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Draw Blood
Draw Blood is a 56 page chapbook containing 16 of Julia's spoken word pieces, published November 2004, Hot Tranny Action press (Oakland, CA).
Note: Many of the spoken word/slam poems from Draw Blood, as well from Julia's previous chapbook Either/Or, are now collected in her third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism.
Table of Contents: intro cocky terminated sleeping sickness mix and match opening analogy endgame submissive streak kinky self-deception calling a spade a spade on being a woman period piece draw blood deconstructive surgery open letter to lisa vogel fighting words bio copyright 2003, 2004 julia serano, all rights reserved excerpts: cocky we are often told that we are living in a man’s world and in this culture no image represents power more than the phallic symbol and if the penis equals power then i am illegally armed and my body full of freckles and feminine curves is like a stealth bomber i fly just under everyone’s radar but only because they choose not to see me only because nobody wants to believe that a sweet, petite green-eyed girl like me could ever possibly be packing heat they say that it’s not the size of the wand but the magic that it does well after many months on estrogen my penis is pretty darn small but she has supernatural powers she’s like some pissed off ancient greek goddess my penis changes the meanings of everything and because of her every single one of my heterosexual ex-girlfriends has slept with a lesbian and every guy who hits on me these days could be accused of being gay because my penis bends everyone who's straight and she can make the most entitled cat callers and womanizers scurry away with their tails between their legs all because of six small words “i use to be a man” and being a transsexual i realize that most people see my femaleness as a facade an elaborate hoax but i am more real than any of them could ever hope to be i am real because unlike them my gender is not based upon what other people think of me and that may make me an object of ridicule but i am not the butt of anyone's jokes because i know that people make fun of trannies because we are the one thing that they fear the most i am more bad-ass than any gangster more dangerous than an entire marine corps my penis is more powerful than the cocks of a million alpha males all put together because when a man is defined as that which is not female and a woman is defined as that which is not male then i am the loose thread that unravels the gender of everyone around me they say its not the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean well my penis gives most people sea sickness she makes them dizzy because most people are not secure enough with their own masculinity or femininity to survive a night in the sack with me my penis turns simple sexual pleasures into political acts she turns biological impossibilities into cold hard facts my penis is the curiosity that you’ve been told will kill your cat see my penis can be deadly especially to me and i’ve heard almost every true crime story about what frightened macho boys do to trannies every bludgeoning and mutilation bodies beaten beyond recognition and i’ve imagined it all happening to me in first person and every time i get up in front of a crowd to perform one of my out-spoken word pieces i can feel myself morph into a slow moving target and at the end of the night when i walk back to my car i'll be holding my breath half-expecting that inevitable blow to the back of the head and sometimes i wonder why it hasn’t happened yet and sometimes i wonder why they don’t just get it over with and sometimes i just wish i was dead see i never wanted to be dangerous and i spent most of my life wishing that i didn’t have a penis and i used to hate my body for not making any sense to me and these days i often hate it for being so in between and some mornings i can barely get up out of bed because my body is so weighed down with ugly meanings that my culture has dumped all over me see i've been made to feel shame and self-loathing so that everyone else can take comfort in what their bodies mean and if i seem a bit cocky well that's because i refuse to make apologies for my body anymore i am through being the human sacrifice offered up to appease other people’s gender issues some women have a penis some men don’t and the rest of the world is just going to have to get the fuck over it and if i am destined to be the loose thread that unravels the gender of everyone around me then i am going to pull and pull and pull until everyone is exposed until they all finally see that all along they were merely wearing the emperor’s new clothes and i know that people don’t like it when i turn the tables on them but what the hell else am i supposed to do? play a hand that was dealt from a deck of cards that's been stacked against me? and if i seem a bit cocky that’s because i've spent my entire life being backed into a corner and like a frightened animal pumped full of adrenaline and sick of hunger and hiding i am finally desperate enough to come out fighting. sleeping sickness in the name of the father the son and the holy spirit amen that’s how it begins my nights are spent