a way that I clearly identify as having much more of a proximity to a male than a female identity. So then I'm stuck. To forcibly repel that threatening advance amounts to treating the transwoman as I would a man, whereas to ignore it is to allow someone to take advantage of me. Neither solution works very well, which is the reason why I largely shy away from the company of transwomen, especially in groups.

And the other problem is that thare are dimensions of this phenomenon that are not under a person's full control. For instance, physicality does in fact matter. A big, tall person is always going to be perceived as more threatening than a little person, and so it's hard for me to deal with a physically substantial person who is physically attracted to me and who I am not physically attracted to, because I tend to feel unsafe because that person always has the power to force me into a situation I don't want to be in. And it's hard for me to get over these feelings.

So anyway, I didn't expect this entry to be as personal as it is. I was going to be much more theoretical, but so it goes. These are my disorganized thoughts on the matter right now...

2002-09-04T23:10:00.000-04:00

Falling Into Place

I am now in the throes of grad school business and things are definitely getting better. It looks like I'm going to be moving into a new place with a really cool roommate, who I have a lot of good feelings about. We're actually hanging out to see a guy play blues guitar tonight, which I'm sure will be fun.

I just got this really nice e-mail from one of the second-year students, which simply said that she was really happy that I'm in the program. That felt really good.

On the personal front, there are lots of little flirtations going around as usual, but among the people in my department at least, the person I have the biggest crush on is a girl. Hmmmmm.... will yours truly jump ship? Only time will tell....

2002-08-29T22:02:00.000-04:00

Little Orphan Trannie

Wow, yesterday was like one of the worst days of my little life so far. I'm going to catalogue it in some nice little headings:

"No Love"
So I made the mistake of getting in touch with K. again, and agreed to accompany him to a demonstration at Berkeley, where he left me alone saying that he was going to be back in about an hour, but still wasn't there about two and a half hours later, at which point I took the train home and cried a lot, first because I realized that my feelings for him were still too strong to be hanging out with him like that and second that, finally and definitively, there's absolutely no chance that we would end up together. This led to me crying about Ralph and how happy I was when I was with him, and how much I loved him, and he me, and me asking for the first time since the operation whether I made a wrong turn, whether it was really more important for me to be the self that I currently am than to have lost him.

"No Shelter"
So after I got done crying, I came out of my room and at that point, one of my roommates, the one who holds the lease, sat me down and said that he wanted me to move out because "our energy isn't flowing." This after he's been quite complimentary of me up to that point, so I'm still kind of at a loss about what happened. He refused to elaborate, and I didn't really feel like bringing the trans issue up since he had already made up his mind. Did he find out? Maybe. I'm certainly not the most discreet person in the world.

"No Friends"
Well, of course I have plenty of them, but no one in San Francisco, no real shoulder to actually cry on to tell me that everything is fine. I called Brian, who I've referred to in a previous post and he made the appropriate goo-goo noises. I've been hesitant about talking about how close Brian and I have become just because everyone who seems to find out about it ends up implying at some point that we either are or have been physically involved, which is untrue. So whatever. Brian is a really good friend, and since he was already witness to my latest ridiculously vulnerable episode when I had my sex change operation and couldn't pee, and was such a good source of support during that time, so it wasn't too hard to like totally break down over the phone with him. But it's the first time in a really long time when I actually wanted to break down in front of a live person.

"No Money"
On top of all this, the operation has plunged me deep into debt, and moving is not going to help. In fact, I'm not even sure how I'm going to afford putting a deposit and first month's rent into a new place without plunging into even greater credit card debt. Ahhhhh!!!!

So that's my life at the moment. So much for a smooth transition.

2002-08-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

Sane and Sound in SF

I'm at an Internet Cafe so I can't be long, but I just want to report that I'm fine, though I'm experiencing major friend withdrawal. I miss so many people it's not even funny. And I haven't met a single new person here yet, except my roommate, who's cool but really busy right now so we couldn't hang out all that much. Thankfully, two East Coast friends, Keith and Linda, are in town, so the friend drought isn't too bad, but I still feel lonely. I'm sure this will pass, especially since I'll be meeting like 60 new graduate students next week, but I can't help the way I feel right now. Oh, and also, I went to a lesbian club the other night and was totally ignored. Straight girl vibes? Lesbian elitism? Who knows.... anyway, that was fine, since the whole reason I went to a lesbian club in the first place was not to be harassed.....

2002-08-15T19:17:00.000-04:00

Beantown Blues

Blogging in Boston for the last time.... wow, i've been here nine years.... boston has seen me grow from barely off the boat innocent to urbane harvard grad, has seen my gay identity blossom, seen me in a wonderful 4+ year relationship, seen me make the transition from man to woman.... so many things have happened, and it's amazing that i probably won't spend more than a week in this city again....

san francisco is going to be amazing.... it's actually quite surprising that i know so few people there.... or at least so few people i've known a long time ago, before i transitioned. it'll be interesting not to be confronted with people who've known me as a boy on a regular basis. and exciting too....

i dunno.... i'm too tired to say anything meaningful right now.... i get on a plane at 4 p.m. tomorrow, and get to san francisco at 10 p.m. or so. one of my roommates is picking me up from the airport, which is super nice of him. and the next day, i'm going to veg out, and the following day, i'm going to start unpacking my stuff, and then the following week i'll slowly but surely adjust to a new life.

2002-08-12T18:12:00.000-04:00

Contemplating Carpet

So my friend Johann took me to his friend Laurel's birthday party last Saturday. I didn't know that this was the same Laurel who is the best friend of Juan-Carlos, an artist I was in a group show with recently. Small world. In any case, the party consisted mostly of queer women, and it was really fascinating interacting among them. I don't know, I don't think I'm going to switch sexuality teams (after switching gender teams) any time soon, but it's nice to be around lesbians and think about making that move. There were a couple of women there who I thought were quite attractive, but they didn't move me physically in the same way as men I'm attracted to do, so I dunno. It'll probably take a persistent woman to convince me to make the switch.

On the other hand, I really enjoyed hanging out with my friend Emmet the other night, who is a non-op ftm.... it was fun walking around Davis Square holding hands, with everyone perceiving us as a lesbian couple, little did they know. So I guess I'm having isocial ssues with being a heterosexual woman. I dunno, there's something really nice about being mainsteam and things being simple, of walking hand in hand with someone and not making a political statement, but there's also something unsatisfying about it. I guess I'm just a rebel at heart.

Waiter update: I was thinking about hitting on the waiter this weekend, but decided that I was too busy. So James and I once again had brunch at the cafe, and it was really funny because Waiter Boy was rather confused and ran hot and cold throughout brunch. When I entered initially, he touched my waist and I subsequently brushed his hand, then he said something like, "Hi again. You're wearing my favorite skirt," but then he saw James and he was much more sedate throughout the rest of the meal, to James's amusement. But he still made a point of walking out of the restaurant when we left and saying goodbye. I saw him do this with only one other woman throughout brunch, and James and I both agreed that she was a knockout, so I felt kinda flattered that I received similar attention.

2002-08-07T10:51:00.000-04:00

Sad Tales from the Other Side

So I recently lost my second-closest female friend, for transitional reasons that I really didn't expect, and that I have to take more fully into account. The awful business started when she told me that she has trouble meeting and itneracting with boys, and so I sort of took her under my wing, introduced her to my entire friendship circle that includes a significant number of men, went out with her, etc. In the process, I made comments about her appearance related to making herself more attractive to men, such as wearing more makeup and dressing better.

Now, I never commented on things that would be hard for her to change or were an integral part of her physical makeup. I never told her she was fat or ugly or needed to lose weight or whatever. The worst thing I told her, and that she kept repeating when she accused me later of making such comments because I was jealous of her being a genetic woman and putting her down as a result, is "You dress like a 30-year-old." She's 25.

So that's the thing she said that absolutely floored me. In the midst of her body image and attractiveness issues, she accused me of being jealous of her because I'm trans and she's genetic. I would admit to this if it were true, but thankfully it's essentially not. I definitely feel moments of envy, but I'm quite happy with myself and my life. What is much more clearly the case is that whereas she perviously perceived me as a person not equivalent to her because I'm trans, she now evaluates me as a woman as I've gone through further stages of transition, and can't deal with my confidence in the midst of her self image issues.

I've actually done a fair amount of attractiveness research at MIT, and it's well-documented that attractive women find it hard to make close female friends, because women in general typically have body/self-image issues that are magnified in the presence of an attractive woman. Now I seem to be experiencing the phenomenon, and it's imperative that I adjust socially. I have resolved never to make any negative comments about my female friends' appearance, and to tone down any positive comments about my own. Thankfully, the transition hasn't really affected my friendship with Fiona, since she's on the same wavelength as me in terms of positive body image.

So it seems that aside from my best gg friend Fiona, and my best mtf friend Bobbi, and my best ftm friend Emmet, my closest friends here in Boston have become heteroseuxal men, which is odd considering that I didn't have a single heterosexual male friend when I graduated from college. There's James, Richard, Keith, and Dave. Very very odd.

2002-08-07T10:22:00.000-04:00

The Read and the Black

Mandy asked about books I've read in the "Scene of the Crime" comment box, and I got to thinking that my trannie reading list is ridiculously short, as far as trans-specific books are concerned. The only trannie bio I've read is Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing, because she's a famous economist and the former of one of my friends. It was pretty good but I found myself disagreeing vehemently with a fair number of her views.

My gender-related reading background was formed out of queer theory and French poststructuralist philosophy, which is probably why I think about gender so differently from most other transpeople. For instance, the book that has probably affected me most genderwise is Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, especially the essay "Critically Queer." But reading it well requires a reasonable knowledge of Derrida, and also possibly Barthes and Foucault. I don't even know where to start with Derrida, Writing and Difference is probably the best place, but it's a tough read. However, Foucault's History of Sexuality is actually fairly accessible and Barthes' Mythologies is downright enjoyable.

The main thing one would get out of reading these books genderwise is that while people in the world generally think of a word and its meaning having a fixed correlation with each other, it really doesn't. So many things are mutable, changes over time, changes with context, etc., and one can subvert the meaings of words and signs in general for their own purposes. For instance, the word queer used to be a bad word, but has now been co-opted by the queer community to have connotations of strength and defiance. Now if you apply this to gender, think of a body, a person as something akin to a word. Now, if a person has a penis, it is automatically assumed that this person shouldn't wear a skirt, makeup, and identify as a woman. An examination of the texts above shows that penis = male identity do not have to necessarily be exactly correlated. For me, knowing that my body produces naturally ambiguous signals, like a woman's full lips and small waist, allowed me to subvert this whole process of correlation, and led me to decide that I would be a better woman in this particular societal setting.

Ugh, my elitist academic underbelly has been exposed!

2002-08-05T13:44:00.000-04:00

Scene of the Crime

The past week has been one of the more surreal and bizarre ones of my existence so far. I suppose in a good way, but my process of adjusting to being postop has taken on surprising turns. I have at this point pretty much shed all signs of non-passability. My shoulder to hip ratio is now firmly within normal female range, and fat deposits have made my face significantly more feminine.

As far as I can tell, this has resulted in me shedding a significant amount of the "boyish" signals that my body used to have, and has now put me into the mainstream category of thin, attractive woman. And people are noticing, even without any makeup, even with conservative clothes. And people are having really surprising reactions to my appearance, and even though I know that this is like every transwoman's dream comre true, the queer part of me is getting a little bit freaked out.

Take for instance Raver Boy. I tried to "break up" (if one could even call it that since we only went out twice) with him over the phone, but he asked to see me in person, where I told him that I couldn't date a regular smoker and was turned off by his drug use. He actually offered to quit. And when I explained that it wasn't the point, he actually teared up before I left him sitting in the park bench where we were talking. I don't know, maybe I should have felt in some way vindicated given how my heart is usually the one getting broken, but it just felt very strange.

