Landscapes Between Bodies

This post is about porn, my desire to make porn, and my sexuality.
This is quite possibly way TMI for many of you who know me personally so, you know, reader discretion is advised.

 But first, watch this.

 
The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

The Third & The Seventh is, to me, one of the first instances of the moving image I've seen that I consider to be fine art. I find it deeply moving every time I watch it.
 The artists eye for light is simply sublime. The quality of the "camera" movement, composition, pacing, color saturation, drama, the way focused is pulled, all of these aspects come together to make something I could never tire of looking at.

And it makes me think of porn.

Specifically, how porn lacks all those elements. I've had the notion that I wanted to make unusual pornography for quite a long time. If you've known me long enough you may have heard me talk about my desire to write an "Opera Erotica".
Prior to my coming out and starting transition though I must confess to still being a little "British" about sex in tearms of liking it but not being able to talk about it very comfortably.
Well, when I say I "liked" sex, that requires some unpacking.
I have certainly had so VERY enjoyable sex in my life, but I've rarely had good sex while sober.
Like a singer who needs a drink to get on stage, performing the male role in bed always required I disassociate first.
 It wasn't that I needed to get blackout drunk or anything, just drunk enough to party.
As a result of this, attaining a real emotional connection during sex had always been a major issue for me.   It is disconcerting to be having sex with someone you love, be aware that there should be more of a meaningful connection but having to leave the moment in search of fantasy to get off.
I ended up watching a lot of porn as it was way easier to come on my own than during sex.
Porn was a super utilitarian thing for me and, as time when on I ended up watching what I would describe as increasingly misogynistic scenarios as my internal state of self loathing and denial got worse.  Being a fairly self aware person it struck me as odd that the porn I was watching really didn't jive with my sense of self at any other time.
It all makes a lot more sense now.

Repressing what I needed had made me resentful and angry wich, aside from the occasional hate fuck, is never a good thing in the bedroom.
Almost as soon as I came out to my wife, our sex life improved as, at long last, I wasn't pretending to be someone I wasn't. I've been finding an emotional joy during sex that has been missing my entire life and it is fantastic. It's also reeeaaly interesting trying to figure out how everything works now. Using my penis in the traditional manner doesn't work at all anymore, it just feels wrong.
 The upside is that being touched feels good EVERYWHERE. I'm sort of in a process of rewiring my sexuality these days.

 The result of this is I've been thinking about sex.
A lot.
I've also been chatting with a few porn stars on twitter, which got me thinking, and what I thought was, I want to do porn.
I want to make porn that I've never seen before. I want to make porn that isn't about getting off quickly in a utilitarian manner.
I want to make porn that says it's ok to have sex that is brim full of humanity and love.  From a visual perspective I'm interested in editing non linier sex scenes that focus on light, shifting depths of field, texture, intensity of color and mood.  I want it to look like The Third & The Seventh.
I also want it to be irreverent and even humorous at times.
Along with spending a lot of time filming the sex in a variety of locations with different lighting scenarios, I want a documentary component of unscripted conversation between the performers on topics both sexual and nonsexual in nature.
How exactly this would all edit together I'm not entirely sure, but I want to try to make something that is authentically beautiful, graceful, awkward, funny, sexy and honest.
 So there, that's my plan.
Now an open call for cinematographers, musicians (it needs original audio), and performers. So if you know anyone who might be interested to work on this with me please point them my way.

Love you all,
be sexy!

Musing with Papa Vol. 1

Papa and I get to talking sometimes and there's no telling where it will go. This time, I thought to record our conversation for posterity.
This time we come in half way through a conversation about Art and the meaning of Self.
Listening back I find that I tend to fall into habitual patterns of speech that are much more "male" than I'd like, but I think this is still worth sharing, even if I dont really like how I sound.
As the title suggests these are just musings, and you should not misconstrue anything we say to be our dogmatic opinion, sacred belief, or anything else.

Emotional Road Rash

I think my medication dosage my be off.
I won't know for sure until I get more blood work done but I have a suspicion that my testosterone is too high.
In the meanwhile I am a little less than happy about that I'm seeing the last 5 months of my ever more feminine appearance start to slowly evaporate.
Last night I woke up in the middle of what I have concluded was a full blown panic attack.
Chest pain, feeling like I couldn't breath and thoughts looping around in my head like in a fever dream.
Lyssa's getting up to change the kid, which could have taken only a minute or two, seemed to be an unending wash cycle of motion and physical sensation that threatened to completely overwhelm me with terror so in the end I had to flee and go lie on the couch for an hour until I calmed down.
Seriously, just having someone moving beside me in bed was completely unbearable as my thoughts ate themselves over and over again like Jörmungandr's offspring.
When I calmed down and and returned to bed I had weird nightmares, the only one I can recall being worthy to relate as it was such a darkly absurd scenario.
In this dream, several of my friends and I were Ponies of the "friendship is magic" variety,  Pony gaiety abounded until I was seized, dragged away and had my body torn off until a boy was left.  I was then handed a gun and sent to join the army.
The rest of the dream essentially being bootcamp.

