All Agave Plants Are Trans Men
The agave plant, like me, comes from the deserts of Southern California.
When I am born in a hospital in Escondido, my cries fill the air and
the first thing I hear is my father’s happy shout—“it’s a boy!” And as the rest
of me follows: “oh—no—wait.”
Teeth line the leaves of the agave, protecting fleshy, leathery spined crescents that open like a bowl to the sky. Perhaps I would have a higher tolerance for flowers as vaginal metaphors if their petals had teeth.
One day, the agave will bloom. Its hard-soft leaves will crinkle, tighten, and dry as it tenses, ready after so much longing to protrude. The new force shoots into the sky, casting its thick trunk upwards, many times its former height, transformed and transcendent, some at eight years—
See him, precocious, dreaming up what his body might grow—
some at eighty—
Your grandmother puts down her knitting at the retirement home, says, “You know, I always wished I had a cock”—
Myself, at twenty-seven—
Researching effects of testosterone, stopped cold for a moment by something I don’t understand, something called “bottom growth.” My trans guy friend says “it’s really not that much” but I barely understand what it is. “I don’t know if I want that,” I say. Him: “You can’t pick and choose the effects.”
Bottom growth, for the record, is a process where the clitoris gets bigger, usually 1-4 centimeters, but that range seems huge. Am I about to sprout a one-inch dick?
Does the agave worry before it bursts itself forth? Does it look around at the other plants, see the height of their turgid stalks, and wonder if it will be normal? Does it debate what it wants to trade: its attractive bowl of toothy leaves, complimented always for how perfectly agave-like it is…or its calling, its destiny, its profound and transcendent growth?
If I had measured my clit in centimeters before and after T, I promise I would tell you. I have seen/licked/etc. the clitoris-es (clitori?) of two other trans men and I think they were both smaller than me, but my partner has seen the pussies of several more trans men and when I ask him he says I’m average size. But then a moment later, he adds: “Well, before you topped me the other day I would’ve said below average.”
I don’t fuck his face very often but apparently it leaves an impression.
The agave does not ask these questions. It does not get stuck in ego swells.
As soon as the agave blooms, it dies. It has reached divine fulfillment. The protective teeth swallowed by the gift of decaying leaves. The agave no longer needs such sharp defenses around its tenderness.
I myself will keep my folds, my leathery fleshy parts, as the centimeters growing out of me in transcendence don’t ask everything else to fade.
All I will let die, perhaps, is the teeth.
Two Men Enter
The Shakespeare-to-Pro-Wrestling Pipeline is apparently strong and now I’m in a crowded armory in suburban Maryland to watch my friends dress up in costumes and pretend to hit each other. There’s a six-year-old kid in the row in front of me with a mullet, and I’m sitting next to my gay lover who is also my Dominant who sometimes takes me places where people dress up in costumes and actually hit each other, and where he actually hits me, but only after I beg.
The men enter the cage with fanfare and yells to prove they are Aggressive and Strong and Mad At Each Other but then they go to land a punch and they slow down in the final breath, like a cannonball that fires and then just before impact turns into a poof of feathers. The Big Scary Men gently pat each other’s shoulders with their soft little knuckles.
When my Dominant takes me to the dungeon we walk in holding hands. First we sit and chat about what implements sound interesting, if I’m sore anywhere, what level of play we’re doing, how naked I want to get (always very naked, but he still asks because he’s nice). Then he ties me to a cross and he really fucking hits me, there are no cannon-feathers here, the blows are real and they make big sounds and usually I make big sounds, too. He hurts me and I like it. When I see the wrestlers’ pretty little pats it makes me crave the sensation of a whip at my back.
My friend whose wrestling character wears a lot of face paint told me they go in knowing who will take the pin, but the losers still Sulk and Pout while the winners brag. A new binary of weak and strong, winner and loser, formed with every match.
When my Dominant finishes with me no one has won or lost. Or maybe I like to lose, every time.
The punches look so fake that when something real does happen it is EXTREMELY SHOCKING TO ME, occasionally one man climbs on another’s shoulders and they wriggle around like they didn’t know this particular face-crotch alignment was possible and then they both go CRASHING down and there’s a big actual CRASH and I can hear it on the cage’s loud floor, and nobody turns into feathers.
Sometimes the violence from my Dominant shows itself to be fake too, like when he and another top beat me with bats at the same time and it doesn’t actually hurt that much but my body starts to panic just because that’s a lot of bats to be hit with at once, so I say “yellow” which means slow down and then I get kisses, which are not at all violent, and in a minute they go back to beating me with something else, and then afterward there are three-way snuggles.