And then I had breakfast the follwoing morning at a cafe near where I live. It's like my third week in a row eating there, because I had become addicted to their pancakes, but it was the first time I was alone, and the previous time I was with my friend James, and for some reaosn whenever we're out people seem to think we're together, I guess because we have that easy familiarity of a couple. Anyway, the waiter, who I actually thought was pretty cute in a dark Ben Stiller kinda way, and has that tall lanky body type I like, asked me why "my friend" wasn't with me this week. And when I said something like, oh, I don't see him that often since he lives in Beacon Hill, he was able to interpret rightly that we weren't together. So then funny things just started happening.

He just became ridiculously attentive. The cafe has these statues that they put on the tables to like entertain people, and he put the biggest one on my table. Then he gave me an extra napkin, even though I already had one. Then he kept checking on me like every five minutes, and making small talk at the same time. And then, when the bus boy brought out my water, which they usually serve without ice, he came over and said, "Oh, I think you're a little too hot to have water without ice. Let me get you some," and then went to get some ice and then said, "See the things I do for you darling." And then when I finished, I asked the bus boy for a takeout box, because customers usually put their own takeout in a box themselves, but he specifically went over, took the takeout box from my hand, and put my food in himself. And then after I paid and left the restaurant, waving goodbye to him, he specifically walked out of the restaurant after me and said, "Bye. Hope to see you next week."

I've never been treated like this before, and I honestly find it very strange, in kinda the same way I find it odd when people treat me differently from my family because I look white. I take advantage of the privilege of course, and in a certain way derive satisfaction from it, but it also makes me feel uneasy, like I don't deserve it in some way.... but a smart man told me once, and I'm quoting him directly because he made this comment over e-mail, "You're beautiful, in many ways, for lots of reasons. If someone feels that you're beautiful, but then discovers you're trans, the level of your beauty does not change," and I think that's something I'm very much on my way to internalizing.

So I guess I'm just going to go along for the ride.

2002-07-31T16:41:00.000-04:00

2002

I'm in the process of writing a performance piece right now based on my epxeriences as a preop transwoman appearing in The Vagina Monolgues while in the process of deciding whether or not to have a sex change operation, all the way through bodily transition. I wanted to share a section with you that I'm working on. It will most likely change a lot while I'm actually rehearsing the piece, but I just thought that since I shared what I was thinking about five years ago, that I should also share what I"m thinking about now.

A word of warning: the piece has medical details that might make some people uncomfortable. I consider this part of the point.

--------------------------------
I Don’t Remember

In the introduction the published version of The Vagina Monolgues, Eve Ensler wrote that she tried to write a maonolgue about a transgendered woman and her vagina, but found herself unable. As a result, there is no representation of transgendered experience in her play.

I would imagine that for Eve, writing about a transwoman’s vagina is about as hard as writing about a man’s penis. Because as much as the world intentionally or unintentionally, liberally or conservatively, tries to lump us into the categories of man or woman, that there are many important things that make us different.

We will never know what it’s like to menstruate or give birth or make the choice of whether or not to give birth. We will never play as little girls, will never watch our bodies grow from girlhood to womanhood.

On the other hand, non-transwomen like Eve wll never know what it’s like to confront a system that everyone else considers fixed. They will never know what it’s like to choose to be a woman, to let go of the many privileges of our native genders so that we can become who we are.

And women like Eve will never know what it’s like to have a sex change operation. The pain and the wonder of it.

The last monologue in the current version of The Vagina Monologues is told from the perspective of a woman watching another woman giving birth. It is in the form of a poem, an ode, and each verse begins with the phrase, "I remember."

I too have given birth. With the help of my doctor, I gave birth to myself. The experience was not notable for what I remember, but for what I don’t remember:

I don’t remember anything
After they injected me with drugs
And I blacked out.

I don’t remember
When the doctor made his first incision.

I don’t remember
When he took out my testicles
And set them aside
Even though they were useless
Because I wanted to save them.

I don’t remember
When he took out the shaft of my penis
Saving the tip
So that he can form my clitoris
And set the rest aside
Even though it was useless
Because I wanted to save it.

I don’t remember
When he inverted the skin of my penis
To form my vagina.

I don’t remember
When he grafted some of the skin from my scrotum
Onto the inversion
To add precious inches
To my vagina’s depth.

I don’t remember
When he used the rest of the skin and tissue
To form my external parts
My labia and my urethra
And my clitoris
From the tip of the head
Of what was once my penis.

I don’t remember any of that.
I don’t even remember waking up.

The first thing I remember
In the haze of painkillers
Is peeking under the covers
To find my entire crotch tightly bandaged
And a tube sticking out.

I remember the agony
Of lying on my back for five days
As any slight movement risked pain
While my back ached
From the pressure.

I remember the boredom
Of being too drugged
To do much of anything.

I remember the excruciating pain
Of being rushed to the emergency room
After my urethral opening closed up
Waves of pain rushing through me
Every few minutes
As I screamed in brand new ways.

I remember inserting
What is politely called a dilator
Inside my vagina
For two hours at a time
Twice a day
Four hours every day
For six months
To keep the hole open.

And yet
I can’t remember
The moment
When I gave birth to myself,
When the process was finished
And I became me.

But I do remember
The first time I saw myself
When they removed all those bandages
And the doctor gave me a mirror
So I can look.

My vagina was red, swollen
There were stitches and wounds marring its surface
It was oozing blood and yellow puss
But even then, I knew it was perfect
Because it was mine.

We are told
By others and even ourselves
That doctors make us.
But seeing my vagina for the first time
Made me realize
That we make ourselves.

What is a surgeon’s stamp
Compared to my flesh?
What is his hand
Compared to my skin?
What is his skill
Compared to my choice?

I don’t remember
But I know
That one summer morning
While I lay unconscious
On an operating table
I gave birth
To a new vagina
My new vagina
Me.

2002-07-28T22:01:00.000-04:00

Raving Perfection

I went clubbing for the first time after my operation on Saturday, to ManRay of course, my usual haunt. Although instead of the usual Friday fetish night, Saturday night is called "Liquid," and features a nice mix of people from many different scenes and of many different gender identifications and sexual orientations, without the fetish attrire requirement, and dancing to retro pop music rather than industrial and techno.

Ralph (the ex that I ended up being in a 4+ year relationship with) and I met at Liquid back in January of 1997. It struck me as funny that I thought of it then as a "Gay" night at ManRay, when it was clear that there were all these heterosexual people there... one just sees what one wants to see I guess. I thought of this night as a way for me to dip back into clubbing waters, to sort of get my body used to moving again after the operation. I was planning to take it slow, to groove in a laid back manner until I'm more confident that my body can handle doing all those fancy things it used to be able to do.

Well, that plan quickly fell through when I met this guy who I will call Raver Boy. Madonna's "Vogue" was playing and so I was doing my voguing thing when I noticed him in the middle distance sort of riffing on my moves and we just started sort of riffing on each other, even though we were probably about 20 feet apart in a very crowded dance floor. He's an awesome dancer, so rare for a straight boy and we just sort of slowly gravitated towards each other, doing our voguing moves the whole time. That's just so awesome, when you're dancing and you connect with someone else's vibe, and then you just get to this zone when you're not even thinking about it, but two bodies are moving as if they're one unit completely spontaneously.

So anyway, after that moment, he introduced himself and I introduced myself. He then introduced me to a friend of his as "the best dancer in the club," which was just ridiculously flattering given that I thought he was the best dancer in the club, and one of the cuter ones as well. I also found out that he's an Ivy League grad who double majored in Comnputer Science and Russian Literature. And he's a Jew; and you all know from reading my bio that I have a bit of a Jew fetish. :)

Yeah, so we just kept on dancing and talking throughout the night, getting a little bit closer as the night wore on. I was pleased to find that beneath the confident Raver exterior was this rather shy and vulnerable geek who felt awkward and was clearly intimidated by me in some way. He just kind of kept stealing sideways glances at me while we danced until he finally whispered in my ear (well, shouted really since we were in a club), "Your'e so beautiful," and I responded with, "You're not too bad yourself."

It's so nice to be physically close to someone on the dance floor and not have to worry about whether the other person will find out by brushing up against you. It definitely made me feel less inhibited and able to occupy my body in a new way.

After ManRay closed, he invited me to this after-hours club called Rise in Boston. We drove over in his blue VW Beetle ( which is like the gayest car but he absolutely assured me he wasn't gay), and danced there until around 4:30 a.m. We were really challenging each other.... I had to pull out a lot of my ballet tricks to compensate for my lack of formal raver training. He did give me a beginner's lesson on how to dance with glow sticks though, which was really cool.

But the most awesome thing about the evening was that on the way to the club, we passed by the Fenway 13 cinema and he said something like, "You know , I just remembered that I complimented a girl who looked a lot like you when I was about to watch a movie in that theatre." And I said, "Yes, I remember that. That was me."

It turns out that more than a year before, about three monts into transition, even before I started taking hormones, Raver Boy had come up to me at the movie theatre and whispered in my ear something like, "I think you're gorgeous," then walked away thinking I was on a date, when I was in fact with my gay friend Michael, and I thought he was on a date but he was with a lesbian friend. Raver Boy was one of the first people who hit on me as a woman. Meeting him on Saturday of all nights, my first night out after my operation, it seemed like everything had gone full circle.

So after we got out of the club, he walked me to Copley Square, and waited until the street was absolutely deserted, and then he took me in his arms and kissed me. One real change in my transition is that I feel so much more desired as a woman. The men I've dated since transition have shown me this artdent interest that I never saw when I was a boy, and I find it really exhilirating. The way he kissed me reminded me in an odd way of the way that the unnamed character in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu wanted to kiss his mother, a sort of impetuous kiss that wasn't completely in control.

Things will soon get complicated. Raver Boy and I are seeing each other again tonight to watch Henry V in the Boston Common. I'm not sure if I'll tell him tonight that I'm trans, but I'm definitely telling him that I'm moving to San Francisco in two weeks. And if he still wants to see me, maybe I will tell him if our relationship evolves, and then the fun really begins. But for now, I'm content to know that my first night out as a postop transwoman was as perfect as it could have possibly been.

The past six weeks since the operation have been hard for me. I've had many doubts and fears, questions and hesitations. But now, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be just fine.

2002-07-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

Questionaire

Since I have a vagina now, I can actually answer some of the questionaire questions that Eve Ensler asks in The Vagina Monologues:

What does your vagina smell like

Smoked chicken.

If your vagina could talk what would it say?

I'm thirsty.

If your vagina wore clothes, what would it wear?

Bunny slippers and hoop earrings.

2002-07-24T16:08:00.000-04:00

TMI

I couldn't help but address a question that Miranda had in an episode of Sex and the City that I saw, because I feel uniquely qualified as a postop transwoman to answer it. However, it is of a rather intimate nature so you may want to get out while you still can. The question is, why do men leave skid marks? Not on the road (though they do that to), but in their underwear.

It may at least partly be that men are just bigger slobs than women, but there are actually certain biological realities that make it easier for women to keep clean in that area. One is that for women, there's no penis to get in the way. It's actually significantly harder to clean down there when you have to work around this protruding object, especially when it's in an aroused state.

The other thing is that a lot of people (and I'm going to use the cute terms that the Thai nurses used to describe bodily functions) go "pee pee" at the same time as they go "poo poo." So for women, a bit of moisture is left from their peeing, which they can then use to help clean that area more thoroughly, whereas men don't have the advantage of moisture. Let's face it, our anuses were not designed to be 100% clean and if we do intend them to be so, pieces of dry paper are not going to do the most thorough job.

2002-07-23T16:18:00.000-04:00

Comparisons

So I've been watchng a fair number of videos recently, since I have to spend four hours a day in bed unable to do anything active. I rented two tapes of "Sex and the City" that contain four episodes each. I haven't really watched the show systematically before, so I didn't really realize how apt Gwen's comparison to it and my blog is. Yes, I'm afraid to say that like Carrie Bradshaw, I'm a single gal with an active dating life who's waiting for the righrt guy to come along and running into a lot of misadventures along the way, and is also quite intent on communicating my observations and tends to dwell and obssess about things...