composing insomniac open letters to you two hour long monologues that end in exhaustion and sometimes in the middle of my day i’ll remember that i fell asleep before ending my previous night’s prayer with a proper amen and i'll wonder whether my channel to you is still open my every word an invocation the sounds of my atari games little league practice and eighth grade history class becoming the annoying background noise of heaven and maybe forgetting to say amen makes my life one long continuous prayer and if so, then you were there that afternoon when i tucked my penis tightly behind my legs just to see what i’d look like without it when i wrapped bedroom curtains around my body like a prom dress turned tattered shoe laces into necklaces and bracelets and you were there later that same night when i began another prayer within a prayer to once again beg for your forgiveness wanting to be a girl never came up in CCD or sunday mass and it’s not covered in the ten commandments but from everything the nuns and priests taught me about you i know that you do not approve and when i turn to your holy words to look for anything that might shed some light onto whatever this is that i’m going through i keep returning to the same story the one about abraham and how you commanded him to sacrifice his son to you stopping the blade only seconds before he actually went through with it and forgive me father for i can’t help but think that that was a fucked up thing to do and maybe i'm like abraham and this is just another one of your tests maybe you put girl thoughts into the heads of twelve year old boys just to see how they'll react maybe i'm an experiment and you're up in heaven looking down on me taking notes as i tear myself apart in self-hatred tossing and turning in bed as if acting out my inevitable burning in hell and at first my sins made me even more devout i’d lie awake each night clutching the glow-in-the-dark rosary beads that my grandmother gave me repeating the words that i once heard her say “blessed are those who have not seen yet believe” and i want to believe but more and more it just feels like you're torturing me and i’m doing the best that i can to plug up all the holes in this disintegrating dam as my brain bleeds rivers of bad thoughts that pour out of my mouth and hands like wounds that won’t clot and i can’t understand why you won’t help when i’ve asked you over and over again to please either turn me into a girl or else make these thoughts stop the nuns say that you answer all prayers it’s just that sometimes the answer is no well, i'm tired of praying to a god who only offers me thou shalt not's i'm tired from lack of sleep from keeping secrets that burn so much that they hollow me out i am tired of hurting so much that sometimes i pray that i don't wake up so forgive me father for i have sinned i have dared to share all of myself with you forcing you to watch one long sacrilegious prayer within a prayer within a prayer within a prayer like a serpent swallowing its own soul like a serpent swallowing itself whole and maybe tonight i'll finally be cured of this sleeping sickness because the last few years of living in absolute shame and unbelievable pain has made me fearless enough to finally say amen. mix and match we are quite a pair a year and a half ago we were pronounced husband and wife and you're still my wife only now i'm your was-band and when we first met five years ago i was a pre-transition transsexual and you were calling yourself bisexual and we gallivanted around berkeley and oakland disguised as a straight couple we had so much fun with the roles of boy and girl we gave oscar winning performances i wore the condoms and you wore the diaphragm and we’d ham it up in the sack no one else has ever made me laugh so much during sex and afterwards we’d lay in that cliché post-coital pose you'd curl your body up along my side and i'd wrap my arm around you as if i was protecting you from something and these days when we strike the same pose your head rests on my developing breasts and when i cradle you in my arms i feel almost maternal and if sometimes it’s like i’m your mother then other times you’re my obnoxious younger brother who knew that you a radical feminist dyke could get such eighth grader amusement out of snapping the backs of my bra straps or giving my breasts a quick squeeze the way harpo marx honks his horn and forgive the pun but it really does make me horny and if sometimes you’re my younger brother then other times you're my big sister guiding me with advice sharing all of the things that you learned having reached womanhood before me and if anyone were to ask this ex-boy what it's like to be in a lesbian relationship i would say that it feels kind of like being sisters best friends and lovers simultaneously and i know that when most people see a same-sexed couple they always try to figure out who's the butch and who's the femme as if all queer people were latent heterosexuals more often than not they base their impressions on hairstyle but we keep them second-guessing your short hair is dyed a fabulous bright red and often accessorized with barrettes too cute for most pre-schoolers and i often wear my long curly hair tied back in a practical ponytail i guess