I have been trying to maintain a level of patience throughout the process of transition.  After all, rushing through the next few years of my life with eyes fixed on the horizon seems kind of unhealthy.
I try to maintain a connection to the present and keep positive about renovations I'm doing to my body, even if the plumbing isn't the best.The feeling that I'm loosing what ground I've gained though, that scares the crap out  of me.
To be bluntly honest, the only thing that scares me more than the idea of going back to being male bodied is the thought of something happening to my daughter.
So today I feel raw.
Much like the pony I was, I've had all the skin torn off, and my nerves are bare to the world.
Emotional road rash.

You care HOW much?

Being trans means being Hated by a small vocal group of people, and being ignored by most everyone else.
Even those people who support our having basic human rights ate typically ignorant of the ways in whichtrans people are marginalized.
So after reading another article detailing how a radio presenter or a writer for a british liberal newspaper can get away with speech that if you replaces trans or rather the many intentional slurs with say, a similar epithet that targeted a racial minority, would end those same people's careers it makes me wonder how aware of this stuff my cisgendered friends actually are.
And how much anyone cares or want's to know.
I was talking with a friend the other day about the state of access to healthcare for trans people and how for instance, if I developed breast cancer my insurance wouldn't cove any of the cost on the basis that it was related to my transition.  Never mind the fact that men get breast cancer too, albeit at much lower rates.
This information came as a bit of a surprise to my aforementioned friend, so much so that I realized "wait, nobody except trans people actually knows about this problem we face".
I'm so acutely aware of the problems I'm likely to encounter (and have mercifully been spared so far) that I sort of forget just how invisible the trans population is, even to those people who are wholly sympathetic to our cause.
I generally want to keep this blog as up beat as possible, and where things are more serious I'd prefer to be writing about my personal experience as opposed to highlighting injustices done to others.
At the same time though, I realize that a great many of my friends have no idea of the actual chalenges trans people face so I'm at a bit of a quandary as to whether I want to do more educational posts, or keep things as they are at present.
I certainly don't want to burn anyone out with tales of woe as even I get compassion fatigue, and the issue directly affects me!
Anyway, I'd welcome peoples thoughts.

Mobile Keypad Layouts

Here's a very quick post to file under "good ideas I don't have time for"
Mobile device keypads, specifically the iphone's but this applies to any virtual keypad, could reduce typo's due to autocorrect picking the wrong word greatly by shifting the layout of the vowels.

Look at that top line of letters. UIO are all in a row.
Toil/tool, love/live, shout/shoot, shit/shot, fig/fog, pug/pig*, put/pit, you get the idea.
The iPhone's autocorrect and predictive keypad work really well, but they could clearly be improved by adopting a keyboard layout that was designed to keep easily substituted letters apart.
We all know qwerty is an artifact layout, and with the switch to virtual layouts it seams really daft to keep it.
Apple have always been good at forcing changes that people don't want to make that ultimately turn out to be an improvement.  This would be a very simple one with ubiquitous and ever present benefits.
Of course, I don't have time to do it so it's up to someone else to fix this, as usual ;)

Seriously, tell someone you butchered the wrong one of those!

I'd rather be wrong

The other day it struck me that in my relationships with others, when disagreement arises, were I to be given the choice of being either the person in the right, or the person in the wrong, I'd rather be the person in the wrong.
The reason for this is quite simple.
If I'm the person who's in the wrong, and I can recognize that, I can apologize for my mistake and, hopefully, correct my behavior.
By contrast, if I'm the person who's in the right, I'm then at the mercy of the other party!
Unless they are willing to address the problem and work to fix it, the problem remains and there is NOTHING I can do about it!

One of the hardest things we have to learn as humans is how to admit wrongdoing without making victims of ourselves in the process.

The most valuable change that has taken place in my life since I started transitioning is that I've learned how to forgive myself.  Learning to be wrong is proving to be the most profoundly liberating experience of my life.  When I have the good fortune to recognize that I'm the one who's making the mistake, once the initial rush of shame and anger subsides, I'm finding that suddenly having the power to fix the problem is amazing. Afterwards I get to feel good about having spotted the error and fixed it rather than geting all defensive and then going off to beat up on myself for being the only person who ever got anything wrong in the history of ever.

