Before professionally abandoning his/her chosen trade of headcleaner, Timothy Tabitha Transformer was both a man and a woman and now resides somewhere in-between. Before is an excerpt from his/her fascinating lecture at the Independence Day Hair Saloon Shoot-Out, in July 2014:
"Thank you for having me here, and me so besotted with rum and spectacle! It is sweet and creepy, like a valentine from your paroled uncle. Potted plants for everyone!
Thanks to new media and old mistakes, it's easier than ever to talk about the fluidity - can I say viscosity? - can I say stickiness? - of gender. It reminds me of my friend Carlton, who, you might say, had his genitals in the wrong place, often at the wrong time, usually at the wrong angle. How did he fill out his tax forms, those boxes of certainty? That's a trick question - Carlton was illiterate, and thought licking a sheet of paper was an acceptable form of signature. But you know what I mean.
We've all heard of the Kinsey Scale, but who wants to weigh themselves on flimsy social science? Give me rock hard science or a reasonable facsimile! You know I'm kidding - science has never been our friend, although it has been a friend-of-a-friend and we do think it's cute. C'mere, science, I'm talking to you! Oh, you wouldn't think the same creature whose orgasm is an atomic bomb blast would be so coy, but there you are.
Where are you? Overeating again? Overeating over the sink, overnight? How can we get over that? It's not understatement to suggest your oeuvre is overwhelming. These are compliments, friend, not rings of liquid left to stain your coffee table. Stop trying to clean the place up, Bartleby! That dust is sacred human skin sloughed off in determinedly daily activities! Treat it with kindness.
It is the skin, indeed, which is what we use when we interact with one another, and skin - like other body parts, like balloons, like computer devices, like government implants - skin will understand gender before the mind or cable news will. Let me demonstrate. Do you see this tattoo? No? You say there's no tattoo? You are both right and wrong; this is a potential tattoo. And indeed what we are is partially potential, even if most of us is entrails and blood and aspartame. Can I get the next slide please? What? There's no slide projector? There have been no pictures of me in compromising positions behind me the entire time? What sort of operation is this, Operation Dumbo Drop?
I am often asked by the young and gender-serious how one deals with the hostility one faces in the face of this hostile world. These eager and earnest wolf cubs with their Moleskine notebooks and cell phones with colored lights haven't yet faced the challenges that they must, in order to develop personalities and goals, and yet I am compelled to advise them. They have a difficult future in spite of themselves, with climate change barbecuing the planet and type II human growth hormone soon available in the drinking water; but I confess my guidance, my encouragement, is terse and a little sarcastic. What is it that Englebert Humperdink once said? Ah yes: 'Do I look like I motherfucking role model?'
But, Timmy Tab, I hear you say, you are a role model, to those oppressed by biology and depressed by the failure of online polls to make any difference in the world. Reluctantly, I concede. Apprehensively, I recede. I cannot continue to mislead or impede. So I say: if you want to succeed, you must proceed! To exceed you don't misread, you reread! We are agreed - together we are a stampede - we are freed, we outspeed their greed, and that is how we shall exceed!
[applause]
The youth of our day believe in rhymes, you know."
