associated with it. For example, there are serious benefits to taking HIV meds, namely that the virus is stopped, the immune system can rebuild, and the person taking them feels like they are fighting back against this jerk known as HIV. There are also serious risks or costs to the meds, including, briefly: short and long term side effects, the potential for triggering drug-resistant virus, and the fact that they are a total pain in the ass to take as prescribed. I cannot make anyone take these pills, and it is not my job to talk people into it. It is my job to help people weigh the benefits and the costs for themselves, and make decisions based on the best possible information, not on stereotypes.

In a similar way, I have weighed the costs and benefits to my out and proud trans status. It is worth it to me to face the risk of being queer- or trans-bashed, because I yield the great benefit of feeling at one with my body, rather than estranged from it.

I am both gendered and non-gendered, I defy gender while embracing it.

Tops and Bottoms

As a young queer teenager I had an earlier exposure than most to the idea that gender and orientation need not be perfectly lined up in two tidy little boxes, male and female. I learned that there is fun in playing with those two boxes, not unlike mixing the orange and purple Play-Doh. I also learned about the variations of power in sex, the roles of top and bottom, and I was most hot for 'switches,' those who play both roles. I learned that vulnerability in sex is actually the secret superhero power of the bottom.

All of these uses of top and bottom seem to imply that there is a person who is doing the fucking, the top, who uses their muscle groups rhythmically to fuck the passive body of the bottom, who lies there motionless. In reality, most people who fuck use a variety of muscle groups, whatever their position, and the act of moving your "passive" bottom's body closer to their "active" top's body is also an act of fucking them. Fucking is mutual. Unfortunately, the negotiations of fucking do not always result in mutuality. The normative model in our society is a deeply imbalanced and