Electro-lit, Red-bull, Coffee, and painstakingly sober.
My habits have grown so healthy and I want to die.
All work and No play makes me want to drink myself to death
I’m starting to miss alcoholism and the ways I could dismiss —
My job, my rent, my friends, and my life with only a bottle to blame
These days I’m drinking legal stimulants in a ‘healthy’ amount
And I have to go to work, so I can pay me rent, so I can host friends
Or not really — there isn’t enough room for friends in this studio
But it gives me a place to sleep so I can wake up in the morning
And visit friends — at least in theory,
For a brief while there was a boom in art among transgender men, deceptions of wombs in the midst of destruction, eraser lines across chests and stomach and groins, collages that covered dysphoric bodies in flowers or syringes – scars or tattoos. Art that reclaimed our bodies and our right to change it, our right to hate the parts of us that hurt us, our right to love the bodies that rise from the ashes of our “self-mutilation,” and “female death,”.
That time was short, art was marked as violence towards women. How dare we mutilate the female body, how dare we degrade, demean, or demonize the sacred womb. Don’t you know there are people who love theirs? How dare you express your pain on paper while you are denied your hormones and your surgeries.
Of course, it wasn’t about art. It was about control. It always has been, the desire of cis men and yes – cis women, to control our bodies. It was not just the drawings, that was a facade – even to those who didn’t recognize it as such, those who thought they were doing good when they beat us down. It was about the way you see our surgeries as mutilation, the way you create a double standard – that cisgender women have the right to a hysterectomy but the transgender man does not even have the right to say he never wants a child to pass his hips, god forbid.
Shouts of, “There are some trans men who want to give birth,” and yes – I know, but this is not about them and it never has been, because you hate them too – you do not care about the medical mistreatment of the pregnant trans man and you question his male identity for carrying a child to term. It was never about that, it was about seeing trans men being angry and then centering yourself in the conversation that your were not invited too.