m4ry k4te & a5h13y

this one is about b00bs

This month I have started the long-awaited process of going to consultations for gender-affirming chest surgery, a boob job if you will. I still can’t quite believe that it’s happening, or that i’ll go through with it, but I’m learning that ambivalence is natural and shared and allowed and that leaving your body and watching it continue to do stuff, from the ceiling, is not always bad.

For a long time my gender things felt outside the scope of the languages I speak and half-speak. Gender things felt more like a hum or not quite silence, but absence of sound. After a decade of hard to place discomfort (here and there and everywhere) I decided to force myself to try and write about it because unfortunately for me that’s the only real way I can make sense of anything.

Earlier this year a friend commissioned me to write on the theme of metamorphosis and below I share with you some of what I came up with in its imperfect and unfinished form because although there’s so so much more to excavate, writing these few paragraphs was enough, as am I, as are you.

a still from a film made about Harpies, the trans strip club I danced at 2019-20

I don’t remember much from the dream except those reeds that stick out the sides of wetness. Cattails they’re called because i just googled them coz i don’t know much about anything, but i know it was a war zone. The hills and ponds were pretty in that english way but the bodies lifeless and red. The cattails balancing fat and gold on strong green stems. Just right they were and all and minding their own business, you know how it is. The scene was idyllic and haunting, a moon, and i was far away but predictably indicated. There was a recital, like a poem or a eulogy but when i woke i could remember only the words cherish the night you felt free. so i did

It’s not something i hadn’t thought about before. i’d always fancied a n1ppl3 piercing for the secret metal and the fuck you, felt very drawn to it in fact. but upon research found out that if it goes in weird you can be left with scar tissue that inhibits your ability to bre4stf33d which pre poem-eulogy-dream felt like too much of a risk. I don’t have kids, and 10 years later, though the body modification spiral lives on, i’m not sure i’d ever want to do it biologically coz idk that just feels a bit sus & out of reach without the entitlement of whiteness to shepherd me through it. 

The pain of the metal ripping through hundreds of nerve endings was holy, which is to say i remember it, remember the sound i made. That night i lifted my shirt in the middle of the restaurant to surprise the guy i was mistreating at the time. i noticed how he sucked more enthusiastically than usual. The next morning my c0c0nut5 had swelled up so big they had swallowed the metal but i was calm because it felt like retribution. 

i didnt understand much and i guess i still don’t but of course i was already familiar with my body as a site of punishment. with my body that would pleasure me and punish me in unequal measure so that i could feel free and not free and free and that i’d be encouraged towards it and into my body but my god sometimes it feels good to leave. Now i know how i’ll feed u regardless of the triumph of my t1ts and that is freedom but it took a sec. It took the white boy on his knees giving head to the air between us and it took a wounded dog crawling to me from the edge of the bed nothing but hunger in their eyes. They will destroy me. I am the only one. We will destroy each other. 

I couldnt breathe in binders and i mean i know no-one can but i was anxious all the time in a way that felt worse than avoiding my reflection and i can’t make my mind up long enough to do anything more permanent than that and in that way im a failure too. When i told my therapist i prefer being naked to wearing clothes they were shocked but i explained that i dont like being naked either and everyone calmed down but i do like to climb rocks like a crab at that queer beach in new york my shell cracked open like a fucking fairground

I suppose it’s weird because i had a chat with myself to approach the idea of not feeling so awkward and frumpy about th3 g1rl5. to have myself adhere to some kind of self imposed binary around wanting them or not you know it’s not that difficult is it but i struggle to feel just one thing about anything at all which is why i will always stand by the fact i hate sports and cooking and people who say they’re on their way but refrain from giving a clear time estimate because life is too short to approach everything with nuance. I decided to try being a slut which presented a challenge because i dont want anyone to touch me before they’ve written me poetry or cleaned my kitchen so i became a stripper instead. 

When i reveal my 7ee7aas to an audience and they cheer i think it’s funny because i left my physical body hours ago when the lights went down and the techno (why are they playing techno) started. Sure i feel embodied but it’s not a thing of flesh and bits it feels more like games. Games in the sky. like teasing and hide and seek and dress up though i've never been a style queen but you want to watch anyway. Not grounded but flying but heavy present still. and It doesn’t hurt me any more when the drag queens in the dressing room take their big juicy silicone baz00ka5 off and place them on the counter but it might again one day and that might be me one day. & The ju9s. the power of the ju9s. It was never about the ju9s.