I'm Ready for the Next Thing

I just gave myself my third 100 cc shot. Like 24 days ago when I gave myself the first 100 cc shot, I'm finishing my period. Meaning that my period is not only regular despite the hormonal havoc I am doing my best to inflict on myself, it's coming in four days under the requisite 28 days. Combine that with the fact that I've still got a couple (very minor) zitty patches and my voice came back perhaps a half step lower but no more, and I'm starting to wonder what the hell I'm sticking myself with a needle for. On the bright side, I'm not going bald, and I'm feeling if anything more solid in my desire to butch up physically.

Even though I'm not talking about the testosterone much, it feels right to be back in a position at the cutting edge of gender. The noblesse oblige of supporting a range of decisions from the most radical spot is more comfortable to me than constantly having to argue the point that not altering one's body physically to correspond to society's norms of maleness is also radical (which I continue to believe).

The irony is that plenty women have facial hair and lack curves: People just don't see them because those women spend lots of time and money trying to conform to the norms of their assigned gender. Meanwhile, the health care and beauty industries are raking in the bucks—mine included. The bad news is that through the wonders of advertising, they also get money from women who don't have facial hair, but are nonetheless convinced that their blond peach fuzz makes them look like veritable cavemen. It works like the penis enlargement spam campaign: I've gotten so many emails telling me to "enlarge my wonder worm" and "stop settling for mediocrity in the bedroom" that I've started to feel like maybe I do have a "microscopic manhood," which is absurd because $100 would buy me the most horse-like piece of equipment out there. But the first step is to sell low self-esteem. The second step is to sell a product that will never fully resolve the self-esteem problem but will keep you spending.

In many ways, I feel like the trend among butch dykes toward taking testosterone has the same phases. As more butches took testosterone, those of us not taking it were left feeling somewhat feminine by comparison—a new and undesired feeling. Seeking a solution, we do the American thing and spend money on a prescription.

Worst of Both Worlds, Part II

Am I fat? Because I've put on about 8 pounds since I started taking testosterone. I can't tell if it's fat or bone density. I know it's not muscle because I'm still struggling with the same weights at the gym.

This was one of the things I was hoping to avoid. Fat is not a transman's friend—not when it tends to gather on the ass and hips. When I weigh too much, I look like a girl as I walk along a building and catch myself in the reflection. That is, in fact, how I define weighing too much.

In an effort to avoid having the "that's no lady, that's my ass" moment of recognition, I have been trying to figure out how to monitor if I'm gaining muscle or fat for some time now. It's totally humiliating to have to ask for help in this endeavor, because I really just seem like a girl who's convinced she's fat no matter how much I explain that I really do want to gain muscle weight. But it's equally pathetic to deprive myself of delicious foods, which inevitably leads one to talk about how one has to deprive oneself of delicious foods, which, yet again, makes one sound like a girl. Do straight biomen not have to watch their waistlines, or do they genuinely not care how fat they get? (They do a pretty fantastic job of looking terrible, so maybe they really don't give a rat's ass.)

And in the end, it's always fat anyway: Building enough muscle to gain weight without manly quantities of testosterone is well nigh impossible. And so far, testosterone hasn't been much help, because I think it's fat now, too. My ass is not looking any manlier. I hold on to one small hope: I don't think I've gotten so much fatter that all of my T-shirts should be cutting into my armpits like they are (and sports bras always do because I have pecs), so I may possibly—maybe—be getting a little bit wider in the shoulders.

Before You Go Getting Any Ideas...

Somehow I need to say that my story isn’t that I’ve always been a man, born in the wrong—clearly wrong—body, and that I’ve hated my “breasts” (such as they are) since the moment they first appeared. I don’t want to live my life as a straight man. I’m ambivalent about facial hair—except sideburns, with which I’m obsessed. And I don’t want to go bald. I’m not sure a dicklet—i.e., large clit—will be any better than what I’ve got now, unless it makes it insanely easy to come while I molest some sweet young thing.

I do want people to stop making all kinds of assumptions about my likes and dislikes, my history and how I want to be treated based on the fact that they associate “biological female” with all kinds of other things that don't follow logically. (To take one particularly annoying example, my housemate really felt like it should be him who changed the lightbulb in the high-ceilinged hallway, even though I swear to god, he looked like he’d never done it before.) (Or the guy who called me baby at the gym.) I do want to stop having waitresses refer to my gorgeous femme date and I as "ladies." And I wanted to experience for myself what biological attributes of masculinity might come in a bottle.

Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?

Maybe it's because the camp gene is right next to the gay gene, but I heart tribute bands. I'm not sure how I feel about Rolling Stone reviewing them, but it is. Still, I can't help but be titillated by their mention of transgendered bands like Lez Zeppelin and (male) Madonna. I've been giving Klezbians and Isle of Klesbos CDs for gifts for years, for the name alone! But the idea of some dykes rocking out to "I've gotta little woman but she won't be true" is just too fantastic. I love the underground, irreverent humor, especially as it pertains to gender, about which we tend to be sooo reverent. But if Rolling Stone is covering it, does that mean it's already over?

Update: Buzz-kill, I got some PR photos of Lez Zeppelin and, oops, it turns out they aren't using the word "lez" ironically. Their T-shirt says "All Women, All Zeppelin," and they would so not be hot singing "I gotta little woman..." Meanwhile, I was repeatedly scolded for not pimping AC/DShe, which I didn't pimp because of the whole "she" thing. Just goes to show, you can't judge a band by its name. I will say that Zeppelin is, in my opinion, a better band on balance. But go see AC/DShe, OK?

In Which the True Biological Difference Between Men and Women Is Revealed

Marga Gomez made a joke at the Castro Street Fair that was so obvious it wasn't even funny. She said the Women for Women section of Craigslist should be renamed Women Fight Women. Here we are in the largest lesbian population in the nation (The Gay Atlas is the first place I've seen lesbian populations studied separately from gay male populations), and the personals site has at least as much in-fighting as it does date-seeking. Butches are gross. Transmen have no business in the Women for Women section. Bi women have no business there either. Of the few ads that are actually posted by someone in hopes of finding a date, I'd say 70 percent of them are people looking to date, not just have a one-time sexual encounter.

Now go to the Men for Men section, and you will find brief posts requesting specific sexual acts, often at specific times or locations. And often, you'll find a cock shot. As in, like what you see?

Is this evidence that men are innately, biologically different from women? It's hard to deny that possibility. There is the cultural argument that men are taught to value their desire more than women. The other cultural argument that springs to mind—that women need to fear for their safety more than men—doesn't hold water for same-sex encounters.

Do gay men really have more social approval for their desire than dykes, who have often (though not always) mutinied against the social limitations on women? I would argue that they do indeed. It's a complicated issue, but I think homophobia is stronger against men because most men, in the cockles of their balls, know that, in a pinch at least, they would have sex with another man. And I'd venture that a lot of straight men—and god knows this transman—are jealous of the easy access that gay men have to sex, for which Craigslist can serve as Exhibit A. Meanwhile, lesbians can't overthrow 20-some years of being taught to suppress and mistrust their desires by just waving a Magic Wand. Although they do try, repeatedly.

But there's another difference between the Men for Men ads and the Women for Women ads. PNP, or party 'n' play. It means crystal meth will be part of the encounter.

Drugs decrease inhibitions. Many dykes I know would love to be able to have sex on the fly the way gay men do, but they worry about being able to get it up for someone they've never met. I wrote in a previous post that I desire more like a man than like a woman. The caveat is, there has to be some energy between me and a potential sexual partner, and you can't determine that over the internet. There's also the issue of your would-be partner's ability to let go of their inhibitions, and sometimes dykes aren't able to do that. Anonymous sex should be fun athletically, rather than emotionally. When I have looked into anonymous sex (I won't say if I've done it or not), it has been with butches or FTMs because they seem more likely to be able to provide that.

Men are able to objectify sex partners in a way that women generally can't—it doesn't matter if a guy is ugly if he has a nice cock, or if he's a douche if he's good looking. That skill makes anonymous sex much easier. Maybe it's the macho athleticism specifically of (trans)man on (trans)man sex that makes it good for anonymous play. But, then again, I'm pretty sure I could get it up for a good-looking girlie girl, even one who was completely brain-dead, if I had crystal meth coursing through my veins. So is crystal meth the biological difference between biomen and biowomen?

If this were Sex and the City, we would cut to me typing, and by the end of the episode I would have an easy, heart-warming answer. But this is not so easy or heart warming. Gay men engage in self-destructive sexual behavior, and too many dykes still have trouble enjoying sex. And even thoroughly sex-positive dykes still wish they could have more sex in the bathroom.

The Bulldagger, the Bustier and the "Baby"

When people first asked me about my "pronoun preference" about a year ago, I didn’t know what to say. For me--and I think this is at least partly generational--female pronouns weren’t especially offensive. After all, I recognize that I am biologically female, and since I call my (spayed) female dog "she," the pronoun must not be all that loaded.

I tried to explain to my sensitive employers that the issue for me is not pronouns, but nouns and assumptions. I wasn’t very good at explaining it, and ultimately decided to go with "he," hoping it would serve as a constant reminder to people that they shouldn’t assume that I feel women things, or am interested in women’s activities, or have what they assume are universal women’s experiences.

Of course, there are still people who slip up. Looking right at me—let’s just say that I get called sir fairly regularly and haven’t purchased anything in a women’s department in over 10 years—people will actually say things like "Your mom taught you how to knit, right?" When I look at them like the angry bulldagger that I am in that moment, they will even insist, "Oh, come on! At some point in your life you’ve knitted!" They’re sure they’re right and I’m just trying to be something (a man) that I’m not (because I do have the booblets).

Once, a coworker was telling me about a good coffee shop. She leaned in and said conspiratorially, "and, there’s a great little bustier store right next door." (I’ve never been entirely sure if she was implying that I would buy a bustier for myself or for someone else.)

When this happens, I feel my phantom penis cinch up back to my belly button. It’s also like I’ve found myself with a huge—huge—chunk of spinach in my teeth. Like, oh my god, maybe I’m not a man after all. It’s not like I secretly do want to buy a bustier (for myself, anyway) nor am I afraid that my closeted love for the color pink will be revealed. Somehow masculinity, I think because we privilege it so much, is inherently competitive, inherently something you find yourself trying to do better.

Of course, I also get really irritated with the person who’s made the weird feminizing assumption about me. Sometimes more than others. There’s a kind of hierarchy of who deserves an ass-whipping and who doesn’t. I think the "bustier" girl gets a low score. She didn’t explicitly insult me, certainly not on purpose. The knitting offender gets a higher score, and probably a chastising remark. The winner is a 5’5" guy with tribal tattoos from the gym (I know, I should’ve holla’d back!). When I asked him to hurry up on one of the two benches he was alternately using, he said patronizingly, "We’re doing supersets, baby." Here, the "baby," mixed in with some high-tech gym vocabulary, was intended to scare biological females away.

Alas, because I didn't even fully process the baby right away and was more focused on the bench than anything else, I didn't give the jerk the lesson he deserved. I said only, "I don't care what you're doing. We're both here to work out, and we have to share the equipment…and don't call me baby, that's just rude!"

Immediately after the incident, the supply of come-backs that queers develop over years and rarely ever use came flooding in. (The best ones: "You could call my girlfriend baby if you could even imagine someone so hot!" and "Your girlfriend calls me baby when I'm fucking her with my 10-inch cock, you midget!") Seems the hierarchy is a little complex to be utilized on the go.

But I did manage to resolve the mystery, at least partly, of why people say such apparently nonsensical things to a tranny dyke. The tribal-tattooed midget jerk obviously had a pat answer that he would use with any biological female challenging his right not to share equipment. Which made me realize that the "bustier" comment was also probably an autopilot remark. A neuron fired in my coworker's brain that said "biological female" and then out popped "bustier." Our cultural thinking about gender is that tangled up with our a priori need to determine whether people are male or female. Wouldn't it be better if we thought about people like dogs—I mean, who really cares what their sex/gender is?

Follow Up: Bulldagger in a China Shop Gets All Dressed Up with No Place to Go

I can't believe it: I forgot to mention sex where it was relevant. Thanks, ghostis, for the reminder. Yes, indeed, sex is a powerful motivator of much of what we do. Try being gay for a day: I bet you'd find that your desire affects larger swaths of your life than you think it does. Without question, a large part of going out to bars is window shopping for potential mates, which isn't so fun when there's nothing in your size or style. (Or woe is me if there is something I like!) My point in describing social outings with the straights was that it's not just sex itself but the whole way that the genders interact in social settings that feels uncomfortable to me. Those normative interactions have sex buried within them; it's just buried deep enough to be socially acceptable. I think that's a major part of why homophobes think gays are hypersexual--when social interactions stop looking familiar, you see the sex at the root of them again.

Well, and, fags maybe are a bit oversexed. To be continued.

Trannydyke Shrugged

I never cease to be amazed at how many people express earnest concern that butch/femme dynamics and FTMs reaffirm normative gender roles. Admit it, dear reader, you've been worried that Gender 3.0 is doing the Man's work.

The criticism of masculine identification comes from many directions. There are lesbians on Craigslist (I'm a dyke looking for someone else who looks like a dyke; I'm not interested in butch/femme), old-school feminists and crunchymen.

As for old-school feminists, read Dorothy Allison and others. I don't have the energy to go through it again (although, unfortunately, lots of young lesbians seem perfectly willing to recreate 70s politics again and again).

It's hard for me to understand why some lesbians of my generation get so outraged by butch/femme. Butches and femmes single-handedly created lesbian culture. They fought at Stonewall, literally. But nothing is better than theorizing about what you don't understand. And because I don't know any butches or femmes who judge and criticize lesbians who identify as andro or resist gender categorization altogether, my theory is this:

(1) Lesbians who don't find butch/femme hot are irritated that it takes up so much of their cruising space. There is a scarcity problem in lesbian culture, so their concern would be perfectly understandable if they would just be honest about it. But butches and femmes are actually minorities in the lesbian world, so why all the tweeners feel like an oppressed majority is perhaps the subject of another post.

(2) Some lesbians who resist categorization do so because they're really not clear on who they are. The presence of butch/femme dynamics has created a language of gender in the lesbian community—not just butch and femme, but tomboy femme, femme-of-center, soft butch, faggy butch, andro, lipstick lesbian and so on—with which fluency is expected, so these uncertain lesbians feel pressured to define themselves and get grouchy.

Now crunchymen are, in my experience, some of the worst, most insidious sexists out there. They don't clean up after themselves; they have a creepy sense of entitlement and inflated self-importance that they will never admit has to do with their gender. And they accuse me of reifying gender norms.

Let's imagine for a moment that I do just that. I believe I deserve special treatment because I identify as male. How far do they think I'd get with that? Do they think bosses and cops will bow down before my grubby tranny self? Because they don't. Cops treat me like any freak who needs to be controlled: Wear Lesbian Avengers shirt; get arrested. Bosses pretty much treat me like a girl, who, like any girl, has no right to take herself so seriously. But then they justify their sexism by claiming to think of me as a man—and one who, obviously, reaffirms normative gender roles. And just so we're clear that I don't subscribe to normative gender roles, let me make explicit that women bosses are every bit as bad about this as men. And lesbian bosses can be the worst, because they feel a little castrated.

But if I did hold pretty conventional views of masculinity and femininity, why should I take the fall for those norms? I mean, wouldn't it be more productive to take one's complaints to centers of power like the military and the boardroom? Is one lone trannydyke doing more to affirm gender norms than to break them down? And why do I have to explain what I think masculinity is and why I think I'm more masculine than feminine before people will accept my choice to identify as male?

That's like asking someone to define the meaning of life before giving them a birth certificate.

He's a Dyke

I’ve been told several times in the last few weeks that I’m a dying breed. I’m a butch dyke of 35, living in San Francisco. I am one of just a handful of male-identified dykes at or under 35 who do not take testosterone and don’t insist in every situation on being referred to as a man. It’s not that I’m ambivalent or unsure about my masculinity — tell me “you go girl” and you’ll likely get a fist in your face. Or at least a look that packs as much punch.

But gender is a funny thing: It’s all relative. I thought being a dyke had taught me that lesson — I notice who’s more butch, who’s more femme, and a million permutations thereof. But the boom in testosterone-taking ex-butches has revealed how butch itself is a relative category. The more tranny boys there are, the more not taking testosterone seems like an expression of some unacknowledged allegiance to femininity. No, I don’t feel any connection to the word woman, but feeling awkward in the women’s bathroom doesn’t mean I feel like I was born to use the men’s room — especially when, testosterone or no, I will always have to sit to pee. I can’t bring myself to think that making my body adhere to the man category is the answer when, after over ten years of queer life, the gender binary (woman = feminine, man = masculine; woman ≠ man) strikes me as comically clumsy — naïve and absurdly autocratic.