It was just strange to find so many of the concepts in the show so applicable to my daily life.... like the question of when to sleep with a guy and concerns about sleeping with too many.... it heartened me that I've actually had far fewer sexual partners than Miranda (who's had 42), because I somehow had this impression that, having been a gay man, I've had this overly sluttish past.

Though I suppose that unlike Carrie, I'm not really a second-guesser when it comes to relationships. I don't get uneasy when a relationship is undramatic or if things are going too smoothly. This is actually something that I don't really understand very well, just because I tend to know instinctively whether or not I like somebody and am fairly straightforward about things, and don't get freaked out if a person likes me back too quickly. Maybe commitment issues are an American thing since, having grown up in the Philippines, I don't seem to have them in abundance.

I experienced a couple of moments of temptation today. This really hot Israeli guy I met at a club called ManRay shortly before I left for Thailand left me another message, and I'm so tempted to call him back.... but he's not really interesting aside from being hot. Though we did dance quite closely when we met and he's one of those hard-bodied but not overly buff people, which is the body type I generally prefer. Argh.... and then as I was walking to the bank today, I passed by this little plaza where a really cute shirtless construction worker was sunning himself.... he was just so lost in his own thoughts, not looking at anyone, while his body glistened in the sun..... goodness gracious, I really need to get a boyfriend soon or I might burst. :)

2002-07-21T19:45:00.000-04:00

1997

Movers are coming on Wednesday to take all of my stuff, so I'm packing. In the process, I rediscovered the text for Dancing Deviant, the performance I did in 1997 as an undergraduate at Harvard. I had forgotten what I had written, and it amazes me that I didn't transition until four years after the piece. I guess it was because I fell in love with someone who loved me as a boy.

It's funny because Ralph never saw my piece. We actually didn't offically start seeing each other seriously until a week after the piece was over. He was supposed to see it, but there was a delay on the subway and he arrived ten minutes late, and the theatre was completely packed. I'm not sure if we would have ended up together if he had seen it.

And now that I'm writing a new piece about transition, I'm actually thinking of eventually performing them together, or something like that. Anyway, I want to share one of the sections with you. It's called:

My Body

Everything starts iwth the body
For the body is as much ourselves
As the mind is.
We cannot account for the shaping of ourselves
Without the body.
The mind is powerful
And yet it is in constant battle with the body
The mind must win
Because it is the mind that advances.
It is the mind that separates humanity
From all the rest.
The learning mind,
The communicating mind
the mind that can write poems and make tools
That can shape and reshpae the world it inhabits.

When you look at my body
There is no doubt in your mind that I am a man.
Because you focus on my genitals
My penis
My scrotum
The marks of my manhood.
My penis allows me to be distinguished
To be categorized
Yet is it really that simple?

Not for me.
I have never felt comfortable
Being a man
Because my body is not fully so.
My body is a failure as a man's body.
My body is short when men's bodies should be tall.
My body is thin, when men's bodies should be muscular.
My body's chances of finding a woman's body
That is compatible
Are much less
Than those bodies who are taller and bigger.

And yet I am also a failure as a woman
Because I have this penis,
Because I have this chest.
And yet I am of a woman's stature
I am of a woman's size.
Judges have told me
Throughout my life
That I would look better as a woman
If only I had breasts
If only I didn't have this penis
To get in the way.

"Look at your waist," they say.
"Your teeny tiny waist,
The one that curves, so feminine,
The one that forces you to wear women's clothes
Because they don't make men's clothes
Small enough for you.
You may have the penis of a man
but you have the waist of a woman."

"Look at your hands," they say.
"So small, so delicate.
Look how your nails curve so elegantly
The fingernails of a woman."

"Look at your face.
Soft, no chiseled features
No strong lines
A face that would suit a woman
So much better than a man."

"but you're not a woman
How can anyone who finds women attractive
Be attracted to you?
You're just a sissy.
You're weak.
You throw like a woman.
You walk like a woman.
You have a woman's body
But no one wants a woman's body
When there's a dick attached to it."

There are days when I want to cut it off
Days when my body wants to succeed
As a woman.
Because it is certainly a failure
As a man.
There are days when I want to grow breasts
Ripe and full
And my body will be a failure no longer
My size, my stature, my waist, my hips, my face
Will match my genitals
My body will be inviting
It will attract attention
For it will be the body of a woman.

But as soon as I find myself thinking
That I should get my dick cut off
I think again.
Do I really want to be a succesful woman?
Does my body want to be successful at anything?
If I were a successful man
How could I know first-hand
What it feels like
To look at my body
And admire its womanly qualities?
to wish sometimes that my body
Is fully woman.

If I were a successful woman
Can I really know and sense
The power of what is manly in me?
Would I be able to see how my failure
Leads to an ambiguity?
How my body's womanhood, attractive to men
Causes my mind to rot at his gaze
Prevents me from expressing my equality
Because my body is not equal
Because my body functions successfully.

The failure of my manly body
The failure of my womanly body
Allows the freedom of my mind
Allows me to see both man and woman
In me and in others.
I fail miserably
As a man who desires a woman.
I fail completely
As a woman who desires a man.
And yet in that failure
I see that my mind can be free
To think about my lack of manhood
Lack of womanhood
And see that in that lack
I can be both man and woman.

But how? How can I be both man and woman
When I am forced to pick?
How can I be both man and woman
When the desires of others
Is squelched by this ambiguity?
When humanity continues to order itself
Continues to see its objects of attraction
Based on the undeniable distinction
Of man on the one hand
And woman on the other.

I will continue to be
Both man and woman at once.
I will continue to live in that uncertainty
However tempting it might be to transform
and forget that in this ambiguity
I can set myself free

---------

Well, that didn't last did it? :) I don't know, reading this makes me feel slightly that I sold out, but I guess the body won out over the mind....

2002-07-20T12:48:00.000-04:00

Let's Talk About Sex

this is another one of those uncapitalized long rambly posts, you're forewarned...

ummmm, yeah, let's see here... to the amazement of many of my friends, i've decided that i don't want to have sexual contact with anyone until i'm in a serious relationship. this is like a radical shift from my days as a gay man.... i mean, i wasn't terribly promiscuous or anything, but i certainly wouldn't have put things in such formal terms.... and also, as someone who is an ex-catholic.... the waiting to have sex thing has all these ties to christianity that i don't like, and also it has a certain conservative, regressive, non-feminist ring to it.

but all this aside, it's what my body and mind seem to be telling me is the right thing. when i was a boy, there was an appreciable difference for me between casual and relationship sex, but now the gulf seems so vast. as a boy, it was kit kat (which i like) v. snickers (which i like more), but now it's more like tootsie rolls (which are tempting even though i know i really don't like them once i eat them) v. dark belgian or german chocolate....

and another thing is that whereas before, casual sex did not at all affect romantic sex for me, now the idea of having sex casually greatly reduces what i perceive to be the satisfaction i would get out of romantic sex.

also, i guess i value my sexuality a lot more now. i didn't know that there was anything the matter with me as a boy, and everyone in my circle thought that i had a pretty much normal gay sex life. but the fact is that in many ways, my sexuality as a boy was different, in that i pretty much derived pleasure out of sex by giving my partner pleasure, rather than getting pleasure myself. despite the fact that i had sexual contact with a fair number of people, i have never been made to climax by another person as a boy.... and i was only penetrated once, very briefly, and i really didn't like it.

but now sex is so much more pleasurable for me, and i had no idea that what i needed for sex to be as pleasurable as it is, is to become a woman with a vagina. i arrived at this realization almost at random. now, it's like the mere idea of having sex with someone i'm in love with sends these waves of erotic sensation up and down my body.... i can't even fathom what the real thing would be like.

the problem is that the real thing seems so elusive, and trying to find the real thing has resulted in a lot of pain for me. i've realized certain things about myself. one is that i am an easy person to be initially attracted to. i'm attractive, intelligent and personable.

however, i'm also ultimately a really hard person to be in a relationship with, mainly because i lack the ability to compromise about the honesty of my life. even a person who is transfriendly would be intimidated by me because i'm as out and vocal as i am, and i experience no hint or shame about being trans. it's not something that i would ever allow a partner to feel like he (or she, but i'm still more comfortable about that being a parenthetical) needs to get over to be with me, and i will never tolerate being made to feel that it's a sacrifice that a person has to make to love me. because being trans is an integral part of who i am, and has shaped me in many positive ways.

given this fact, i've decided on a couple of things. first is that i really don't want to make much of an effort to be generally attractive anymore. it used to be this ego boost, walking into a room and seeing eyes turn to me, especially because we are socialized as tranwomen not to perceive ourselves as attractive. but the fact is that kind of attention is empty, because being generally attractive also means that one should be willing to like a general kind of person for a partner. and the fact is that to be with me, someone has to be special and exceptional in unusual ways. so now i just want to recede, to be there and content but not be generally noticed. second is that i need to find some way to definitively signal my status as an out transwoman.

so i've already taken some steps on the first front, but i'm contemplating measures that are somewhat more drastic. i mean, i refuse to be dowdy or unstylish, but just less inviting of attention. i no longer wear my hair down in public, because it's blonde and straight and alludes to hair in fashion magazines even though i make no effort to make it so. these days i wear it in a permanent bun. i'm showing a lot less skin, and i've been gravitating more toward looser clothes. i'm also not wearing any makeup. i think i'm just going to continue more in that direction. i'm still willing to be glamorous on special occasions, but not on a daily basis.

on the second front, i'm not sure.... it's just really awkward to tell every random person you meet who happens to show interest that i'm trans... there's the idea of getting a tattoo that makes things explicit, but i'm actually now leaning on just designing a more formal web site and then giving anyone who shows interest in me a card with the URL. i just can't entertain the advances of anyone who doesn't know upfront that i'm trans anymore. it leads to too much complication and pain.

so we'll see... these steps would probably turn off like 99.9% of people who show interest in me.... but the ones who aren't turned off are the ones ultimately worth knowing and maybe even eventually loving.

2002-07-12T19:31:00.000-04:00

Dirty Little Secret

So I've basically decided that I'm becoming more private in real life, I'm going to use this forum to continue to express highly personal views and opinions, just because I think it's the only place I can really do it in my life, and this site has come to serve at least a partly public service function. I'm also semi-anonymous since my last name isn't listed anywhere....

Thankfully, because people lead busy lives, none of my friends in real life who I see on a regular basis actually read this, even though they have the address. There's just so much Meredith one could take I guess. This is a really good thing because people in my daily life don't actually discuss some of the more intimate things I share in my blog, and people who do read my blog regularly I don't really see enough for me to be embarassed that they do know stuff about me that I probably wouldn't normally share.

So anyway, my dirty little secret is that I actually like to dilate. I know that's heresy in the trans community. Maybe it's because I lead a rich fantasy life and I like to spend quiet time reading and writing anyway, but I find that it's actually a nice way of getting in touch with my new sexuality. I've also come to more fully appreciate why women are more reluctant to have sex. Whereas sex for men (or at least penetrators) is a purely pleasurable experience, sex for women always comes with pain.

2002-07-12T19:12:00.000-04:00

Random New Vagina Fact

Here I am blogging from San Francisco. I'm actually at school right now and not at an Internet cafe, so I can blog at my leisure.

So here's my random new vagina fact: because my clitoris is made from erectile tissue taken from the head of what was once my penis, and that area is significantly bigger in a penis than in a vagina, there was a lot of leftover tissue from my operation. So what the surgeon did was line my vaginal opening with the same tissue, so that someone who penetrates me would actually stimulate me as if he were stimulating my clitoris. Cool, huh?

2002-07-07T21:59:00.000-04:00

Changes

Two days before leaving Thailand, I feel the need to make an evaluation of the eperience, and I don't think I'll be able to update this before I get to American soil, so here it goes...

