Tranny Queer, the Beginning of Bent

The Artist D

What do you want to be when you grow up? They kept asking that. Do they still ask that? Please approach the head of the class! Now, speak clearly into the tape recorder, Little Johnny. What do you want to be when you grow up?

I cleared my throat and thought about all of the things I was supposed to say. I could be an astronaut. Maybe I’d be a teacher. That’s it! I could be a teacher, because I never told them what kind of teacher I wanted to be. The headmaster smiled approvingly thinking I wanted to be just like her, a teacher. Well, I did want to be just like her. I didn’t want to be a teacher though. I wanted to be a girl.

There shined that old school mentality that we are what we do and are not who we are. Most of our parents and grandparents were under the impression that we already were who we were. The only question remaining was what we were going to do with ourselves. Little did they know we had completely different plans. Little did they know we’d blow it so far out of proportion and spend the rest of our lives intently focused on the who instead of the what.

Little Johnny had no idea who he was. He was a blank slate born into a boring body with a penis. He would have loved to grow up to be an astronaut or a teacher, but first he had to solve some more pressing questions about his or her identity.

Much like choosing a career path our forebears also convinced us that it was the same situation when choosing a gender. Johnny did not like his penis. Johnny told his parents he wanted to cut it off. Johnny’s parents digested this and said, “Well fine then, you want to be a girl. Go get a vagina.”

Society is madly in love with the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the S.A.T. Pages and pages of little circles to fill in with the right answer. Life is a multiple choice question for our ancestors, but there never was an “Other” bubble.

I used to fill out the page of S.A.T. choice bubbles to create sheet-sized silhouettes of Mickey Mouse. Much like my life, I had no interest in the multiple choices they had decided to give me. I was an outlaw. An education outlaw. A society outlaw. A gender outlaw.

Somewhere out there a Little Johnny grew up and had a surgeon invert his penis into a vagina. Little Johnny loved it but soon found that being a woman wasn’t totally her bag either. Johnny was confused and was stricken by the possibility that nothing would make her happy. Johnny jumped off a bridge and went splat.

The thing They don’t tell us is that They also created a multiple choice bubble column for Happiness too. It’s all pre-made bullshit. You don’t have to be a girl or a boy. You can be both. Just like I learned from my Mickey Mouse S.A.T.’s. You aren’t put in a jail if you fill in more than one bubble. You just flunk. You flunk and you go home to live the rest of your life the way you want to live it. You flunk society’s test. What a great thing to flunk!

You don’t have to be happy like they tell you. Likewise, you are not sad just because they say it is so. You do not need to look like a man or a woman. You can be both. You can be neither.

One thing I learned from interviewing countless transgender individuals on my prehistoric radio show, The Fabulous D Show, was that if society didn’t deem it so there would be a whole lot less transitioning. There would be a whole lot more gender outlaw-ism instead. People would love their bodies and it wouldn’t be a big deal because there would be no choice bubbles in front of them. And if they really did hate their penis or vagina then altering that would be totally cool too, because do what thou wilt and be happy. Your version of happy.

You don’t need to take their tests and you certainly don’t have to pass them.

To be continued . . . 

Tags: featured, flunked, sat, society, testing, theartistd, trannyqueer, Transgender, Transition

Category: Transgender Body & Soul