Unfair Advantage

So I came across this brilliant piece by Katherine Cross on how writers with Guardian and New York Times columns still claim to be being 'silenced' by trans people who happen to be on Twitter.

Particularly disappointed that Hadley Freeman buys into the nonsense that Fallon Fox has 'unfair advantages' due to having once had testosterone in her system.  Two facts, one born out of doing research (supposedly a key element in the journalist skillset, but what do I know, I don't write for the Grauniad), and one born of personal experience:

Like, check your privilege before criticizing this national newspaper from the leather-armchaired Ivory Tower of your Twitter account, yeah?

1) State boxing and wrestling commissions, the bodies in the US which rule on who gets to compete in MMA bouts, mandate that trans woman competitors must spend TWO YEARS on HRT, which includes taking anti-androgen drugs - testosterone-blockers;

How lifting weights feels after three months on T-blockers.

2) I have, myself, been on testosterone-blockers since April, at the same time as which I've embarked on a get-fit campaign, which has allowed me to observe their effects on my physical strength.  Despite training hard during the process, in a mere three months, I have lost 2kgs of muscle from my torso area. It was actually easier to hoist the backpack in which I carry my gym kit before I started lifting weights about. This put me in the interesting position of watching cis women who attended the circuit training sessions I was going to visibly finding them easier and easier as the weeks passed, while I found them harder and harder. There is an advantage here - and at times it certainly seemed unfair - but it isn't on the trans side of the equation.

A stain, a gift, a shadow

Hiding in a toilet stall,
I photograph the bruise:
this capillary trace of the way your cupped palms
made their percussive contact with my skin.

I call it bruise: it's really just a hint
of sepia, a watercolour tint,
a stain, a gift, the shadow of your fist.
Impermanent: not tattoo, still less brand,

it aches to be recorded. With inexpert hands,
that I would never think to cup when striking,
I tilt my phone, I shoot the spot and wish
you'd left behind a far more livid kiss.

This loving violence I memorialise
perhaps more than is necessary or true.
This mark, this ghost desire left behind:
I take its photo, and I name it bruise.

Laser

She sounds like Sidse Knudsen
telling Chiara D'Anna she's late.
She tells me to climb on the couch,
compliments me on my boots,
wears a magnifying lens to better see
the Orion's Belt of follicles
still clinging to my lip.
Admires my work with the razor.
If she sees my tattoo, it's not mentioned.

I close my eyes.
I hear her breathe.
She puts the wand against my skin.
The warm pain comes in waves.

(Btw, in case anyone's wondering about why I mentioned my tattoo here...)

 

Zugzwang

This game of chess, this drive to seize and take,
this duel of bluff and countermove and feint,
is what your songs and movies celebrate?

This urge to rob another of their space,
the meet-cutes that seem like intimidation,
this is what your culture venerates?

This fight in which I seem to have no chance,
this slow-quick-quick-slow-lunge assassin's dance:
you call this romance?

I'm not enchanted. I refuse to hymn
this torture that we sanctify with rings.
I will talk about the other things,
and abandon, on this board, my toppled King.

Zugzwang: a situation encountered in chess where any move you make will weaken your position.

Pyjama Revenge (after...oh, take a wild, leaping guess)

The part of me that hates to bake
would make my birthday cake for you
if you asked me in that tone of voice
telling me you have to:

read the recipe. And make the cake.
The part of me that flinches from
a stranger's touch would melt
like rum-soaked amaretti if your finger

flicked my side as Cynthia's strikes Evelyn.
The part of me that's seen this scene
and knows where it is going
will wish it didn't climax with

a safeword silenced by a woollen sock.
There's part of me that needs to know
if I say no, you'll stop: and part of me
that wishes you would not.

Yes, I know I did use Pyjama Revenge as the title for another poem in this sequence (and I suppose I may as well admit it is a sequence at this point); that title obviously draws its inspiration from a different scene in the film and has therefore been renamed The Flirtatious Use of Tape Measures. This poem gets the original title, being based on the relevant scene.

A couple of points need to be made here, lest any dickheads out there try to say 'but that fat trans lesbian poet said all subs secretly don't want their doms to stop' to justify their Christian Gray-esque behaviour:

1) This is not a poem about all subs - it's about two at most, one of whom is fictional - me, and Evelyn, the sub character in Strickland's film, and our differing reactions to Cynthia's behaviour in the scene leading up to the 'revenge' moment (what Evelyn finds unsettling about Cynthia in that scene, I actually really like, essentially);

2) I'm a poet, so I choose my words carefully. There's a difference between a need and a wish;

3) Very few people are so unimaginative as to use 'no' as a safeword.