First of all, I guess I didn't fully take into account all these dimensions of identity that change as a result of surgery. I think it's really easy to get swept away by it. Now, I think I understand why so many postop women withdraw from the identities they inhabited previously in the trans community, because I certainly have feelings in this regard, which I never expected to have, being the highly political person that I am. By going through this process, I literally feel like i've gien birth to myself, a self that is if not fundamentally, at least extremely different from the self I was before.

I feel myself withdrawing, becoming more reticent. I feel myself accepting a new identity and achieving a certain amount of resolution and closure, and part of me wants to just chill out for a while and not have to deal with all the personal and political complications of being as outspoken as I have been.

At the same time, there is still the competing force, that trans progress can only come from people being out, especially people who can afford not to be. Just looking for a place to live in San Francisco of all places, people pretty much don't care about your sexuality, but mention that you're MTF and you instantly get crossed out. Because the prevalent images of female transsexuals in this country come from "The Crying Game" and "Silence of the Lambs." We're preceived as personal and psychological threats, always on the verge of derangement. And a person who's looking for a roommate would never know that I am none of those things.

So what's the solution? I think I need to make more of a mental separation between my personal and political self, between my person and my art. I will continue to make work about my self and my body, but I think I have to think of that identity as more of a "persona," rather than an integrated part of who I am. I feel myself becoming shyer. It used to be that when I envisioned showing a piece that involves making 10 full body nudes of my self as my body changes through transition, I pictured myself standing proudly at the center of it all. Now, I picture myself making the work and then letting go, going to the opening but not entering the room. I'm not sure why this is yet. I'm still thinking about it.

And what about the other life priority, love? Well, both my vagina and my heart are on the mend right now. It's been a hard year on this front, consisting mainly of going through the pain of breaking up with someone I dearly love, and seeing things not work out with the two people I was interested in since then. I didn't expect to say this, but I have to admit to myself that I have become afraid to love. The wounds are healing as well as could be expected, but they have definitely left and will leave scars, and I don't think my heart is as capable as it had been of that innocent, completely trusting kind of love that I used to be so capable of giving. I think it'll take a while before I let another person in. But ultimately, I can take comfort in the fact that I am still capable of loving and, imperfections aside, have qualities that people find endearing and lovable.

So there you go.... who am I? Who will I be? I guess we'll have to find out together.

2002-07-07T05:27:00.000-04:00

Getting My Groove Back

Ok, I'm feeling less ornery now that it's been a few days. My urethra started swelling up again the other day, which scared me to pieces, but things have been flowing quite well since then so hopefully it's just a one-time phenomenon.

I'm wearing my "Enjoy Vagina" shirt from Vagina Monologues today, which always puts me in a good mood.

And the people around me no longer look at me like I'm a freak since I now walk pretty much normally, even though I still need to put a donut under my butt when I sit

It's Sunday now. I'm leaving Wednesday morning. How time flies. I don't know how I'll be able to find a room in San Francisco, given I'm still quite weak and I'll be exhausted from traveling and jet-lagged. We'll just have to see...

2002-07-04T01:59:00.000-04:00

I Can Pee!

Well, the subject line says it all. Funny what you fail to appreciate until it's temporarily taken away from you. I'm still having this otherworldly experience every time I go to the bathroom.

Rebecca also seems to be doing well. You should all check out her site. It's so beautiful and heartwarming.

Otherwise, nothing much to report. Someone (you know who you are!) sent me a huge bouquet of flowers yesterday, which really cheered me up. Then I took a ridiculously pampering bubble bath this morning. I'm wearing shorts for the first time in weeks! It's very liberatring.

I came out to Poet Boy, and we're still talking (well, he hasn't e-mailed me in two days but I think we're still talking). Vegan Boy is next, though I'm not really sure I should even open up that can of worms until I'm in San Francisco, as I actually don't want to get involved with him again, so I'm actually more afraid of the, "That's fine, let's get back together" reaction than the rejection.

I've also found out that people I didn't expect are reading this, so I'm kinda blushing about how open I've been, and thinking of withdrawing a bit. Yeah, it's true, I do have boundaries, flimsy as they are.

2002-06-30T05:29:00.000-04:00

Ups and Downs

So here I am still in Thailand, recovering more slowly than I would like but showing definite signs of progress. So should I start with the bad news or the good news....hmmmm.....

Down: I experienced a minor but extremely painful complication. Basically, my urethral opening closed up and I couldn't pee. But being the stoic that I am, and thinking that it was a temporary problem, I held it in too long and had to be rushed to the emergency room because the pain became unbearable. This is probably the trannie version of childbirth. Remember that feeling when you're like driving on the freeway and you can't really stop off anywhere but you really really really need to pee, or your Dad is ordering you to hold it in for another hour. So think about that feeling, and imagining it coming continuously in waves every five minutes for about 45 minutes, getting worse and worse each time. It was the worst pain I had ever experienced. I'm glad I'm a born optimist because there was definitely a couple of moments there when I was thinking, please, please, kill me now.

Up: my clitoris works! I'm so embarassed when the nurse comes to disinfect me daily because she takes a couple of cotton swabs at it and I writhe and wriggle and stuff. For the men, imagine someone continuously stimulating the head of your penis without you being able to touch it..... the feeling is both frustrating and exhilirating.

Down: The people here depress me. They all either want to go to the beach or, in the case of the men, have sex with little Thai girls. The looks I get vary between pitiful and dirty. I crave intelligent conversation, but have no one to talk to, except over e-mail. I'm on the verge of running up and down the halls screaming, "Has anyone read Proust?!!!"

Up: My brain is very actively reconnecting nerve endings in that area, so I'm quite close to not being numb at all down there.

Down: Well, this also means things have the potential to hurt more. It's a bit more painful to dilate, and I get itches but can't scratch them and they drive me crazy.

Up: I got an illustrated "Better Sex" guide at the bookstore, and didn't quite internalize all the wonderful things one can do with a vagina until I now actually have one. Being the former dancer and generally flexible person that I am, I'm really tempted by the more acrobatic ones.

And for those of you who read this and haven't e-mailed me (read Sarah, Rebecca, Emmet and Bobbi), I can e-mail but I don't have my address book online and I don't know your e-mail addresses by heart, so you have to e-mail me before I can e-mail you, ok?

Also, e-mail me with your snail mail address if you want to get a postcard.

2002-06-20T21:42:00.000-04:00

Vaginal Wonder

So here I am blogging from Thailand. I'm now settled into my hotel and am mostly fine, though there's the slight complication that my urinary system won't cooperate and let me pee, so I have to have a catheter for a few more days, which hurts like the dickens when I pee, but otherwise all is well.

Today I put on makeup for the first time since the beginning of the trip, coordinated my outfits, etc., so things are starting to return to normal, even if four hours of my day every day is devoted to having a dilator up there... that's going to be hard to adjust to when I try to lead a normal existence back home, but things should progressively ramp down as time passes.

My new vagina is beautiful. I don't know how to describe it, it just is. I mean, it's also really really strange to have this new body part, but I obviously made the right decision. I just need to get through the pain a bit more and then I'll be even more convinced.

2002-06-09T21:12:00.000-04:00

Bye Bye Birdie

This is probably my last post before leaving tomorrow morning for Thailand. I actually feel quite settled right now.

This weekend was my 5th year college reunion, and I ended up completely missing it. I even scheduled my Thai trip around it, but I realized when it actually came that since none of my close friends were there, I wasn't really very enthusiastic about paying the money to go.

Also, I realize that I like myself so much more now than I did back when I was in college. That I guess provided me with this settled feeling that I've been carrying through this admittedly tough time....

I guess I'm also lucky in that I have a lot of positive reinforcement as a woman..... a lot of people find it really tough to get that.... but this weekend was very positive in terms of seeing my friends, being complimented, feeling secure in my womanhood, etc. It was a really great way to feel emotionally prepared for the operation.

I'll try to update as soon as I can and assure you all that I'm alive and well, albeit sore I'm sure.

2002-06-07T22:14:00.000-04:00

Post-Hormonal

Five days before V-Day.... actually, four really, since with the time difference, I'm actually getting operated on Tuesday night Eastern Time..... technicalities.

Argh.... I have a splitting headache. It's so cruel that you have to go off hormones before the operation (risk of blood clots). So I'm making all these important and stressful decision while having a severe hormonal imbalance. It's really fucking annoying.

I transferred money to the hospital today.... it's all becoming so real.

2002-06-03T19:14:00.000-04:00

Roller Coaster Weekend

Wow.... this was such a crazy weekend.... lots of high highs and low lows.... where to begin....

First of all, I had an art opening at the Gallery at Green Street on Friday, which was a big success. I'm really happy with how the show came together and how the artists in the show collaborated. There's this huge lenticular piece of me that Carl Sesto did, that's really awesome. If you don't know, lenticulars are those things where one picture is superimposed onto another picture, and as you pass them or move back and forth, the image changes. Carl's piece is of me both as a boy and as a girl.... it's really cool and I'm gong to try to get it. Stop by the gallery if you're in the area.

Unfortunately, my party the next day ended rather abruptly when my friend Sudarshin and I had an accident while dancing that ended with him falling headfirst on the ground and sustaining a couple of cuts that needed stitches, while I hit my head but was otherwise unscathed. I ended up having a bit of a breakdown later, for reasons I can't get into because it involves people who read this, but significant relationships may be forever altered as a aresult of the incident, and not in a good way....

I also had a long talk with my ex-boyfriend Ralph.... we broke up on my birthday last year so it was kinda tough to see him at my party. I admitted to him that he's still the only person I would be willing to stay preop for, but alas, he just can't get over the hump of me being female-identified, regardless of what my body looked like. It's really too bad.

In addition to this, the person I'm currently seeing wasn't able to come to the party for complicated logistical reasons, and I haven't seen him or heard from him since Saturday morning. His job requires this kind of absence of communication..... he's been pursuing me for months because whenever we're on the verge of actually getting together, he would get sent off somewhere.... but now I actually care substantially whether he calls again or not, and I do hope he does sooner rather than later because I'll be in Thailand as of next Monday.

The funny thing is that even though I really like him, I've actually come to a place where I'm much more settled about men coming and going in my life, so I'm ok with the possibility of him not calling again, I guess at least partly because I know that at heart, he really liked me during the time that he knew me. And even if this thing with him doesn't work out, I've come to really internalize the fact that I'm an attractive person, and as long as I'm open to the opportunity, the stars will align someday so that I'll find the right person for me. It's a good settled feeling, even though I do miss him.

2002-05-30T18:46:00.000-04:00

Starlight

So my horoscope for this month, courtesy of Astrology Zone is ridiculously sunny.... which is good since last month really sucked. And it bodes well for surgery.

Does this mean I believe in horoscopes? Marginally, I guess...

This is going to be a crazy weekend.... art opening tomorrow, birthday/going away party Saturday, etc.... but it'll be fun. Friends in real life, I'll be seeing you soon....

2002-05-28T19:49:00.000-04:00

Boobie Privilege

I was having a conversation with Winston and Keith today when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Keith's gaze had drifted down.

"What are you looking at?" I asked.

"Ummmm....." he muttered as he shifted his weight for a few seconds, "I was just noticing the seam of your bra."

Likely story. I've noticed that people have been treating me better as my breasts have grown bigger. People must be really nice to Ingrid.

2002-05-24T17:40:00.000-04:00

In case you're wondering....

all five of you who are reading this (judging from the numbre of comments, hint hint), I'm actually quite fine, highly confessional previous entry notwithstanding. Friends of mine (e.g. Brian) have remarked with a certain impudence that I fall in love too easily, and Ingrid has said something like, "While I'm the kind of person who's not even sure if I want to put on a bathing suit, you're the kind of person who just dives into the pool over and over again."

The truth is that I'm not actually a masochist. It's also not true that I fall in love easily. I form relationsips fairly easily, and I date a lot, and I'm usually enthusiastic about whomever I'm seeing, but falling in love is for me a really specific experience that happens quite rarely. It is however true that when I do fall in love, it happens quickly and decisively.

