By Pete Moss
September 1, 2001
This article began
with a E from my friend Gina (not her real name) who works for a weekly
tab here in LA. Gina is an assistant editor and I've never met her face
to face, but that's ok 'cause it keeps the romance alive. Gina consistently
runs my letters to the editor. Saleeby reminded about this whole episode
with his piece about how he wrote crazy letters
to the editor for National Lampoon when he was seventeen. Gina and I
have a symbiotic relationship in that she wants to make it as a full-on
editor one day, and I want to get paid for the shit I write. If she
breaks a hot new writer that helps her case and if I establish a lasting
relationship with a rising editor that makes mine. So anyway, back in
the day when I used to be online, I was whining to Gina about how I
thought I should get paid for all these wacky letters to the editor
that her rag was running, penned by me. And, like an editor, Gina shot
back, "Look, 'letters to the editor' is not a paying genre. Why don't
you try writing an article?"
"You mean an article? Like,
that's actually about something?" I asked.
"Yeah, we pay for that,"
Gina replied.
"What should it be about?"
"I don't know. Something
you know about."
"Well .... how about motorcycle
messengers?"
"Naw. We had two bike related
articles in the past year."
"Uh ..."
"How about transsexuals?"
goes Gina.
"Transsexuals?"
"Transgendered people, that's
cool right now."
"Transgendered people?"
"C'mon, you know who I'm
talking about."
"I don't know nothing about
that."
"OK, forget I mentioned
that. Do some research."
"Research?!"
"Yeah, here's where you
can start looking..."
Gina gave me some web addresses
and the name of a club that had a weekly night for transgendered peeps.
I said I'd check it out. The first thing I did was go online, and I
was instantly fascinated. Turns out changing somebody's sex is a pretty
involved bit of business. And there are different levels of quality
control. If you're a guy and you want to be a chick (and what guy hasn't
fantasized about being a chick at least for one night and having that
awesome power of deciding who gets nookie and who doesn't) you better
be prepared to lay out at least 25K for a good job.
99 percent of the guys who
wanna be chicks, wanna be hot chicks. Almost nobody goes to the doctor
and says 'I wanna be a dumpy housewife from Lakewood'. The guys all
wanna be porn star style chicks. To take some ugly old guy and turn
him into a sex bomb is no mean feat. But sex change specialists thrive
on that kind of challenge. So the first order of business is to get
the guy into classes to learn about how to dress and wear makeup. They
call it 'counseling', but I'll bet most of the guys already know more
about hottie outfits and eye shadow than the counselors. Then there's
hormone treatment, where they pump up your estrogen levels with a variety
of feminizing chemicals. This is where the bills start to pile up. But
if you get past that, the next thing is surgery. Not surprisingly most
candidates stop short of actual surgery. The surgery is pretty basic,
but requires a pretty big commitment. You whack off the Johnson and
family jewels. Take the Johnson and scrape out all the gristle, turn
it inside out and sew it into the cavity you've dug out between the
legs. Depending on how much cash the customer has you can go in for
laser removal of hair follicles and shaving the pelvic bone and any
number of refinements.
You can have just as much
fun playing dress up. Pick up some guy in a bar, lead him on, get him
all hot and bothered, get him some place to do the deed. By the time
he gets the panties off and finds out, he doesn't care. He just wants
to get his rocks off, he'll settle for your mouth or your ass. So most
Trannies stop short of surgery, figuring they've got the best of both
worlds.
So much for the guys who
wanna be chicks, what about chicks who want to be guys? This presents
much more of a problem. In fact, there is no universally accepted procedure.
Some practitioners go in for whacking the clitoris and adding skin grafts
and gristle and then sewing this on, with some kind of grafted scrotum
and a little hand-operated pump to simulate an erection. This method
rarely results in anything longer than 4 or 5 inches. Other artisans,
working under less governmental oversight in places like Calcutta or
Tijuana have been known to employ the members of pigs or ponies.
Basically, for a female
wanting to become a male, it's tough. The best bet is to go to sex-toy
shop and buy a strap-on; a practice the drag-kings refer to as 'packing
heat'.
So there we have it. The
article I wrote for Gina was too short. The same thing editors are always
whining at me about. But I hate to beat around the bush. As Maria Maulduar
said, 'it's not the meat it's the motion'. Why take forty words to say
what can be said in ten? Unfortunately this attitude doesn't make me
any money, which is the only thing that matters in this old world.
