If anyone wonders why my activism when it comes to dealing with anti-gay religious right bullies very specifically attacks ONLY the bullies themselves and their misrepresentation of their faith, rather than the faith itself or it's followers as a whole, it's because I acknowledge a simple universal truth; I cannot prove my faith is true anymore than I can prove definitively theirs is not, just as a Christian cannot prove definitively THEIR faith is true and MINE is not. No one can prove either one either way. I CAN prove, by simply reading the Bible, when a bigot is intentionally abusing his or her faith to justify hatred falsely, but I cannot prove or disprove that the Christian God exists, nor my own Goddesses. Christians believe in Christ, I believe in Hedon and her daughters.
Why am I bringing this up? Because of the one belief I WILL openly attack; Aggressive Atheism.
Not the average Atheist who simply doesn't believe in Gods or the supernatural and spiritual but respects others' rights to believe otherwise. I mean the truly aggressive douchebag skeptics. The ones who actively campaign to scold, tease, mock, attack and belittle those who believe in ANYTHING that isn't tangible. The ones who are every bit the equal of the worst fundamentalist Christians and Muslims. The ones who think ONLY what THEY believe (or disbelieve) is the absolute truth and everyone else needs to fucking fall in line buster!
As my dear friend Katie can attest, there most certainly ARE Christians who are perfectly content to believe in Christ AND let me believe in Hedon. She's a leader in her church. I believe she's ordained in fact. But she has never ONCE dismissed MY beliefs, or told me I'm wrong or sinful to not share HERS. Nor have I ever felt any need to criticize hers. She does me no harm, I shall do her none in kind. Simply mutual courtesy. I have NO problem with people like HER.
Conversely I also know Atheists who are like her. They believe there are NO Gods, no reincarnation, nothing of the kind, but they are perfectly content to let those who DO believe, well, believe.
I have no issue with THEM either.
I have issue with bullies.
On the side of belief, I hate Christian or Muslim bullies who try to shove their beliefs down everyone else's throat, who demand EVERYONE believe as they do, and ONLY as they do.
On the side of DISbelief, I hate the militant aggressive Atheists, who think NO ONE anywhere should believe in ANYTHING intangible. No God, no Goddess, no spirits, no NOTHING. The aggressive skeptics who feel a need to inject themselves into every conversation and talk down to believers like we're idiot children.
I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else believes, as long as they a) keep it mostly to themselves, and don't try to force it on me, and b) respect MY right to believe different.
I don't shove my faith down anyone's throat. That's actually one of my faith's few rules; Don't force it on others. I only talk about it if asked.
But I WILL not tolerate another human being, whatever THEIR beliefs or lack thereof, talking down to me like I'm an idiot for believing differently, and trying to force me to believe like them. If I believe I have lived past lives and that Earth has a soul and her children were Goddesses co-opted by other ancient religions how does that hurt you? I'm doing no harm, I'm minding my own business, and I'm not telling YOUR children what a flake YOU are because you don't believe in MY faith, so why the hell is it okay for YOU to do it to me?
I am NOT a flake or a kook or an idiot or a sinner or a blasphemer because my faith is not yours, OR for having a faith at all when you may not.
Seriously, fuck militant skeptics. They're as big a pain in the ass as fundies. Science does NOT mean "If we haven't conclusively proven it yet it's bullshit", nor does it mean "Well, we can't 100% conclusively DISPROVE this thing, so we'll round off and chalk it up as bullshit" either. Science means exploring the unknown, NOT dismissing it.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Friday, August 31, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A Word About Trans Erotica
After once again slogging through the cesspool that is Literotica's "Transsexuals & Crossdressers" section, I very much NEED to say the following.
*AHEM*
You have every right to have sexual fantasies ABOUT us, if women like us are what turns your crank. You have NO right to treat like that is all we are or all we are good for. We do not exist to provide masturbation material for closeted gay men who want us so they can play with cock and pretend they're straight. (I stress this because straight men who happen to fall for trans women generally aren't actually trans fetishists and don't seek out "tranny" porn).
Also, we are not sissies or spineless men who get off on anyone "forcing us" to look like little girls. If you want to WRITE about sissies and forced femme, fine, just stop writing as if every woman with outdoor plumbing is just a sissy man forced into a dress for a domination fantasy.
Finally, stop lumping us in with fetishist crossdressers. I'm not talking about the shy "men" who dress in secret, feeling shamed about it, looking in the mirror alone at home wishing the mirror was the truth. THOSE are closeted trans women who haven't faced their demons and found their true selves yet. I'm talking horny men who put on lingerie and act like porn sluts to fet off on it, but who at the end of the day take the costume off and happily g back to being men. These men are NOT trns women. Stop lumping us in with them as if we're all just men in drag.
Trans women are not sexual fantasies on legs created for you to fucking fap to. We are WOMEN, PEOPLE, HUMAN BEINGS. We are women who have real lives, and real dreams, and real feelings. And yes, many of us are sexual, with sexual lives, but that is PART of us, NOT who we ARE. We're bloody ALLOWED to be sexual without some creep turning that into the only thing of any value about us.
I'm an intersexed woman, I stand with my trans sisters. We are ALL women with extra bits. But we ARE women. If we turn you on, so be it. But stop treating us like that's the only thing we're good for.
*AHEM*
You have every right to have sexual fantasies ABOUT us, if women like us are what turns your crank. You have NO right to treat like that is all we are or all we are good for. We do not exist to provide masturbation material for closeted gay men who want us so they can play with cock and pretend they're straight. (I stress this because straight men who happen to fall for trans women generally aren't actually trans fetishists and don't seek out "tranny" porn).
Also, we are not sissies or spineless men who get off on anyone "forcing us" to look like little girls. If you want to WRITE about sissies and forced femme, fine, just stop writing as if every woman with outdoor plumbing is just a sissy man forced into a dress for a domination fantasy.
Finally, stop lumping us in with fetishist crossdressers. I'm not talking about the shy "men" who dress in secret, feeling shamed about it, looking in the mirror alone at home wishing the mirror was the truth. THOSE are closeted trans women who haven't faced their demons and found their true selves yet. I'm talking horny men who put on lingerie and act like porn sluts to fet off on it, but who at the end of the day take the costume off and happily g back to being men. These men are NOT trns women. Stop lumping us in with them as if we're all just men in drag.
Trans women are not sexual fantasies on legs created for you to fucking fap to. We are WOMEN, PEOPLE, HUMAN BEINGS. We are women who have real lives, and real dreams, and real feelings. And yes, many of us are sexual, with sexual lives, but that is PART of us, NOT who we ARE. We're bloody ALLOWED to be sexual without some creep turning that into the only thing of any value about us.
I'm an intersexed woman, I stand with my trans sisters. We are ALL women with extra bits. But we ARE women. If we turn you on, so be it. But stop treating us like that's the only thing we're good for.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
New Direction
I've pretty much lost interest in wrestling. But I don't want to just toss this blog away, so from now on Musings From Hedon will be strictly for my activism. Blogs about bigotry, about asshole politicians and the religious right, about fighting sexism and rape culture. THIS blog, Penny Candy, will be for and about things in my personal life I feel like sharing.
Friday, October 14, 2011
The Transsexual Umpire; (Work In Progress)(UPDATED)
The Transsexual Umpire; Navigating Life In A Mix And Match Body
Introduction
Twitter is an interesting thing. I think more than any other new idea in the ever expanding information age, Twitter has manahed to cut a hole in the space
between even minor celebrities and everyday average people. I simple boring girl like me has been able to make friends on Twitter, real friends, that as
little as 5 years ago wouldn't have been conceivable.
Because of Twitter, there are adult film actresses, TV actors, Pro Wrestlers, Film stars, and published authors who have of their own volition gotten to
know me, and consider me a real friend, someone they actually care about. Not to say any schlub can tweet at a celebrity and expect to make a friend. Every
single one of the Twitter celeb friends I have approached me first, usually because someone else they followed re-tweeted something I said that they found
interesting.
After that, they'd get to know me. And I never treated them like "Ohmigawd wow you're so-and-so! I've seen/read/masturbated to all your work like fer
shure!!!". I just treated them like I treat everyone else, as people. Which I suppose above all else is why they consider me a friend. These people,
especially the ones in sex work, like finding people who treat them like a normal every day person. It's why I have the personal private contact info for
some of them. I earned their trust by just being myself and accepting them as is.
They in turn accept me as is, defects and all. They worry about me when I'm sick or sad abbout something, and they get genuinely excited for me when I'm
happy about something.
Which leads me to why I'm telling you this.
I'm not a name-dropper, so no, I won't be naming any names. No names of any celebrities who call me friend, except one.
Ms. Kate Bornstein.
Kate is the acclaimed published author of several help books for people working though or trying to understand their genfer incongruities. From simple
heterosexual male crossdressers to full-tilt 100% transsexuals, both M2F and F2M, and all the variations in between, Kate's books are written to help
someone who's internal identity and/or external presentation doesn't match society's arbitrary rules for the genitals they were born with.
Aunty Kate is so prolific a writer that she makes a very good living with speaking arrangements. She speaks about Gender at college and university campuses,
at medical symposiums, at social conferences. Her opinions and ideas hold weight.
So when she tells you after reading your silly ranty angry bitch blogging that you're a damned good writer and you had BETTER get off your ass and write an
actual book, you generally listen. Or should. Me? I put it off for the past two years because I couldn't for the life of me decide what in the bloody hell I
was going to fill an entire book's worth of non-fiction writing with.
Oh I have plenty of thoughts and ideas for fiction. Hell I made it through the first four chapters of a trans-themed crime drama about a serial killer who
was targetting pre-op transsexual women, performing the SRS so they'd die with the body they wanted and be forever safe from those who would beat them up,
and the transphobic police detective whose only child was a proud and defiant MTF girl, who evolves over the course of the story to let go of his "son" and
accept his daughter when the killer targets her. I lost it in a hard drive crash and never felt like starting over from scratch, and no one I'd sent prelim
copies to kept one I could continue from. Fiction was never a problem.
But writing about reality? Talking about my life in anything longer than a 1000 word blog entry? Filling an entire book with my cranky fat bitch opinions
about the world around me? That I wasn't sure I could do.
I mean truth be told, I'm not even a transsexual. I used to think I was. But I'm not. I'm actually a natal female who has a penis where her clitoris SHOULD
be, and a scar where her vagina once actually was. I'm intersexed. Mother Nature came to work drunk on my birthday and grabbed parts from the wrong box.
Which isn't to say I don't identify still with Trans women. I AM still a "woman with a penis". I consider myself trans by psychiatric history and life
experience, having been raised as a boy. I just can't outright lie and still claim to BE one. I've found myself once again in a position of being sort of on
the outside looking in. While I still have many trans friends, a lot of the more bitter and insecure trans women out there hate women like me. Mostly, of
all the stupid reasons to hate someone, because I needed neither hormones nor silicon to have a decent sized rack.
But Kate thinks I write very well. And she thinks, despite her and I locking horns a few times on topics we disagree on, that my opinions and feelings and
history are important and powerful and relevant and need to be shared. And for the past two years, on Twitter, via e-mail, even on comments left on my blog,
she's been goading me to write an actual full length book.
I personally don't think anyone not already friend or family will particularly care to read the disjointed opinions or autobiography of an overweight freak
of nature, but Kate insists.
So I'm finally giving in. This is what I've come up with. This book, like I myself, is going to be mix and match. Some chapters will be my ranting. Like my
blog, but longer and more in-depth. The other chapters will be biographical, relating sections of my patchwork life that I think are most relevant to the
person I've become. It's the best I could come up with. I don't think, in writing non-fiction, anyone WOULD want to sit down and read an entire book of
either or.
But somehow, people have accepted the some of Column A and some of Column B that I am. So maybe they'll like a book modelled after the Frankenstein's
Transwoman who's writing it.
And then maybe Aunty Kate will smile and be satisfied I listened.
1. It's A...... It's A..... Hold That Thought
Alright, the very first thing you need to understand about me as you read this is that I'm a legitimate freak of nature. I'm intersexed. If you're
unfamiliar with the term, it's what us hermaphrodite folks actually prefer to be called. Intersexed sounds a lot less Fantasy Freakshow than Hermaphrodite.
Intersexed means for whatever reasons, something went wrong in the womb and the person in question was born with some sort of visible sexual incongruity.
And contrary to what most people think, the fabled perfect Penis And Vagina combo is exceptionally rare. Being born intersexed is rare enough. Less than 5%
of all births each year are born intersexed. And less than 1% OF that 5% are born as "True Hermaphrodites" as the terminology goes.
I was as close to the fabled 1% as you're ever likely to meet.
When I was born, and please, try not to eat anything for the next few paragraph, with the following configuration.
I had a penis, which while perhaps in the Doctor's opinion a little below average, appeared normal, healthy and functional. I had a scrotum, with one gonad
already descending as normal, and the other, he presumed, would follow suit shortly thereafter. What made him concerned however was that, embedded in my
scrotum, like someone had stapled it on, was a very small hole. No labia, just a hole. According to the records I got through a Freedom of Information
request, it was a pinhole sized opening. The clinical term I'm told is "Ovo-Testicular DSD".
The Doctor's assumption was that it would never be big enough to accomodate anything thicker than a pencil.
Yes you read that right. The doctor's primary criteria in deciding how to proceed was whether or not I could grow up to comfortably accomodate being
sexually penetrated by a penis. Doncha just love patriarchy?
The normal procedure most everywhere else in North America with an intersexed child is to look at the genitals and decide which sex's bits are closest to
normal and healthy-looking, and get rid of the rest. Normally with a "pinhole sized" vagina, most doctors leave it alone and hope it will just close up on
it's own, or, if it grows and normalizes, remove the penis when the infant has passed one year old. It was common accepted practise you see, until the past
decade when grown intersexed eople and newer modern more open-minded parents began filing lawsuits over it, to just "fix" intersexed children.
Lucky me though! I got a doctor in his fifties who'd never encountered a baby like me before, and he decided it was in my best interests to be a boy, so he
decided to go full tilt boogie with it. So he used a heated metal rod to cauterize any mucous membranes I might have, then snipped and stitched to correct
the scrotum.
But wait there's more! We haven't reached the really REALLY fun part yet!
The other gonad descended too, but it wasn't a testicle, it was an ovary! Which was connected to my uterus!!! Wow isn't that awesome? A lazy-ass old fart
with a medical degree and not a whit of decency, compassion or common fucking sense, made ALL his decisions about MY future based on whether or not I could
score a husband as a woman when I grew up if he removed the boy bits, WITHOUT doing ANY kind of internal examination!
If you're a woman you know how much fun those awesome periods are. All rainbows and unicorns and tampon commercials clearly written by brainless men telling
you to have a happy period! And if you're a man I'm sure you run in terror from a woman running low on Haagen-Daaz every 4 weeks. Knowing that, imagine how
much fun menstruating iswhen the blood had nowhere to go. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you come back from your "Why???" moment.
So that's my life now. An idiot old fart decided to experiment on making me perfectly normal and doomed me to a lifetime of shame, self-loathing, abuse, and
permanent health problems. All because he didn't think I was going to be fuckable when I grew up if he'd left my girl parts alone.
Like any other trans girl, I always felt different. As far back as I can remember I knew I should have been a girl. And thanks to one of my older brothers I
always knew that meant there was something wrong with me. I remember once at age 4 being at a grocery store with my mom and having a stranger tell her what
a lovely little girl she had. I giggled at this. After mom told my stepfather about it and they had a good laugh, the middle child of my three older
brothers, who, from youngest to eldest I will refer to in this book as Cobain, Closetcase, and Cultsheep, (I'll elaborate on those later), took me aside and
told me boys don't giggle when someone calls them a girl, they get mad and yell. And if he heard about me giggling again he'd beat the giggles out of me.
So from then on every time someone in a store or the park or whereever told my mom how pretty her little girl was, I'd loudly and "angrily" shout "I not a
girl! I a boyyyy!!!". Loud overcompensation just so Closetcase wouldn't beat me up.
When puberty came around I'd already had a long history of anger-management issues and violent school outbursts. Having to live as a boy was hell, and I was
mad a lot. So when I realized I was growing real breasts and my hips were widening instead of my shoulders to go with the fuzz now growing on my chin, I was
caught in a sad self-loathing mix of happy vindication and even angrier disgust.
On the one hand, BOOBS!!! I had boobs! I'd been right all along! Boys don't grow boobs! I really WAS supposed to be a girl!
On the other hand, facial hair and a deepening voice. What the hell kind of freak was I? God fuck, I was going to get the shit kicked out of me in school,
even more than normal.
And so began a decade of hip and breast hiding baggy jogging pants and sweatshirts, and painful days of using a tensor bandage to keep my breasts hidden. My
anger only got worse. I hated myself, I hated the world for letting me exist as I was, I hated everyone IN the world for making me feel like a worthless
freakish piece of shit. And it was in a fit of this anger, 2 days before I turned 16, that I lost my temper in the group home my parents had left me in, and
beat up one of the staff who'd pulled a petty power trip on me by trying to make me pay for my morning bus tickets out of my allowance even though we were
all allotted them every weekday for school.
It was a petty little bit of bullying, which is sadly common in group homes. Every single group home I'd ever been in always had at least one, sometimes
more than one person on the staff who abused their authority and bullied the kids in their care. If the target wasn't me it was someone else. I've seen kids
bullied by staff for as petty a reason as not matting down a stubborn cowlick in their hair. And the kids are of course never believed when they complain.
So it was petty bullying, and a petty thing to flip out over. But by then my anger was hair trigger and constantly simmering, and I lost it. I beat the
woman up, trashed her car, and did so much damage to the home itself that I was told I'd made it unlivable for a few weeks while they repaired it. The staff
who had bullied me with her silly little power trip was so traumatized she quit her job and called off her wedding. She spent years in therapy. All because
I couldn't control my anger at being a freak having to hide myself away, and being ignored and dismissed by every shrink I ever tried telling it to.
After all, they just KNEW my anger was REALLY about my parents divorcing when I was too young to even bloody remember it. I had Daddy issues they said. Any
claim of gender identy issues was just a silly attempt to deflect the REAL reason for my anger. Which just pissed me off worse.
So I destroyed a life because she was getting off on being a minor inconvenience to mine. Because I couldn't control my anger anymore.
Oh don't worry. I was paid back for it in spades. Fate made damn sure I was properly punished for what I'd done. And I deserved what I got. No therapist, no
friend, my mom, my wife, no one will EVER convince me I didn't deserve every single second of what happened to me in jail.
2. The Three Stooges Redux
Alright, before I tell the juvey story, and trust me, I need to work up to that, I told promised I'd explain the pseudonyms to which I'll be referring to my
elder brothers throughout this book.
I'd already decided I wasn't going to use any legal names. There are more than a few worthless people I'm biologicly related to who, on the off chance I
actually make any money off of this rambling stream of consciousness, would not hesitate to sue me for an undeserved cut because they'd consider the brutal
honest truth to be slander. But just giving everyone some random new name felt kinda bland to me. So everyone gets nicknames! It's a party!
I have three older half brothers, and two younger half-sisters and a half-brother. I grew up with the elder and barely know the younger set. Hell I've never
even actually met or spoken to the youngest brother.
Anyway, I'll stop going off on tangents, (despite this being the whole point of this silly book), and finish my explanation.
The youngest of my three elder brothers, and the only one I ever actually had a close relationship with, gets moniker'd as Cobain because he was an
exceptionally talented and creative musician who was plagued by drugs and demons. He could never clean up long. His ex wife kept his daughter from him, his
last serious love overdosed in their bed in my mom's basement. He never made peace with his biological father leaving my mom, and he never made peace with
his demons. He overdosed on heroin in November 2001.
The eldest brother is Cultsheep, because he wasted the last decade of his life suckered in by the Jehovah's Witnesses, bullying us all with his newfound
beliefs. For example, when our mom and stepdad lived in Ontario for 5 years and he still in Vancouver, he and his son came to visit us one summer. And in my
own bloody house he wouldn't let me watch the Beetlejuice cartoon on Saturday morning because it was "demonic and evil and would corrupt his son". He died
in hospital in November of 1989 of a rare blood disease. It rendered him braindead. But had he allowed a blood transfusion the first night there was a 50/50
chance he might have survived. Members of his church backed his idiot decision because "The blood of Christ was enough to save him, and a transfusion would
prevent his chance of reaching Heaven". By the time he was too out of it to protest and my mom chased the selfish assholes out of the hospital, it was too
late to save him, the transfusion only gave him an extra day.
Gee can you tell I have issues with organized mainstream religion?
Finally, we have Closetcase. The middle of the three older brothers. Saving him for last here because he's the brother I honestly don't love. I loved
Cobain. He was the first one in my family after I came out as a woman to fully accept me as is. And despite his misguided religious stupidity, I loved
Cultsheep. He at least meant well.
I don't love Closetcase. I don't outright hate him because hate is unhealthy and I try not to hold grudges as best I can. But I don't love him. He's family
by biology only, and I could give a rat's ass about him or his life. I tolerate him politely only for my mom's sake.
So, you're wondering, how did he get saddled with "Closetcase" as his pseudonym for my book? Easy. He's one of the biggest self-loathing gay men I've ever
met. And his refusal to accept his sexuality and desperation to convince himself he's straight have made him a bullying abusive piece of shit as long as
I've known him. He has a long history of drug issues, a prison history, and life-threatening STD's from his history of careless self-destruction. He puts
most professional Ex-Gay asholes to shame. Compared to my brother a self-loathing queen in denial like Greg Quinlan or George Rekers look positively upright
and decent by comparision.
Closetcase used to date Transsexual women and fulltime homosexual male crossdressers. Yes, he was one of THOSE. The gay man so desperate to suck a cock, but
so terrified of anyone knowing he wants to suck a cock, that he went out of his way to date trans women and passable crossdressers so he would appear
perfectly heterosexual to anyone who saw him and his lovers together, while getting to indulge his shame-inducing desires in private.
So you can imagine when I announced to the family, (I thought I was a trannsexual woman until some standard pre-SRS approval testing discovered the truth),
that I was trans and would from that day forward live full-time as a woman, he was less than thrilled. He'd always been bullying and abusive to me before.
He'd stolen from me, run up bills in my name, beat me up a few times to de-sissy me, left more cats in my care than I could afford to feed, and stuck me
with overdue unpaid rent in two different apartments he'd suckered me into sharing with him because I couldn't afford anything else.
