It's not about that I said. You hippie he said and I said Clam up. Are you this insensitive to your infertile sister? He said Leave her out of this and I said What’s the difference between us?

When I was a child I saw right through a ruse of my parents' church. Men, they claimed, are given the power to act in the name of god: they do all the ceremonies, blessing the sick, conferring names and bestowing power into the hands of their male progeny. Women are blessed with the power to give birth, to teach and raise the next gen(d)eration. This was the essential, distinct difference between the two. These abilities are birthright; they are holy duties.

I received a separate set of lessons which suggested that Eve was smitten with the pains of childbirth for her sins. Her punishment for demoralizing Adam was the curse of bearing children.

And so I learned that some teachers provide conflicting lessons without a word about cognitive dissonance; a concept I've become immensely familiar with since I've been a tranny.

A big part of my life has been trying to figure out what about me is natural and that which is manufactured. I don't know if this makes me different from most people or not, but it certainly feels like I spend much more time on this question than other people do. Being a woman seems to come quite naturally to me, but -- as I mentioned in last month's column -- I tend to feel more in tune with my nature hopped up on my favorite (synthetic) hormones. Most days, I'm surprised and annoyed by the natural, animal things my body seems to want me to do, like eating and sleeping. But for a few days, every so often, I will find myself somehow aching for my nature.

When I first started hormones, my doctor was pretty heavyhanded about wanting me to go bank some sperm -- just in case, you know, sometime in my future I kinda sorta got the urge to reproduce -- ahem -- naturally. She pressed so hard that I started to wonder if she had stock in the sperm bank. Can you buy stock in sperm banks?

Anyway, I declined, because even if I felt I could conscionably bring a child into this world, I'd have to spend all this money to freeze my assets until I could figure out when I was ready for motherhood without the labor. All of this just so I could have a child which was somehow "naturally" mine. Can you see the bind I'm in?

There are times when I'm sure I'd make a great parent, times when I'd like to try to raise a child to pick zir own gender and to be all perceptive and political and stuff. And then there are times when I realize that I might wind up the Nancy Spungen of moms, albeit with less eyeliner, so maybe the world's much better off. Regardless, I don't get the menses, as my friend from the top of the column so delicately reminded me, so maybe I ought to just shut the book on the subject and move on. Surely I, "as a woman", can contribute something more useful to the world than another blonde rugrat. Hasn't feminism helped us all to realize that there is more to "womanhood" than the ways in which we participate in species propagation?

Obviously, no -- watch absintence education ad on tv if you need proof. I'm thinking that nothing could make the skeptics -- some of the folks in my parents' church, for instance -- believe me more when I say I'm a woman than if I were to go home knocked up. Of course, then we'd have the whole discussion about the consequence of sex outside of marriage, but hey, one step at a time.

Gayatri Spivak, who is one of the smartest people on earth, speaks about how she defines her project as one of "un-learning our privilege as our loss." (The Post-Colonial Critic, Routledge, 1990, p. 9). When I first came to this notion, it blew my mind; it has since been an amazing tool for understanding the sneaky powers of privilege. And while I don't like to think of "male body functions" as privileged over "female body functions," there are contexts -- such as within my religious upbringings -- where such conditions of privilege are clearly spelled out.

My point here is that I could spend a lot of time, as a beleaguered transwoman, lamenting the fact that I don't have a clear menstrual cycle, and perhaps seeking ways to be compensated for that perceived loss. (Because, you know, biology can be soooo unfair.) But like I told my friend, that's not what it's about.

What it's about, for me, is that I cannot unproblematically live as a woman in this world; I cannot unproblematically become a parent; and yet again I left with no clear answer about whether I really am a natural creature or not. Call me shallow, but from time to time I get totally bummed about feeling entirely unnatural. I write about this situation less to complain, but to find new ways of thinking about these things, which will, in turn, help me to occasionally feel better about being a product of technology trapped in the shape of a human being.