The Artist D Sounding Off — Fit Right In

The Artist D

Lately, each week on my show I have adventured into different realms of transgender life. We’ve talked to a woman transitioning and preparing for sexual reassignment surgery in a few weeks. We’ve interviewed a transsexual female to male porn star and a straight male crossdresser. Soon we’ll be discussing the post-op of sexual reassignment surgery with a male to female transgender individual too.

Every time I talk to someone from a different path of the transgender world we discuss “going stealth.” The dream many have that one day they will transition to the opposite gender than they were born and fit right in with Susie Homemaker from down the street. Some people want to just be normal, whatever that may mean to them. Others aren’t too keen on fitting in since they have always been outcast by the normal people. A lot seem to wonder why go fitting into a culture which shunned them from the beginning? Then there are those who wish they could fit in but know it just doesn’t work out that way.

I have to wonder why anyone would want to be normal, conventional, extra-extra ordinary. Of course I’ve stuck out like a sore thumb most of my life and have become quite accustomed to it. It suits me and since those who have fit in weren’t interested I have no interest in accommodating myself into the mold. I make a point to break the mold whenever I can and not only because it’s interesting, but because it makes them think that normal may not be so normal.

The one thing I’ve purloined from all these people I’ve been talking to on the radio is that if anything we are all our own breed or, better yet, category. Especially when I spoke to the female to male individual he made it very clear that while he is a male he is a transgender male. He’s not stealth and he didn’t throw out who he was. It all builds us up to who we are. I suppose what I’ve been seeing is a lot of people who run towards transition and then spit upon who they were. We spend so much time hating what we are naturally that we forget that it builds. Do we hate our foundation if we have built a beautiful house upon it? I guess that’s your prerogative, but you weren’t born yesterday.

Would we be who we are today if we weren’t who we were yesterday? So you are now a woman with a vagina who once was a woman with male genitals. So what? I can understand being disgusted with it for whatever valid reason you may have, but must it go? Must you integrate into the “one or the other” society before you. That society which is male or female and nothing else in between or everything possible. Make a decision, make up your mind, what are you? They used to always ask me that. My mother echoes, “Why don’t you make up your mind already? You can’t be everything.”

Why not mom? I’ll be who I want to be. I’ll be whatever I become. I’ll be the straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, male to slightly female and back again, drag queen, artist, lesbian, at times spastic, psychologically bent, damaged fiend and friend. That deserves a category just as much as male or female. If you ask me.

Think before you integrate. Don’t do it just because they told you to. Do it because you want to be who you know you are. All of what you may be, not just a portion so you can fit right in. If you were born a Susie Homemaker trapped in a man’s body then by all means — but if you’re sixty-seven things packed into one fleshy capsule I highly recommend you carve your own notch instead.

Tags: featured, opinion

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion