💾 Archived View for gemini.estradiol.cloud › ~rumblestrips › journal › 2024 › 2024-04-04-peak-perfor… captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:38:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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don't stake too much in me
don't make me fall in love again
we try this over you and falling over me into your bedroom
stay for the afternoon and then go back to work
and soon i’m coming home again
coming home again
for all intents and purposes i am not what most people think of as an ideal trans woman. (sadly, this also includes a lot of other trans women.) my body is not small, but rather rugged and sturdy. i have a belly and tiny tits and a decent ass that gets increasingly peach-like over time. when i look at myself, though, i see myself as a beautiful creature. i think this started to happen alongside a significant decrease in dysphoria once i accepted that i might be a butch — the rara avis of gender presentation and identity. the butch i am is the person i longed to be, and i love this version of myself more and more.
i'd always looked up to butches when i was a younger, sexually confused inhabitant of the wrong body. this ranged from old school working class butches that i saw at my first gay bar that i'd go to with my high school ex, fancy academic butches (botanists! working artists! literature profs!) that i ran into throughout college and grad school, and the butchy campusdyke friends i ran with who really went out and made their own fashion sense rather than being hidebound (lol) by the motorcycle jacket-cum-501s look.
i guess it's fairly similar to me that i made my own path. i guess i have my femme moments (says the girl who bought two dresses and a skirt last weekend), but i really gravitate to a soft butch. my butch is that of velvet and leather, of the scents of a barbershop, of boots and carabiners, of alpaca and teak. it's not "gentleman butch," as i am not a gentleman, nor trying to be one. for me, butchness is a form of service. it's a butchness that smells of frankincense, cider, and soft cheese. it is the butchness of chivalry, albeit with better class politics: one of the old weapons from a more civilized age.
about four months ago i talked to my doctor about going on supplemental testosterone for "performance" reasons related to sexual function. (i also refer to this as "recreational T", or "shits and giggles T".) every few days, i slather a pump of 12.5 mg per pump gel to my inner thighs and hope and pray for the best. i'll say that the experience has been marginally better, but it's still unpredictable, even when supplemented by something banal like tadalafil (which, to my chagrin, my insurance considers 10 pills to be a 90 day supply).
given this unpredictability of my own sexual function, i logistically supplement my own body with a strap: a harness that looks and functions like a jockstrap, and a starry sapphire silicone dick. when i put it on last (before fucking a new lover), i caught a glance of myself in the mirror. in a moment like that i feel powerful, dramatic, and in control. i feel butch, but not masc. it becomes an extension of my beautiful, chunky body, "imperfect" in all the right places, a functional accessory much like my eyeglasses.
i catch more glances of myself as i ogle my changing body as i return from the gym. three months of weightlifting have led to amazing progress, and i move slowly, intentionally, as i struggle with the weight i take on. i watch videos of me deadlifting 200 lbs. and squatting 185 lbs. and i see a strong, powerful, beautiful butch woman. i look at my broad shoulders and back muscles and feel a longing for more definition — for more butchness as if the sweat that drains me carries it away from me. i look at my thighs, chiseled from three months of squats, and fall in love with myself again. i look at my face, and see the face of not only myself, but my mother. i look at my hands and i see calluses that will scrape across a femme's thigh with the gentleness of a cherry blossom falling to the ground. as the meme goes, this is the ideal female body; you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
patrick califia, "butch desire"
dorothy allison, "her body, mine, and his"
britt h. young, "the total package"
funambulist magazine, "modes of subversion against the pharmacopornographic society"
--- posted 2024-04-04 tags: trans shit, weightlifting, gender ---