Oh Nostalgia, I don't need you anymore

Prior to top surgery, that's what my body looked like. I wasn't on T yet but I was forced to be on estrogen once things started developing in a way that, hmm, maybe didn't make sense for the expected body of someone assigned female at birth.

You have to understand that I was raised in a highly Christian, highly sex avoidant family, and so frank conversations about what genitalia looks like were simply not had. I had to drag it out of my mother when I read a Bible verse discussing, ahem, the sin of the pull out method (yes, that's actually a thing, in the Old Testament) because I had already had the sex talk but had not yet realized that certain things go *inside* of others.

So when it came to my body, I was left with the impression that everyone looks like this, and that it's normal to have to go on hormones to ensure you turn out as a boy or a girl, that everyone is born a bit ambiguous and things either shrink or grow with puberty and medication. After all, my mother is on estrogen (because she had an ovariohysterectomy) and both of my sisters too (because one has PCOS and the other also had an ovariohysterectomy), so why should I have questioned it? It's not like I got that many up close and personal looks at genitalia that isn't mine, and I was not yet sexually active, so why consider that anything might be different?

Until I was old enough to start changing in a locker room, and my friends pointed out that I did not look as expected.

Until I started having sex, and my boyfriends pointed out that while it wasn't a problem for them, they hadn't expected what they found.

Until I went to the doctor for something unrelated, and during an attempt at an internal ultrasound the nurse mentioned that something wasn't quite right here.

I had other signs. A developed Adam's apple. Significant body and facial hair. A deeper voice. I was tall and grew muscle easily. I had traditionally masculine interests and no desire to present femininity. I got along better with boys than girls. My romantic prospects were exclusively gay and bisexual boys and men. My sisters bet that I was going to come out as butch or become a stud, but I never showed interest in girls. No one who knew me was surprised when I came out as transgender.

This is not uncommon, at all, for people with my intersex variation. After the nurse said something, I confronted my mother who confessed that when I was born they were very undecided on whether to assign me male or female at birth, and ultimately chose female due to the presence of a vagina. That body part of mine is small, underdeveloped, and atrophied- the nurse said it was like a very young child's, and she wasn't able to perform an internal ultrasound because there wasn't a wand small enough to fit. I've had partners verify that it's really barely there at all.

Then I started testosterone. Bottom growth has not really happened- a bit of girth, nothing more. But it is certainly in a much more forward position, and much more like those statues than it was before. The flesh behind it certainly does give the appearance of a matching scrotum.

My guess is that if I had not been forced onto estrogen during puberty, I likely would not have needed to go on testosterone as an adult. As it is, I'm on a fairly low dose, less than half of the dose other trans men in my life take, and with significantly more changes.

I did get confirmation that I am intersex, as bittersweet as it is to finally figure things out.

But when I see people fighting over who has experienced what, it's so off of what my actual lived experiences have been that it startles me sometimes.

I'm happy to be a man. Truly, I am. I'm at a point where seeing myself in the mirror makes everything I've been through worth it. I love my masculine body and I love finally seeing myself.

I just know there are plenty of people out there with my exact same variation and my exact same pre-surgical body who also had to fight to be seen as women, just as I had to fight to be seen as a man.

When intersex people ask not to be left out of this conversation, it's not because we hate transgender people. Quite a few of us *are* transgender people- I identified as a trans man long before I even heard of the term intersex. But my life experience fits neither binary sex assignment, and it fits neither binary trans identity, and so we're left asking where do we even fit, in the grand scheme of things?

I'm not nonbinary, and that sure is an F on my birth certificate, but my journey is dramatically different than most other trans men I know. I find myself feeling a lot of kinship with trans women, and feel alienated at times by trans men. I find myself drawn to those who toe the line of sex and gender- studs and butches, queens and femmes, those who embrace their genders but rattle the bars of presentation and strict roles for such.

One- Your characters can be bad people, they can do bad things. There doesn't have to be a reason or a moral. You can make them bad if you want to. No other reason needed.

Two- it doesn't have to be good, it just needs to be written. On my last book i literally wrote the words "dumbest version" on the top of the page because I had seen some advice to do that. It changed everything. I stopped trying to make it perfect, I just tried to make it. Period. Full stop. You can edit bad writing. You can't edit a blank page.

For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.

He was wearing a uniform and was just chilling with the other unidentifiable children before I started my class (spanish class, btw); he was the perfect student, so cute and with a great pronunciation.

Baggie's kiddos live in my brain, apparently.

this was so cute i had to make it canon 😭

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.

“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.