Even though I had previous relationships, the first person I fell head over heels for was my ex-partner Ralph, who I was with for almost five years. Even now, I sometimes find myself puzzled about why we're not together. I guess sometimes gender trumps love. Aside from him, I had vague feellings of love for Poet Boy, but our relationship was so short and so many things were in the way (his youth, my transness, etc.), that I pretty much knew that it ultimately wasn't right from the get-go.

So with K., it was more like a hammer hit me on the head. It's just that instant flash of recognition that you're absolutely right for this person and this person is absolutely right for you. It has only happened to me once before, with Ralph, except that in many ways this was more significant because of the stage in life I'm at. I was 20 when Ralph and I began our relationship, with a life so subject to change. At this point, I have a much better sense of who I am and what I want, and I knew the first night I met him that I wanted K. like what? water? life itself? something ridiculously substantial. Of course, I didn't bother to check if he felt the same way, but that's really pretty irrelevant.

I'm not really kidding about that. I've been gifted with enormous emotional resilience, so I've never been afraid of jumping in, because I've always known how to extricate myself emotionally when I need to. Getting hurt to me is just a natural part of the process. It doesn't intimidate me at all, even when it hurts this much.

So yes, I'm hurting a lot. But beneath that pain is a strength that I feel lucky to have, and a knowledge that I'm a better person for having gone through this experience. I didn't pass muster, but I'm still the same special person I was before this happened, and I will appreciate reciprocated love so much more when it does happen. And it will, because really, I'm just ridiculously full of myself. :)

2002-05-23T15:12:00.000-04:00

Not Enough

This article, which I found linked from Rebeccca's amazing site really threw me for a loop. It details the story of how Barry Winchell, an Army soldier, was murdered for being gay, but was actually dating a trangendered woman named Calpernia Addams. So in order to establish that the murder was a gay hate crime, everyone basically had to erase Addams' trangender identity.

I guess what mainly depressed me about the article was the fact that these two people were totally in love, and that Winchell didn't really care about who knew about their relationship, which showed an amazing amount of courage. And for that to be taken away brutally, and then presented in a light that completely corrupted the nature of that love because of a political agenda, just seems so cruel.

Another quote from the article really struck me: "Calpernia Addams is a very beautiful and painfully shy, slightly awkward woman who
measures, thanks to recent medical interventions, 36-30-38." It's the phrase "thanks to recent medical interventions," that I was really bowled over by.

I don't know, I guess I just started to think about how difficult it is really to ascertain whether one undergoes such "medical interventions" for oneself or for others. My position on sex change operations has always been, if you don't care that much whether you have a penis or a vagina, have the surgery because it'll make it easier on you. Of course, hormones have made it much more clear that I want one.

But would I get breast and hip implants? Would I have surgery on my face? Would I do this to not feel inadequate, not to feel I somehow fail to meet the minimum standards for womanhood? These are questions I never really fully entertained before, just because there have been very few times when I've felt truly inadequate in my life. I can think of three instances: my first year at Harvard, when I realized I couldn't be myself and continue being with my ex-partner, and now.

Why now, you ask? I guess to do that, I would really have to talk about K. He essentially gave me permission to talk about him, and I've really been keeping my feelings bottled up for much too long, so I'm just going to come out with them.

K. and I met in an online chat room a few months ago, but quickly realized that we have mutual real life friends and interests in common. So we just started corresponding on a regular basis. I've become really wary of online interaction being any sort of indication of real life attraction, so I basically just thought of him as someone to chat with online. He also sent me a picture of himself, which I didn't find significantly attractive. K. (I hope I'm not compromising your privacy; I'm pretty certain that no one you know personally reads this or could identify you based on the information I divulge) crossdresses and professes to being attracted to transwomen, not exclusively but in addition to nontrans women.

K. lives in the Bay Area, so when I visited San Francisco to look at the school I'm going to, we met each other in real life for the first time. I essentially already knew that I liked him a lot and thought he was brilliant, but I was just really expecting to say hi and have dinner, because I know that there would be many things about him in real life that I could potentially find unappealing. And I suppose that I confirmed some of this when I met him. He's certainly not my "physical type," at least if one were to judge from people I've been with in the past.

At the same time, I found our real-life interaction to be really enjoyable, stimulating, and challenging. And internally, it was fairly efortless for me to set aside the things that I physically and emotionally didn't like about him, because I thought the things that I really liked about him were things that I was really attracted to. I guess also, I have this tendency of really liking people when I like things about them that 99% of the population would not. For instance, I really like his gender variance, his commitment to his rather extreme politics, his highly argumentative nature, and his general eccentricity.

The major mistake I made that night was fooling myself into thinking that because I was attracted to him, it would do no harm to fool around with him regardless of the terms. I guess this is one of those transition problems. I am still behaving in old ways (fooling around fairly immediately after meeting someone I'm attracted to) even though my feelings are different now (that really, it's not a good idea with someone I like a lot because I need to develop trust first). So then we made out, and then he later said he just wanted to be friends, and then later modified his position and we've been going back and forth ever since. When I asked him about the reasons for his indeicision, he basically admitted to me that the main one is physical, that even though he's moderately attracted to me, he's not (in his words) super-attracted to me, and is therefore not sure about how to proceed. When I asked him about what he thinks the chances of our being in a relationship are, he estimated 15 to 20 percent.

I think I need to switch to the first person now.... I know I'm not supposed to do this here, but it somehow feels right, so I'm just going to go with it....

[embarassing admissions edited out]

2002-05-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

Wanna Seem Me Naked?

In a not-so-subtle attempt to increase traffic, Meredith introduces her gallery, linked at the top of the page. Let me know what you think. :)

2002-05-21T16:07:00.000-04:00

Ring Ring

I gave my number to a mysterious Russian guy on Friday while clubbing at ManRay. He had seen me the last time I was there, two months before. Russian guys seem to behave oddly around me. The week before I met this one, a different Russian guy offered me $500 to sleep with him. This Russian guy whispered "I've been dreaming about you" in my ear, and proceeded to dance with me in a fashion I can only describe as dangerous, as he tugged at my hair and moved my body with a manly authority that I'm unaccustomed to, given that I tend to hang around boys with extensive feminist training. I must admit it was exciting, but I don't know if he knows I'm trans, and he's too dangerous for me to bother finding out. He's called for the fourth time in four days. I don't know whether to be flattered or terrified.

2002-05-21T13:39:00.000-04:00

Call for Suggestions

So a couple of friends are organizing a party for me, to see me off to Thailand and wish me an early birthday because I'll be celebrating it there. They're currently soliciting suggestions for what to call it. Something suggestive and witty would do the trick. My suggestion is the "Wye Wye Wee Wee" party, but your collective minds I'm sure could come up with better names.... So please, make a suggestion!

2002-05-21T13:12:00.000-04:00

Dear K

Your wish is granted, though I believe myself to be a fair judge. To imply otherwise is equivalent to a pot calling a kettle black when the kettle has been recently polished, and the pot sits atop sooty coals.

With affection,
Meredith

2002-05-20T20:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Mr. K

I plan to continue responding here as long as you keep e-mailing me, so as to maintain a certain discipline (certainly for me but also possibly for you) I'm not sure I can muster if we communicate privately.

We seem to define "friends with benefits" relationships differently. For me, a friends with benefits relationship involves both physical attraction and general regard, but does not have a romantic or significantly emotional component. Therefore, a friends with benefits relationship for me does not involve "becoming interested" in somebody, at least not in the way that you describe. Besides, I will be moving 3,000 miles away from my present location in three months. Becoming interested in someone here would be highly impractical.

Given this state of affairs, my position on the question of whether we should communicate while I'm here remains the same. I will let you know if it changes.

With affection,
Meredith

2002-05-20T14:40:00.000-04:00

Q and A

I got this interesting question over e-mail:
"your statement 'when i'm aroused now, i feel that organ between my legs as a vagina' kind of weirded me out. i mean, at the risk of prying, are you sure you aren't confusing other internal feelings? as in, i know the feeling that's a kind of soft caving inside, but, you know, i haven't ever conflated it with the feeling women have wrt their vagina."

As a caveat, I wouldn't be this upfront about my sexuality if it were not for the fact that I think there's a certain public service function involved in talking about what a transwoman might expect while transitioning.... so be warned that the following might make you blush.... onward....

I think that each individual has a different experience when they have sex, and that it isn't particularly relevant to compare how "women" as a class feel when they have sex as opposed to "men," at least when it comes to individual experience. I've heard a lot of women describe their sexuality, and every person is different. I happen to be a super-sensual person, and quite sensitive physically. The first time Vegan Boy and I got together for instance, I orgasmed while he was rubbing my back. My nontrans female friend Ingrid has revealed herself to be even more sensitive than that...

So in terms of how I feel, I currently have two quite distinct modes of orgasm, which I tend to talk about as male and female, because the former was the only kind of orgasm I could have pre-hormones, and the latter is what I almost exclusively have now, and I would imagine the only kind I would have after the operation. For me, male orgasm is powerful but unsubtle.... it lasts for a few seconds and then exhausts itself, then takes a while to start up again. Female orgasm, on the other hand, is at least so far for me less powerful in terms of brute force but lasts for much longer and has many levels and subtleties, and has the ability to recycle much more frequently. I've also been known to experience it spontaneously, which never happened to me as a man.

In my sexual fantasies and with the people I've had sexual experiences with, I actively feel my genitals as a vagina. I don't even have to actively visualize that part as something other than it is right now to have that experience. It's hard to explain, but the feeling is really pronounced and powerful, and I experience it as penetration even when there's nothing to penetrate at the moment. I've had one sexual experience in which my partner positioned himself on top of me in the classic "missionary" position, and made motions that simulated penetration. I actively experienced my genitals as a sort of oddly formed vagina, and had my most satisfying orgasm to date.

Of the three people I've been physically involved with, the two who knew I was trans both made comments along the lines that I (in the words of Bob Dylan) "make love just like a woman," and the other who didn't know didn't perceive anything about my sexuality being anythng other than that of a woman. In all of these cases, I never felt like I was "acting." I've also never been with a woman (except once in an observational capacity), so I don't really have firsthand knowledge of what a woman is supposed to look like when being made love to. I just go with my instincts, and the feedback so far is that I'm quite womanly in bed, whatever that means.

I attribute the development of my feelings to both the hormones and the fact that I had to play a woman who talked extensively about her vagina when I did The Vagina Monologues back in February, and also had the rare opportunity to talk about vaginas all the time with other women. So I feel like I've pretty much come as close to feeling what it's like to have a vagina without actually having one.

In terms of what I think about the neovagina I'm going to have in less than three weeks, as compared to the vagina of a nontrans woman, I'm actually much less concerned than I used to be. There was a time when I was really worried that I'll never have an orgasm again, but the thing is that I have plenty of orgasms now, which may not be "as good" or whatever as those of genetic women, but I experience them as really really good so I don't really care. Having the neovagina could only make things better, regardless of how it feels compared to the vaginas of nontrans women.

2002-05-20T03:07:00.000-04:00

Bio

I just wanted to direct everyone's attention to the latest "bio" link at the top of this page... I'm thinking of adding a photo gallery too in the near future.... watch out for it...

2002-05-19T20:09:00.000-04:00

Dear Mr. K

I apologize for responding to your e-mail over this forum, but I'm afraid that doing so through other means would result in a cascade of communication, which we mutually agreed wasn't a good idea. However, I must clear up an important misunderstanding.

I was actually talking about somebody else when I described the "friends with benefits" relationship that I recently decided to start. We're definitely friends, but not with benefits. :)

As you've noticed, I don't talk about you here because I know that you read my journal and I don't want you to feel uncomfortable. I hope you forgive this single breach. I still think it's best for us, given our mutual feelings, not to communicate with each other at all until we're both in the same city, except for the updates that we've previously agreed upon.