I wonder if the wrestlers ever go backstage after their fights for three-way snuggles.
My face-paint friend loses, and my friend dressed like a unicorn loses even harder and their group turns on them and beats them down (they casually tell me later they asked to go solo), and my friend who wears a skateboarding helmet wins, and the final fight is between two Big-Belly Daddies (BBDs), one big-bellied and very very Short (SBBD), and the other big-bellied and very very Tall (TBBD), and they seem to both be heterosexuals but if they stopped being heterosexuals there would be many spaces where they could have a very nice time and be so darn loved for their scruffiness and their middle-age and their breadth, especially in these particular stretchy red onesies, they would be deeply admired by me specifically but also by everyone, in the right bar.
SBBD ends up with his crotch in TBBD’s face and they all go tumbling down, and I look at my Dominant out of the corner of my eye and I want us all to go tumbling down, and maybe something is a little wrong with each of us for wanting to play in the way that we do, but maybe we’re exactly right.
TBBD wins the match, and the kid with the mullet is screaming approval, and they give him a championship belt. SBBD is so small and so sad and he’s clearly Disappointed With Himself and I wish I could go comfort him.
I wish I could tell him that the losing is sweet.
Pussyprint
I am a twinky fairy femmeboy so I’ve never been sad not to have a cock.
I was butch for a woman, tough in a way I’m now soft. When I had sex with girls who thought I was a girl, they assumed I’d enjoy fucking them with a big plastic cock, and it always felt absurd to me, an unwieldy hunk protruding from strappy underwear. It was all I thought I had to offer them.
My cock wasn’t absent but nothing else was present, either. My brain conjured only a Ken-doll of smooth not-cock down between my thighs, paved over by fear, shame, the many traumas of teenage girlhood. A crease that should never be unfolded.
Pre-transition, age 26, I’m at a queer performance festival in Austin, Texas, and a woman is onstage in a huge wig and multilayered dress and full-face makeup, and she greets the theater, every seat filled with people ready to see something, to see her, and she turns her ass toward the audience and flips her dress over her head and she has a googly eye on each ass cheek, with big long eyelashes, and she lip syncs an entire power ballad with the lips of her pussy, and that’s when I learn (finally) that I have more than not-cock-ness inside of me.
Her vibrato is a sight to behold.
Later she’ll slather her pussy with ink and sit on page after page, inventing her own printing press and distributing the papers to the audience, and I’ll lose mine but I’ll remember her when three breakups, two apartments, and one global pandemic later I’m at my first Burning Man and I see something called a genital printmaking workshop.
In this made-up desert city I’ve discovered I pass completely as male, even when I’m shirtless and my mastectomy scars plainly show. This makes my pussy a secret, one I never asked to keep, created only by others’ assumptions based on the beard I can now grow (a beard much fuller than my brother’s). I get in the workshop line anyway.
The camp is run by older gay men (my favorite type of human) and they’re all wearing aprons with bare asses. One of the daddies catches me looking at him, so when it’s almost my turn, he kneels in front of me, so skinny and sweet, draping his arms over my lap, and his crinkled smile asks, What are we having printed today?
I’ve traded flirtations with plenty of men post-transition, but only on the apps, where I can outrun cisnormativity by including FTM in my profile name. This is real life, and I know what he has already assumed I am carrying. I try not to think too hard before I tell him, My pussy.
I can see his wheels turning but his arms still rest on my thighs when he says, I was going to ask if you needed a fluffer but I’m not sure I’d know what to do, and I suddenly become someone who is confident and alive and I respond, Well I’m a very good teacher, and he squeezes into me with curiosity and heat and he says, We’ll talk later.
I get myself slathered with ink and pressed on a paper and the skinny daddy is the one putting them in plastic sleeves, and he takes a long moment with the inky black blotches I’ve presented him, and he gives me a look that’s serious and beautiful and he points and says, That’s where I camp with my partner. My secret has proven delicious and I have sex with him and his husband and our bodies make natural students of each other and I walk back to my camp in a dust storm.
When I return one of the straight men at camp asks what I’m holding and I say it’s a print of my pussy and ask if he wants to see it, and he says Your pussy looks like my parents fighting and we laugh until we’re hacking dust up out of our lungs.
The big plastic cocks sit on a shelf in my bedroom still, a parade of colors and sizes, but hanging on the wall above them, framed, is an ink-blot print of my pussy. It’s not a smooth thing, it’s not an absence, it’s a thing that can sing. It’s rough and curled and it has shape, the shapes of pleasure centers and protecting folds and entrances, and it is a world unto itself.