But after I came out he got worse. He'd bully me openly, no longer caring if Mom or Stepdad were watching, threatening me harm, going out of his way to
misgender me, forcing me to do chores at mom's for him that she'd asked him to do. Well, at least until the day he tried to bully me about not carrying
heavy laundry bags to the car at my mom's one day after my wife had told me not to. I'm in constant excruciating pain and she gets mad at me if try to
overwork myself. She overheard him and got right up in his face. Like all bullies, he was too chickenshit to press his luck with someone clearly more than
willing to beat the piss out of him.
To this day he only tries to bully me now if my Mom or my wife aren't in earshot or sight of us. And he still refuses to call me a she. My wife, mom and
stepdad and I all agree, he hates me because I've become what he used to hide his sexuality behind, and I'm now a constant reminder of his innate
internalized homophobia.
He's a perfect example of why "Ex-Gay" is a complete and total crock. You're born gay, period. No one chooses to be gay, and no one can really choose to not
be gay. All you can do is put on a fake smile and live in deep denial, and denying your true nature never has positive results. I feel so much pity for ex-
gay hypocrites, who force unhappy lives in loveless marriages upon themselves to please a hateful interpretation of God that has no actual bibival legs to
stand on. Ex-Gay is a lie, and it only causes harm. If my brother could just accept who he really truly is, he'd have had a much happier life. Instead, he's
miserable and making the poor nice woman he lives with miserable by faking love for her to aboid admitting he wants a dick in his mouth, because he believes
that liking cock makes him inferior.
3. Karma.
Alright, this isn't going to be pretty. I'll give you fair warning right now. This chapter is very high risk of triggering anyone who has been raped, or is
sensitive to traumatic events. I'm going to talk openly and bluntly as I am prone to do, about what happened to me in juvey. If you think you might be
triggered, skip this chapter. I CANNOT stress this enough. This is going to get ugly. Skip this chapter if you don't have a strong stomach.
Alright, now, those of you still reading this page are still here because you wanted to know what I meant at the end of the first chapter when I said I was
punished in spades for what I did at the group home. Obviously I'm saying I was raped. The warning I just gave kinda gave that away. But the devil is in the
details as they say. So let me explain what I went through, and the effects it's had on my life.
I'd been in juvey, (Young Offender Detention here in Canada), for near a year, in Phase 1 custody. Phase 1 is for offenders aged 13 to 15, which I had been
sentenced to because I was still 15 when I was arrested and charged. While in an open custody group home, I got in another fight with staff, though not near
as destructive. This time 4 male staff ganged up on me and beat me up a little after I had used my foot to push away, that's PUSH AWAY, not kick, a female
staff member who had tried to sneak up on me to take my tape deck away. I had been living with guilt for a year since attacking the other woman, because my
birth father had beat my mom up a lot, and after I calmed down the day I'd been arrested, I realized I was letting my anger turn me into HIM. So I had begun
bottling my anger and turning it inward rather than hurt anyone like that again.
Of course 5 trusted group home staff against the word of one angry teenager with a documented history of attacking a woman meant I was arrested without
hesitation. And as I was now 16, I was sentenced to Phase 2 time. 16-17 years olds get this, and the detention facilities used are a lot more like adult
jail than any Phase 1 facility. I arrived at my new home 6 days before my 17th birthday.
The gaurds at every place I'd been to the past year had allowed me to keep my body hidden, not wanting to deal with the stress and grief and paperwork of my
freakishness being known to the other boys. At that age, even with my best efforts to look masculine, I looked kinda like a ginger Christina Ricci with a
few extra pounds, and the gaurds knew letting my tits be seen would only invite trouble they didn't need.
The gaurds here however couldn't give a fuck. My tensors, they insisted, could be used to strangle someone. They wouldn't give me baggy clothing either,
even though all the other kids had sweatshirts, I only got a tight teeshirt to wear. The gaurds weren't shy about making Faggot and Queer comments, so I can
safely assume they did this HOPING somebody would beat me up. This is further evidenced by the fact the new arrivals are supposed to go in A-Ward with the
other first time Phase 2 offenders, and the gaurds put me in C-Ward with the repeat offenders, the violent cases. Kids in for robbery, assault, rape, even a
couple murderers.
I spent the first 3 days hiding in the corner with my arms crossed trying to hide my breasts. Strangely, those first three days no one really bothered me. I
got funny looks yes, but no one talked to me, and no one hit me. I was expecting to get beaten up pretty much hourly, but nothing happened. It made me
stupidly let my gaurd down.
On my 4th day, 2 days before my 17th birthday, a couple boys got into a fistfight at dinner when one stole the other's pie. While everyone was distracted, I
figured, as I had not yet showered here to keep hidden, I snuck into the showers to wash quickly. I hate feeling greasy and I thought since no one had seen
me go in while watching the fight that I'd be safe if I was quick. That was a very stupid assumption.
I'd just finished lathering up my hair and was about to rinse it off, in the stall farthest from the open door and most obscured, when my face hit the wall
very hard, several times. To this day my right eyebrow still droops noticably from the damage this caused. Dizzy from this with shampoo suds running into my
eyes, I wasn't really able to struggle much as two boys pinned me against the stall wall and held my legs apart. Five other boys took turns while I was held
still, and through my haze I saw blood splashing on the floor between my legs.
I don't know how long it lasted. When they'd finished with me, one of them rammed my face into the wall again and punched me hard in the stomach. When I
fell to the floor, he kicked me in my groin, said "Nice tits fag", and left. I passed out as one of the other boys peed on me. A gaurd shook me awake at
bedcheck, blood still trickling from my rear. My request to see the doctor was ignored. The gaurd, laughing, asked me if I had fun being such a fucking fag
for my new boyfriends, ordered me to dry off and get dressed, and put me in my cell.
One of the boys who raped me in the shower was also my cellmate. he was already asleep that night on the top bunk. I crawled onto my bed and put my back to
the corner. The next night, and every night after til I was transferred a little over 3 months later, he raped me. I tried to struggle the first few nights
and got punched in the face for my troubles. After that I just laid still and bit my pillow so as to not scream for him. Twenty years later now as I'm
writing this, and I still bleed nearly every time I shit. The damage was never treated, and I healed badly. Until my wife came along, I couldn't sleep at
night, and when I did sleep I slept back to the wall in a locked room. I'm a chronic insomniac. I sleep a little better now with my wife around, and I only
get nightmares during the anniversary period of May 11th to August 24th every year, and now only sporadicly if something makes me feel triggery before bed.
Venturing into TMI territory, it took me 5 years to trust my wife enough to let her use a strap-on with me in bed. I wanted to let her try, she wanted to do
it, but I just couldn't. Not for 5 years. 5 years of the woman I love cuddling me, coaxing me, telling me I'm beautiful and I'm safe in her arms, before I
could relax enough to experiment sexually with my own wife.
And I deserved it. I destroyed a woman's life. Made her afraid to leave the house, ruined her wedding, cost her her job, all over a pair of bus tickets
because I couldn't keep my rage in check. What I went through in juvey was karma. And no one will ever convince me otherwise. And if I had the power to
rewrite my life, I wouldn't undo that, because my trauma in Juvey made me who I am not. The anger was beaten out of me that first night.
I'm kind, selfless. I put other people before myself always. I take care of people, my own needs don't matter to me. I'm a good person, a far better person
than I was before juvey. And I wouldn't be if I hadn't been punished by karma. I know deeply, truly, without any doubt, what it means to hurt someone like I
did, because the universe hurt me back tenfold. And I can NEVER hurt anyone like that again, knowing how it destroys a life.
And no, I'm not suggesting for even a second that any other victim of rape deserves it. No one deserves to be raped. Not even me. What I deserved was
retribution. What I deserved was trauma. I deserved to forever know, every single minute for the rest of my life, what I had done to that woman by beating
her up that day. And I will. I won't ever for a single second forget what I've done.
My wife and friends and family keep telling me I'm still punishing myself. That I'm wrong, and I didn't deserve what I got just to be taught empathy. Fran
tries to lighten the mood by joking that if it really WAS Karma teaching me a lesson it seriously overcompensated. The sad thing is... I dunno, sometimes my
mind knows she's right. But my heart will never accept that. And that's why I'll never truly be past it.
I think about it a lot less. It's been a few years now since I stopped cutting myself. But I think it'll always be there, lurking just under the surface, to
keep me good.
Alright, enough of that. We got the really ugly stuff out of the way as early as I could stomach it. Let's move on to other things.
4. The Threesome That Killed A Sad Man
Alright. Now that I've gotten the single ugliest story in my life out of the way, let's move on. Time now to write a letter to Penthouse. Except that mine
is, y'know, actually true. And the happy ending in mine resulted from the destruction of the fantasy, not the fulfilling of it.
You see, before Juvey, when I was fuelled by my anger and not thinking anything through enough, I was hellbound and determined to begin transitioning and
living as a woman the moment I turned 18. After Juvey though, I was broken. I was afraid to come out. I began to overthink everything. I was afraid that, if
the rapes could happen while I was actively trying to hide my femininity, what could happen to me if I was open about it?
So I buried it. All of it. I buried the rapes, I buried my identity, and I resigned myself to life as a sad depressed man. For two years after the rapes I
lived in complete denial it had ever happened. At least until my first post-rape sex, when, while giving me a blowjob, the prostitute I was with that night
tried to do the finger up the ass trick to make me cum harder, and everything came flooding back. I screamed, cried, and collapsed on her floor sobbing. She
just held me the rest of the night. She listened as I sobbed out what I'd been through, told me it was okay, told me she understood.
We became friends for awhile, but she got fed up with me after 6 months of trying to convince me to both seek a counseller and to come out of the closet.
She stopped answering my calls after telling me to look her up when I stopped living in fear. Sadly by the time I did she'd become another body on the pig
farm in Coquitlam. If you're curious go Google "Pickton Farm Coquitlam missing women". I don't care to discuss her death. I just wish she'd lived to see
what I've grown into.
Anyway, after she cut off our friendship, I just sort of drifted through life, empty and alone, refusing to talk to a counsellor, resigned to being an
increasingly overweight ugly man. I'd gained near 100 pounds since Juvey, depression eating gone wild. When I was 24, on New Year's Eve, I didn't feel like
being home alone even though I had no friends. So I went downtown and sat at a bar sipping a Coke while people danced and mingled around me. After an hour,
on my 4th Coke, watching something on TV I couldn't hear, around 10:30, the bartender refilled my Coke without me asking him to. He told me it was on the
table behind me across the pub floor.
I turned around and saw two ridiculously beautiful women. They could easily have been models. Women I wouldn't in any possible scenario I could imagine
having the SLIGHTEST chance with. And yet they were waving me over. So I swallowed nervously and took my drink over to their table with me to thank them.
We all sat talking for a half-hour or so. They seemed to find my shy nervousness endearing. After awhile they asked me if I wanted to come upstairs to their
hotel room. They thought it was adorably naive when I asked why. They said point blank, to be sure there'd be zero confusion, that they wanted me to fuck
them. So I said yes. Not out of some "Wow I get to fuck hot chicks!" mentality, but out of my empty need to be touched and not feel alone.
As I was, despite being overweight, still young and reasonably healthy at this point, (The constant chronic pain I'm in these days has pretty much destroyed
my libido), I was actually energetic enough to do very well in bed. We stayed up there for a couple hours. They made me cum 4 times, and I lost count of how
many times they got off, at my hands and at each others'. It was one of the few times I'd had sex that I actually enjoyed it. I've never really actually
much enjoyed sex. I mostly had it when I had it in a vain attempt to fill the empty space inside, not out of any actual desire to get laid, and before
meeting my wife I can think of exactly THREE times I actually enjoyed myself in bed. It was, honestly, the second best sex of my life.
But, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, lest you think this a fake Penthouse letter, remember that life back then had a tendancy to punch me in the
face after kissing me.
So we all went back downstairs, having fucked our way past midnight. We sat back down, and they were all smiles, asking me if I'd like to do that again
soon, raving about my peformance, and not in the fake "there there you tried" way. We traded phone numbers, and I was about to leave to make sure I caught
the last bus home. But my low self-esteem couldn't keep it's nose out of it, and I turned back to them and asked the question that ruined the evening
forever.
I asked them why me.
There were so many far more attractive guys in the pub than me. Why did they choose the chubby average looking guy instead of one of the many gymrat studs?
They took my hand, and smiled a warm affectionate smile, and without the slightest hint of awareness at how they were about to sound, they told me "Because
fat guys try harder in bed".
I sat there quietly for a moment, absorbing that. Then I quietly handed them back their phone numbers, and with tears running down my face, I paid for my
drink and I left. They called out after me to come back, shouting they were sorry and they didn't mean it to sound hurtful. But I just kept walking. I cried
the whole way home, and cried myself to sleep. There were several messages in my voicemail, but I just deleted them all. I didn't want to hear any
apologies. They called a few more times the next day but I never picked up. That afternoon, I made New Years Day my new start. I'd decided that life would
find ways to hurt me and kick me while I was down no matter who I was, and if I was going to be a punching bag, I was damn well going to do it on my terms.
I packed every piece of male clothing I owned and every existing picture of me as a male adult into a suitcase and walked down the hill to the Fraser River
by the train tracks, dumped everything into an oil drum, and in a moment that would make Peter Parker proud, burned everything. The illusion of a sad man
died that day. And Penny was finally free to exist in the open.
There was one new voicemail when I got home. I listened to this one. It was the brunette of the pair, and she repeated what I assumed was the gist of all
the other messages, that they meant it as a compliment, that they really did enjoy my company, that they hoped I'd calm down and reconsider seeing them
again, but would understand if I was too hurt to do so, and that they were truly sorry they'd been so insensitive. I deleted it and never tried to contact
them.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn't let my anger decide that. I know I probably hurt them too by storming out and never giving them a second chance. For all I
know I could have ended up being their girlfriend. They can't have not realized my breasts were actually breasts and not chubby guy tits, given both that
they paid attention to them and liked how I reacted to the attention. Maybe they'd have accepted me being a woman. Maybe they'd have even helped me learned
the ropes as it were. I'll never know. I let my hurt write them off. I was too focused on coming out of the closet to stop and think things through
rationally.
I never ran into them again. Sometimes I wonder what I'd tell them if I did. I used to think I'd yell at them for being so insensitive that night. But age
gives us different eyes, and realizing as I do now that I seriously overreacted and hurt their feelings too, I'd probably hug them, apologise for
overreacting, and ask if we could start over as friends. And I'd thank them for being the catalyst that finally kicked me out of the closet.
5. Vampirella
One of my lessons in accepting people as is and not caving in to what other people think I should think came at the expense of a nice strange girl who
actually wanted me. I doubt I actually hurt her much, she took EVERYTHING in stride. But I was unkind to her, and having never found a chance to apologize,
it haunts me to remember how I treated her.
I never knew what her real name was. She, much like me, always seemed out of place at the weekly goth night. Amongst the throngs of stiuck-up self-absorbed
non-conformists who conformed to whatever was goth enough, people like us stood out. Me (still living as a man at the time) in my jeans and black velvet
shirts with black lipstick on, her always happy and bright and cheerful. Neither of us belonged in this crowd. But I had a few aqquaintances there and I
hated being alone, so I put up with the sneers.
Everyone called her vampirella. It was meant as an insult, because she claimed to be a vampire, but she took it as a compliment and adopted the nickname as
her own. Make no mistake, she was a little loopy, and seemed to live with one foot in a fantasy world, but she was harmless, and she was nice, and she liked
me. A lot. And had I not been so fucking insecure and desperate to be accepted by the group, I more than like would have dated her.
But I WAS an insecure weak-willed little prick then. And when my aqquaibntances, (friends talk to you outside of a weekly club event), started filling my
head with petty bullshit, I let them. They told me all kinds of crap.
She probably has a bajillion STD's because she goes home with a different guy every week.
She likes to cut her lovers and fill glass jars with their blood.
She's a pycho nut job who believes she's really a vampire.
And like all insecure twits desperate for peer approval, I just believed them, without asking HER. And they had told me this AFTER she and I had gotten a
little frisky on the dance floor. Her kissing me, and me rubbing her ladybits throught her tights til she came. I HAD planned on going home with her that
night. She's made it crystal clear she wanted me to. And then my "friends" started warning me to "run away from the nasty crazy skanky freak", and I robbed
myself of the chance to have one person showing me genuine affection and desire so I could have a clique of deluded self-important snobs instead.
This is why I never play the stock market. I suck at choosing wisely.
For the next year, she kept trying to woo me. Every week I'd get a flower and a kiss on the cheek and a winking "You know where to find me". Never in the
creepy stalkerish way. Afterwards she always just went to dance. And she never followed me home or called 55 times a day. All she ever did was make sure I
knew she still wanted me and was waiting for me to ignore the gossip. I think she knew why I suddenly seemed to lose interest. Maybe she saw the real me
deep inside buried under all my shame and fear and clique-approval seeking. Maybe she hoped I'd eventually find the strength to ignore the clique and follow
my own instincts. I'll never know.
I wussed out in the end. I eventually did realize the regulars at Sanctuary at best pitied me and at worst thought I was a poser and a joke. I also knew I
wanted to be with Vampirella. But by then she'd finally given up waiting for me. So I just stopped going altogether after several of the regulars made it
clear that my transitioning was a joke and I was too ugly to pass for a "real woman".
My last night attending, I only showed up and stayeds five minutes. I wasn't dressed goth. I had on a flowy tan and white skirt and a lacy purple shirt. I
had normal make-up on. I got stared at, heard the comments. Didn't care. I knew I was a better person than all of them, and it was time to start showing it
and stop trying to please people who don't care about me.
I found Vampirella. Took her hand, kissed it, and wished her a happy life. Then I left the club. And I haven't gone back since. I should have, to ask her
for a second chance. But I never did. I assumed she wouldn't want to give me one. But I know she would have.
If she reads this and recoginizes herself and I, I hope she knows how sorry I am for passing her up to appease shallow twonks I owed nothing to.
Another example of me learning to be a better person because being stupid cost me something that could have been wonderful.
Introduction
Twitter is an interesting thing. I think more than any other new idea in the ever expanding information age, Twitter has manahed to cut a hole in the space
between even minor celebrities and everyday average people. I simple boring girl like me has been able to make friends on Twitter, real friends, that as
little as 5 years ago wouldn't have been conceivable.
Because of Twitter, there are adult film actresses, TV actors, Pro Wrestlers, Film stars, and published authors who have of their own volition gotten to
know me, and consider me a real friend, someone they actually care about. Not to say any schlub can tweet at a celebrity and expect to make a friend. Every
single one of the Twitter celeb friends I have approached me first, usually because someone else they followed re-tweeted something I said that they found
interesting.
After that, they'd get to know me. And I never treated them like "Ohmigawd wow you're so-and-so! I've seen/read/masturbated to all your work like fer
shure!!!". I just treated them like I treat everyone else, as people. Which I suppose above all else is why they consider me a friend. These people,
especially the ones in sex work, like finding people who treat them like a normal every day person. It's why I have the personal private contact info for
some of them. I earned their trust by just being myself and accepting them as is.
They in turn accept me as is, defects and all. They worry about me when I'm sick or sad abbout something, and they get genuinely excited for me when I'm
happy about something.
Which leads me to why I'm telling you this.
I'm not a name-dropper, so no, I won't be naming any names. No names of any celebrities who call me friend, except one.
Ms. Kate Bornstein.
Kate is the acclaimed published author of several help books for people working though or trying to understand their genfer incongruities. From simple
heterosexual male crossdressers to full-tilt 100% transsexuals, both M2F and F2M, and all the variations in between, Kate's books are written to help
someone who's internal identity and/or external presentation doesn't match society's arbitrary rules for the genitals they were born with.
Aunty Kate is so prolific a writer that she makes a very good living with speaking arrangements. She speaks about Gender at college and university campuses,
at medical symposiums, at social conferences. Her opinions and ideas hold weight.
So when she tells you after reading your silly ranty angry bitch blogging that you're a damned good writer and you had BETTER get off your ass and write an
actual book, you generally listen. Or should. Me? I put it off for the past two years because I couldn't for the life of me decide what in the bloody hell I
was going to fill an entire book's worth of non-fiction writing with.
Oh I have plenty of thoughts and ideas for fiction. Hell I made it through the first four chapters of a trans-themed crime drama about a serial killer who
was targetting pre-op transsexual women, performing the SRS so they'd die with the body they wanted and be forever safe from those who would beat them up,
and the transphobic police detective whose only child was a proud and defiant MTF girl, who evolves over the course of the story to let go of his "son" and
accept his daughter when the killer targets her. I lost it in a hard drive crash and never felt like starting over from scratch, and no one I'd sent prelim
copies to kept one I could continue from. Fiction was never a problem.
But writing about reality? Talking about my life in anything longer than a 1000 word blog entry? Filling an entire book with my cranky fat bitch opinions
about the world around me? That I wasn't sure I could do.
I mean truth be told, I'm not even a transsexual. I used to think I was. But I'm not. I'm actually a natal female who has a penis where her clitoris SHOULD
be, and a scar where her vagina once actually was. I'm intersexed. Mother Nature came to work drunk on my birthday and grabbed parts from the wrong box.
Which isn't to say I don't identify still with Trans women. I AM still a "woman with a penis". I consider myself trans by psychiatric history and life
experience, having been raised as a boy. I just can't outright lie and still claim to BE one. I've found myself once again in a position of being sort of on
the outside looking in. While I still have many trans friends, a lot of the more bitter and insecure trans women out there hate women like me. Mostly, of
all the stupid reasons to hate someone, because I needed neither hormones nor silicon to have a decent sized rack.
But Kate thinks I write very well. And she thinks, despite her and I locking horns a few times on topics we disagree on, that my opinions and feelings and
history are important and powerful and relevant and need to be shared. And for the past two years, on Twitter, via e-mail, even on comments left on my blog,
she's been goading me to write an actual full length book.
I personally don't think anyone not already friend or family will particularly care to read the disjointed opinions or autobiography of an overweight freak
of nature, but Kate insists.
So I'm finally giving in. This is what I've come up with. This book, like I myself, is going to be mix and match. Some chapters will be my ranting. Like my
blog, but longer and more in-depth. The other chapters will be biographical, relating sections of my patchwork life that I think are most relevant to the
person I've become. It's the best I could come up with. I don't think, in writing non-fiction, anyone WOULD want to sit down and read an entire book of
either or.
But somehow, people have accepted the some of Column A and some of Column B that I am. So maybe they'll like a book modelled after the Frankenstein's
Transwoman who's writing it.
And then maybe Aunty Kate will smile and be satisfied I listened.
