Paint-By-Numbers

It's like life is a paint-by-numbers picture, but those whose interpretation of gender is strictly traditional are handed only two colors of paint. It's not surprising that they paint the whole world so simplistically, but I know they do not see the whole story, the nuance inherent in the world's complications. If we only have two colors to choose from, then those two colors carry an incredible burden of connotation. In this sloppy connotation, the logistics of the sex I have starts to spill over into metaphysics of who I am. This is totally ridiculous, and yet it's considered totally reasonable and 'the way the world works.'

A graphic example of the complicated intersections of flesh and spirit: when my lover is licking my cunt, I am thrillingly, ecstatically aware of the magic of my body and his hungry desire for it, this body, here, the one I've been inhabiting for some decades. At those moments sometimes I catch myself, while very consciously experiencing an aspect of my female-coded flesh and its capacity for pleasure, fantasizing about the tip of the dick I don't have touching the roof of his mouth. He's a bisexual guy, assigned male at birth, and we share a realm where our desires are explicitly multi-gendered and multiply oriented. I love my body as it is; that fantasy dick is not my goal, or a definition of myself, but a spiritual sex toy I can use to please both of us.

My Body at Work

There are ways that my relationship to my body and gender reflects in my work as an HIV treatment educator activist. HIV, like transgenderedness, is not solely a medical issue. It is also social, political, economic. It only appears easily reducible as a medical issue in the pathologizing medical model.