Angst Princess Zero

Something Might Happen: The Obstacles of Finding Hope

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:30:00 -0400

Something Might Happen: The Obstacles of Finding Hope :

Ok y’all, so I have a total dilemma. This sucks. I just finished a consultation with a doctor (who seems like a great surgeon) based in Boston, MA. He said that he would have little work to do, because my face is already pretty feminine. I would be getting my nose, chin and jaw done, as well as…

If you care more about social integration as female than genital surgery (which was certainly the case for me), I would prioritize as follows:

1.) Spend all your money on electrolysis, until you are shaving no more than once every two days. You can do FFS & stuff while you’re doing electrolysis, but if it’s a choice between one or the other, hair removal will make more of a difference.

2.) Get your deep bone work FFS (jaw shave & nose in your case). You do not have to do all of FFS at once, especially if the “nice to have”s are going to break your budget, and it is often possible to get soft tissue work done at more competitive rates by non-gender-specialists. Also, consider getting work done overseas. Dr. Spiegel is amazing, but I’ve seen results just as good from Femilife in Peru for half the price.

3.) Go back to electrolysis, splitting your time between facial stuff and GRS prep. Start having a real life, save up some money, and decide which surgeries you need next.

I fucking hate my hips. That’s me1 in the middle, in between what, if you look up the article...

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 15:53:00 -0400

I fucking hate my hips.

That’s me¹ in the middle, in between what, if you look up the article “Human”, Wikipedia will tell you are typical male and female bodies.

All told, I’m not really a disaster, especially for a woman who transitioned at the decidedly average age I did² — but rational thought processes have nothing on body dysmorphia, and nothing can stop my relentless self-castigation for not starting estrogen at a time when my skeleton was younger and more tractable.

Take, for instance, the lovely Jenna Talackova — transitioned at 14, Miss Universe^® Canada runner-up, whose unrealistically cisnormative beauty I wish to heaven I’d had around to aspire to as a kid:

Or the winsome, impossibly curvaceous gender prodigy and adult actress Sarina Valentina:

I know these thoughts are petty and vain, but I can’t stop feeling them. My boyish hips bother me way more than my genital configuration ever has. I catch myself standing in front of the mirror, running my hand over the invisible contour I ought to have. I have to wear ridiculous padded underwear to feel even remotely comfortable in a dress. I do ankle-weighted hip abductions to bulk up the only muscle in that region, the puny tensor fascia latae.

If there were a surgery that were at all safe, I would sign up in an instant. I’ve seriously considered fat grafting, or getting cohesive silicone implants, even though that would leave a long, ugly scar on my flank and need to be replaced a decade or so down the line. Everything short of loose silicone injections.

…wait a minute.

Oh my God, Sarina. Oh my God.

So, I have a riddle for you. What does a trans woman with a healthy body image look like? In the queer community we tell most people that they should love their bodies, and love them the way they are — tall or short, fat or lean, hairless or hirsuite. This is a community where the mere act of shaving your legs is a fuzzy superposition of submission to patriarchal notions of beauty and the radical exercise of personal autonomy through body-modification. Whatever you do or don’t do to your body, someone’s going to have an opinion about it.

Mercifully, once you pick up the label “trans*” and pin it on yourself, most of that chatter goes away, or at least goes behind your back. I don’t think anyone would dare to tell me that the hundreds of hours of electrolysis I’ve endured has all been in the service of reifying binary gender or acheiving trans invisibility or whatever, even though that’s transparently true. I know queer cis women who’ve had breast augmentation and are terrified of their friends finding out for fear of the endless rounds of flak they anticipate over it, but my gender history exempts me from that criticism if I were to make the same choice.

Our community standards, two-faced as they may be, serve the practical purpose of bucking up the self esteem of the unconventionally attractive while getting the fuck out of the way of the severely body dysmorphic who have absolutely no use for that kind of thinking. But that leaves trans women without a sanity check on our process of self-critique. There is no image in the collective consciousness of what a healthy trans woman is supposed to look like. Our benchmark for permitting painful, self-effacing body modifications seems to stop at “well, if it really matters to you”.

Electrolysis? “It sounds awful, but I’m glad you’re doing what makes you happy.”

Jaw shave? “If it’s really driving you crazy every time you look in the mirror…”

Breast implants? “Well, if you really think you need them to pass…”

Bottom surgery? “Of course! Who wouldn’t want that?”

Loose silicone?

I don’t want the trans* community to imitate the fucked up self image policing that happens in the cis queer world. Owning your body is awesome. Paint all over it with all the tools you have. I love electrolysis and FFS and breast implants just as much as I love edgier bod mods like piercings or tattoos or scarification.

