testo junkie
in which i'm just me but more
i’m rereading testo junkie, which i first read in college without understanding it, and again when i started hrt, and again. it’s delightful when paul preciado finally moves on from setting up the pharmocopornographic era with his swollen lexicon on how society has bought and sold gender to us since world war 1 etc etc and starts to unhinge himself; at one point he proposes that every cis female on earth should shoot a little testosterone as a treat, and that shouldn’t bar them from having sex with cis guys—it would just all be gay sex with the possibility of vaginal penetration. you know what? go off, king.
democratizing the consumption of hormones, which continue to be viewed as sexual, would require a radical change of our gender and sexual topographies. freely circulating and collectively used testosterone is dynamite for the heterosexual regime. it’s no longer a question of asserting the existence of four or five sexes… but of accepting the completely technoconstructed, undeniably multiple, malleable, and mutable nature of bodies and pleasure.
on 12/12 it will be a year to the day of the first time i slathered testosterone gel onto my upper arms. it looked like hand sanitizer, and smelled like hand sanitizer, but when i squeezed out the little packet i held the contents—a clear and shining gel—up to the sunlight and thought, this is angel cum.
when i noticed a few months later that the packets were made in perrigo, based in israel, i switched to shots. the nurse was under the impression that i was starting hrt that very day, and used a lot of language that i’m sure was meant to be loving—that it was “people like me” who made her job worthwhile, that people’s bodies need “nutrients, like trees do,” and the only difference between me and “other people” is that i don’t make my own nutrients and my nutrients have to be injected into my quadriceps muscle every week with an inch-long 24-gauge single-use needle. people shoot insulin too, though, and cis bodybuilders are the biggest users of testosterone, the way that 97% of chest masculinization surgeries performed on minors are for cis teen boys.
gender-affirming care is for every gender, is what i’m saying, is what i was thinking, as i sank the needle into my thigh for the first time, without hesitation, straight down and steady “like a raindrop,” my nurse said.
a year ago i was in a very different place, freshly out of a terrifyingly abusive relationship, sending a body that i did not love to go make love with people i didn’t love. no matter how many ways they fucked me they could not make me feel fuckable. heightened fuckability is not why i started hrt, though of course i wanted that too—but more than to be desirable to other people, i wanted me to want to fuck me.
i said to a friend, “when you were a teen, did you jerk off every day?” he said, “like twice a day on a slow day.” i said, “do you love how you can shoot ropes?” he said, “it’s not that great.” but that’s the thing—some things i’ll never know.
t is only a threshold, a molecular door, a becoming between multiplicities.
but there were things i could know but didn’t—i didn’t know if i wanted bottom growth, for example. i was so apprehensive!, looking up dht blockers just in case i wanted the petunia’s obscene gesture to stop at some point. i didn’t know back then, but i literally fucked around and found out. a year on and a couple of inches later i’m in love with my tdick, i take incredible nudes and i fuck like a champ.
pre-hrt i’ve never felt any particular way about what i was working with down there, hated the words clit, pussy, pekpek, and asked that these never be said in bed. i convinced my gynecologist, a sweet grandmotherly type from new delhi, all of four feet eight inches tall, to call it a bussy. she said, waving the lubed-up wand, “sorry but this will be cold on your bussy.” it’s called transvaginal—the ultrasound, i mean, that she did on me. she checks on the cysts in my ovaries every six months. they’re benign, but they’ve caused me debilitating pain that lasted a week every month for much of my adult life. my period stopped about three months into hrt, and so did the pain. peaceful bussy, raging tdick.
the slightest hormonal change affects all the functions of the body: the desire to eat and to fuck, circulation and the absorption of minerals, the biological rhythms regulating sleep, etc etc—in fact the entire biochemical physiology of the organism. none of these modifications can be qualified as masculine. but of all the mental and physical effects caused by self-intoxication based on testosterone… the feeling of transgressing limits of gender that have been socially imposed on me was without a doubt the most intense.
talking about my dick so much feels so boy but boy isn’t real; i suspect that people born with biological dicks don’t actually talk about dick as much as, well, this particular iteration of boy. and so i’m not really talking to you as a boy but rather as someone who had a desire and followed it, beyond the limits of the fiction that is gender. of course t has improved my quality of life in so many other ways, you can ask me about that or i’ll write about it in the future— suffice it to say i’m simply less afraid of the world, and more sure of my place in it. and yes, sure, at this point, i would fuck me, i fuck people like me, but i would also love me. i love people like me. devotion, i have discovered, is a pursuit that pursues you. if you can’t stop thinking about something, why wait for any other sign?
i do sincerely believe anyone who is even remotely interested in hrt should try it. or at least be able to, despite what parents, lovers, governments say. simply because you never know what you might want until you try it, and to try it is the only way to find out. besides, if you decide hrt isn’t for you, you can always stop. what matters is that everyone, even if hrt has never in their entire life crossed their mind, should be able to start. i did, and i can’t imagine i’ll ever stop, but again, who knows?
what i do know now—because i have done what i’ve done—is that it will be wrong and bad of someone else to tell me to stop. america’s government plays by a flipped script, insisting that “these people” are telling kids to start. so maybe i’m wrong and bad and proving these demons correct when i say this but, you know what? sure, start! and then maybe you’ll stop! or maybe you won’t, and you’ll become one of the many many people who get their nutrients from outside their body. what matters, i think, is that you get to find out for yourself if you’re that kind of tree, that you hold your self up to the light (angel cum) and investigate what’s possible, before demons turn out the sun.