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Finally, last October, Turner began injecting testosterone cypionate every other week. His muscle mass changed much more rapidly. His shape moved from a female's hourglass to a male's V. "I felt like a lava lamp," he says.
More body hair. More acne. More confidence. In two weeks, his voice dropped an octave.
"I woke up one morning, tried to talk and was like, 'AaAaAaAa,'" he says, as if, at long last, he was experiencing puberty from a teenage boy's point of view.
That tall, boyish gal gave way to a slender, faintly girlish guy -- a bohemian version of the wholesome boy-next-door. And once the hormonal factor was out of the way, being a man became less about equipment and more about attitude.
Turner was so satisfied with his new voice that he even gave up donning his "soft pack," the convincing artificial penis he sometimes wore beneath his underwear. "They even have ones you can pee through, but I've never been able to pee standing up. Before I went on testosterone, I'd sometimes put on my soft pack when I went out -- if anyone was looking, I'd have the right bulge in my pants. After testosterone, I was like, 'Fuck that.'"
Turner now likens passing to an acting exercise -- learning to master such regular-guy gestures as "that chin-forward head-nod" to other men in public. He's even able to mingle with cowboys without raising eyebrows.
During a January visit to the University of Wyoming at Laramie, he went out one night with a group of young men and women to a cowboy bar. "These cowboys there would talk to me but just sort of look right through the women. Or they'd look at the women, then give me a nod like, 'Git 'r done!'"
Bad dreams accompanied the testosterone. In one, his uterus fell into his hands and he wanted it back inside. The anxiety has a real-world corollary. Testosterone's side effects could cause him to need a hysterectomy. Turner claims to have no second thoughts about his transformation but sometimes considers the costs of sacrificing his womanhood, like the loss of his soft, feminine skin.
His new gender comes with trade-offs. He stopped menstruating four weeks after injecting testosterone, but now has to shave his face. "Forced to choose between a period and having to razor my face regularly -- with razors that cost way more than tampons -- I don't know. OK, I do prefer shaving but still, it sucks."
Testosterone also will cause his vocal chords to lengthen permanently. Turner insists that "this is an OK voice to have as a woman" should he ever want to change back.
He seems to miss being androgynous more than being feminine. On his right arm, he has a tattoo of one of the Janus-faced, ambisexual animated characters from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and at times, he's made the ambiguity of his gender an explicit part of his art. You get a sense that he finds being a man less exotic than being a mysterious individual who transcends rigid social constructs and keeps a foot in both camps.
His change has created problems for Underground TRANSit, the one-person show he developed as an honors thesis. He's performed Underground TRANSit at playhouses, college campuses and performing arts festivals across the country. It describes his coming to terms with his own identity and the slippery concepts of sex and gender, with a recurring metaphor of the New York subway system. Elements of striptease extend throughout the show: In front of his audience, Turner changes from a long, feminine skirt to sharkskin suit, "skater boy" duds, and even down to leopard-print briefs and a glimpse of small, unbound breasts.
Before the testosterone injections, Turner seemed more like a chameleon, with his gender matching his outfits. The first line of Underground TRANSit is, "Would you believe I was almost homecoming queen in high school?" And it worked, because you could believe it.
Turner admits that now he looks much more like a guy wearing a skirt. "Some people think I'm a male-to-female trans now, so when I ask the opening question, they think, 'Yeah, in some kind of alternate universe where drag queens get on the homecoming court.'"
Turner's transformation contains an element of Murphy's Law. He's pleased with his lower voice and more masculine frame. But he acknowledges, "It might fuck up my performance career. For acting purposes, I want to bring an audience along with me."
Now, he's trying to decide how much he needs to overhaul Underground TRANSit, or whether he should retire it altogether. And Turner takes classes so he can still have the freedom to speak in a higher register as a performer -- just as male-to-female transsexuals take lessons to sound feminine more convincingly.
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Spruce Pine Alien Festival @ Spruce Pine Alien Festival
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Robots, Rockets, & Rovers @ The Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium
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Double Trouble Improv Comedy Night @ CATCh
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AllMachines
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AllMachines - Raymond Forklift
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Get Out of theWay! 1
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Sniper School 1
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