But there has to be a line. Someone needs to be telling these girls no, it doesn’t matter how much sleep you’re losing over your curves, this shit has consequences. Don’t do crazy things. Really, really try to be okay with your body before doing something you’ll spend the rest of your life regretting. Please. You’re worth the effort.

Bailey Jay and Drew Deveaux³ and Kim Petras all transitioned at ridiculously young ages, and none of them have an hourglass figure, and none of them need one to be beautiful.

1. It’s a tuck, not that you’d have asked if I hadn’t said anything. ↩

2. I started HRT two months shy of my 26th birthday, about ten years after my epiphyseal plates had closed up shop for good. ↩

3. Current trans woman whose hairstyle I am unimaginatively ripping off. ↩

Hi.

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:16:51 -0400

Hi.

blood-bending: tawawawa: “You speak fire ferret?” OMFG....

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:15:25 -0400

blood-bending:

tawawawa:

“You speak fire ferret?”

OMFG. DEAD.

Who are you? How did you happen, and why haven’t I?

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:17:53 -0400

Who are you? How did you happen, and why haven’t I?

On "Tranny"

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:48:00 -0500

My first Aidan was an undergraduate at Mills college sometime around the turn of the century. He was as angry and articulate as the entire generation of Theory-happy trans boys he heralded, and I was his paralytically indecisive teenage genderfucked fangirl. He tossed around the word “tranny” with carefree abandon, and even had this hilarious series of adbuster-style parodies called “spokestranny”. I adored him for it.

That was my first exposure to the word - not spoken at me in anger or branded across a porno DVD cover, but as a reclaimed word. It doesn’t even make sense to me as a slur. It has all the wrong phonetic structure to be spat out like a hard-consonant word-dagger. It sounds cute. Teasing, but friendly. “Tranny”. “Meanie”.

But it bites people, and our community has decided that the people who reclaimed it had no right to do so, so taboo it remains. Personally, I still like it. I giggle when my wife sing-songs “my little tranny, my little tranny” at me. I mock myself for getting lost in my “angsty tranny bullshit”. I don’t really think words are offensive by themselves - it’s the intent behind them that sharpens the edge.

But I don’t ever use it to talk about anyone but myself anymore. I hate the stifling language policing in our community, but pissing other people off is not on my agenda. And I really don’t enjoy being scolded by gender theory majors for forgetting that my ability to rise above being offended by little bits of language is yet another of my unchecked privileges.

shattercity: I still think this is the most homosexual...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 10:33:36 -0500

shattercity:

I still think this is the most homosexual character ever and he is straight… why does rent make no sense.

Mark is obvs. a hipster trans dyke, but RENT is set in 1991 and those don’t exist yet, so he just confusedly hangs out with queers and pines after lesbians.

I danced with Aidan last night. He smells hot. Over and out.

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 11:54:36 -0400

I danced with Aidan last night.

He smells hot.

Over and out.

Electrolysis, Hour 73.5

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:59:00 -0400

I quit 80 minutes into today’s session. Tired; was up ‘til two last night. What’s my motivation again?

I’m bored of spending five hours a day having a gender. I never wanted one anyway. I remember when my mom first told me about how you could tell the sex of a human by their skeletal proportions — I think we were talking about “Lucy”, the Australopithecus. I wasn’t jealous of girls having hips; I was offended that there was any difference.

And with every zap and pluck I thank my lucky stars and every god I ever prayed to that this is even a technologically and financially possible thing for me to do. My friends talk about oppression, but I know that I am the most privileged person in the world.

TIL A New Word

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:42:17 -0400

“Kyriarchy”. Apparently this is what we call the patriarchy when there are patriarchs in the room who might potentially be offended. As near as I can work out the etymology, it means “rule by lords”.

How completely wonderful. At last the trite dichotomies of identity politics have come crashing down into one perfect, terrifying tautological singularity. This is the chant we will cry in the streets as we cheer on the heat death of the universe.

My Oppression Diary, Part II

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 18:06:50 -0400

I was openly stared at by the McDonalds staff for almost fifteen seconds before they took my order!

I don’t like it when people use the word “androgynous” to mean “looks like a...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 23:00:24 -0400

I don’t like it when people use the word “androgynous” to mean “looks like a cis girl with short hair”.

Tonight at blues dancing, this guy in a Star Wars shirt came up to me from behind and asked if I...

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 05:26:00 -0400

Tonight at blues dancing, this guy in a Star Wars shirt came up to me from behind and asked if I wanted to dance. I was shocked and happily said yes, but when he caught a look at my face he totally failed to conceal his doubletake. After about thirty seconds, he begged off, telling me he had a toothache.

