The Grass is Always Greener...

By Pete Moss
September 1, 2001
This article began with a E from my friend Gina (not her real name) who works for a weekly tab here in LA. Gina is an assistant editor and I've never met her face to face, but that's ok 'cause it keeps the romance alive. Gina consistently runs my letters to the editor. Saleeby reminded about this whole episode with his piece about how he wrote crazy letters to the editor for National Lampoon when he was seventeen. Gina and I have a symbiotic relationship in that she wants to make it as a full-on editor one day, and I want to get paid for the shit I write. If she breaks a hot new writer that helps her case and if I establish a lasting relationship with a rising editor that makes mine. So anyway, back in the day when I used to be online, I was whining to Gina about how I thought I should get paid for all these wacky letters to the editor that her rag was running, penned by me. And, like an editor, Gina shot back, "Look, 'letters to the editor' is not a paying genre. Why don't you try writing an article?"

"You mean an article? Like, that's actually about something?" I asked.

"Yeah, we pay for that," Gina replied.

"What should it be about?"

"I don't know. Something you know about."

"Well .... how about motorcycle messengers?"

"Naw. We had two bike related articles in the past year."

"Uh ..."

"How about transsexuals?" goes Gina.

"Transsexuals?"

"Transgendered people, that's cool right now."

"Transgendered people?"

"C'mon, you know who I'm talking about."

"I don't know nothing about that."

"OK, forget I mentioned that. Do some research."

"Research?!"

"Yeah, here's where you can start looking..."

Gina gave me some web addresses and the name of a club that had a weekly night for transgendered peeps. I said I'd check it out. The first thing I did was go online, and I was instantly fascinated. Turns out changing somebody's sex is a pretty involved bit of business. And there are different levels of quality control. If you're a guy and you want to be a chick (and what guy hasn't fantasized about being a chick at least for one night and having that awesome power of deciding who gets nookie and who doesn't) you better be prepared to lay out at least 25K for a good job.

99 percent of the guys who wanna be chicks, wanna be hot chicks. Almost nobody goes to the doctor and says 'I wanna be a dumpy housewife from Lakewood'. The guys all wanna be porn star style chicks. To take some ugly old guy and turn him into a sex bomb is no mean feat. But sex change specialists thrive on that kind of challenge. So the first order of business is to get the guy into classes to learn about how to dress and wear makeup. They call it 'counseling', but I'll bet most of the guys already know more about hottie outfits and eye shadow than the counselors. Then there's hormone treatment, where they pump up your estrogen levels with a variety of feminizing chemicals. This is where the bills start to pile up. But if you get past that, the next thing is surgery. Not surprisingly most candidates stop short of actual surgery. The surgery is pretty basic, but requires a pretty big commitment. You whack off the Johnson and family jewels. Take the Johnson and scrape out all the gristle, turn it inside out and sew it into the cavity you've dug out between the legs. Depending on how much cash the customer has you can go in for laser removal of hair follicles and shaving the pelvic bone and any number of refinements.

You can have just as much fun playing dress up. Pick up some guy in a bar, lead him on, get him all hot and bothered, get him some place to do the deed. By the time he gets the panties off and finds out, he doesn't care. He just wants to get his rocks off, he'll settle for your mouth or your ass. So most Trannies stop short of surgery, figuring they've got the best of both worlds.

So much for the guys who wanna be chicks, what about chicks who want to be guys? This presents much more of a problem. In fact, there is no universally accepted procedure. Some practitioners go in for whacking the clitoris and adding skin grafts and gristle and then sewing this on, with some kind of grafted scrotum and a little hand-operated pump to simulate an erection. This method rarely results in anything longer than 4 or 5 inches. Other artisans, working under less governmental oversight in places like Calcutta or Tijuana have been known to employ the members of pigs or ponies.

Basically, for a female wanting to become a male, it's tough. The best bet is to go to sex-toy shop and buy a strap-on; a practice the drag-kings refer to as 'packing heat'.

So there we have it. The article I wrote for Gina was too short. The same thing editors are always whining at me about. But I hate to beat around the bush. As Maria Maulduar said, 'it's not the meat it's the motion'. Why take forty words to say what can be said in ten? Unfortunately this attitude doesn't make me any money, which is the only thing that matters in this old world.