*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are my own. I can only speak to my personal experience of gender and transition. Other experiences may look or feel different, and everyone's unique relationship with their gender and their transition is valid.
Content warning: Mental Health, graphic surgical descriptions
Gender affirmation for me has almost always come at the end of a needle. Little shots of testosterone under my skin created a voice that I loved and a body that felt like home. The burn of anesthesia as it enters my arm, the metallic taste as I fade away, only to wake up in a body that is more me than it was a few hours before. And the heat that surrounds a needle as it passes through my skin, leaving little pieces of metal behind that all come together to create “me”. My transition is not possible without blood, without needles, and without a little bit of pain, and I wouldn’t want it if it didn’t have these things. For me, body modification and gender are intrinsically interlinked, and one does not exist without the other.
A common question people ask folks with lots of piercings is what was your first one. What made you want to get all of these? My answer has always and forever been my nostril piercing. I begged and pleaded with my parents for years to let me get my nose pierced, and when they finally did, it was a momentous occasion. Teen years are not kind to anyone, and I was already struggling with an eating disorder and a distorted sense of self-worth. Most of my time was spent picking myself apart in the mirror, wanting to be smaller, taller, anything but who and what I was. But when I looked in the mirror after getting my nose pierced….I didn’t see the acne. I didn’t see the glasses I hated and the hair that never did what I wanted it to. I saw that piece of metal wrapping around my nostril, and I thought to myself, “I look so cool.” For those few moments, I loved the skin I was in. Not just the visual of seeing the piercing in the mirror, but knowing I had the strength and the ability to get through the process (I was so nervous). It just felt so ‘right. ’ I’ve been chasing that “rightness” ever since.
For a long time, I thought it was just my relationship to piercings and tattoos that caused this. I always, from a young age, had a desire to be something else. Someone else. I loved the way tattoos and piercings could create something human but different. Set apart. I fantasized about worlds where you could have wings or tails or robotic limbs. I was fascinated by science fiction and fantasy that included these variations on humanity. As soon as I found out about more extreme body modifications and ways of changing your appearance, I was obsessed (I still, deep in my heart, dream of getting subdermal horns, more than you might expect.)
Initially, I thought this was separate from my understanding of gender, something I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with. I spent my freshman year of high school dressing in men’s clothes and binding my chest on and off, but I quickly realized that I had no desire to be a man. I started exploring more extreme women’s fashion, switching from emo alternative to pinup to vintage on a daily basis. “Woman” never fit right either, but at least I could play around within it more comfortably. As I grew up, my discomfort with certain gendered parts of my body increased. Despite tattooing and piercing my breasts, I never felt the same euphoria I did when I modified other areas on my body. It would take me a decade to realize that was because the only thing that would give me euphoria was removing them completely.
When I began to learn about Non-binary identities and third genders, was the first time I felt truly seen and understood in terms of my gender. I’d never aligned with either male or female for myself, and in my dreams, my ideal body was a blend of both, something that combined and transcended the options I had been given. The more I began to explore my gender identity, the more I realized how interlinked it was with my modification journey. I had always been inspired by something outside of our standard definition of ‘human’ and of gender. Having my arm tattooed black and having metal rods through my cheeks were things that separated me from everyone else, just like paring a masculine, flat chest with full, feminine hips separated me as well. I wanted to look weird, I wanted to look alien and different. People already spat the word freak at me on the streets, I wanted my entire body to be the definition of the word. The same small child who always dreamed of having wings or horns or a tail was an adult who wanted to blur the lines of gender and the capability of the human body. Those desires were one and the same. Gender, for me surpassed just breasts and penises and vulvas, it was about creating a body that was otherworldly. For me, that looked like an androgynous blend of features, along with extensive tattooing, piercing, cutting, and implant work that combined to create a body that looked and felt decidedly different than that of other humans. It wasn’t about becoming a man or becoming a woman. It was becoming Lynn. Transhumanism always appealed to me, not just in the functional sense but in the literal sense. What ways can we change our human bodies, and how can we push the boundaries of our skin.
I felt such euphoria when I had this realization, only to quickly have it crushed by society at large. On the one hand, many people didn’t understand. They minimized my connection between body modification and gender. “You just want to look like a freak; its all just about looking different.” Many cisgender folks in my life, they couldn’t wrap their minds around a gender identity that surpassed our societal notions of gender and expanded out into human presentation. They didn’t see how changing the color and texture of my skin with tattoos and scars was as much a part of creating my ideal body as cutting off my breasts. And within the trans community, I found my experience minimized. “You aren’t really trans, and this isn’t a gender journey. You just like really extreme body mods. It’s all just a mod project for you.” Because my transition wasn’t binary, and because my goals and feelings around gender were more nebulous, it somehow was less valid or real. And of course, there was the model minority element of it all. “Nonbinary identities are too hard for cis people to wrap their minds around, and the body mod stuff is just freaky. You hurt the transgender movement when you talk about this stuff.” It made me feel small. It made me scared to speak up and share my experiences. I didn’t want to make things harder on my community and my peers. And I knew my experience of gender wasn’t the same as many others. I started to separate the two when I spoke online and in my content. I discussed the overlap between gender and modification, and specific piercings as gender affirming. But my larger gender experiences and goals remained private and personal.
However, as time went on I saw more people who expressed things like I did. Folks who discussed the gender euphoria of a throat tattoo or a tongue piercing as identical to the euphoria of hormones or surgery. Others who expressed gender feelings well outside the binary, who yearn for a cyberpunk future where you could change your limbs as easily as you could change your genitals. Others’ expression of gender was marked by ink and metal as much as flesh and blood. Who simply liked it when things looked or felt ‘different’ ‘weird’ or ‘abnormal’. A client of mine who is visually impaired discussed that when they run their hands along their partner's bodies, finding areas of hair, scar tissue, and metal from piercings, they feel unlike other humans they have ever touched. The different textures and sensations are beyond human and turn their partner into their own unique being. In that sentiment, I felt seen.
I know I’m not the only queer person who feels this way. Who finds euphoria in every aspect of customizing my body and whose experiences of gender can not be removed from my body modification experiences. Because I find a gender wholly outside the binary to be what fits for me, every change I make with my body that takes me closer to that feels euphoric. Enlarging my earlobes and creating an entire new shape to my ears is as affirming as removing tissue from my chest to create an entirely new shape. Both allow me to have control over my body, to create a body that feels right and comfortable to me, and both take me a step away from the limitations of my birth sex and toward an identity that isn’t male nor female nor this or that. It’s me, uniquely, fully.
Gender comes in a little glass vial and a tri bevel needle, a 6g 3/8 solid gold segment ring, 57 hours of ink pushed into my skin, a scalpel that removes everything and a blade that carves my skin in beautiful patterns. It’s in the scars I asked to adorn myself with and the ones from failed piercings and desperate nights at home; it’s in bottles of hair dye and makeup, in weights picked up and put back down at the gym. It is in everything I do in my body, everyone who I permit to touch it, and every breath I take. That, to me, is the beauty in all of this, that everything folds into the creation of me, and each small change I make to my body every single day all comes together to create the entire universe that is Lynn.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.