With affection,
Meredith

2002-05-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Sex

Yeah, this is a tough topic for me right now. And I'm having a hard time wrapping it around in my head. My short relationship with Vegan Boy (see my March 21 entry) introduced me to the wonders of the female orgasm, and now I feel like this pubescent teenager who just craves this experience because it's so new and different and pleasurable.

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that due to my preoperative state, my dating pool is distinctly limited. The second is that due to the combination of female hormones and the social role I now play, I've become significantly more picky about who I'm willing to sleep with, regardless of how randy i'm feeling. I find the combination rather frustrating.

So yes, I'm a reasonably attractive person, I've been told unusually attractive for a transwoman, so I could go to a tranny bar and pick up someone there. The problem is that I can't have sex with people I don't trust any more, not to mention the fact that I can't really have sex with someone who fetishizes my male parts, unless it's someone I know well enough.

So I started this friends with benefits thing with someone, who I like a lot and find reasonably attractive physically. The problem for me is that I find myself wanting to have sex with him more than he does with me, which I'm really ambivalent about just because I know that's such a temporary state and that normally, the amount of sex I want to have with someone is correlated with how much I like them. The thing is that in this case, the novelty of having sex as a woman, and the fact that he's possibly the only person I know right now who finds me physically attractive and who a) is attractive to me physically, b) I trust and like as a person, and c) doesn't fetishize me in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable, makes him more important than he would otherwise be at any other point in my life, and I'm not really sure how I feel about that.

To further complicate matters, I also can't really pleasure myself properly as a woman right now. That's another really pronounced change in my sexual life post-hormones. It's much more difficult for me to get off by fantasizing about strangers or people in magazines. Now, I have to fantasize about people who are actually in my life, which then makes me want to have sex with them even more in real life, which I don't want. Grrrrrrrr..... I've been preventing myself from reaching orgasm as a man ever since Vegan Boy and I got together, but given my frustration, I think I'm probably not going to hold out for much longer.

2002-05-16T14:14:00.000-04:00

Pretense

Just to show you all how pretentious I can actually be, here I present the statement of purpose I used to apply to grad programs. Some of the pieces described in this statement are going to be at an exhibit at the Green Street Gallery in Boston. So here it goes:

Many visual critiques of gender currently exist in contemporary art, especially in photography, which as a recorded medium both manipulates reality and provides the viewer with the illusion of direct experience. From Nan Goldin’s narrative photographs of transsexuals and drag queens to Catherine Opie’s elegant portraits of gender transgressors, important and compelling questions were raised as soon as visual artists tackled the poststructuralist notion that boundaries between genders, previously so fixed, have become a matter of negotiation.

My work attempts to broaden and deepen the hole we’ve jumped into by casting binary and stable notions of gender aside. I was a "man" when I began the work, and have become a "woman" since then. The work represents the in-between, the first ten months after I decided to live as a woman to explore the limits of gender performance, not on paper as I had done as an undergraduate literary critic, but in lived life. I felt instinctive recognition when I studied Jacques Derrida’s critique of J.L. Austin’s theory of performative speech acts, and Judith Butler’s subsequent expansion of this critique to include social behaviors in general, and gender in particular. Like a signature, like a minister declaring "I now pronounce you man and wife," gender distinctions are only as powerful as the centuries of iteration that have established such distinctions, and are in no way essential. While Butler only wrote about the non-linguistic elements of performativity, I set out to actually perform the gender that contradicts my biology, and to document my performance photographically.

So I presented myself to the world as a woman, photographed myself, asked people to photograph me, and photographed other people. Some of my pictures are self-portraits, others taken by friends, some by dates or lovers. A group of pieces consists of photo assemblages that document one particular encounter with one particular date. I was interested in seeing how men reacted to me as a woman, both by taking pictures of them, and by asking them to take pictures of me. Sometimes strangers took our pictures. Sometimes we took self-portraits. I am interested in this multiplicity of perspective because I feel that it expands the meanings of my photographs and leaves the viewer enough information to form opinions about the possible interactions during those encounters, without allowing those opinions to be definitive.

I am therefore not only interested in the content of my work. I am also highly invested in viewer response, similar to the ways in which conceptual and abstract artists question traditional relationships between the artistic work and its audience. However, a more proximate model for examining my work exists in literary reader-response theory. Each viewer brings to my work a different experience of gender, and the context in which they see my work also elicits different responses. There are those who look at the work and can tell that I used to be a man, those who cannot, those who are unsure. Those who are later told react differently than those who are left in the dark. Those who have known me as a man react differently than those who haven’t. Just as the signs within the photographs are unstable, viewer interpretations are equally fluid.

The last picture in my portfolio points to a new direction in my work, as I have quite recently decided to make bodily modifications in order to signal my womanhood. I have begun to take hormones that slowly augment and replace male secondary sex characteristics with female ones. This new project, provisionally called "Specimen," involves taking identical self-portraits every month, that track the transformation of my body from male to female. Visually, the photographs will allude to anthropological and medical photographs, in an attempt to isolate the biological signals of gender from the cultural ones. I plan to pursue both projects concurrently as a graduate student.

2002-05-13T17:38:00.000-04:00

Proginy

What would happen if a certain catty catlike funloving buff neo-fay post-fairy blogger were to have a love child with a certain whiny verbose pseudo-intellectual psychoanalytic-ish jail bait for some record producer in her teens alternative-yet-pop musician, using Photoshop 6.0 as the petri dish, seeing that there's no way in hell they'll actually end up in bed together? The answer may terrify you.

2002-05-09T16:26:00.000-04:00

Shirley

So have any of you ever actually called Travelocity? Because they seem to have the nicest travel agents imaginable. I mean, I only talked to one but I could overhear the other ones and they all seemed really nice.

My travel agent was Shirley. I had to go through the onerous process of changing my ticket so that I could travel as a boy, which wasn't a straightforward process. We were on the phone for about 30 minutes, and this was after I had spent another 30 minutes arguing with United Airlines.

Yet Shirley was calm and collected throughout, offfering words of comfort about how awful Philippine law is, etc. She also found me a ticket that was cheaper than the one I previously had, so I'm going to end up paying about as much as I did when I booked the flight in the first place.

She says that she collects postcards from her international traveling clients, that she puts on a big world map and shows her children. Isn't that wonderful?

I think this is the first time that I've talked to a travel agent and felt happier afterward than I did before.....

2002-05-08T15:26:00.000-04:00

Traveling

I found out a couple of pretty disturbing things today about Philippine law, in the process of trying to switch from a male to female passport. Oh, in case you don't know, I"m a Filipino citizen with permanent resident status in the U.S.

First is that, under Philippine law, I can't change my name or my gender on my birth certificate. And because the Philippines bases its passports on birth certificate information, there's essentially no way for me to change my passport either.

I've had misgivings about naturalizing because of my allegiances to my country of birth, but now I'm definitely doing it.

In the meantime, I'm going to have to travel to Thailand as a man (pony tails and androgynous clothes and sport bras, here I come). The funny thing is that they expect me to appear as a woman when I get to Thailand, so I'm going to have to change on the plane and put on a skirt or something. The interaction between gender and cultural norms is all so confusing.....

2002-05-07T23:29:00.000-04:00

Pretty Pretty

so i seem to have encountered a hormonal spike of some sort... my skin the past couple of weeks has changed a lot.... it's gotten so much smoother and my pores have gotten so much smaller.... it's really surreal and cool at the same time... my breasts have been growing at an ever faster rate, and a lot of male gender markers seem to be disappearing... my fat patterns are becoming a lot more feminine.... my fat is collecting more and more at the stomach and hips, and my body is just generally becoming softer.... maybe my brain is subconsciously preparing for surgery or something? who knows? but i like it....

2002-04-30T16:30:00.000-04:00

Present, Absent

so what accounts for my relatively long blogging hiatus is the fact that i've been kind of preoccupied by a boy situation that i can't talk about here because said boy reads this blog. but it's pretty much boiled over at this point, thankfully.... moving on....

surgery is set for june 13. oddly enough, my friend stacey's column on butchdykeboy this month is about srs. now, i sympathize with a lot of her views, though i also think that a more moderate gender politics is in order.

for instance, i don't think there's anything wrong with telling friends and other transwomen that i'm having sexual reassignment surgery. and of course i'm scared and excited about it. and it's also naive to think that it shouldn't make a big difference, because it does. i agree with stacey that transwomen make it out as being more vital than it actually is, but that doesn't mean that it isn't important nonetheless.

i think it's crucial to make the distinction between how the transcommunity and people within it view the significance of srs, and how the rest of the world views it. i am not excited about being postop because i internally believe that i become a "real" woman as a result. i'm a woman now. but it's also impossible to escape the fact that gender doesn't exist in a vacuum, and like it or not, our society values having a penis or a vagina as a determining factor when it comes to one's gender. so i would personally never make a distinction between preop and postop women that prioritizes one group over the other. but i also recognize that a whole heck of a lot of other people make such a distinction and, like it or not, my life is affected by it.

and there's also the other issue that since starting hormones, my body believes that it has a vagina like a missing limb. when i'm aroused now, i feel that organ between my legs as a vagina, and i want the physical reality to match my perception.

true, there are a lot of class issues related to surgery, but unfortunately, class issues permeate so many social issues. i mean, yes, surgery is a privilege for those who have the resources to devote to it. but so is vegetarianism.

anyway, i'm afraid i don't have time to write a really considered response to stacey.... maybe i should and ask the people at butchdykeboy to publish it as an official guest column or letter to the editor.... i don't know.

2002-04-24T17:09:00.000-04:00

I Had a Dream

i ended up having a really werid dream last night. i was on a bus of some sort, going to i don't know where, but it was bright on the bus. and then, out of nowhere, someone handed me a metal bowl. in that bowl were three newborn babies, though they were pretty tiny. nevertheless, they were viable and i thought of them as babies and i felt this great maternal urge to protect them and care for them. come to think of it, i think the bus was some sort of remnant of my days as a teenager in southern california, where i took the bus every day on my way home.

so here i was at home still feeling extremely protective of these babies, and promising myself to care for and look after them for the rest of my life. and then my grandmother came into the room, my mother's mother, the one i don't get along with. actually, it's a bit more than that. she's apparently mellowed out (i haven't seen her in five years), but when i was growing up, she was extremely mean and bad-tempered. anyway, she walked into the room, looked into the bowl, and then proceeded to pick up each of the teeny tiny babies one by one and swallowed them. i protested but was somehow frozen, unable to protect my babies.

then my friend richard woke me up. i was asleep in his living room because i missed the subway while i was having dinner with him and a few other people.

so what the hell does this mean? i guess i've been thinking a lot more about motherhood and childbirth these days. it does seem somehow mean and/or ironic that i didn't have significant maternal instincts when i began the hormone process, but now that i'm here, i find myself having much more significant maternal feelings. but i also have a healthy disposition about these things, so i'm not one of those people who's going to dwell on it for very long. there's always adoption.

my solution, i suppose, is to make art about these feelings. i'm planning a new series as we speak.

and oh, i've set my sex change operation date. it's going to be about six weeks from now.

2002-04-13T18:29:00.000-04:00

California!

Greetings from sunny California. This has to be quick since I'm at a cybercafe and paying up to my ears to be blogging, but anyway.... the trip so far has been great.... the weather is amazing and the environment is fantastic. The school is ever so cool, and eveyone is really enthusiastic about my work, especially the director of the graduate program, who I'm becoming good buddies with. It seems like he's poised to become a promoter of my work and the stuff I do, which makes me feel really good.

It's actually been kind of a mellow trip so far..... I had the perfect San Francisco day yesterday.... outdoor cafe for breakfast, yoga class where I was the only student (the class apparently only started like the week before so no one knew about it), a massage, sushi for lunch, a long walk, a nap, a walk to an art opening, dinner and drinks afterwards, and then sleep. I could definitely get used to this life...

Better yet, I have this scholarship from the school so I can actually live in a decent place when I get here in September, which is just amazing.... I'm already having a hard time trying to pick what neighborhood to live in.... people are suggesting the Mission but it's a bit sxuzzy for me.... I dunno.... we'll see.....

