Don’t get me started on surgical options. Modern medicine can 3-D print a human heart, but it can’t make a flesh-and-blood dick that gets hard the way a cis guy’s does.
Do you know how a surgically constructed phallus becomes erect? They have to put a rod inside it.
Yeah.
I’ve already got something that does that, and I didn’t have to go through years of painful and expensive surgeries. I didn’t have to worry about loss of sensation or my body rejecting it. It cost fifty bucks online.
I want the real thing. And I can’t have it. None of us can.
I picked the wrong century to be trans.
Look, I won’t romanticize this shit. This is fucking hard to deal with. Being transgender is an endless compromise of half solutions and almost-like-thereal-things.
Sorry if that triggers you. Sorry if my definition of “real” makes you feel less real.
I’d like to not feel that way, too. I don’t know how.
But tonight a girl wanted to ride this half solution in my pants, and for a second I was drunk enough to believe that made me a real boy.
So I stood at a urinal, pretending to piss while I put the rod in to make my plastic dick hard.
This is what I mean, by the way. Tell me that is not the weirdest fucking sentence you’ve heard today.
Well, I was so damn drunk I dropped it.
The rod, the dick, the whole shebang.
And it rolled right against the shoe of the guy next to me.
I was so utterly wasted that I could only laugh. The guy’s face was priceless. He didn’t know what he was looking at, and when I put the cock back in my pants he walked out, fast. I didn’t care. Everyone knows me at this club. Not like I hide who I am.
Me and the girl hooked up, but I was too drunk to fuck like a man anyway, so I knelt between her legs and showed her what growing up identifying as lesbian can teach a guy.
Lust, check. Overconfidence, check.
Lack of situational awareness, check.
As I walked to the train on my way home, some guys followed me.
You probably know how this story goes.
It was late. Too late to run to the station for help. And I was still pretty damn drunk. So I turned into an alley and waited.
There were three of them. One was the guy who’d seen my dick. He said, “What the fuck are you?”
I said, “I’m the guy who’s going to kick your ass.”
A year ago this never would’ve left my mouth. But T is pure swagger. It makes you stupid.
They thought I was funny. They asked to see my dick. To pass it around.
Cute.
Bathroom Guy got in my face. He made various remarks implying I was a disease-carrying degenerate, then gave himself away by saying he’d “fuck that boy-pussy straight.”
As you can imagine, that’s when I hit him.
My body really is different. I’ve been lifting hard. It’s one thing to see your muscle in a mirror and quite another to feel it galvanized by adrenaline, propelled by rage. Few things feel as good and primal as bone impacting bone. It was beautiful almost, the elegant cascade of nerves firing, muscle contracting, fist crushing jaw, a spark of violence tracing its way from my brain stem to his bloody mouth. And the hitting—the hitting felt like fucking. Violence is tangled up with sex, and when I slammed my knuckles into his cheek, his temple, I felt the same explosive jolt as when I jerk off. I beat the shit out of him and thought: I don’t mind not having a real dick if I can get off like this.
Besides, violence is better than sex. You don’t have to hold back.
Then his two buddies were on me, and this happened.
[Ren leans close to the camera. His face is mottled with bruises and cuts.]
I lost. But I lost clean.
Those fuckers just had to ruin it.
When they saw I couldn’t get back up, they started talking. They kept saying “it.” Obviously, “it” was me. Been a while since I’ve been a thing, not a person. And you can do almost anything to a thing.
Their voices were low, furtive. One of them said, “Let’s see its pussy.”
He moved closer and I drew the gun from my jacket.
I said, “Stay where you are.”
He said, “That’s not real, either.”
I said, “If you take another step I’ll shoot your dick off. Then we can compare holes.”
So I won, in the end. But I had to cheat by scaring them with another fake phallus. That’s all men care about—dicks, fucking dicks. They’re obsessed. It’s super homoerotic.
You know what hurts more than a busted face, and fractured ribs, and having to go to the ER and take your clothes off so strangers can ogle your chimera body?
Losing your pride.
On the plus side, I think I’m gonna look good with scars.
[Jump cut.]
My roomie’s wrong. T didn’t make me a monster—it gave me access to the monster that’s always been inside me.
Tonight I found a piece of myself. I learned that I’m a man who enjoys beating the shit out of other men.
I can work with that.
———
All night, she asked questions.
How do they find you?
How do you know they’re not lying?