This is a photograph taken when I was a 3 year old puppy. I'm the blonde one, being held by the paw, by my mother. The little boy, next to me, eating ice cream is my mother's first puppy, a result of a disasterous affair with a married chinese national.
Note: 4 years later, my mother died, unexpectedly yet
predictably so, of an overdose of sleeping pills. After enduring 23 years of unjust
holocaustally induced depression. This is one of only 4 photographs, I have of
her. 
If you can't raise conciousness, at least raise hell. -Rita Mae Brown
Recently, I heard the news from a friend of mine, that a friend of hers had just completed his FTM surgery and that "word of the street was that he had become an absolute ordeal to deal with anymore." Such news, amazingly enough, no longer surprises me. I have come to accept it as a reality, yet it still troubles me, to hear it.
When I began hormone treatments, I identified as an FTM. By reason of logic, I sought out other FTMs to gain support. There were several reasons, for this, but the most important was that my therapist was unable to guide through this journey. Not one of them, actually helped me. In fact, I was expected to be a man without so much as a rule book to go by, (save for the occasional, "Be a man about it" comment whenever I dared to express emotion of some kind). I had lived as a man (I use the term loosely because all I basically did, in reality, was hide the fact that I had a female body neath my clothes) for decades, and I was sometimes successful, sometimes not.
So after months of searching, I found a couple of post-op FTMs. One of them is now my adopted brother in spirit who recently told me he was gay and couldn't come out to his FTM support group because the other guys had a problem with anything that wasn't heterosexual in nature.
In the beginning of our relationship as friends, he could not remember anything about his transition. I asked him how such thing could possibly be. I was going through inner turmoil with my hormonal shifting and I was sure as all cow chip hell, that I would remember years from now, how that felt. Amazingly enough, I still do. In short, he wasn't much help to me. In fact, I ended up supporting him more through his inadequacies as a man, than he supported me through my transition.
The other who told me at first sight, after watching me light a cigarette, "You'll never make it as a man. You'd better quit while you are ahead." I asked him what he meant by such crude remark. He replied, "Well, look at you. Your face is well chiseled, like a woman. Your cheekbones are high. And to make matters worse, you cross your legs when you're sitting down. Men don't do that. Women do!"
He, then paused and said, "Unless, of course, you wanna be a faggot but they'll never give you hormones if you wanna do that. Stay a woman and save yourself some money." I, of course, have never been known to tolerate such unwarranted insults gracefully, and I replied wryly, "This, of course, has been said to me by a man whose penis is large and wide enough to fuck a cow, never a woman. In light of this saddening fact, I will not lower myself to meet your manly standards." Thus, a potential friendship ended abruptly.
As a result, I went into hiding for a while, endured the transition hell, mostly by myself. My girlfriend had since left me for a real man, that is, a man with a penis. Therapy was useless as well again, since as an FTM somehow, I was not entitled to feel helpless, suicidal or even rejected. Those privileges were not meant for me, it seemed. Other men who perceived me as a male, also denied me those privileges.
Then, my FTM brother found an FTM support group. He kept raving about it to me, every so often when we met to catch up on each other's lives. I was skeptical, even as I travelled two and a half hours to meet these guys. The meeting had begun when we arrived. All was well, at first, as we each introduced ourselves. Then, we were supposed to speak of our respective "gripe du jour."
I chose to remain silent, something I must admit is totally uncharacteristic of me. But it happens sometimes when I'm in a room full of testosterone - I suddenly lose my desire to be ridiculed - something I learned from having been thought of as a female.
The evening consisted of FTMs proudly showing their latest scars for all of us to see and admire, and there was one post-op FTM who proudly showed us his newly constructed penis. I have nothing against those public displays, yet, I was somehow expecting for us to discuss what it meant for us to be men, how we were going about it, a bit of soul searching with brothers, as it were.