1. It's A...... It's A..... Hold That Thought
Alright, the very first thing you need to understand about me as you read this is that I'm a legitimate freak of nature. I'm intersexed. If you're
unfamiliar with the term, it's what us hermaphrodite folks actually prefer to be called. Intersexed sounds a lot less Fantasy Freakshow than Hermaphrodite.
Intersexed means for whatever reasons, something went wrong in the womb and the person in question was born with some sort of visible sexual incongruity.
And contrary to what most people think, the fabled perfect Penis And Vagina combo is exceptionally rare. Being born intersexed is rare enough. Less than 5%
of all births each year are born intersexed. And less than 1% OF that 5% are born as "True Hermaphrodites" as the terminology goes.
I was as close to the fabled 1% as you're ever likely to meet.
When I was born, and please, try not to eat anything for the next few paragraph, with the following configuration.
I had a penis, which while perhaps in the Doctor's opinion a little below average, appeared normal, healthy and functional. I had a scrotum, with one gonad
already descending as normal, and the other, he presumed, would follow suit shortly thereafter. What made him concerned however was that, embedded in my
scrotum, like someone had stapled it on, was a very small hole. No labia, just a hole. According to the records I got through a Freedom of Information
request, it was a pinhole sized opening. The clinical term I'm told is "Ovo-Testicular DSD".
The Doctor's assumption was that it would never be big enough to accomodate anything thicker than a pencil.
Yes you read that right. The doctor's primary criteria in deciding how to proceed was whether or not I could grow up to comfortably accomodate being
sexually penetrated by a penis. Doncha just love patriarchy?
The normal procedure most everywhere else in North America with an intersexed child is to look at the genitals and decide which sex's bits are closest to
normal and healthy-looking, and get rid of the rest. Normally with a "pinhole sized" vagina, most doctors leave it alone and hope it will just close up on
it's own, or, if it grows and normalizes, remove the penis when the infant has passed one year old. It was common accepted practise you see, until the past
decade when grown intersexed eople and newer modern more open-minded parents began filing lawsuits over it, to just "fix" intersexed children.
Lucky me though! I got a doctor in his fifties who'd never encountered a baby like me before, and he decided it was in my best interests to be a boy, so he
decided to go full tilt boogie with it. So he used a heated metal rod to cauterize any mucous membranes I might have, then snipped and stitched to correct
the scrotum.
But wait there's more! We haven't reached the really REALLY fun part yet!
The other gonad descended too, but it wasn't a testicle, it was an ovary! Which was connected to my uterus!!! Wow isn't that awesome? A lazy-ass old fart
with a medical degree and not a whit of decency, compassion or common fucking sense, made ALL his decisions about MY future based on whether or not I could
score a husband as a woman when I grew up if he removed the boy bits, WITHOUT doing ANY kind of internal examination!
If you're a woman you know how much fun those awesome periods are. All rainbows and unicorns and tampon commercials clearly written by brainless men telling
you to have a happy period! And if you're a man I'm sure you run in terror from a woman running low on Haagen-Daaz every 4 weeks. Knowing that, imagine how
much fun menstruating iswhen the blood had nowhere to go. Don't worry, I'll still be here when you come back from your "Why???" moment.
So that's my life now. An idiot old fart decided to experiment on making me perfectly normal and doomed me to a lifetime of shame, self-loathing, abuse, and
permanent health problems. All because he didn't think I was going to be fuckable when I grew up if he'd left my girl parts alone.
Like any other trans girl, I always felt different. As far back as I can remember I knew I should have been a girl. And thanks to one of my older brothers I
always knew that meant there was something wrong with me. I remember once at age 4 being at a grocery store with my mom and having a stranger tell her what
a lovely little girl she had. I giggled at this. After mom told my stepfather about it and they had a good laugh, the middle child of my three older
brothers, who, from youngest to eldest I will refer to in this book as Cobain, Closetcase, and Cultsheep, (I'll elaborate on those later), took me aside and
told me boys don't giggle when someone calls them a girl, they get mad and yell. And if he heard about me giggling again he'd beat the giggles out of me.
So from then on every time someone in a store or the park or whereever told my mom how pretty her little girl was, I'd loudly and "angrily" shout "I not a
girl! I a boyyyy!!!". Loud overcompensation just so Closetcase wouldn't beat me up.
When puberty came around I'd already had a long history of anger-management issues and violent school outbursts. Having to live as a boy was hell, and I was
mad a lot. So when I realized I was growing real breasts and my hips were widening instead of my shoulders to go with the fuzz now growing on my chin, I was
caught in a sad self-loathing mix of happy vindication and even angrier disgust.
On the one hand, BOOBS!!! I had boobs! I'd been right all along! Boys don't grow boobs! I really WAS supposed to be a girl!
On the other hand, facial hair and a deepening voice. What the hell kind of freak was I? God fuck, I was going to get the shit kicked out of me in school,
even more than normal.
And so began a decade of hip and breast hiding baggy jogging pants and sweatshirts, and painful days of using a tensor bandage to keep my breasts hidden. My
anger only got worse. I hated myself, I hated the world for letting me exist as I was, I hated everyone IN the world for making me feel like a worthless
freakish piece of shit. And it was in a fit of this anger, 2 days before I turned 16, that I lost my temper in the group home my parents had left me in, and
beat up one of the staff who'd pulled a petty power trip on me by trying to make me pay for my morning bus tickets out of my allowance even though we were
all allotted them every weekday for school.
It was a petty little bit of bullying, which is sadly common in group homes. Every single group home I'd ever been in always had at least one, sometimes
more than one person on the staff who abused their authority and bullied the kids in their care. If the target wasn't me it was someone else. I've seen kids
bullied by staff for as petty a reason as not matting down a stubborn cowlick in their hair. And the kids are of course never believed when they complain.
So it was petty bullying, and a petty thing to flip out over. But by then my anger was hair trigger and constantly simmering, and I lost it. I beat the
woman up, trashed her car, and did so much damage to the home itself that I was told I'd made it unlivable for a few weeks while they repaired it. The staff
who had bullied me with her silly little power trip was so traumatized she quit her job and called off her wedding. She spent years in therapy. All because
I couldn't control my anger at being a freak having to hide myself away, and being ignored and dismissed by every shrink I ever tried telling it to.
After all, they just KNEW my anger was REALLY about my parents divorcing when I was too young to even bloody remember it. I had Daddy issues they said. Any
claim of gender identy issues was just a silly attempt to deflect the REAL reason for my anger. Which just pissed me off worse.
So I destroyed a life because she was getting off on being a minor inconvenience to mine. Because I couldn't control my anger anymore.
Oh don't worry. I was paid back for it in spades. Fate made damn sure I was properly punished for what I'd done. And I deserved what I got. No therapist, no
friend, my mom, my wife, no one will EVER convince me I didn't deserve every single second of what happened to me in jail.
2. The Three Stooges Redux
Alright, before I tell the juvey story, and trust me, I need to work up to that, I told promised I'd explain the pseudonyms to which I'll be referring to my
elder brothers throughout this book.
I'd already decided I wasn't going to use any legal names. There are more than a few worthless people I'm biologicly related to who, on the off chance I
actually make any money off of this rambling stream of consciousness, would not hesitate to sue me for an undeserved cut because they'd consider the brutal
honest truth to be slander. But just giving everyone some random new name felt kinda bland to me. So everyone gets nicknames! It's a party!
I have three older half brothers, and two younger half-sisters and a half-brother. I grew up with the elder and barely know the younger set. Hell I've never
even actually met or spoken to the youngest brother.
Anyway, I'll stop going off on tangents, (despite this being the whole point of this silly book), and finish my explanation.
The youngest of my three elder brothers, and the only one I ever actually had a close relationship with, gets moniker'd as Cobain because he was an
exceptionally talented and creative musician who was plagued by drugs and demons. He could never clean up long. His ex wife kept his daughter from him, his
last serious love overdosed in their bed in my mom's basement. He never made peace with his biological father leaving my mom, and he never made peace with
his demons. He overdosed on heroin in November 2001.
The eldest brother is Cultsheep, because he wasted the last decade of his life suckered in by the Jehovah's Witnesses, bullying us all with his newfound
beliefs. For example, when our mom and stepdad lived in Ontario for 5 years and he still in Vancouver, he and his son came to visit us one summer. And in my
own bloody house he wouldn't let me watch the Beetlejuice cartoon on Saturday morning because it was "demonic and evil and would corrupt his son". He died
in hospital in November of 1989 of a rare blood disease. It rendered him braindead. But had he allowed a blood transfusion the first night there was a 50/50
chance he might have survived. Members of his church backed his idiot decision because "The blood of Christ was enough to save him, and a transfusion would
prevent his chance of reaching Heaven". By the time he was too out of it to protest and my mom chased the selfish assholes out of the hospital, it was too
late to save him, the transfusion only gave him an extra day.
Gee can you tell I have issues with organized mainstream religion?
Finally, we have Closetcase. The middle of the three older brothers. Saving him for last here because he's the brother I honestly don't love. I loved
Cobain. He was the first one in my family after I came out as a woman to fully accept me as is. And despite his misguided religious stupidity, I loved
Cultsheep. He at least meant well.
I don't love Closetcase. I don't outright hate him because hate is unhealthy and I try not to hold grudges as best I can. But I don't love him. He's family
by biology only, and I could give a rat's ass about him or his life. I tolerate him politely only for my mom's sake.
So, you're wondering, how did he get saddled with "Closetcase" as his pseudonym for my book? Easy. He's one of the biggest self-loathing gay men I've ever
met. And his refusal to accept his sexuality and desperation to convince himself he's straight have made him a bullying abusive piece of shit as long as
I've known him. He has a long history of drug issues, a prison history, and life-threatening STD's from his history of careless self-destruction. He puts
most professional Ex-Gay asholes to shame. Compared to my brother a self-loathing queen in denial like Greg Quinlan or George Rekers look positively upright
and decent by comparision.
Closetcase used to date Transsexual women and fulltime homosexual male crossdressers. Yes, he was one of THOSE. The gay man so desperate to suck a cock, but
so terrified of anyone knowing he wants to suck a cock, that he went out of his way to date trans women and passable crossdressers so he would appear
perfectly heterosexual to anyone who saw him and his lovers together, while getting to indulge his shame-inducing desires in private.
So you can imagine when I announced to the family, (I thought I was a trannsexual woman until some standard pre-SRS approval testing discovered the truth),
that I was trans and would from that day forward live full-time as a woman, he was less than thrilled. He'd always been bullying and abusive to me before.
He'd stolen from me, run up bills in my name, beat me up a few times to de-sissy me, left more cats in my care than I could afford to feed, and stuck me
with overdue unpaid rent in two different apartments he'd suckered me into sharing with him because I couldn't afford anything else.
But after I came out he got worse. He'd bully me openly, no longer caring if Mom or Stepdad were watching, threatening me harm, going out of his way to
misgender me, forcing me to do chores at mom's for him that she'd asked him to do. Well, at least until the day he tried to bully me about not carrying
heavy laundry bags to the car at my mom's one day after my wife had told me not to. I'm in constant excruciating pain and she gets mad at me if try to
overwork myself. She overheard him and got right up in his face. Like all bullies, he was too chickenshit to press his luck with someone clearly more than
willing to beat the piss out of him.
