Chapter One.
or
on being a female-to-male transsexual living in San Francisco.
what were the odds. when you think about it being a female-to-male transsexual living in San Francisco was and is really very unlikely. well. if you live in San Francisco your chances of being a female-to-male transsexual are probably higher then if you lived most anywhere else in the world. statistically though given the sheer numbers of the world’s population from the time it has been populated until now it is highly unlikely that any given person would have ever even seen San Francisco let alone live there and it is highly unlikely that any given person would have known a female-to-male transsexual let alone be one themselves and yet here I am a given person and what were the odds of that and that is why I propose that I could have been anyone and in fact am but apparently this is not at all true because I am as it turns out extremely unlikely. if you take me as an example I cannot exemplify anything as I am unusual to say the least and yet what am I but one example among billions of others. I could take anyone’s place and have and anyone could take my place and will. it is the same for everyone that is being peculiar being particular being that one bizarre occurrence as well as being completely exchangeable for any other bizarre occurrence.
if I say I am just like you and I do say that I am not just like you but I am just like you. there is a fine distinction to be drawn and it is always the same gesture to draw it but the gestures are all different and each one not at all what might be expected.
obviously my odds of being any given person were 1:1 because that is what I am. obviously my odds of being this given person were 1:1 because that is what I am but the chances that I should show up as this person at this time and place seem to me to be infinitesimally small. the odds against my arising in this form they must have been astronomical even though there was no getting around it for me and certainly no way of ignoring what turned out to be true.
this is partially to say then that none of this is my fault as there is no beating the odds and I could just as easily have been you and you me and we both would have been every bit as surprised as we are now. the fact is I am you insofar as I am anyone and so are you but we do not coincide in any way and by that I mean that although it might prove difficult to show precisely where my outermost membranes stop and the world around me begins it is still true that the particular path that brought me this far has been unique except that it is pretty much the same way for everyone that is it is not at all the same for everyone.
as a friend once said “I” is perfectly common even though only one person can say it that is the first person who is every person except in relation to you or me it is only a single person. if there is only one commonplace it is “I” but my place in particular is peculiar and strange. you could be writing this for instance but you are not and the odds of my writing it were unimaginably slim and yet here I go.
here I go. here I go in your place and you in mine and look at that we wear the same size shoe. no we don’t. I only have my feet and you only have yours. oh even that is saying too much. feet. what can one say beyond that. not a lot.
but you see that we are not alike because we have feet or ears or hands or hair or fingernails in fact we are not alike at all and I do not mean to imply that we are the same because we are definitely not. but all of this could easily have happened differently except for the fact that it did not and thus could not have but you could have found yourself in my place very easily even though there was little chance of that but still this could have been you here. what if that had been the way life worked out. it could have you know.
if you know what I mean.
be that as it may I could still tell a story or rather take down a few of the things that have made my experience whatever my experience has been. I mean things you might not have thought of even though as we have established you very well could have and you could not have done one iota of a thing about it had you. keep that in mind while you read this. I mean you do not have to but it might prove useful for imagining what it might have been like to be somebody else.
there must have been an infinite number of ways I could have come to arrive here where I am now, whatever here might mean in this case which will no longer be the case when you read this although I cannot begin to guess what will be. spelling out any one of those infinitely different ways seems pedestrian to me but not even that so much as a kind of betrayal although not necessarily of myself so much as of the living of what has been so far my life. to say it was that way or this way is but an island of hearsay in a racing flood of anonymity parading. not parading as anything. just parading. that is the best you can get out of this sort of question and if you try to extract more than that what will happen is that instead of opening the way up to the possibility of being told rather you end up closing off what ought to remain a source of potential stories even to the point of never ever running out of them.
that said.
that said suppose we were to talk of those ways of being that we call boys and those ways of being that we call girls if in fact there are ways of being that can be called either one without some liberal dose of irony. whatever the case may be it seems to me that someone somewhere is always ascribing the title of ur-difference to whatever difference might arise between the ways boys are said to go about life and the ways girls are said to go about life and this title of primeval difference is said to found the whole frigging dialectic but I am here to tell you that that is not the case.
oh it has already been shown. there is no need to show it again. that is I am not going to try to prove to you that male and female cannot be constitutive of the enduring difference that plays out along the general schema of this versus not-this. and I am not going to do that because others have done a good job of it already. if I remember when I get there I might append a bibliography to all this but then again I might just let it be.
but see the main problem is that the greatest of differences has been attributed to exist between one and two and if you think about that is quite absurd because not only are they are far too involved with one another not to mention what else they might be involved with but why stop at two that is why stop at this and not-this. one might for instance move on to some other or a house or pink or bleakly or carom. and one might continue to move on indefinitely without running out of places to turn.
don’t even get me started about the one and the many. we are talking of girls and boys here not god and the manifold. although there is the slight possibility they are the same thing. by that I do not mean to claim they are the same thing but to suggest that they might be very closely allied with each other in the general mayhem of ideas.
suppose there were other alliances than this.
Chapter One continues
in two weeks
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