I, soon realized that such concepts were not even within their grasp. Totally bored and feeling trapped because my FTM brother had given me a ride to this sordid gathering, I decided to entertain myself while the others cheered at the latest surgical techniques, by getting up and gathering the dildoes that were lined up, across the mantel in the living room.
I sat, dutifully, unzipped my fly and tested each and every dildo I had gathered, by inserting it inside my zipper. The other FTMs present were too busy to notice, but one FTM - whose mastectomy operation had left his chest totally concave - asked me what in the hell I was doing, "I was just trying to see what it feels like having a penis. even if it's a facsimile." He then, scornfully replied, "Don't bother, you'll never make it." To which I replied, "That seems to be the consensus these days, I noticed."
I got up and quickly placed the dildoes back, on the mantel and walked up to my FTM brother and whispered to him "I wanna leave and I wanna leave now. I can't live up to their manly ideals here either, so be kind to me and take me home. At least there, my dog won't condemm me for not being man enough." He was aghast at them and, at me as well. On the way home, he kept talking about his desire to meet the manly ideals and not being able to meet them. There I was about six months on hormones, already rebelling and mocking those ideals in my own way.
Years went by, quickly. I was too pre-occupied with defining myself to think about the epidemic of the pursuit of hegemonic masculinity - as R.W. Connell calls it - by FTMs and the toll it was having on those I knew. In fact, when I sometimes mentioned to anyone I was FTM, their faces would tighten and constrict, a permanent frown would freeze on their foreheads. I came to view this reaction as an omen for myself: It was time to change my path, it seemed.
It was then, that I had to soul search and find for myself what type of person I wished to be, instead of what type of man. I was at a terrible quandry because I could not claim membership to the man's world, because I could not do what was expected of me by my FTM peers, by other men and sometimes women. Neither could I claim membership to women's culture just because as I have said quite often, "I've done time in dyke country and did time in female hell." To think, I could claim membership to either gender dichotomy would have been a bit presumptuous of me, in my opinion.
Since physically and emotionally, I have always felt to have both genders and neither simultaneously, despite my anatomy prior to hormonal treatment. Suddenly, in no man's land, I found myself. I knew it would be a very lonely road. I expected it. What I did not expect was the FTM consensus around my area that after all I was "too chicken to be a man" and they knew all along that I'd never have surgery. It wasn't as if I ever said that I would. They each would ask me when I was going to have my chest done, I kept saying, "The twelfth of never" to deaf ears. Yet, none ever asked me why I wouldn't, yet I did volunteer the answer often. It had more to do with not having enough reasons to mutilate my body than anything else.
I can confess that I once did apply for mastectomy surgery but was rejected in the end (my step-mother saw this a sign from above). Later I realized, she had known all along, that I am too vain about my body to undergo a such risky venture. In the end, vanity won out.
Another step I took was to change my gender identity. I relinquished my FTM title to something that was more in tune with how I felt about gender and society. After several titles, I settled for: Gender Anarchoterrorist. When word got out that I had changed my identity, the FTMs in my area weren't pleased with me.
I understood that the brotherhood was conditional. You were considered a brother if you upheld the rigid and universal yet unattainable manhood ideal without question. My very presence suggested that there wasn't just one form of masculine ideal and as did my adamant refusal to participate in the patriarchal order, by way of constantly questioning whenever I saw signs of hegemonic masculinity.
Sadly, I had to come to terms with the fact that some FTMs do acquire the worst traits of manhood. To this day, I can't understand why that must be. Perhaps, those FTMs, do not realize that they have an advantage over biological men drawn, from their experiences of having been treated as females, for most of their lives. I call this habit of forgetting: c*nvenient amnesia.
Perhaps, they also do not realize that such experience can lead them to find the strength to redefine their own concept of masculinity. After all, when we say masculinity, we aren't talking about just one prototype -the John Wayne ideal- but we are talking about masculinities which vary depending upon how we choose to define ourselves.
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