Oh excitement! The only real downside is that I'm already missing my friends and family. I don't really have close friends in this area, and I knwo that this is not going to be the case when I get here, but I've been feeling kinda lonely, especially at the opening yesterday, because I was just missing my arty friends so much, and dishing about the artwork, which was of generally very good quality, but there were also a few pieces that I wasn't so terribly fond of, and I miss having someone to whisper to and say witty things with, like Fiona or Jae Rhim or James..... oh well....

Ok, bye for now.....

2002-04-11T03:47:00.000-04:00

Trippy

So I'll be in San Francisco from today until the 16th, and in L.A. from the 17th to the 21st, to visit the grad school I'm going to and friends in L.A., including Ingrid, Dave, and Matt. So there may be limited blogging, I'm not sure yet.

2002-04-09T18:52:00.000-04:00

The State of Things

So Keith, sweetie that he is, agreed to take me to get my state ID in Melrose, after being once again denied not only a female state ID at the RMV in Quincy, but they even refused to grant me an ID with my new name without an amended birth certificate, which is like patently illegal. I mean, does everyone who changes their name have to get an amended birth certificate before they could get a driver's license with their new name? Absurd....

Anyway, the people in Melrose were awfully nice. They didn't even put my name change form as part of my file, so from the state's perspective, I started out as a woman with a woman's name. It's amazing how much variation there is between different RMV branches.

2002-04-08T17:53:00.000-04:00

My Candle Burns At Both Ends

I have a bad habit of reading Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets whenever I'm having relationship issues, which tend to magnify my emotions, already quite strong to begin with. Anyway, I was thinking of The Boy last night as I came upon this one:

I think I should have loved you presently,
And given in earnest words I flung in jest;
And lifted honest eyes for you to see,
And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;
And all my pretty follies flung aside
That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,
Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,
Spread like a chart my little wicked ways.
I, that had been to you, had you remained,
But one more waking from a recurrent dream,
Cherish no less the certain stakes I gained,
And walk your memory's halls, austere, supreme,
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.

When I broke up with him, I really did think that I was doing it for the right reasons, that I didn't want both of us to get hurt when I move to California. But now, I realize that such behavior is extremely uncharacteristic of me. I have always jumped in and taken the risk, despite the pain after, because I've always felt that present experience does not trump future pain.

But now, I really have to admit to myself that I broke up with him because I was afraid to tell him I'm trans. He knew me as this unique, wonderful person who had no significant flaws. And somehow, it became more important for me that he keep that image of me alive, that simple belief in how faultless I am, than to tell him the truth and know that he will think less of me as a result. I wanted him to remember me as the girl that got away, not the girl who turned out not to be who he thought she was.

And, I don't know..... is that ok? As the days go by, it becomes more and more difficult to revisit my feelings for him, and I'm sure he feels the same way. Maybe if I had told him that night, instead of breaking up with him, then we would have been able to continue the relationship if he was accepting. But now, I don't think it's going to happen. We've done our mourning and it becomes more difficult to revisit the past. So I may be destined to be a ghost in marble.

2002-04-08T03:30:00.000-04:00

Nightmares

i'm up at 3:00 in the morning here even though my body says it's 2:00 in the morning.... i was planning to go to the dmv tomorrow to try to get a girl state id one more time.... i don't think i mentioned here that the last time was a real disaster, with me talking to like four people higher and higher up in the food chain and being continually more offensive....

it would have been fine if i had gotten my id pre-9/11, but post 9/11 they require me to present either a passport or a birth certificate, both of which list my birth name and gender. so because of this, they apparently require a surgeon's letter in order to give me a female license, even though friends of mine have managed to get them without it.

worse, when i went, polite she's and ma'am's before i produced my passport immediately turned into brusque he's and sir's, which everyone knows is so utterly offensive, especially given the way it was meant, that is, it doesn't matter that you changed your name or that i wouldn't have been able to tell your birth gender by the way that you look or behave, but given that i know this information, i will make every effort to remind you that in my puny little brain that wouldn't matter to you except for the fact that i'm a lowly bureaucrat with nothing better to do than to be transphobic and harass people, you are and will always be a man, and that the only reason i will grant you a female state id even if you have surgery is because i'm required to do so by the state.

oh, and i called gay and lesbian advocates and defenders, which kind of proved to me how much trans people are treated as second class citizens in the glbt community. being he'd and sir's maliciously, and i believe i have good perspective on this since i have been both a gay man and a transwoman, is equivalent to being called queer maliciously.... in fact, the two situations are pretty equivalent since queer has pretty much become a reclaimed word that doesn't give offense when said among community members.... anyway, could you imagine glad's reaction if state workers regularly called gay people queer derisively? but somehow, being sir'd and he'd by state officials just isn't enough to cause any kind of uproar at glad.... they said that the only way they'd take action is if i get a letter from my primary care physician stating that i've "taken the necessary steps to change gender from man to woman," and if that doesn't work, they would take action.

of course, doing what they suggest, even though there's no guarantee that they would in fact do something if i get refused again, runs the risk of being once again traumatized by the dmv. and this is what i plan to be spending tomorrow morning doing, which is probably why i'm staying up late, as a subconscious effort to wake up too late to actually get it done.

2002-04-05T14:19:00.000-05:00

Ever After

goodness.... so many things happening at once.... another stream of consciousness post..... was accepted to california college of arts and crafts in san francisco and school of visual arts in new york for grad school, which was originally going to b e a contest of priorities..... ccac has the better program and they're more enthusiastic about my work, but i like new york better as a city and i have more friends there, and the sva program is nothing to scoff at..... however, what tipped the balance was that ccac offered me a half-tuition merit scholarship which, combined with need-based scholarship will basically pay for my tuition at ccac, so i only need to think about living expenses. so at this point, unless i absolutely hate the school and the city when i visit, which isn't likely to happen. i also toyed with the idea of deferring for another yet, but the ccac offer is too good to pass up, ultimately.

so i'm going to be moving to san francisco in september. say hi if you're reading this and you live in the area. :)

now, on the subject of the boy..... i broke up with him amid tears on both sides last night, more on my end than his. he was very understanding, and didn't make me feel guilty at all, and told me to take as much time as i need to reconnect. as soon as i got the scholarship offer from ccac, it hit me that i have to stop seeing the boy because doing so would run the great risk of really traumatizing me come september.

this has happened to me before with my ex, who i ended up with for almost five years. i was supposed to spend a year abroad after college, and then settle in new york or l.a..... i really hated boston then, and i still don't care very much for it now. but i stayed because the relationship took priority, and i don't want to be faced with that kind of decision again. the stakes are a lot higher at this point in my life, where i really need to carve out a life of myself that is and foremost for myself, and then have someone to share it with when it has reached some degree of stability.

so the trans issue was never broached. i do so want to tell him, and i've promised myself i will the next time i see him, most likely when i'm postop.... the funny thing is that one of the last things he told me, before we kissed and hugged each other one last time and said our tearful goodbyes, is that i am one of the most unique people he has ever met. he has no idea how true that is. or who knows, maybe he does.....

2002-03-28T16:33:00.000-05:00

Whine and Snivel

*GOD*, what a bummer this blog is becoming. I really need to inject some humor here or else I'd feel like shooting myself every time I read through the entries.

If you haven't found LiquidGeneration, where have you been? I especially like "The Mystery of Britney's Breasts" and "The Crying Game," which will offend pretty much any self-respecting transperson, but is also really funny.

Oh, and check out and order buttons from Emi at Eminism.org. My favorite one is "I'm a feminist and I love porn."

2002-03-27T12:49:00.000-05:00

As for....

... the rest of the trip. Lemme see.... well, I went to see Iris with my mom and one of my sisters, and my mom and I ended up crying a lot because it was all so depressing to see such a great mind just completely disintegrate, and its effect on her husband, who was completely devoted to her.

Well, and I'm also pretty emotional these days anyway... You see, dear readers, I generally make sound decisions, and lead my life in a calm and ethical manner, so when I find myself making bad decisions, I have a tendency to really hyperventilate. And right before I left for New York, I made what I've come to realize was one of the worst decisions I've made in a long time. I slept with Vegan Boy.

OK.... let's stop calling him Vegan Boy.... he doesn't like that. I'll call him..... hmmm..... let's just call him The Boy for now. So sleeping with The Boy wasn't wrong per se, except for the fact that I did not ascertain conclusively whether or not he knows that I'm trans before I slept with him, and then after I slept with him, I came to the realization that the chances of him having no clue are much greater than him knowing, and that the indications I had that he knew were in fact only rationalizations so that I didn't have to deal with telling him before I slept with him (just to make it clear: "slept with" in this context means sleeping in the same bed and doing Monica Lewinsky-type acts).

I also realize that we both knew that we were the kind of people who placed a certain amount of weight in being together that way, so it definitely raised the stakes of the relationship. He now regularly calls and introduces me as his girlfriend, and I even called him my boyfriend while we were laying in bed together, but am now so wracked with guilt over the idea that he's coming into this relationship without any idea of what he's in for.

Not that I want to apologize for being trans. I just want to apologize for not telling him upfront, and making him come to his own decisions about how to deal with it before things got too serious. But now, my only option really is to tell him soon, and regardless of how he reacts, I know that the revelation would hurt him more significantly than if I told him before we slept together.

So yes, we slept together Friday night and I went to New York on a Saturday morning, and during the ride, put on the soundtrack of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" on my Ipod, which of course caused me to weep uncontrollably on the bus trip.... thankfully my bus mate was asleep when this happened. I have like dark rings around my eyes right now because of losiong sleep.... I'm a bit of a wreck. I'm seeing him for lunch today, and then he's going to be away for Easter with his family. I don't think I'll tell him today.... I'll tell him on Monday when he gets back.

But argh..... I can't believe I got myself into this mess.....

2002-03-27T11:51:00.000-05:00

Sigrid

I spent last weekend in New York visiting my family and also meeting the first person I've met through this journal. Her name is Sigrid and I only became aware of her because she posted a comment in one of my entries a few weeks ago. It's funny because she has apparently reading my blog since very shortly after I started it, back when I was a boy, even back when it wasn't being hosted through blogspot at all. I really admire her detective skills.

Sigrid is currently a grad student at School of Visual Art in New York, and does work on alternative communities that has a certain affinity to mine, so it was really great talking to her about work and life in general. We saw the Gerhard Richter show at the MOMA. If you don't know who he is, you should look him up.... he's my favorite contemporary painter. My favorite pieces of his are from the '70s where he did a lot of photorealist monochromatic paintings, paintings of bad black and white photographs in other words. They have this really surreal, mysterious feeling, and I find them really haunting. Sigrid has this really cool digital camera/watch so she could take pictures while looking as if she's just checking the time. She took pictures at the show. I suggested that she blow them up to the proportions of the actual work as a kind of exercise in appropriation. I can't wait to see if she actually does it.

It's really nice to finally meet someone that I've known exclusively through this journal. As people in my life know, I consider being with people one likes as probably the greatest pleasure in life, so meeting a really awesome person like Sigrid through this journal somehow makes the effort of keeping it more affirming. Now I only wish I could convince her to start a journal of her own....

2002-03-21T18:36:00.000-05:00

Bloop Bloop

Must run to yoga class to feed yoga addiction.... must blog..... eep..... must keep this short but much to say so freewheeling, unedited prose once again...

got accepted to california college of arts and crafts in san francisco. would love to go but will miss friends, family and such. not heard froma ny other schools. will cross bridge when i get there. right now, will probably go to an east coast school if accepted, but that's a big if. in any case, will visit san fran and possibly l.a. in the near future. *must* hook up with friends in the west coast.

met a really cute, nice boy at manray last friday. vegan. ridiculously sweet. smells fantastic (like berries). writer/waiter. special. treats me like a princess, which i like, because i also treat boys i like as if they're royalty. long hair. not-so-closet geek (e.g. plays dungeons and dragons). met him friday. he called saturday afternoon. i called sunday afternoon.... went to see "manhattan" and made dinner (fresh pesto) with him on monday.... he slept over (nothing happened, well a tiny little bit happened but not much).... had lunch/tea/dessert/shopping wednesday. talked today. skating tomorrow morning and seeing a play in the evening.

i do believe i have a boyfriend. and as per the usual em problem, i'm not sure if he knows i'm trans.