Don’t panic: I’m not going to argue that all FTMs take us back to overly simplistic ideas of gender. Such generalizations are useless and don’t ultimately advance the ideal of gender chaos. But the physical trappings of manhood — except one or two that testosterone can’t give — have not been the things I have aspired to or identified with. I may walk and fuck a lot like a man, but mostly I am masculine in the ways I feel: I am tough and fiercely self-sufficient and find myself in pissing contests, even though I think they're stupid; I go awkwardly rigid when it comes to tenderness and vulnerability; I feel completely entitled to experience desire without guilt, shame or obligation and to speak my mind as I see fit. At times, I do want to feel testosterone running through my veins, like a drug I was meant to have, to give these feelings physical form. Would a low dose (one too low to change my voice or body hair) make me more of a man, in society’s view? I don’t think so, because society cannot see gender anywhere but on the physical body. I think I would still be seen as a mannish, militant lesbian who doesn’t know her place by those who disapprove of me, and as some version of butch by those who get it.

But I’m not a woman who refuses to accept her place; I’m not a woman — for me, personally, the word is irredeemably steeped in its connotations of motherhood and nurturing. (For this, I blame the Second Wave feminists.) The constitutive thrill of being a male-identified dyke is feeling like those prescriptions simply don’t apply. Problem is, femmes and other gender-savvy dykes tend to be the only ones who recognize this basic fact of masculine gender identity.

People, in my experience, have a strong desire to be seen for what they are, or, at least for the good things they are. That’s why the thought of injecting testosterone crosses my mind at times — say, when I’m sweating my balls off picking up trash for the city to work off parking tickets. I’m in Dickies and an old T-shirt. It’s me and the homeboys; there are no straight women or femmes or even middle-class folks doing it. Then somebody comes up (with the class-blind expectation that because I “work for” the city, I will have handy information at my fingertips) and addresses me with “Miss!” Miss? I may have the tiniest hint of breasts, but doesn’t the combination of actions, attitude and attire speak louder? People who call me “miss,” or who apologize profusely after calling me “sir,” mistake me for some poor old frump who can’t help but look mannish. But I am more in charge of my gender than they are: I have negotiated it; I know who I am and I like it.

Some butches probably transition because they’re tired of dealing with these situations. Their choice may be politically retrograde or politically radical or neither — only time will tell. But nobody said it would be easy to overturn social expectations, and it’s really no surprise that society willfully misreads attempts to loosen its categorical shackles. One such attempt comes in the form of folksy advice: It’s best not to give a fig how others see you. Aside from the fact that no one is comfortable being misread profoundly and negatively — they may not have experienced it, but I’m quite sure they wouldn’t like it — this advice ignores the basic fact that refusing to see people in all their complexity furthers the cause of discrimination.

But that same tone deafness is what has allowed the category of butch to exist at all. “Butch” is a space between the poles of gender and would play quite differently if the poles disappeared. The current explosion of FTMs is already shifting how it plays, and what it's called. As a dyke dude, I could feel emasculated by FTMs’ ballsier embrace of masculinity. Sometimes, say when I see them at the gym lifting twice as much weight as I can, I do. But sometimes I feel ballsier than they are for pushing the gender envelope in a more active way that FTMs who pass — or at least for walking away from a potential pissing contest with them. Being butch is a claim that can be rejected (unlike, say, being biologically female), and some butches and tranny boys respond by needing to be more masculine than the next dyke to feel masculine at all.

I will admit to being uncomfortable with the popularity of transitioning to the extent that at least some people are doing it to win at that game — a perfectly reasonable desire for your early twenties, but not one worth shaving a few years off of your life for. (Testosterone is hard on the liver and may be linked to various kinds of cancer--no one knows because no one researches it.) But because male-identified dykes are also often judged harshly for reaffirming patriarchal biases, I’m inclined to abstain from judgment. I generally think it’s better not to fret that FTMs are limiting the scope of gender play in the dyke community. The decision to transition or not to transition can be a reflection of which aspects of masculinity different people connect with, or which strategy they employ to break through the walls of binary gender. Or maybe the polarity that has resulted from some butches’ choice to transition reveals what most lesbians already knew: Gender is so complicated that sleeping with biological females is not a very strong glue with which to hold a community together. (Note to homophobes: It’s our shared experience of oppression that really connects us as a community.)

Whatever the case, testosterone isn’t a magic key to a brave new world where gender diversity — and perversity — are valued. That should go without saying. Meanwhile, some of us are still holding down the butch fort, which is — in case it’s never occurred to you that butches look working class because we can’t get better jobs— still very much under attack. Now it’s also on shifting ground.