i’m the femme tomboy and you’re the butch girlie-girl and i know that when most people think about lesbian sex they imagine lots and lots of cuddling and we do some of that in between the wrestling and the tickling and the biting and the coming and let’s not forget all of the musical numbers comedy routines and sex toys and sometimes i wrap a strap-on over my real mccoy and i fuck you with all of the sweetness of a girl and the aggression of a boy and sometimes you like it when you’re on top and sometimes you ask me to tie you up and i'll never forget the time that you turned bondage into a magic act while i stepped out of the room for a minute you un-did your knots and sprung to your feet like houdini shouting “ta-da!” like i said, when we have sex you crack me up our love is like one long list of seemingly contradictory anecdotes before i transitioned our apartment doorbell was labeled with our names “tom serano and dani eurynome” but our landlord misspelled your name “D-A-N-N-Y” and we joked that we were secretly two gay boys our love transcends all categories all orientations and all identities our love is not about me being this and you being that we are not merely each other's better half no, we are everything to each another some people insist that opposites attract but i’m not so sure about that i’m no longer impressed with boy versus girl butch versus femme i’ve found that i can be any of those things it just depends on what mood i’m in and i used to be really into the idea of tops and bottoms dominants and submissives but these days i get off on the fact that we’re both such perfect switches and no matter how you serve it our love is always delicious because we mix and match. deconstructive surgery being an out trans-woman there is one question that follows me around where ever i go inquiring minds want to know have i "gone all the way" you know, have i had “the surgery” and to me, it feels like a no-win inquisition if i tell the truth: “no, not yet” then i get to deal with everybody else's emotional baggage because nothing makes people more paranoid than a real life female with a phallus straight men shake in their boots at the possibility that they might accidentally become attracted to me and those who patrol the gates of women-only spaces are often dead-set on discriminating against me driven by the ridiculous belief that my girly little estrogenized penis is somehow still pulsating with hyper-masculine energy on the other hand having the operation has its own stigma attached to it no medical methodology induces as much fear and anxiety as SRS sex reassignment surgery a friend told me that he once saw SRS on the video "faces of death" sandwiched in between real life shark attacks and murder attempts some people go so far as to call SRS a form of self-mutilation conveniently ignoring the fact that more common procedures such as nose jobs and liposuction also involve the removal of a small amount of non-essential tissue most people are surprised when i tell them that the surgeons don't really cut the penis off they just turn it inside out and move the nerve endings around to make a functional and realistic looking clitoris and vagina at that point, i am invariably asked if i want SRS so that i can have sex with a man and you should see the blank stares i get when i reply: "no, but i’m really looking forward to having my wife fuck me with a strap-on dildo" see, we live in a phallic-obsessed culture where we're all trained to believe that everything having to do with gender and sexuality somehow revolves around the penis that's why so many clueless straight guys come on to dykes with pick-up lines like "once you've had the real thing baby you won't ever go back" they actually buy into that crap and it is also why most people can't even talk about transsexual women or SRS without centering the discussion around "the penis" but the thing that nobody seems to get is that my desire to have SRS has absolutely nothing to do with my penis this is about me wanting to have a clitoris and vagina but we don’t even have the language to describe this desire it's the ultimate freudian slipwe naturally assume that all young girls suffer from penis envy but we can’t imagine that any boy could possibly have its polar opposite it’s all in the words we use when someone is bold or brave we say they have “balls” while words like "pussy" and "cunt" are only ever spoken as insults and while everyone seems to understand how the penis works we treat female genitalia like they’re a mysterious black box most young women aren't even taught the names of all their body parts many people are unaware that the clitoris even exists and as for the vagina well aren’t we all taught to see that as simply the hole where the penis is supposed to go? so it’s no wonder that most people assume that i must be mentally ill because in this culture wanting to be a woman is something most people find literally unimaginable and when i do have SRS my surgically deconstructed genitals will no doubt be seen by some to be an abomination or blasphemy because my cunt will be the ultimate question mark asking how powerful can the penis really be if a sane and smart person like me decides that she can do without it? and if the world