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Ars Erotica
September 2003 Eat A (Tranny) Peach I've been fretting about relevance lately. Unsure of which choir I preach to, and uncertain of which of the thousand tranny-flavored topics I should attack, I've been thinking that my contribution to Western culture this month could just not even happen, and no one would notice. It'd be like I was everyone else, like I always am. And then I discovered a Christian ministry devoted to healing transsexuals. They preach the same crap that they preach to the healing homos – that god's biological plan will see them through to their own personal Ode to Joy. The main spokeswhatever, going by the Everyname "Jerry," gives the same sob story you get from Jerry Springer's guests. The best part is there are all these alterna-testimonials from virtually nameless persons who, years later, find themselves trapped in the trappings of femininity. One whines about her huge breasts. It's like Penthouse Forum, fortified with Savior Fare. The best part is they have a whole page – insofar as the internet has pages – devoted to Renee Richards, the tranny grand dame who served her time in the public court in the 1970's, when she wanted to play tennis for the girls squad. Our friendly neighborhood preachers dug up a 1999 interview in which Richards expressed a bit of regret around the circumstances of her own transition. While she didn't exactly complain about how her huge throbbing boobs are making it hard to squeeze herself into a Packers jersey in time for kickoff, she did suggest that perhaps there might have been other means for her to have resolved the issues which led to her changing her sex. I, for one, am glad she did it, because if she hadn't, we might never have seen Vanessa Redgrave play the role of a pre- and post-transition transwoman (Second Serve, 1986). And personally, given the remaining media depictions of transwomen in the 1980's, I needed that performance like I needed a subcutaneous layer. Well, the ministers snarfed up Richards' quote right quick and posted it on their website as evidence that the demon of regret lurks behind every dark door. They really don't want you to go changing to try to please thee. They like you just the way you are. And judging from their Forum postings, it doesn't even seem to matter that you've had a great rack for a bazillion years now – with God's love and a $7,000 implant removal, you, too, can find True Happiness. So long as we don't talk about anything below the belt, of course. What disturbs me about the Richards discovery is the same thing that's kept me from being able to write my column this month – this issue of relevance. A couple of things have become quite clear to me in the year and change since I started to write Ars Erotica there's a lot of people who could not care less about me and my transsexual revolution, and there's people who care aplenty. And this latter category isn't always going to be populated with my best friends. I'm not as proud of this as I'd like to be, but I'm kind of a perennial outsider. I'm critical of everything tranny the language, and the ways transfolk are treated by their doctorshave been dealt with by the medical establishment – especially the doctors who have hung their shingles with the explicit intent of making their living by serving trans populations. I'm critical of the organizations and their boards who have set themselves up to speak for transfolk and genderqueers – pretty much any of those folk who fell out of the normative gender box only to find that no one was going to pick them back up. I 'm critical of the ways by which transfolk – especially transwomen – come to know themselves as women; moreover, I'm critical of the ways they deploy that knowledge in a world which remains unapologetically patriarchal in all of its structures. I could go on, and trust me, I will. There is a lot to be concerned about in all this transsexuality business, because there is a lot at stake. If there wasn't the biblethumpers would turn the other cheek, just like they do with Enron officials and Watergate convicts. So should I second guess myself, and fret over carefully chosen words? Maybe I shoud just pack up this column and a vacation in Florida for a while until me and my tan can write a column that's just a little more "up." Maybe I should question the relevance of any of my ideas simply on the basis that there doesn't seem to be a lot of folks burning with the desire to confront these issues. There's no policing like self-policing, you know. The easiest way to kill a dream is to avoid the vulnerability of sleep altogether. The Muppet Show, a staple of my childhood television addiction, had a running gag where Gonzo's goal was to go to Bombay to become a movie star. Gonzo, a semi-sane birdlike daredevil with a thing for hens, was clearly the fool. Everyone knows you go to Hollywood to be a star, and even then they only let in The Beautiful Ones. You just kinda had to shake your head and say, "Whatever, dude." Gonzo always played innocent, childlike, seemingly incapable of understanding that his dream was laughable, especially to anyone in the real culture industry of Tinseltown – the manufacturers of relevance. But 25 years later, Bollywood – Gonzo's dream industry – is the shit, and even there you can't swing a cat without hitting a tranny. I'd love to be able to devote every ohm of what passes as my talent towards some great hunk of literature – Gatsby, maybe, or Cat's Cradle, but even if I get that kind of access (or that kind of time) there's no way I'll escape the fringe so I'll be the transsexual Gatsby, the transsexual Prufrock – and then I'll go Bollywood, and then it won't matter whether I'm misquoted or not. Rahne Alexander can be seen playing all 400 of her dystopic personalities in the autobiographical film, 28 Days Later. Return to Ars Erotica Index |