A nice bath and painkillers (another one after Peter Strickland)

It's all downhill from now, she says,
and her younger lover smiles,
and tells her she's many years left.
I have been that younger lover: laughed aside
the fear of aging that you voiced.

Now I see the wrinkles spread
around my eyes like cracks in pressured glass,
hurricane lamp weakened, brought in
too often from the cold,
and wonder how I'll feel
to no more be the light, the nectar.

If I had known the last time was the last,
would I have told my hunger
in the bite of fingertips
against your muscled back?

If I had known how words like spinster
fill the twilight with their beating wings, would I have said so freely
all the things young lovers say

to hold their older paramours to ransom?
You're the last, I promise you :
I never thought this possible. 
As long as I'm yours, I remain alive.

I think one of the reasons The Duke of Burgundy fascinates me so much is the age gap in Cynthia and Evelyn's relationship. The two most important romantic relationships I've ever had were with women over a decade older than I was: now, as a lesbian approaching 40, I find myself having to deal with the possibility that future partners may be younger than me. And I appreciate, now, that this dynamic - the age-gap relationship - feels very different from the other side of that gap. Things feel so much more serious, more final. Oh, young people talk a good Epic Romance game: every love is the last love, everyone is The One, every promise lasts until the End of Time. But it's easy to say that when you're young and full of other people's stories. Later in life, with Time's Winged Chariot drawing so near you can hear the music on Time's Wicked Car Stereo, it's harder to credit all those promises. And yet you cling to them, you hope: and maybe the cruellest thing a younger lover does is to make an older one believe there is hope, after they've gotten used to living with its absence. Believe that I love you, they say: and you do, because what's life without love? 

And that, of course, is how the cruellest trap closes on you, like the lid of a trunk, a bed that's lifted by a simple spring. And there's no word to say to end these torments: except, perhaps, the one you fear the most. The word goodbye.

The Flirtatious Use of Tape Measures (after Peter Strickland)

I'm double-bluff and Highsmith riffs, I know this:
if another woman's eyes met mine
the way Fatma looks at Chiara
during the measuring scene,
the shield I've built would crumble
like the edges of a burning index card.

How useful, then, this hat:
so proletarian, demotic, so glamour-resistant,
with its brim which pins my eyes to ground
like pavement braille, like peppers roasting,
moths repeating in a mount.

Not the only poem I've written recently inspired by The Duke of Burgundy, or indeed Patricia Highsmith, but the one which wears its influences most clearly on its sleeves. I reviewed The Duke recently for Clarissa Explains Fuck All,  and was a little hard on writer-director Peter Strickland for being too sympathetic to Cynthia, the domme character, despite her clearly overstepping a big red line in BDSM terms during a crucial scene in the film. I still think I was right about that, pretty much: but I've also been thinking a lot lately about how much - too much - we forgive for the sake of romantic love, and how desperate that emotion makes us: how much of a bullying concept love is. I think you can't remove the horrible turn the relationship between Cynthia and Evelyn takes from the fear of being without love, and it's hard to say who feels that more: Cynthia, who is ten years older than Evelyn, and perhaps worried this is her last throw of the romantic dice, or Evelyn, who 'never thought it would be possible' to meet a lover like Cynthia, and would therefore fear never meeting another. 

The wild card in all this is The Carpenter, played by Fatma Mohamed. Having seen the film a number of times again on digital download recently (perhaps in an attempted retreat into fantasy to escape recent political events - a world without men is a world without Rupert Murdoch, David Cameron and Michael Gove, after all) it's clear to me that the scene between Evelyn and The Carpenter is a key point in the film: it's the first time Evelyn has met a woman like her. There's such a wonderful sense of play between the two,  and both Mohamed, and Chiara D'Anna, playing Evelyn, convey so much purely through the way they look at each other. It isn't quite a meeting of equals: The Carpenter has clearly been around this stuff more often than Evelyn, and is more confident and aware of what she wants, a fact conveyed in the way Evelyn tries, but fails, to meet her gaze - but Evelyn clearly recognises a fellow member of her species in The Carpenter the way she never, quite, recognises Cynthia. 

The more quotidian subject of the poem is the pink camouflage baseball cap I wear to keep the sun off my face while I undergo laser hair removal treatment, which also has the added bonus of making it harder to make eye contact with others if, like me, you seem to be suffering from more social anxiety than usual at the moment.