I think it's incredibly sad how fallibility and weakness are so often seen to be irredeemable flaws in our society.  Learning to concede ones mistakes with grace can be the most empowering lesson you'll ever learn.

Of course, I'm stil learning how to tell when I'm in the wrong and more often than not both sides are often right and wrong in their own different ways meaning it's rare you'll be lucky enough to be completely in the wrong and thereby able to solve the problem entirely on your own.

Trust me though, if you approach every disagreement prepared to prove yourself wrong, you'll almost certainly get a better outcome.  At least so long as you value solving problems over inflating your own ego.

Girl enough for government work

This was meant to be another post entirely, but that will come later I guess.  
This post should really be a book, but it's not one I want to write, so please excuse the great dis-service of omission I'm doing to this topic.  If you want to know more, there should be enough here for you to go hunting for it on your own.
You know how to google right? 

I can't think of any good analogy for how odd a situation being trans put you in.
Most people don't spenda great deal of time thinking about their own internal sense of gender.
Having the feeling that you're "in the right body" is hardly something you'd notice, let alone care to think about in any depth.
The favorite narrative for trans people, at least as far as the rest of the world goes, is the story of the little boy who is adamant that he is, in fact, she*.
The child who knows who they are and cannot be persuaded otherwise.
The media likes this story because it's neat and tidy and you can sum it up with the phrase "I always new I was born in the wrong body"
Cis people, as a group, like this narrative too because it's unambiguous.  It's clearly about someone else and that means they don't have to worry about it affecting their lives.
Also, when the story features the assertions of a child, then no one has to worry about motives.  A four year old can't understand gender and sexuality inter-relate so it makes being transgender more wholesome.  It removes that idea of trans people being motivated by sexual deviancy from the picture  and so creates a wholesome narrative fit for a tear jerking human interest piece.
Everybody's happy.

Well, except all of us trans folk who don't fit that narrative.

Prior to the 1950's (and through them into the 60's for most people) the most you could expect as far as treatment went if you were trans was a stay in a mental hospital ans perhaps some electro shock treatment or if you were really lucky, a lobotomy.
After Christine Jorgenson's sex change and subsequent cases, the doctors who were willing to treat such patients, along with psychiatrists, developed a set of standards that had to be met in order to receive treatment.
Aside from the onerous requirement for "real life experience" ie. being forced to live in drag for a year before starting hormone therapy, trans women were required to be "sufficiently feminine".
What that meant was conforming to the standars of behavior deemed appropriate by white male academics of the 1960's.
If you wanted to receive medical treatment back then, by go you'd better act the woman you claimed you wanted to be.
Which set us up for a terrible collision with second wave feminism.
Radical feminists during the late 60's and 70's didn't believe in gender as anything other than social construct.  Trans people's assertion of an internal sense of gener was at odds with feminist theory of the time. The presence of a bunch of "men" claiming to be women and acting in ways so stereotypical that they were at odds with the women's movement's bra burning agenda of the time were not well received.
In fact they were vilified.
Pro gay rights legislation that was being passed at that time, under pressure from radical feminists, included language that to this day is the reason trans people are second class citizens in many areas but most crucially, in health care.  The work done by radical feminists to exclude trans people from the gay rights movement has literally been killing us for the last 40 years.

Trans Narratives don't help trans people.  Except for the lucky few who's life stories match up with whatever narrative is most acceptable at the time, these narrative ar really only for the benefit of those people who need to categorize and control us.
For those of us who don't fit the narrative perfectly, we often spend a lot of time worrying whether we're "trans enough".
Even though I have no difficulty in tearing apart the hateful arguments of radfems, and the even less coherent but equally hurtful opinions of the religious right, I still internalize a lot of that gender policing.
I still find myself worried that my friends will decide I'm either trying to hard or that I'm not girly enough to be a "real" girl.
I often have to correct myself to say cis-girls rather than normal or real girls.
Changing my body to be inline with my mind is relatively easy.  It's expensive, extremely painful and it is anything but quick, but it has a clear beginning , middle and end to it.
By contrast, the changes that are taking place in my brain as the hormones slowly rewire my corpus callosum and change how I relate to, and experience my emotions will never be finished.
Some days I just feel like a girl.  That is, I'm aware of the absence of concern over my transness.  For a few minutes here and there I experience what I asume it must be like to be cis.
To be a natural born citizen.
But most of the time I'm reminded that I'm an immigrant i n a country known as Woman.  I still have a long way to go before I get my naturalization papers.
Only those of us who have the determination to force their will upon the world at the youngest age, who match that convenient and socially acceptable narrative, if they're really lucky, will ever get a shot at being seen as true citizens.