Calliope
11-20-2007, 08:28 AM
Below, a few paragraphs from "My Wonderful Askewness," a 2003 essay, published in the anthology Crossing Sexual Boundaries (2006) by author-activist Bet Power. He lives in Northampton, where we briefly met. His ideological pro-"organic" stance has been an inspiration to me. I am reading this excerpt tonight at the hammock shop where other Twin Oaks' queers will unite to honor those who did not live (their dreams).
Meanwhile, I was sorting out my own FTM transition path.
I gave myself visits to a gender counselor and time to figure out whether or not I wanted to medically transition. My wife Lonnie and I had the best sex of our lives in those years, but she still wanted me to change my body to be more male. It would have been simpler and easier for her to introduce me to her social and religious circle at Harvard if I looked and sounded like a man instead of a transman, and if she could pass for a traditional heterosexual woman.
But I always felt negative about testosterone for myself. I was an addict in recovery and I never wanted to be dependent on a chemical ever again. Besides, no one yet knew the long-term effects of T on the female body – and I wanted to live to be 105! And the pain of being surgically cut across my private parts – forget it! Okay, call me a coward, I told my wife and the whole FTM community I had helped to form, but don’t call me anything less than a transsexual or a man, because that’s who I am.
Gradually, I came to define the right space for myself – sometimes meeting with rejection from some within my own transgender community – as a female-to-male non-hormone, non-operative transsexual man. Damn anyone who can’t or won’t understand my delicious complexity and my rebellious resistance to all things medical and psychiatric, I said. This is MY transgender journey and I have good reasons for letting my body be. I was already a man – and had ever been so. I didn’t need or want T and TS surgery to make me into me. And get our fabulous trans community out of the goddamn DSM!
As Thich Nhat Hahn says, “I am not my body.” In his wisdom, I found new meaning to describe the truth of me. I am a heterosexual man wearing a female form on top of which I apply a “skin” of male clothing. I am a non-operative FTM transsexual. We do exist. Get used to it.
Throughout my life, I’ve instinctively shaped my body to appear manly through alternative but natural means – clothing, haircut, weight control, masculine mannerisms and movements, binding, packing, lowering the pitch of my voice, and investigating plant-based androgens that are natural testosterone boosters. I emerged in these ways and continued to look more like my true self, first as a younger man and then more mature as I reached middle age.
Although I employ only non-chemical, non-surgical means, I’ve changed my body over time to look fully male. I pass as a man 80 to 90 percent of the time. The only people who still use female pronouns about me are some few at my office. Others use no pronouns at all in the workplace and simply repeat my first name in carefully constructed, non-gendered sentences.
For anyone I want to be close with, I soon tell them this about who I am: I am a man wearing a female body. What you see is not necessarily what you get.
Meanwhile, I was sorting out my own FTM transition path.
I gave myself visits to a gender counselor and time to figure out whether or not I wanted to medically transition. My wife Lonnie and I had the best sex of our lives in those years, but she still wanted me to change my body to be more male. It would have been simpler and easier for her to introduce me to her social and religious circle at Harvard if I looked and sounded like a man instead of a transman, and if she could pass for a traditional heterosexual woman.
But I always felt negative about testosterone for myself. I was an addict in recovery and I never wanted to be dependent on a chemical ever again. Besides, no one yet knew the long-term effects of T on the female body – and I wanted to live to be 105! And the pain of being surgically cut across my private parts – forget it! Okay, call me a coward, I told my wife and the whole FTM community I had helped to form, but don’t call me anything less than a transsexual or a man, because that’s who I am.
Gradually, I came to define the right space for myself – sometimes meeting with rejection from some within my own transgender community – as a female-to-male non-hormone, non-operative transsexual man. Damn anyone who can’t or won’t understand my delicious complexity and my rebellious resistance to all things medical and psychiatric, I said. This is MY transgender journey and I have good reasons for letting my body be. I was already a man – and had ever been so. I didn’t need or want T and TS surgery to make me into me. And get our fabulous trans community out of the goddamn DSM!
As Thich Nhat Hahn says, “I am not my body.” In his wisdom, I found new meaning to describe the truth of me. I am a heterosexual man wearing a female form on top of which I apply a “skin” of male clothing. I am a non-operative FTM transsexual. We do exist. Get used to it.
Throughout my life, I’ve instinctively shaped my body to appear manly through alternative but natural means – clothing, haircut, weight control, masculine mannerisms and movements, binding, packing, lowering the pitch of my voice, and investigating plant-based androgens that are natural testosterone boosters. I emerged in these ways and continued to look more like my true self, first as a younger man and then more mature as I reached middle age.
Although I employ only non-chemical, non-surgical means, I’ve changed my body over time to look fully male. I pass as a man 80 to 90 percent of the time. The only people who still use female pronouns about me are some few at my office. Others use no pronouns at all in the workplace and simply repeat my first name in carefully constructed, non-gendered sentences.
For anyone I want to be close with, I soon tell them this about who I am: I am a man wearing a female body. What you see is not necessarily what you get.