Sigh. I’m sorry for your embarassing Ackbar moment, but really, I don’t think finishing the song with me would have queered you irrevocably.

Love Your Body, Hate Your Gender

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:56:00 -0400

I don’t understand the way the genderqueer and body-acceptance communities run together on tumblr. To be clear, I think that questioning/repudiating binary gender and promulgating a love-your-body ethos are both good things, but for me they run in completely opposite directions.

Hating my body is my religion. When I love it, I love on it with makeup and hormones and lasers and scalpels. A friend of mine once said that she hated the expectation that she had to “apologize for my face” by wearing makeup to conform to societal expectations of female beauty. Where does my relatively urgent desire for facial feminization surgery fit into that philosophy?

I don’t want to be the prettiest little femme in dykesville USA, but I do I want to be able to rock a buzz cut and still look like the gender I identify with. Is it just vanity? Sometimes I feel like I have more in common with Paris Hilton than my genderqueer friends on this point.

I worked really, really hard to accept my body within the context of masculinity, and I got a reasonable fraction of the way there before I threw in the towel. Throughout my whole denial phase, I told myself that because I could make a decent man, and because being trans was such an awful thing, I should try my hardest to love my body just the way it was. I can look back at old photos of myself, and I see an objectively handsome young man. I had to throw away a lot of that in order to start transitioning - I felt like I was committing myself to a life of constantly holding myself up against unattainable standards. If it were a rational decision I would never have made it. As long as I could convince myself to imagine that it was a rational decision, I didn’t.

So I feel this intense ambivalence - I quite like my face, from a certain perspective. But it’s a boy’s face, or a trans girl’s at best. Part of me doesn’t really believe in male and female as personally relevant categories, and views buying in to femininity as a convenience, and in that capacity I want to not want surgery at all. But another part of me desperately, passionately, viscerally yearns for a chance to be a cute babydyke ironically playing with masculine fashion before I turn another year older.

So what do I use as my moral compass? “Be whatever you want to be, and don’t let society tell you what to do” is a great slogan, but it’s impossible to extricate our own desires from the expectations of the culture at large. If facial hair were normed as an attractive and desirable feminine trait, I would never put myself through laser and electrolysis. If trans-feminine faces were all over magazine covers in their brow-bossed lantern-jawed glory, I might not feel any conflict over FFS.

And this unexamined contradiction is part of what’s so vexing for me about the tumblr mentality - fuck gender, but love your (gendered) body. Gender is not just hairstyles and clothing and attitude, it’s in our bodies too, and it’s in the cultural air we breathe, and the constantly moving intersection of all of these things.

kylathegreat: Homework for my followers: Listen x2 (at least)....

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:34:58 -0400

kylathegreat:

Homework for my followers: Listen x2 (at least). Relevant song is relevant.

Kimya Dawson - I Like Giants

We all become important when we realize our goal
Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole

My Dad: Sam is really into making sure everyone is on the correct side of the car. At his daycare, the boys all sit on the driver's side and the girls all sit on the passenger's side, so he gets upset when Eleni is sitting behind me when I'm driving. I have to tell him, "it's okay for us to be in an 'X'".

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:56:00 -0400

My Dad: Sam is really into making sure everyone is on the correct side of the car. At his daycare, the boys all sit on the driver's side and the girls all sit on the passenger's side, so he gets upset when Eleni is sitting behind me when I'm driving. I have to tell him, "it's okay for us to be in an 'X'".
Me: I suppose you think it's a little early to tell him how gender is a social construct?
My Dad: It wouldn't be my first choice, no.

nixvisceral: minastefan: dear Jenna, thank you for accurately...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:55:05 -0400

nixvisceral:

minastefan:

dear Jenna, thank you for accurately portraying my every day life :)

I really really wish this were less accurate.

I think you’ve really captured something here.

"I think “California Gurls” is as good a test as anything. Does Katy Perry give you a..."

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:07:00 -0400

“I think “California Gurls” is as good a test as anything. Does Katy Perry give you a hard on, or does she fill you with heartbroken sehnsucht for a person you’ve never been?”

emogirlj: she - Insomnia Part 4 lain’s new single

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:44:36 -0400

emogirlj:

she - Insomnia Part 4

lain’s new single

shattercity: As highly requested, here is a topless tuesday...

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 21:09:40 -0400

shattercity:

As highly requested, here is a topless tuesday photo.

I’m uploading this photo for other women as well. To show you that even though I’m a bigger girl it doesn’t mean I’m any less beautiful. Even though I was assigned at birth something I don’t agree with, we are all beautiful. Inside and out. <3

God, you’re beautiful.