supposedly revolves around the penis then my SRS will knock it off its axis and phallic symbols everywhere will come crashing down like nothing more than a house of cards after all, a cigar is always just a cigar and i am simply me and i refuse to let anyone project their penis obsessions onto my body as far as i’m concerned if they can't fathom why i might want to trade in my penis for a clitoris and vagina then they're the ones who have the gender disorder. fighting words transsexual. transsexual, transsexual, transsexual transsexual, transsexual, transsexual transsexual! i can say it over and over again but i can't change how that word sounds transsexual is the most maligned word in the dictionary it’s the ten-thousand ton ugly assumption that the world has dropped on top of me because as far as most people are concerned that transsexual is just a triple X spam email advertising the one type of porn that no one they know will admit to wacking off to transsexual is a sure-fire one-liner in a jay leno monologue it's howard stern's second favorite word after lesbian i even heard that transsexual women will be coming out to their boyfriends yet again on this week's jerry springer even psycho-babble hacks like doctor laura and doctor phil want in on the tranny action well fuck all of them! i want my fucking word back! it's mine and you can't have it! like the vast majority of transsexuals i grew up closeted but not by choice i was intimidated into silence as a child, i took every dumb ass joke and ignorant hateful comment that i heard about transsexuals and turned them all in on myself it felt like death by a million cuts my developing brain bathed in self-hatred as i learned at a young age that the only way i'd be allowed to survive was if i buried myself alive i kept a twenty-seven year long secret and for most of my life i honestly would have killed myself if i thought there was any chance of having my family and friends find out and that's exactly how the world wanted me to feel because most people are like powder kegs so full of insecurities about their own gender and sexualities that they've become scared to death of me for simply being a spark that they're afraid might set them off so instead, they engage in an unspoken strategy redirecting their fear back at me because they realize that if they can bully me into keeping quiet then they will be free to appropriate my identity and say whatever the fuck they want about me thus turning their worst nightmare into a laughing stock but that's all about to stop because i'm out now and i'm ready to go toe-to-toe with every non-transgendered person who is arrogant enough to assume that they have even the slightest clue of what i'm all about i am calling the whole fucking world out i'm calling out every person who thinks they’ve never met a transsexual before because chances are you've met scores of us you're just stupid enough to believe that we’d be so different from you that you would be able to notice us i'm calling out every person who assumes that transsexuals must be delusional because we don't conform to common sense well fuck that common sense is what tells us the world is flat i'm calling out every paranoid straight boy who assumes that transsexual women are out to deceive him the fact that you are homophobic and conceited doesn't give you the right to take your fears of inadequacy out on me! i'm calling out every woman who believes that being born female makes her more of a woman than me fuck, after spending most of your life never quite measuring up to our society's unrealistic expectations about what a "real woman" should be you have the nerve to turn around and use that same bullshit on me? i'm calling out every person who has ever complained about how difficult it is to use the right pronouns with me here's a helpful hint why not try thinking before you speak i'm calling out every person who has ever called me courageous because after hearing that a hundred times it just sounds like the nicest possible way of saying "i'm glad i'm not in your shoes" i'm calling out every person who has offered me back-handed compliments like "wow, i never would have guessed" or "you're so lucky you're able to pass" oh, so i should be grateful that i don’t look like a transsexual? well fuck that, i am a transsexual! and while i'm at it i'm calling myself out for every time i pretended that being a transsexual was no big deal every time i played it down so that somebody else wouldn't feel so uncomfortable around me fuck everyone who has ever felt uncomfortable around me! and fuck me for every time i tried to make the best of the role of circus freak jumping through everyone's hoops and juggling their false impressions of me fuck me for not having the guts to just be a bull dozer and run all their expectations right the fuck over fuck me for every time i worried about what others might think when all along i should have been shouting out "shut the fuck up!" at the top of my lungs because the whole fucking world doesn't know what the fuck they're talking about everyone needs to stop talking about transsexuals and listen to what we have to say for once so shut the fuck up! because transsexual is our word and you can't have it anymore. |
julia serano ©2002-2024