I’ve recently been reading “Breasts and Eggs” by Meiko Kawakami. It’s about the contemporary life of women in Japan and the expectations of the gender.
One of the main characters, Makiko, comes to Tokyo to visit her sister, Natsu, with her daughter Midoriko. Natsu comes to Tokyo to get breast implants. The expression of Makiko’s sex relates to her gendered experience.
That’s where much of this column will be building, on the basis of a transsexuals experience.
I use transsexual rather than transgender to define myself because I feel it describes my personal wants and realizations of transition more adequately.
To be transgender is simply to trans- your gender. In fact, during the AIDS crisis, the CDC coined the term “transgender” to define transvestites, cross-dressers, drag queens, butch lesbians and additionally transsexuals (Susan Stryker’s “Transgender History,” Vol. 2).
Nowadays, people use the term transgender to mean what transsexual used to mean. Transsexuals are simply people who modify their body through the use of hormones and, at times, surgery. I use transsexual because, while I am transgender, I feel my transsexual experience overrides the experience of many transgender people who simply have no desire to begin hormones.
So I am a transsexual, and the implication is that I have “transed” my sex. I have changed my sex, which runs contrary to many teachings of sex as an inchangeable force, while gender is unstable and very changable.
My sex has changed, and I am a woman.
My sex has changed since birth. Without getting into specifics of my transition, I find that my sex is more inline with women than it is with men. My veins do not leak testosterone.
My breasts are not fake, nor plastic (not to say there is a problem with that). They were molded by bioidentical estradiol and progesterone. My genes signaled the growth; the stretch marks that appear on my thighs are that of fat redistribution. I’ve grown shorter as my hips shifted for a “more” appropriate child birthing repositioning.
My body is that of a woman.
Womb transplants are on the horizon. Besides my XY chromosomes, I’m entirely the same as “cis” women (which XY chromosomes only serve to signal the production of testosterone, and with my hands, I’ve prohibited that growth). I feel the pain of being infertile, unable to carry a child.
In sex and gender, I’m a woman.
So this column will serve as an experience, a guide, through interviews and personal essays, about the experience of a woman, who has changed her sex.
The title of the column: “Infect Your Mind with a Trans Woman,” after Torrey Peter’s novella, “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones.”
