The most shocking thing in the issue is "Plasma and Poultry," Sherilyn Connelly's account of sitting around with a couple of friends and drinking each other's blood, which was, she reports, "an odd sensation."

Sipping blood from a syringe inspired Connelly to contemplate vampires, and she concluded that she isn't one. "Vampires don't exist," she writes. "But, by gum, you willingly drink blood and your weirdness factor can't help but shoot through the roof."

So true! And only in Morbid Curiosity would a story about recreational blood-drinking include the phrase "by gum."

Though I have to take issue with almost every single verb, I'm always happy to see that my name is spelled correctly. And, to step off the diva platform for a moment—my story got a few lines of ink in the Washington Post! It's almost like I'm a real writer! How cool is that?

4:51pm

There. I did it. I made appointments for next month for both a consultation with the surgeon, as well as to get The Necessary X-Rays beforehand.

I don't really know what I want or need done yet. That's why it's a consultation. But after nearly eight years on hormones (and enough electro to render facial hair a moot point) (I hope), it's increasingly apparent that this is as good as my face is going to get on its own, and it...ain't...quite...there yet.

It's scary, without a doubt. Surgery is risky, lots of things could go wrong, it's expensive, and few things unsettle me more than a reconstructed face. But even scarier is the thought of things staying the way they are.

My good neighbors move out today, I have a comfy new bed, and a desk at which I'm actually comfortable sitting and writing—I was working on my Transforming Community piece until well past midnight last night, and that's unusual for me. This year's going to bring a lot of changes, and they've already started.

I took yesterday off from work, and today and tomorrow as well. My birthday week and all. Today is going to be all about my Transforming Community piece, with a few sidelines into my piece for Sizzle. I may need to leave here at some point for a different environment; thus far, the majority of it has been written while sitting at a coffeehouse (Java Beach and/or The Sea Biscuit) drinking a mocha and listening to Marilyn Manson on my discman. Works for me. Your mileage may vary.

I've also started eating meat again, but I don't think there's a connection.

This can't go on. Something has to change.

3:38pm

Vash and I are talking about going to the Market Street Cinema on Friday afternoon for my birthday. Neither of us have been, but we both want to do something sleazy, and it certainly fits the bill. Their website's schedule is too retarded to see that far ahead, but I hope Jenna is working. Obviously over thirty, and wears a purple wig? Oh my yes.

9:35pm

You were on hormones, and you had electrolysis done. Neither of them required much debate. Like so many trannies, before you came out, you regarded hormones as a sort of mythical goal. No, not a goal; a door, the start of a journey, one which would change you within and without, and make the awful feelings go away, the voices in your head, telling you that your very existence was false. These things, you believed, could make your brain a quiet place, perhaps bring you a measure peace you'd only imagined, but didn't really believe could happen.

Most of all, you wanted to see a different face in the mirror, one without the hair and with softer lines, a face that would make the clerk at the store say "Miss" rather than "Sir." God, it was such a simple thing on paper, but it would mean so much. You could be at a restaurant, and the server would say "Are you ready to order, Miss?" Then you'd go to the restroom, choosing without hesitation the stick figure with the triangle. Maybe as you entered another woman would exit, and your eyes would meet for a split second. She would continue on her way, not giving you a second thought. Even if you were (inevitably) a few inches taller than her, or couldn't hide that upper torso which was genetically predisposed for a quarterback or perhaps a date-rapist. She would pay these things no mind, for yours was clearly a woman's face. In that split second, no doubt unconscious of the fact that she was doing it at all, she would grant you passage. You were where you belonged. And so it came to be.

One thing that didn't change was your attraction to women. You weren't sure what would happen when you transitioned. As you personally moved away from maleness, that state of being you found so distasteful in yourself, would you begin to find it attractive in others? As your skin softened and thinned of hair, would you find yourself wanting to touch someone else's hirsute hide? Would there be a thrill to kiss a mouth with a bristly afternoon corona even as your own was being electrified away, follicle by painful follicle? When the day finally hit you a few years into your transition, when you looked at a boy and saw a species other than your own, you felt nothing but relief—and the surreal, transcendental thought of that's not me. i'm a girl now.

You were on the periphery of the tranny scene, occasionally going to events, interacting with that particular variation of "your kind," but not connecting. Never really sure why; the click just didn't happen. Then you stumbled into the dyke scene, via the lit/performance world. There was every kind of queer imaginable, including more different flavors of tranny than you knew existed. (Not that you tasted any of those flavors, being in an monogamous relationship.) You did notice that there were a lot more Female-to-Males than Male-to-Females; if you were to ratio it, you'd guess it was a factor of about five to one. You had to laugh, because you knew that according to conventional wisdom (when the conventioneers gave it any thought at all), it was M2Fs that who comprised the larger flock.

The reason for this misconception was fairly obvious: F2Ms passed a great deal easier. With a few exceptions, but not many; again, if you were to express it in ratios, about one in ten M2Fs passed, but only about one in ten F2Ms didn't pass. As trannies went, M2Fs tended to be the sore thumbs, while F2Ms were...um...the other fingers. Or something.

You became familiar with the concept of the non-op/noho-nolo tranny: one who eschews any sort of hormones or surgery, preferring to remain unaltered physically while still living in their chosen gender—or lack thereof. Which was where genderqueer came in, those who rejected the concept of gender altogether. You noticed this group was far more likely to be genetic female by birth. (With some notable exceptions, of course. There were exceptions to everything.) You figured this particular skew of genderqueer towards double-X chromosomes had something to do with genetic logistics, since the female-born body has a much better shot at achieving androgyny than the male. Heaven help anyone who tried to suggest the genderqueer was one or the other, though.

Across the board (especially from the genderqueer sector), there was an unmistakable hatred of the so-called binary gender system. It was viewed as repressive, a restricting label. You supposed so, though in truth, you'd never felt so free as when you traded the male for the female role. In fact, it didn't feel so much like a trade as a liberation. You were conscious of how lucky you were to be born in the seventies, coming of age after the advent of feminism. The girls your age (at least, those you chose to be around) were strong and free and self-reliant. They chose their own destinies, did what they wanted, wore what they wanted. They didn't think their purpose in life was to find a man and squeeze out puppies. Oh, sure, some did, but because they wanted to, not because it was expected of them. That was the face they put on, anyway, and you accepted its value.

The women in your life were your inspiration and role models, though you never consciously imitated them. What you learned was to simply be yourself, to act natural. Aside from becoming more brave and confident as your body and mind finally started getting in sync, your behavior and personality didn't change dramatically. They didn't need to; you were never much of a boy to begin with. (You could never think of yourself as a "man," even though you didn't begin transitioning until you were will into what is generally considered manhood. At the most, you thought of yourself as a boy, though "kid" never stopped feeling accurate.) When you first stepped into the shrink's office on your twenty-fifth birthday, she said you had a female energy. Many other people who spent more than a few minutes with you said the same thing.

Except that now there seemed to be something wrong with that. By considering yourself female, you were buying into the gender binary. This, you were informed, was a bad thing.

Not to your face, of course. Nobody was so rude as that. Well, mostly; at an open mic, you read an emotionally vulnerable piece about your body image issues in which you confessed to a desire to be thin, and tied it in with your gender issues. After you were done, the host almost frantically did damage control, as though to clear the air after you'd sullied it with your non-canonical thoughts. She essentially described you as being brainwashed by the patriarchy, the media's beauty standards, and, of course, the binary gender system. This was news to you; all along, you'd just thought you wanted to be thin. You were out as a trans person, but evidently that wasn't enough to keep you from being a counterrevolutionary assimilationist sellout. You had to have a certain sense of aesthetics as well. You discovered that even if you weren't straight, you were still expected to be narrow. It was just a different ledge to walk.

If wanting to be thin was bad enough—and some plus-sized girls actually walked out in protest when you read the piece elsewhere, not realizing that your demons were too busy with you to give a shit about them—the desire to pass was also frowned upon, almost regarded as an act of oppression. An F2M friend asked you passionately if rhetorically over dinner one night, "Why should anyone have to pass? And what if they don't? Does that mean they've failed? How fucked up is that?" You agreed that it was highly fucked up, declining to mention that you tended to think of the word "pass" in terms of motion rather than success. But hey, everyone's entitled to their metaphors, if not their bodies.

You never entirely passed anyway. Nobody did. You did better than some, not as good as others. You used the women's restroom with no problem, and got called "Miss" and "Ma'am" more often than not. For the most part, the only people who got the pronouns wrong were people to whom you were already out. Hurt every time, but at least it was infrequent.

Then you found yourself in the Midwest, visiting your girlfriend's family. You spent a week in a mid-sized Nebraska town and another week in a zit-sized Kansas town, a burg so dinky that if you couldn't see the water tower with the town's name, you weren't there anymore. The weirdest thing happened: you passed. At the grocery store in Clay Center with your girlfriend's grandfather, or in an an Omaha mall or even an equidistant Wal-Mart, nobody gave you a second look. If they did, they certainly didn't stare like people did back home. Everyone used the female pronoun and defaulted to "miss" or "ma'am" much more than in San Francisco.

It was as though this place, with all its xtian man-on-top-get-it-over-with-quick sexual mores couldn't begin to conceive that a real live transsexual might be in their midst, so they parsed you as a girl, no questions asked. In San Francisco, the Norms were looking for you; here, they didn't know you existed. Was it somehow safer in Flyover Land?