I want to nightcore my fucking life
Lorelei d’Andriole
I want to nightcore my fucking life.
The other night, I was with a cis friend and after I described a recent change to my hormone replacement therapy, she said:
“You’re going to be so hot.”
I am already hot. I am already so fucking hot. Everyone I fuck begs for my girl cock.
To nightcore is to increase speed.
A nightcore edit of a song is created by increasing the speed and pitch by approximately thirty-five percent. This speed adjustment is the same effect as if you play a 33.3 RPM record at the 45 RPM setting. I think I’d like an RPM switch on my neck so that I may effortlessly feminize my voice.
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In “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts”, José Esteban Muñoz articulates how rigorous evidence-based research is often neither possible nor useful for understanding minoritarian histories. “Queerness is often transmitted covertly. This has everything to do with the fact that leaving too much of a trace has often meant that the queer subject has left herself open for attack.”
Certainty in my body feels like fear.
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What is the Post Body?
Post Body: A phrase used on 4chan’s fitness board, asking someone to back up their statement with a photo of their physique.
Trans women often come to sound in search of liberation or a solution to visibility. A knowledge of vocal anatomy and the physics of sound is crucial to crafting a new voice that will “pass” over the phone.
It is common when one hears their voices played back from a recording device to react miserably. This is because the information others hear, the information transmitted from the outer ear/inner ear/cochlea to the brain, is missing the resonances that travel from our blood, bone, and tissue. That is not my voice! This can’t be how I sound! It challenges our perception of our body.
When I speak, my head shivers, and the fullness of my voice is inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t share this carnal site.
I don’t think we need any more information. We know that things aren’t working.
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In 2020, I bought the video game Cyber Punk 2077 because I heard I could create an avatar who was a woman with a dick. I created a samurai wielding, uncircumcised girl cock having, trans hyper femme avatar. The game, however, completely erased my avatar’s transness. In a dystopic cyberpunk future where gangs and corporations rule, somehow transmisogyny has been totally eradicated. Being a woman with a dick did not change gameplay at all. My dick was invisible. No one cared that I had a dick, and I became bored. Not acknowledging my penis, treating it like it is ordinary, did not feel liberating.
The writer and kinkster, John Altmann aligns fantasy and kink. Altmann asserts fantasy is a pure abstraction which allows people to imagine radical alternatives to the present. In other words, it distinguishes between “-what should and should not be.” Kink, is the praxis of fantasy, allowing participants to lead expeditions into the unknown as a community. I translate and expand this by replacing the word kink, with the word art. Seeing art by trans women and reading academic transgender studies material, has allowed me to reimagine radical alternatives to the present. Art has been the pathfinding tool towards my gender liberation.
Before I came out to any of my friends, I announced my identity through performance artworks. I started talking openly about my womanhood, often through tears, during my radio art show, “The Test of Lime w/ Jake Jacobs” at KRUI 89.7 FM. There may have been thousands of listeners but being alone in the studio allowed me to feel as though no one was really listening. The people who called the station never asked me about my transness. One woman called to say that her and her husband were waiting for a dinner reservation and asked politely if I would please play some music, to which I replied, “No :).” This affirming incident made me laugh and I felt powerful when I rejected her request.
I was invited to perform at Trumpet Blossom in Iowa City as part of Justin Comer’s iHeariC series. For my performance, opening for a jazz singer and a free improv group, I played a muzak record through my sound system while two of my friends pantomimed playing their instruments with the goal of making fun of how boring musicians are. At the climax of the record, I left the building and wheeled in an Iowa City trashcan to the stage, crawled inside, and screamed “I’m Afraid I’m Trans, I’m Trans and I’m Afraid,” so loudly and desperately that the words were intelligible. I technically told almost two dozen people and that felt good.
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I have only ever felt gender euphoria playing one video game; South Park: The Fractured But Whole.
In this game, parodying superhero movie franchises, you play as a new kid in South Park who has special powers. Your avatar’s default pronouns are he/him/his, until you get the mission, The Talk, where you are sent to visit the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, to talk about sex:
“M'kay, New Kid, it's, it's really simple when, uh... when you wanna talk about your sex, you simply... you can start by simply saying, you know, I'm a... I'm a boy, or a girl or other.”
I select “girl” and was elated to be given a choice between cis gendered girl or trans gendered girl. I, of course, chose the latter. Next, the counselor calls your parents:
“Yes, hi, uh, yes I know she's a girl but well, she just let me know she's a transgender girl. Yes... yes... Well, no, it doesn't matter. No, of course not, it's just that um... No no no, you're right…”
This small bit of visibility was not what made me feel euphoric.
After leaving the elementary school, a group of, as the game describes them, rednecks, pull up in a large, red truck:
“Well, well, well. If it ain't a transgendered girl!”
“We don't take kindly to your types around here!”
“Let's welcome this thing to our town!”
As soon as you make the decision to identify as a trans girl, you are met with violence. You are targeted, and attacked, but in this video game, you have the pleasure of beating the shit out of them. The humor, rooted in fear, is what gave me gender euphoria.
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There is an abundance of queer art documenting the most terrifying parts of queer identity. Who are these works for? My goal is not to re-traumatize my comrades. I want to laugh and be happy.
In 2020, I was a featured artist at Public Space One’s “Open Air Media Festival,” which was curated by intermedia artist and educator Zen Cohen. This was one of the first times I presented myself as a woman in public. I tried to look hot. I had been practicing my makeup for so long and was beginning to feel confident. I borrowed a cute blue velvet jumpsuit from my partner.
After my second night of performing with friend and collaborator Will Yager, I found myself alone, driving in my car from one festival area to the next. I stopped at a red light next to a large truck full of young men. As soon as the light turned green, they threw trash at me and screamed, “WHORE!” then sped away. It was terrifying. As I pulled up to PS1, I joked that I was finally a woman. It was easier to share the fear in my body with others through humor. I’d like to suggest that joking about this is an alchemical formula that transmutes the fear into something lighter, but that would be a lie. That moment is something I joke about and that feeling of fear still lives at the crossing of my brain and gut.
How does one articulate and process the validation from the violence of visibility?
The first time I thought about myself and trans identity was during a band practice in the summer of 2018 with my emo band, Mariska Hargitay. I was talking with my bandmates about a friend who had disappeared from social media after moving to California, and had recently reemerged with new pronouns, a new face, and new breasts. My bandmate joked, “I think its awesome, I want all of my friends to have huge tits.” I laughed even though the joke is on me. I’m still imagining myself with big tits and it makes me happy.
~
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 8, no. 2 (1996): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/07407709608571228.
Altmann, John. “In Defense of Kink.” www.hipporeads.com
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Post%20Body
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/The_Talk/Script#Trans_Female