To this day he only tries to bully me now if my Mom or my wife aren't in earshot or sight of us. And he still refuses to call me a she. My wife, mom and
stepdad and I all agree, he hates me because I've become what he used to hide his sexuality behind, and I'm now a constant reminder of his innate
internalized homophobia.
He's a perfect example of why "Ex-Gay" is a complete and total crock. You're born gay, period. No one chooses to be gay, and no one can really choose to not
be gay. All you can do is put on a fake smile and live in deep denial, and denying your true nature never has positive results. I feel so much pity for ex-
gay hypocrites, who force unhappy lives in loveless marriages upon themselves to please a hateful interpretation of God that has no actual bibival legs to
stand on. Ex-Gay is a lie, and it only causes harm. If my brother could just accept who he really truly is, he'd have had a much happier life. Instead, he's
miserable and making the poor nice woman he lives with miserable by faking love for her to aboid admitting he wants a dick in his mouth, because he believes
that liking cock makes him inferior.
3. Karma.
Alright, this isn't going to be pretty. I'll give you fair warning right now. This chapter is very high risk of triggering anyone who has been raped, or is
sensitive to traumatic events. I'm going to talk openly and bluntly as I am prone to do, about what happened to me in juvey. If you think you might be
triggered, skip this chapter. I CANNOT stress this enough. This is going to get ugly. Skip this chapter if you don't have a strong stomach.
Alright, now, those of you still reading this page are still here because you wanted to know what I meant at the end of the first chapter when I said I was
punished in spades for what I did at the group home. Obviously I'm saying I was raped. The warning I just gave kinda gave that away. But the devil is in the
details as they say. So let me explain what I went through, and the effects it's had on my life.
I'd been in juvey, (Young Offender Detention here in Canada), for near a year, in Phase 1 custody. Phase 1 is for offenders aged 13 to 15, which I had been
sentenced to because I was still 15 when I was arrested and charged. While in an open custody group home, I got in another fight with staff, though not near
as destructive. This time 4 male staff ganged up on me and beat me up a little after I had used my foot to push away, that's PUSH AWAY, not kick, a female
staff member who had tried to sneak up on me to take my tape deck away. I had been living with guilt for a year since attacking the other woman, because my
birth father had beat my mom up a lot, and after I calmed down the day I'd been arrested, I realized I was letting my anger turn me into HIM. So I had begun
bottling my anger and turning it inward rather than hurt anyone like that again.
Of course 5 trusted group home staff against the word of one angry teenager with a documented history of attacking a woman meant I was arrested without
hesitation. And as I was now 16, I was sentenced to Phase 2 time. 16-17 years olds get this, and the detention facilities used are a lot more like adult
jail than any Phase 1 facility. I arrived at my new home 6 days before my 17th birthday.
The gaurds at every place I'd been to the past year had allowed me to keep my body hidden, not wanting to deal with the stress and grief and paperwork of my
freakishness being known to the other boys. At that age, even with my best efforts to look masculine, I looked kinda like a ginger Christina Ricci with a
few extra pounds, and the gaurds knew letting my tits be seen would only invite trouble they didn't need.
The gaurds here however couldn't give a fuck. My tensors, they insisted, could be used to strangle someone. They wouldn't give me baggy clothing either,
even though all the other kids had sweatshirts, I only got a tight teeshirt to wear. The gaurds weren't shy about making Faggot and Queer comments, so I can
safely assume they did this HOPING somebody would beat me up. This is further evidenced by the fact the new arrivals are supposed to go in A-Ward with the
other first time Phase 2 offenders, and the gaurds put me in C-Ward with the repeat offenders, the violent cases. Kids in for robbery, assault, rape, even a
couple murderers.
I spent the first 3 days hiding in the corner with my arms crossed trying to hide my breasts. Strangely, those first three days no one really bothered me. I
got funny looks yes, but no one talked to me, and no one hit me. I was expecting to get beaten up pretty much hourly, but nothing happened. It made me
stupidly let my gaurd down.
On my 4th day, 2 days before my 17th birthday, a couple boys got into a fistfight at dinner when one stole the other's pie. While everyone was distracted, I
figured, as I had not yet showered here to keep hidden, I snuck into the showers to wash quickly. I hate feeling greasy and I thought since no one had seen
me go in while watching the fight that I'd be safe if I was quick. That was a very stupid assumption.
I'd just finished lathering up my hair and was about to rinse it off, in the stall farthest from the open door and most obscured, when my face hit the wall
very hard, several times. To this day my right eyebrow still droops noticably from the damage this caused. Dizzy from this with shampoo suds running into my
eyes, I wasn't really able to struggle much as two boys pinned me against the stall wall and held my legs apart. Five other boys took turns while I was held
still, and through my haze I saw blood splashing on the floor between my legs.
I don't know how long it lasted. When they'd finished with me, one of them rammed my face into the wall again and punched me hard in the stomach. When I
fell to the floor, he kicked me in my groin, said "Nice tits fag", and left. I passed out as one of the other boys peed on me. A gaurd shook me awake at
bedcheck, blood still trickling from my rear. My request to see the doctor was ignored. The gaurd, laughing, asked me if I had fun being such a fucking fag
for my new boyfriends, ordered me to dry off and get dressed, and put me in my cell.
One of the boys who raped me in the shower was also my cellmate. he was already asleep that night on the top bunk. I crawled onto my bed and put my back to
the corner. The next night, and every night after til I was transferred a little over 3 months later, he raped me. I tried to struggle the first few nights
and got punched in the face for my troubles. After that I just laid still and bit my pillow so as to not scream for him. Twenty years later now as I'm
writing this, and I still bleed nearly every time I shit. The damage was never treated, and I healed badly. Until my wife came along, I couldn't sleep at
night, and when I did sleep I slept back to the wall in a locked room. I'm a chronic insomniac. I sleep a little better now with my wife around, and I only
get nightmares during the anniversary period of May 11th to August 24th every year, and now only sporadicly if something makes me feel triggery before bed.
Venturing into TMI territory, it took me 5 years to trust my wife enough to let her use a strap-on with me in bed. I wanted to let her try, she wanted to do
it, but I just couldn't. Not for 5 years. 5 years of the woman I love cuddling me, coaxing me, telling me I'm beautiful and I'm safe in her arms, before I
could relax enough to experiment sexually with my own wife.
And I deserved it. I destroyed a woman's life. Made her afraid to leave the house, ruined her wedding, cost her her job, all over a pair of bus tickets
because I couldn't keep my rage in check. What I went through in juvey was karma. And no one will ever convince me otherwise. And if I had the power to
rewrite my life, I wouldn't undo that, because my trauma in Juvey made me who I am not. The anger was beaten out of me that first night.
I'm kind, selfless. I put other people before myself always. I take care of people, my own needs don't matter to me. I'm a good person, a far better person
than I was before juvey. And I wouldn't be if I hadn't been punished by karma. I know deeply, truly, without any doubt, what it means to hurt someone like I
did, because the universe hurt me back tenfold. And I can NEVER hurt anyone like that again, knowing how it destroys a life.
And no, I'm not suggesting for even a second that any other victim of rape deserves it. No one deserves to be raped. Not even me. What I deserved was
retribution. What I deserved was trauma. I deserved to forever know, every single minute for the rest of my life, what I had done to that woman by beating
her up that day. And I will. I won't ever for a single second forget what I've done.
My wife and friends and family keep telling me I'm still punishing myself. That I'm wrong, and I didn't deserve what I got just to be taught empathy. Fran
tries to lighten the mood by joking that if it really WAS Karma teaching me a lesson it seriously overcompensated. The sad thing is... I dunno, sometimes my
mind knows she's right. But my heart will never accept that. And that's why I'll never truly be past it.
I think about it a lot less. It's been a few years now since I stopped cutting myself. But I think it'll always be there, lurking just under the surface, to
keep me good.
Alright, enough of that. We got the really ugly stuff out of the way as early as I could stomach it. Let's move on to other things.
4. The Threesome That Killed A Sad Man
Alright. Now that I've gotten the single ugliest story in my life out of the way, let's move on. Time now to write a letter to Penthouse. Except that mine
is, y'know, actually true. And the happy ending in mine resulted from the destruction of the fantasy, not the fulfilling of it.
You see, before Juvey, when I was fuelled by my anger and not thinking anything through enough, I was hellbound and determined to begin transitioning and
living as a woman the moment I turned 18. After Juvey though, I was broken. I was afraid to come out. I began to overthink everything. I was afraid that, if
the rapes could happen while I was actively trying to hide my femininity, what could happen to me if I was open about it?
So I buried it. All of it. I buried the rapes, I buried my identity, and I resigned myself to life as a sad depressed man. For two years after the rapes I
lived in complete denial it had ever happened. At least until my first post-rape sex, when, while giving me a blowjob, the prostitute I was with that night
tried to do the finger up the ass trick to make me cum harder, and everything came flooding back. I screamed, cried, and collapsed on her floor sobbing. She
just held me the rest of the night. She listened as I sobbed out what I'd been through, told me it was okay, told me she understood.
We became friends for awhile, but she got fed up with me after 6 months of trying to convince me to both seek a counseller and to come out of the closet.
She stopped answering my calls after telling me to look her up when I stopped living in fear. Sadly by the time I did she'd become another body on the pig
farm in Coquitlam. If you're curious go Google "Pickton Farm Coquitlam missing women". I don't care to discuss her death. I just wish she'd lived to see
what I've grown into.
Anyway, after she cut off our friendship, I just sort of drifted through life, empty and alone, refusing to talk to a counsellor, resigned to being an
increasingly overweight ugly man. I'd gained near 100 pounds since Juvey, depression eating gone wild. When I was 24, on New Year's Eve, I didn't feel like
being home alone even though I had no friends. So I went downtown and sat at a bar sipping a Coke while people danced and mingled around me. After an hour,
on my 4th Coke, watching something on TV I couldn't hear, around 10:30, the bartender refilled my Coke without me asking him to. He told me it was on the
table behind me across the pub floor.
I turned around and saw two ridiculously beautiful women. They could easily have been models. Women I wouldn't in any possible scenario I could imagine
having the SLIGHTEST chance with. And yet they were waving me over. So I swallowed nervously and took my drink over to their table with me to thank them.
We all sat talking for a half-hour or so. They seemed to find my shy nervousness endearing. After awhile they asked me if I wanted to come upstairs to their
hotel room. They thought it was adorably naive when I asked why. They said point blank, to be sure there'd be zero confusion, that they wanted me to fuck
them. So I said yes. Not out of some "Wow I get to fuck hot chicks!" mentality, but out of my empty need to be touched and not feel alone.
As I was, despite being overweight, still young and reasonably healthy at this point, (The constant chronic pain I'm in these days has pretty much destroyed
my libido), I was actually energetic enough to do very well in bed. We stayed up there for a couple hours. They made me cum 4 times, and I lost count of how
many times they got off, at my hands and at each others'. It was one of the few times I'd had sex that I actually enjoyed it. I've never really actually
much enjoyed sex. I mostly had it when I had it in a vain attempt to fill the empty space inside, not out of any actual desire to get laid, and before
meeting my wife I can think of exactly THREE times I actually enjoyed myself in bed. It was, honestly, the second best sex of my life.
But, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, lest you think this a fake Penthouse letter, remember that life back then had a tendancy to punch me in the
face after kissing me.
