FTI

I think the time has come for me to admit something. Something that won't be popular to a lot of FTMs but is very real experience for me.

I feel more and more intersex then male. Honestly all that t has done is make me more aware of how I am not like men then am of the male category. The urges I have sexually don't correspond with the equipment I have.
I joined the yahoo group FTMsex to talk about issues of sexuality within the transmale community. It is open to FTM loving partners (of all genders) as well as transmen. A recent discussion has been around the feeling of not being male the longer one is on T. An older FTM recently posted that while phallioplasty helped with this discrepancy he did feel more and more like a eunuch or intersex the longer he was on testosterone, to the point where he was pretty depressed.

Now it is true that I've always never felt like a woman or female, but I know now that I don't really feel like I'll ever be male either. I don't align with either prototype (mythic gender/sex norms that they are) of the binary. But to exist as a person one has to align themselves at one point or another. Over the last few weeks this tension has been building and this Friday it came to a maddening breaking point. How can I as a person who does not embody either gender psychically or (ever will) physically feel that my path must be from one side of a gender/sex line to the other? Will I imprison myself on the male side? How do I keep my past gender/sex within my present?

I am frustrated by the labels/narratives/boxes others have put me in during this process. One of my hallmates, someone I've told numerous times that I want to keep my vagina (and am damn proud of it) recently got wasted "she"d me without any thought and repeatedly told me that I haven't found my voice yet. I was angry, hurt and pissed. I was scared because this is someone I've asked to go to Maryland with me in January. I was irritated that someone would think a man can't have a vagina.

Yet at the same time my parent's letters to me at the beginning of this process have been slowly beating into permanent soundings in my head. "No matter what you do to mess with your body's chemistry or how much you look like a man, you will always be a woman in a man's body." Ah biological essentialism, how I cannot escape you. As much as I detest the phallic obsession of Freud it seems to be the first marker of masculinity in this culture, ridden down even into the substance I inject into my thigh every 14 days.

And so this is my quandary, to shape myself as a man loosing my hair, gaining weight, putting myself on the path of early stroke and heart disease, loosing my 20/20 vision. Only to be told I will never reach that point in which I am supposedly striving for. The ever illusive manhood that seems to be an obsession in both the straight and FTM community. But this is not my goal...I have deceived myself and my friends if this has been the understanding.

What I am trying to do is to become myself, who I am in accordance with my gender identity. And my gender identity I have come to realize is not what is programed into T. It is not the biological blueprint of maleness involving a penis (unless that penis is a dildo). I have never desired those bits, testosterone does drive one to obsess about penetration. This has frustrated me.

So I have realized that I may give up testosterone sometime in the near future. I have to for surgery anyway so my month long break may be extended. I have always wanted a male upper body (including the beard) and female lower body (minus the menstruation). I have wanted to be treated like a woman, but physically made up like a man. Being an FTM results in this, except one is forcibly socialized like a man. In a way I guess I have always wanted most to be like a modern day eunuch, the go between of gendered spaces, taking a place in both and yet neither. If I were to strip in public anyone who read my body would see that this is most definitely the case. But clothing reinscribes the binary, it saves me from violence even as it masks my bodily reality.