Trans woman Samantha Allen describes the process of changing her gender while in graduate school: “Estrogen is not made of sugar and spice. In pill form, it is synthesized from two decidedly unsexy ingredients: soy and yams. But that’s only fitting because, when I first started taking prescription estradiol in the fall of 2012, I felt like a yam: ugly, hairy, and awkwardly shaped. […] I fantasized about meeting a sexy someone in the archives and spending long afternoons admiring each other’s, um, research before sneaking off to make love in the stacks. But who was going to look at a gross yam like me and see a juicy peach, ripe for the picking? […] I was one week into my research when she showed up–a college senior with a grant from the City College of New York to come here and study feminist pornography. I didn’t know that from the start, of course; I felt too gross even to say hi to her, although we were often alone together in the institute’s cramped third-floor reading room. But I knew from glancing at her that she was gorgeous, that she bit her lip when she was concentrating, and that, if she had decided to come here, we must have a few common interests. We spent three silent days together in that room. But then, as I left to go back to my rented basement apartment on the third afternoon, Corey followed me into the elevator. I may have been a yam, but she wanted to eat me up. I felt gross. I said hi anyway.”
I don’t normally do two quotes per book, but I could not resist this one:
“If you had told me when I came out as transgender five years ago that I would one day sit inside a Baptist church in Waco, Texas, I would ask you who had kidnapped me.”
–Samantha Allen–Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States
GhoulieJoe 