Here’s the time in the blog where Cock takes the stage and shares a little transdudely tirade…My apologies for adding yet another moment to your day where a big, white dong is on center stage.  But I just gotta get it out.

First, a little background.  I moved from a super conservative Colorado city to San Francisco almost 5 years ago to start my transition.  I didn’t really have any reference point or words for my identity – as I packed everything I owned into my little car and drove over to my dad’s house to blurt out something along the lines of:

“I’m moving to California – I can’t be me in this place.”

Dad: “What do you mean, who are you?”

Cock: “I’ve never felt like a girl.  I’m not quite a boy.  I don’t know how to explain it, but I gotta go.”

Dad: “I don’t understand.”

Cock: “You never understand.”…Drops the mic and drives away.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I had been exploring what I now have words and labels for – questioning where I fell between agender, gender queer, transgender and on.  I knew I wasn’t a lady and I wanted a beard and for my boobies to go away, and after 6 months of Denver “gender therapy” I did not get the green light on HRT so I found an informed consent clinic (also known as the great Planned Parenthood of Sacramento) and was out the door.

Almost two years later, after finding transmasculine community and identifying all of my feelings of ‘not a girl’ to be translated to ‘trans man,’ I did what my good friend Atypical had told me since day one NOT to do:

He said: “You’d better pay attention, because one day, you will wake up with a beard and wonder how it got there.”

He was right.  I had slipped into the majority of the Golden Gate City and was being perceived as a gay white man.  (For those of you who don’t know, SF isn’t actually a super queer place, unless you consider queer the epicenter of white man power x2)

I was starting to pass everywhere as male and I saw my sense of queer visibility slip away along with the width of my hips.

I freaked out.  Not entirely in a bad way, but certainly in a “stop taking T, quit your job, move into a van and go off the grid” kinda way.

It lasted about 10 months and I am now about 10 months back on the sauce, 6 months post op and slowly slipping into pseudo stealth mode – Where I only disclose my trans identity when it is safe, relevant and purposeful.  More and more I am finding how rare this is and how much my previous disclosures were really about gaining access into female community.

See, another thing my good friend would tell me that I didn’t quite get until now when I went on about how much I missed lady community…”You can’t have it both ways…”

To this, I thought: “I’m a trans, pan, queermo – of course I can have it EVERY way!!!”

Now, I get it.  I know that my brain and heart are much happier in a testosterone driven body.  And I know that being a white trans man doesn’t mean I get passage into female community.  Like other men, if I want a holding and loving community, I have to help to create it – not just have ownership of it because I happen to have had an experience which makes me feel entitled to it.  And as a man – I am not entitled to female space.  As I hold process and nurturing, this only means I am a man who values these traits that our culture deems feminine, nothing more.

So as I reconcile shedding shame in stories of stealth hood and accept growing up as a white dude who happens to have a female social history, I reflect on the words of a wise friend and try to find a shred of humility as I own my privilege.

“You can’t have it both ways, man.  Deal with it.”

In gender-bending solidarity,

{COCK} Asia