2002-03-15T19:07:00.000-05:00

I'm a Lesbian and I'm OK

So I've been saying for like months that I sure wish I was attracted to women because I really love women, etc., and lo and behold, I find that I'm becoming more attracted to women. Granted, I like them butch and manly, but I realized when I went to this local performance event called Gendercrash, populated by lots of FTM's and dykes that woah, I'm attracted to biological women now. I was finally able to read my monologue from "The Vagina Monologues" in the presence of a trans audience, and even embarassed a boy (presumably genetically female but one is never sure) by pointing him out as super-cute. Of course I was too chicken and distracted afterward to seek him out, but it's all right.

However, I was courageous enough to put up a personal ad on Butchdykeboy.

So I'm not sure where this newfound attraction has come from. I guess maybe a combination of hormones and the fact that things are so transitional and in flux for me right now, that I've been able to question a lot of my assumptions about who I perceive to be attractive, and I've come to realize that even though I'm still kind of afraid of the idea of dating genetic women, trans or non-trans, I'm at least ready to seek out the opportunity to explore.

A friend e-mailed me today and called this site "sex and the city for the passable transgendered," which i thought was a great compliment. if only i had sex as often as the girls in the show, it would be a perfect description. in the meantime, i'll just have to content myself with wearing the high-heeled boots and short dresses.

2002-03-11T17:08:00.000-05:00

Le Weekend

The weekend was somewhat eventful, I suppose. I went to ManRay again on Friday night and gave my number to two boys there, both of whom called me last night. The boy I was less interested in left a message, while I actually answered the phone when the boy I was more interested in called. He doesn't have a nickname yet.... we're going to the MFA next Sunday. He's a cook who's into yoga, which I'm also getting into right now. I think he's quite cute, if a bit on the short side. He's Italian-Irish.

I guess I'm getting the hang of this "playing the field" thing. It's not something I do instinctively, but I do think it's better than moping around waiting for one person to call, especially if that person is a big flake and doesn't know what he wants. So in the meantime, I'm just going to have fun and try to ignore my pair-bonding instincts.

So speaking of yoga, I started going to yoga class ath the Baron Baptiste Studio, and I'm really enjoying myself. I took a couple of yoga classes a few years ago and found them rather boring. But I've definitely lost strength and flexibility since quitting dance a couple of years ago, so I found the class quite challenging this time, also because it's supposed to be a physically strenuous form of yoga.

2002-03-06T16:07:00.000-05:00

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!!!!

Witch Boy called and left me a message. I was actually there to receive his call, so his number on my screen, and was going to answer it, but I chickened out. I have no idea what to invite him to. Hmmmmm..... Huhhhhh..... ok I feel like I'm 16 years old. I must stop. But eeeeeeeeeeeeekkkk!!!!

2002-03-06T01:28:00.000-05:00

Lovely Like Sandalwood

Ok.... let's try another rambly blog entry.... I went to ManRay last Friday to drown my sorrows over Poet Boy, who is still being a big flake. ManRay and I have always had a good relationship.... I've been shaking my booty there since the day I turned 19 all those years ago.... except then I was a twinky gay boy. On Friday, fetish night, I was a vampy transwoman. And ManRay did not disappoint.

I haven't been clubbing in at least three months, and I completely forgot how much I *absolutely love it,* and how good of a dancer I am, and how I always get a lot of attention when I go clubbing, some good and some not so good, but attention nonetheless. Lots of compliments, eye contact, hellos, etc. I went with friends, but I was dancing alone for most of the night, which to my surprise I found I preferred, even though yucky men kept coming up and trying to dance with me. The upside was that I also got groovin with some cuties, and even a couple of girls, one of whom licked me from neck to crotch, perhaps in an attempt to find out if I'm trans? I dunno....

But I'm one of these picky people, and the only creature who held my attention that night was someone I will call Witch Boy, because he sells and designs "witchcraft-related products." Without exaggerating, he is probably the hottest boy I've ever personally met. His skin is perfect and luminous, and he dances with a natural flair that cannot be taught. He was also really sweet.... I dropped my earring, he picked it up, and he had the cutest grin on his face when he handed it to me..... then we talked for a little while, he gave me his number, and i was able to gaze at his skin close up, and even touch it! He also sounds like he came from another time and place, even though he lives in Worcester. So it was a definite major physical crush, at least on my part. I don't know what he's thinking. Though I left him a sexy message tonight. I'm pretty sure he won't call but that's fine. Him calling would be just a bonus. The single ManRay experience was enough.

On the Poet Boy front, things are kind of on a holding pattern. He's been avoiding meeting me, but still keeping in contact. This indicates to me that he might be afraid that when we do meet, he might not be able to control himself and something might happen. Ahhh these neurotic Jewish boys. I've resolved to seduce him at the first opportunity, and if he doesn't get seduced, he will be dumped. I just can't deal with the passive aggressiveness anymore.

Yale rejected me (conservative bastards). I haven't heard from any other schools, but I should be hearing soon.... I have a friend who has already gotten letters from Columbia and SVA....

2002-02-28T02:30:00.000-05:00

Dear Self-Centered Boy

I'm listening to Alanis Morisette's new album, Under Rug Swept right now, and I really like it. In fact, I think I'm one of the few people who liked Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Everyone complains that she's too self-involved and that she's too verbose and convoluted. Surprise! People accuse me of the same thing all the time, so I really don't mind these supposed flaws.

2002-02-24T06:00:00.000-05:00

Awake

Ok, I should maybe stop including the times when these messages are posted, as they demonstrate that I'm just sleeping later and later.... this is what happens when you have a flexible schedule.

I usually pride myself in being original, but I just have such clever friends. She Who Is the Keeper of Ideabox, not to be confused with The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, wrote her last journal entry in a style that I really like. So I baldfacedly copy her....

Things this week that made me:

* laugh at my own joke
When I was at a cafe with Fiona and I ordered a salad with chicken in it and then the waiter came over and, in this incredibly apologetic voice, said that they were out of chicken, then suggested substituting turkey. He was so elated when I agreed that would be fine. We then did impressions of the waiter when he left. Here's how they went:
Fiona: Oh, we really don't have any meat left and I'm really really sorry. Perhaps we could roast some discarded tongue for you. Maybe that would work as a substitute.
Me: Oh, we really really don't have any meat left and I'm really really sorry. Maybe I can cut off my arm and use that as a substitute.
Fiona and I laughed hysterically over that one.

* feel guilty about feeling self-satisfied
Tonight, I went to Jacques, a trannie bar in Boston, to see a friend compete in the Miss Gay East Coast Pageant (she was 2nd runner up, btw). There were no seats left, so I had to sit on the arm of a couch that this big black guy was sitting on. His t-girlfriend returned a few minutes later and was visibly annoyed that I was sitting next to him. After a few more minutes and some checking out of me, she stood up to go somewhere and, just as she was passing me, told her boyfriend as she gazed in my direction: "Remember, cunts are bad for you." After she left, the guy whispered to me, "The only reason she let you sit next to me is because you're not trans." Ha!

runner-up: vagina monologue castmembers repeatedly saying that hey hate me because i'm so thin.

* feel empowered
A guy in my department asked me if my breasts were real. When I said yes, he motioned jokingly to touch them. I motioned not so jokingly to slap him.

* feel warm and fuzzy inside
Happening to accidentally overhear Vagina Monologue castmembers talking about me on at least three occasions, and in all of those instances, saying how wonderful I am!

* sad
Not seeing Poet Boy this week, as I was doing VM while he was doing a concert.

runner-up: my family not being able to make it to the show.

* educated
Finding out that "armpit fat," that bulge that one gets between one's bra and one's armpits, is a documented phenomenon among genetic women. I thought it was just me and my physiology for some reason.

* absolutely thrilled
Performing my monologue and experiencing this moment when I thought I had the audience in the palm of my hand.

2002-02-23T19:40:00.000-05:00

Depth Matters

So now that Vagina Monologues is over, and I'm vegging out on a Saturday night, watching Miss Janet Jackson on HBO while writing this, I can finally write a more lengthy and contemplative missive about the things going on in my life lately.

Last night wasn't as fun as the night before. My family ended up not coming up. It was my parents' anniversary and they wanted to spend the weekend back home, and my sisters coming had always been questionable anyway, given that they're 17 and 18 and my parents are quite protective of them. So that was kind of a bummer. And to make matters worse, the lone mtf friend who I thought was going to see the show ended up not being able to go. Even though I haven't seen her for three months or so, mainly because she's been living in the suburbs and having a honeymoon period with her girlfriend, I was still fully expecting her to come. And when she didn't, I did feel quite lonely as a transwoman.

Yeah, I don't know what it is about me and other transwomen. I have friends of so many stripes, but transwomen.... I have such a hard time forming relationships with them. I tend to be seen as an arrogant bitch in that community, living off my passing privilege.... making other people feel bad when really, the only thing I'm doing is expressing my sense of self, which is fundamentally healthy. I guess so many people in the community have psychological issues, gender related or not, so it's just kinda expected that it would be difficult to get along with many transwomen. But it's still sad.

So anyway, I had a *huge* crying fit this afternoon, bigger than anything I've ever experienced really. I was making sounds that I had never made before, whimpers and moans. It was all because I told Poet Boy at one point that I would perform my monologue for him privately, since he wasn't able to see the show. So I was just kinda lying there in bed with the TV on, saying the monologue the way I was thinking of saying it to Poet Boy, when the reality of my situation hit me. My monologue is about a woman who is disgusted with her vagina, until she finds a man who loves vaginas and makes her feel like her vagina is beautiful. I realize that this is a loaded monologue to perform for Poet Boy, and saying it in my bedroom and thinking of him, I experienced for the first time what it's like to *really want* a vagina. Before, I was just neutral about the issue, thinking it would be good to have surgery because it would allow me to navigate socially through the world more easily. But this time, I felt this bodily need to connect with this particular man in this particular way, to have a vagina for him to look at, feel, and enjoy. And the fact that I didn't have that vagina yet filled me with this despair, not of the destructive but of the cathartic sort, the kind that you feel when you want something so much and it's within reach, but you don't have it yet.

Right now, it really feels like there's a part of my body that's missing, and it should be there in order for me to feel complete. Detached postmodernism has gone out the window. In its place is a bodily longing, a hunger, an ache.

2002-02-22T02:19:00.000-05:00

Say Something, Bitch!

So taking my cue from she who is the keeper of Ideabox, I've reintroduced comments on this site, and hope that the service I'm using, YACCS, doesn't go bust like the last one.

The headline is my way of inviting everyone who reads this to say hi, just so I know you exist. Sometimes, I feel somewhat ambivalent about keeping this thing going when I feel like I'm talking to a wall.... though truth be told, important people in my life are already reading this so I know it's not a complete waste of time, though I'm really interested to see if people I don't know might have come upon it.

Oh, and my Vagina Monologues performance went even better tonight than last night. It's such a high. Really makes me want to do theatre more seriously, though it's such an awful profession really.

One of the things I kinda regret is not coming out as trans in my bio. It's such an opportunity to educate people and to let them know that there are transpeople living in their midst, but I kinda chickened out. My castmembers know, but there were all these people in the audience who probably just thought I was just any old woman up there. I'm special, damnit!

Oh another significant thing that's been happening is that my boobies are becoming quite shapely, and seem to be growing on a daily basis. It's really exciting. Now, I've become pretty sure that I don't want to have implants, even if they end up being quite small, because I like them as they are right now, and can only like them better if they grow a bit more. They're perky and shapely and beautiful. I'm so proud of them. Go boobies!