So we all went back downstairs, having fucked our way past midnight. We sat back down, and they were all smiles, asking me if I'd like to do that again
soon, raving about my peformance, and not in the fake "there there you tried" way. We traded phone numbers, and I was about to leave to make sure I caught
the last bus home. But my low self-esteem couldn't keep it's nose out of it, and I turned back to them and asked the question that ruined the evening
forever.
I asked them why me.
There were so many far more attractive guys in the pub than me. Why did they choose the chubby average looking guy instead of one of the many gymrat studs?
They took my hand, and smiled a warm affectionate smile, and without the slightest hint of awareness at how they were about to sound, they told me "Because
fat guys try harder in bed".
I sat there quietly for a moment, absorbing that. Then I quietly handed them back their phone numbers, and with tears running down my face, I paid for my
drink and I left. They called out after me to come back, shouting they were sorry and they didn't mean it to sound hurtful. But I just kept walking. I cried
the whole way home, and cried myself to sleep. There were several messages in my voicemail, but I just deleted them all. I didn't want to hear any
apologies. They called a few more times the next day but I never picked up. That afternoon, I made New Years Day my new start. I'd decided that life would
find ways to hurt me and kick me while I was down no matter who I was, and if I was going to be a punching bag, I was damn well going to do it on my terms.
I packed every piece of male clothing I owned and every existing picture of me as a male adult into a suitcase and walked down the hill to the Fraser River
by the train tracks, dumped everything into an oil drum, and in a moment that would make Peter Parker proud, burned everything. The illusion of a sad man
died that day. And Penny was finally free to exist in the open.
There was one new voicemail when I got home. I listened to this one. It was the brunette of the pair, and she repeated what I assumed was the gist of all
the other messages, that they meant it as a compliment, that they really did enjoy my company, that they hoped I'd calm down and reconsider seeing them
again, but would understand if I was too hurt to do so, and that they were truly sorry they'd been so insensitive. I deleted it and never tried to contact
them.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn't let my anger decide that. I know I probably hurt them too by storming out and never giving them a second chance. For all I
know I could have ended up being their girlfriend. They can't have not realized my breasts were actually breasts and not chubby guy tits, given both that
they paid attention to them and liked how I reacted to the attention. Maybe they'd have accepted me being a woman. Maybe they'd have even helped me learned
the ropes as it were. I'll never know. I let my hurt write them off. I was too focused on coming out of the closet to stop and think things through
rationally.
I never ran into them again. Sometimes I wonder what I'd tell them if I did. I used to think I'd yell at them for being so insensitive that night. But age
gives us different eyes, and realizing as I do now that I seriously overreacted and hurt their feelings too, I'd probably hug them, apologise for
overreacting, and ask if we could start over as friends. And I'd thank them for being the catalyst that finally kicked me out of the closet.
5. Vampirella
One of my lessons in accepting people as is and not caving in to what other people think I should think came at the expense of a nice strange girl who
actually wanted me. I doubt I actually hurt her much, she took EVERYTHING in stride. But I was unkind to her, and having never found a chance to apologize,
it haunts me to remember how I treated her.
I never knew what her real name was. She, much like me, always seemed out of place at the weekly goth night. Amongst the throngs of stiuck-up self-absorbed
non-conformists who conformed to whatever was goth enough, people like us stood out. Me (still living as a man at the time) in my jeans and black velvet
shirts with black lipstick on, her always happy and bright and cheerful. Neither of us belonged in this crowd. But I had a few aqquaintances there and I
hated being alone, so I put up with the sneers.
Everyone called her vampirella. It was meant as an insult, because she claimed to be a vampire, but she took it as a compliment and adopted the nickname as
her own. Make no mistake, she was a little loopy, and seemed to live with one foot in a fantasy world, but she was harmless, and she was nice, and she liked
me. A lot. And had I not been so fucking insecure and desperate to be accepted by the group, I more than like would have dated her.
But I WAS an insecure weak-willed little prick then. And when my aqquaibntances, (friends talk to you outside of a weekly club event), started filling my
head with petty bullshit, I let them. They told me all kinds of crap.
She probably has a bajillion STD's because she goes home with a different guy every week.
She likes to cut her lovers and fill glass jars with their blood.
She's a pycho nut job who believes she's really a vampire.
And like all insecure twits desperate for peer approval, I just believed them, without asking HER. And they had told me this AFTER she and I had gotten a
little frisky on the dance floor. Her kissing me, and me rubbing her ladybits throught her tights til she came. I HAD planned on going home with her that
night. She's made it crystal clear she wanted me to. And then my "friends" started warning me to "run away from the nasty crazy skanky freak", and I robbed
myself of the chance to have one person showing me genuine affection and desire so I could have a clique of deluded self-important snobs instead.
This is why I never play the stock market. I suck at choosing wisely.
For the next year, she kept trying to woo me. Every week I'd get a flower and a kiss on the cheek and a winking "You know where to find me". Never in the
creepy stalkerish way. Afterwards she always just went to dance. And she never followed me home or called 55 times a day. All she ever did was make sure I
knew she still wanted me and was waiting for me to ignore the gossip. I think she knew why I suddenly seemed to lose interest. Maybe she saw the real me
deep inside buried under all my shame and fear and clique-approval seeking. Maybe she hoped I'd eventually find the strength to ignore the clique and follow
my own instincts. I'll never know.
I wussed out in the end. I eventually did realize the regulars at Sanctuary at best pitied me and at worst thought I was a poser and a joke. I also knew I
wanted to be with Vampirella. But by then she'd finally given up waiting for me. So I just stopped going altogether after several of the regulars made it
clear that my transitioning was a joke and I was too ugly to pass for a "real woman".
My last night attending, I only showed up and stayeds five minutes. I wasn't dressed goth. I had on a flowy tan and white skirt and a lacy purple shirt. I
had normal make-up on. I got stared at, heard the comments. Didn't care. I knew I was a better person than all of them, and it was time to start showing it
and stop trying to please people who don't care about me.
I found Vampirella. Took her hand, kissed it, and wished her a happy life. Then I left the club. And I haven't gone back since. I should have, to ask her
for a second chance. But I never did. I assumed she wouldn't want to give me one. But I know she would have.
If she reads this and recoginizes herself and I, I hope she knows how sorry I am for passing her up to appease shallow twonks I owed nothing to.
Another example of me learning to be a better person because being stupid cost me something that could have been wonderful.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
The 6 Best Wrestler Theme Songs (That They Sang Themselves)
Since the mid 80's theme music has been an important factor in wrestling. Fans recognize a theme and will cheer or boo often before the wrestler actually even appears on the ramp.
A good theme song will get a crowd charged and ready for the match. And some theme songs become iconic. Themes can even show a company's faith in a performer. If so and so spends more than two months coming out to, as Danielson called it, "Generic Rock Song #43", chances are the office sees them in the midcard at absolute best. If they get a badass sounding song by an actual band hired to record it, such as Drew McIntyre's "Broken Dreams" by Shaman's Harvest, it suggests the company is hoping for great things from that performer.
A perfect example of the effectiveness of theme music in conveying the mood the audience is hoped to have is Doink the Clown. When Matt Bourne was Doink and a heel, he had what many fans call the best in-house WWE theme song EVER.
After Bourne left and Steve "Brooklyn Brawler" Lombardi was put in the costume as Doink II, (The version with the damn mini-me), the theme was changed to this.
It went from creepy and mood-setting to generic circus music, and the crowd's love of Doink went with it. The happy Doink theme let the crowd know it was piss-break time.
But sometimes for whatever reasons, a wrestler isn't content to just take the theme they're given. Sometimes, for reasons ranging from a gimmick album, a promotional purpose, or a wrestler stretching their own creative legs, a performer will do their own theme song.
Now obviously results of this endeavor are very mixed. No one with actual taste in music will argue that R-Truth's rythmless cookie-cutter rap themes were good for anything but getting kids and moms in the crowd to sing along. From way back in 2002 with "Gettin' Rowdy" in his first WWE run as K-Kwik, (Derailed by Road Dog getting fired shortly after their tag-team debut), to "Get Krunk" which made so little sense even for Talentless Truth that they soon went back to "What's Up" so the crowd could remember to pop for him, R-Truth is a good argument for NOT letting most wrestlers near a recording studio.
So let's get started here. My criteria for compiling this list is as follows.
- Wrestler must at least be in tune. No one expects a wrestler to have Christina Aguilera's pipes, but they need to at least sound better than Kei$ha.
- Theme must have been used regularly for minimum 6 months on TV, long enough to be recognizable to the fans.
- For context of how good they are, I'll include with each entry a counterpoint of a similar song that was just horrible.
So here we go.
#6; With My Baby Tonight (Sung by Brian "Road Dog" Armstrong)
Used at first to get Jeff Jarrett's "aspiring country music star" gimmick over, the problem was that Jarrett wasn't comfortable singing at the time and didn't want to try to. Luckily someone had overheard Jarrett's on-screen flunkie the Roadie sing in the shower, so Brian sang the sand and Jeff lipsynched it on TV and PPV. As far as the story goes, this was not originally intended to be revealed publicly, until Jeff had a falling out with management and made his first brief jump to WCW, leaving Brian adrift without a storyline. So it was decided that the "lipsynching scanal" would be revealed, giving Brian a storyline to get him off on his own as a singles wrestler. Not only did the song, which actually got some airplay on country music stations, become the entrance music of the rechristened "Road Dog Jesse James", for the next year he actually sang it live every week as he entered. It faled to get him over though, and he eventually got paired with the struggling Billy Gunn following Bart Gunn leaving the company, forming one of the WWE's most popular tag-teams.
Honorable mention here; When Jeff Jarrett's first WCW stint ended and he came back to Vince, he had gotten sick of the bs he got from fans on the street about the lipsynching, and asked Vince for a favour, and got his friends in the country band Sawyer Brown to appear on the 1998 Unforgiven PPV and let him sing "First Class White Trash" with them live, just to prove he COULD sing. While I can't find the clip on YouTube, I remember him not being half bad.
Counterpoint; I Hate Rap (Curt Hennig & the West Texas Rednecks)
The ONLY reason this song exists is because WCW needed an antogonist to diss Master P after they spent a few million to have the mediocre rap star come in and give some unused b-listers a reason to exist by forming the No-Limit Soldiers.
A good theme song will get a crowd charged and ready for the match. And some theme songs become iconic. Themes can even show a company's faith in a performer. If so and so spends more than two months coming out to, as Danielson called it, "Generic Rock Song #43", chances are the office sees them in the midcard at absolute best. If they get a badass sounding song by an actual band hired to record it, such as Drew McIntyre's "Broken Dreams" by Shaman's Harvest, it suggests the company is hoping for great things from that performer.
A perfect example of the effectiveness of theme music in conveying the mood the audience is hoped to have is Doink the Clown. When Matt Bourne was Doink and a heel, he had what many fans call the best in-house WWE theme song EVER.
After Bourne left and Steve "Brooklyn Brawler" Lombardi was put in the costume as Doink II, (The version with the damn mini-me), the theme was changed to this.
It went from creepy and mood-setting to generic circus music, and the crowd's love of Doink went with it. The happy Doink theme let the crowd know it was piss-break time.
But sometimes for whatever reasons, a wrestler isn't content to just take the theme they're given. Sometimes, for reasons ranging from a gimmick album, a promotional purpose, or a wrestler stretching their own creative legs, a performer will do their own theme song.
