Brought to you by the letter T

I had a transboy friend tell me a while back that he 'wasn't really intersted in trans stuff anymore'. Somehow it didn't come as much of a surprise, but it did get me thinking about the differences between transition and transgression, the different desired outcomes of trans 'projects', transsexual in relation to transgender (I tend to see the former as transition and the latter as transgression)...

Volcano and Halberstam, in the Drag King Book, quote Hans that 'Transgender means that you can actually change secondary gender characteristics without fully changing from male to female' and then go on to comment on 'the essentially contradictory project of transgenderism. On the one hand, transgenderism expresses the detachment of sex from gender and signifies the production of new forms of embodiment; on the other hand, however, as many transgender men begin hormones and start to live as men, transgenderism seems to confirm the dominance of gender binarism' (1999:127-128)

A boy I know just had chest surgery, with two more scheduled for it in the next few months. A friend has just revealed that she now identifies as he, and yet another gorgeous butch is starting to question her female identity to me. Pronoun confusion and proper noun confusion everywhere!