Now obviously results of this endeavor are very mixed. No one with actual taste in music will argue that R-Truth's rythmless cookie-cutter rap themes were good for anything but getting kids and moms in the crowd to sing along. From way back in 2002 with "Gettin' Rowdy" in his first WWE run as K-Kwik, (Derailed by Road Dog getting fired shortly after their tag-team debut), to "Get Krunk" which made so little sense even for Talentless Truth that they soon went back to "What's Up" so the crowd could remember to pop for him, R-Truth is a good argument for NOT letting most wrestlers near a recording studio.
So let's get started here. My criteria for compiling this list is as follows.
- Wrestler must at least be in tune. No one expects a wrestler to have Christina Aguilera's pipes, but they need to at least sound better than Kei$ha.
- Theme must have been used regularly for minimum 6 months on TV, long enough to be recognizable to the fans.
- For context of how good they are, I'll include with each entry a counterpoint of a similar song that was just horrible.
So here we go.
#6; With My Baby Tonight (Sung by Brian "Road Dog" Armstrong)
Used at first to get Jeff Jarrett's "aspiring country music star" gimmick over, the problem was that Jarrett wasn't comfortable singing at the time and didn't want to try to. Luckily someone had overheard Jarrett's on-screen flunkie the Roadie sing in the shower, so Brian sang the sand and Jeff lipsynched it on TV and PPV. As far as the story goes, this was not originally intended to be revealed publicly, until Jeff had a falling out with management and made his first brief jump to WCW, leaving Brian adrift without a storyline. So it was decided that the "lipsynching scanal" would be revealed, giving Brian a storyline to get him off on his own as a singles wrestler. Not only did the song, which actually got some airplay on country music stations, become the entrance music of the rechristened "Road Dog Jesse James", for the next year he actually sang it live every week as he entered. It faled to get him over though, and he eventually got paired with the struggling Billy Gunn following Bart Gunn leaving the company, forming one of the WWE's most popular tag-teams.
Honorable mention here; When Jeff Jarrett's first WCW stint ended and he came back to Vince, he had gotten sick of the bs he got from fans on the street about the lipsynching, and asked Vince for a favour, and got his friends in the country band Sawyer Brown to appear on the 1998 Unforgiven PPV and let him sing "First Class White Trash" with them live, just to prove he COULD sing. While I can't find the clip on YouTube, I remember him not being half bad.
Counterpoint; I Hate Rap (Curt Hennig & the West Texas Rednecks)
The ONLY reason this song exists is because WCW needed an antogonist to diss Master P after they spent a few million to have the mediocre rap star come in and give some unused b-listers a reason to exist by forming the No-Limit Soldiers.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
On The Reality Of Wrestling (With apologies to Phil Clark)
I'm going to be blunt.
I really don't give a flying fuck if some of the more pompous jaded guys who read me take issue with anything I say. I don't care if some think I overreact when a pompous idiot insults me blanketly because I happen to have a different take on the business. I don't think it's a bad think that I'm not so jaded that I can actually be concerned for the health of the performers I watch on TV. But despite the backpeddalling one of my detractors attempted after Glazer came to my defense, his first volley at me was very much an insult.
The man called me a rube and said I make ALL fans look bad. Why? Because in my opinion it looked like something was legitimately wrong with the Undertaker. His condition following the match was very much out of character. Apparently that makes me a markish rube, stupid enough to believe the product. The jerk in question, (out of respect for Glazer I won't name the guy, it's not as if it'd be hard to find out on your own), is apparently so jaded that he believes every single thing we see on screen is all part of the script, and nothing ever goes wrong, and anyone who's smart enough to pay attention and notice when something has clearly gone off-script is actually a moron in the "It's still real to me dammit!!!" camp. Yes, he actually went there and quoted the weepy redneck meme on me.
If anyone is wondering why I'm wasting column space to rehash this, it's because I think the more jaded fans need a serious reality check.
THINGS GO WRONG IN THE RING.
That is a bloody fact. No matter how jaded you are, you can't really deny that fact and expect me to take you seriously. And yes, I tend to get very visceral when I feel like I'm being unfairly shit on or trolled. That's not going to change, and I'm not going to apologise for being that way. I spent the bulk of my life being a carpet, letting people walk all over me because I didn't want to rock the boat. I don't lay down for ANYONE anymore, least of all a pompous jaded ass who thinks my having compassion for the health of the performers I enjoy watching makes me an idiot.
So let's give a reality check to the jaded "It's all in the script" assholes out there.
If that was all in the script, Mitsuharu was the single most dedicated to kayfabe wrestler EVER. I mean jesus, dying IN the ring? That's commitment right there folks! I guess All-Japan really wanted some shocking press. I wonder how they rigged his heart stopping? Of course we all know Misawa is living on his fat pay-off in the mountains of northern Japan, a wealthy hermit who really sold that whole dying in the ring thing.
Uh huh.
Wow, Time-Warner sure made the most of the money they kept throwing at WCW in it's dying days. That was the most seriously awesome special effect stunt I've ever seen! I mean come on! It HAD to be in the script, why else would Steiner have kept kicking him? Well, besides the roid-rot in his brain. But seriously, that was the most awesome scripted injury EVER!!!
*coughs*
Well of course THAT one is so fake. WWE NEVER lets the women wrestlers actually DO anything, so there's no way such an injury on Lita could've been real, it simply MUST have been part of the match lay-out, amirite?
*stares blankly at a wall trying not to laugh derisively*
And last but not least.
Because Joey Mercury was willing to take "blading" the it's most logical extreme. He had a surgical scalpel hidden in the sole of his boot and gouged his own lip and nose off his face. I mean SOMEONE had to do it to sell how dangerous ladder matches are, and he just drew the short straw I guess. And for his sacrifice he was rewarded with a long main-event push and.... oh... wait.....
These are just 4 examples. YouTube is littered with literally hundreds of clips of serious legit injuries occuring in the ring, things not going as planned, bad mojo striking mid-match. But I'm a rube for being worried about Mark Calloway's health.
RIIIIIIGHT.
I'll spare you all the argument about the possibility of sexism and/or homophobia being an undercurrant to the detractors I get, (while Wheeler gets cheered and high-fived for his frequent and unneccesary fat chick jokes), but the bottom line is, I have yet to recieve a criticism here not based in trollish bullshit. I'm a female lesbian wrestling fan with a brain and an opinion, and I'm not shutting up or toning it down for anyone. I'm not going to change my opinion on something without being given a good sound logical reason to do so. And I'm NEVER going to accept a "Your an idiot becausae I disagree with you haw haw" attitude with a "Thank you sir May I have another". Someone dumps on me, I dodge the bucket and drop them into it.
Things DO go wrong in wrestling. Edge's forced retirement proves that much. His announcement on Raw was surreal, and depressing, and yes it made me cry, so sue me. My detractors will probably call me a rube for caring, but while I'm sad he has to quit, I'm happy he's walking away while he's still physically able to do so.
So yeah, I'd still like to know if Mark Calloway is okay. But I'm glad I at least know Edge will be now.
Next week I'll get back to witty insightful top 5 lists. Any suggestions on a topic?
I really don't give a flying fuck if some of the more pompous jaded guys who read me take issue with anything I say. I don't care if some think I overreact when a pompous idiot insults me blanketly because I happen to have a different take on the business. I don't think it's a bad think that I'm not so jaded that I can actually be concerned for the health of the performers I watch on TV. But despite the backpeddalling one of my detractors attempted after Glazer came to my defense, his first volley at me was very much an insult.
The man called me a rube and said I make ALL fans look bad. Why? Because in my opinion it looked like something was legitimately wrong with the Undertaker. His condition following the match was very much out of character. Apparently that makes me a markish rube, stupid enough to believe the product. The jerk in question, (out of respect for Glazer I won't name the guy, it's not as if it'd be hard to find out on your own), is apparently so jaded that he believes every single thing we see on screen is all part of the script, and nothing ever goes wrong, and anyone who's smart enough to pay attention and notice when something has clearly gone off-script is actually a moron in the "It's still real to me dammit!!!" camp. Yes, he actually went there and quoted the weepy redneck meme on me.
If anyone is wondering why I'm wasting column space to rehash this, it's because I think the more jaded fans need a serious reality check.
THINGS GO WRONG IN THE RING.
That is a bloody fact. No matter how jaded you are, you can't really deny that fact and expect me to take you seriously. And yes, I tend to get very visceral when I feel like I'm being unfairly shit on or trolled. That's not going to change, and I'm not going to apologise for being that way. I spent the bulk of my life being a carpet, letting people walk all over me because I didn't want to rock the boat. I don't lay down for ANYONE anymore, least of all a pompous jaded ass who thinks my having compassion for the health of the performers I enjoy watching makes me an idiot.
So let's give a reality check to the jaded "It's all in the script" assholes out there.
If that was all in the script, Mitsuharu was the single most dedicated to kayfabe wrestler EVER. I mean jesus, dying IN the ring? That's commitment right there folks! I guess All-Japan really wanted some shocking press. I wonder how they rigged his heart stopping? Of course we all know Misawa is living on his fat pay-off in the mountains of northern Japan, a wealthy hermit who really sold that whole dying in the ring thing.
Uh huh.
Wow, Time-Warner sure made the most of the money they kept throwing at WCW in it's dying days. That was the most seriously awesome special effect stunt I've ever seen! I mean come on! It HAD to be in the script, why else would Steiner have kept kicking him? Well, besides the roid-rot in his brain. But seriously, that was the most awesome scripted injury EVER!!!
*coughs*
Well of course THAT one is so fake. WWE NEVER lets the women wrestlers actually DO anything, so there's no way such an injury on Lita could've been real, it simply MUST have been part of the match lay-out, amirite?
*stares blankly at a wall trying not to laugh derisively*
And last but not least.
Because Joey Mercury was willing to take "blading" the it's most logical extreme. He had a surgical scalpel hidden in the sole of his boot and gouged his own lip and nose off his face. I mean SOMEONE had to do it to sell how dangerous ladder matches are, and he just drew the short straw I guess. And for his sacrifice he was rewarded with a long main-event push and.... oh... wait.....
These are just 4 examples. YouTube is littered with literally hundreds of clips of serious legit injuries occuring in the ring, things not going as planned, bad mojo striking mid-match. But I'm a rube for being worried about Mark Calloway's health.
RIIIIIIGHT.
I'll spare you all the argument about the possibility of sexism and/or homophobia being an undercurrant to the detractors I get, (while Wheeler gets cheered and high-fived for his frequent and unneccesary fat chick jokes), but the bottom line is, I have yet to recieve a criticism here not based in trollish bullshit. I'm a female lesbian wrestling fan with a brain and an opinion, and I'm not shutting up or toning it down for anyone. I'm not going to change my opinion on something without being given a good sound logical reason to do so. And I'm NEVER going to accept a "Your an idiot becausae I disagree with you haw haw" attitude with a "Thank you sir May I have another". Someone dumps on me, I dodge the bucket and drop them into it.
Things DO go wrong in wrestling. Edge's forced retirement proves that much. His announcement on Raw was surreal, and depressing, and yes it made me cry, so sue me. My detractors will probably call me a rube for caring, but while I'm sad he has to quit, I'm happy he's walking away while he's still physically able to do so.
So yeah, I'd still like to know if Mark Calloway is okay. But I'm glad I at least know Edge will be now.
Next week I'll get back to witty insightful top 5 lists. Any suggestions on a topic?
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