Steve - Hates

I've been reading Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit again. I've also been reading The SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. The former is a kind of lesbian-coming-of-age-love-story-with-substance. The latter is a radical feminist theoretical tract, with the premise that women are superior to men.

They both share a kind of rad-fem men-are-inferior perspective (though in Oranges it's covered more as a side-issue). Solanas' basic underlying theory is that men are incomplete women, and on some level realise this. This realisation is the reason for women being seen as inferior, because men project all their failings onto women. The full realisation of a man's existence, his actualisation, according to Solanas, is to realise his inferior and submissive nature, and (to the extent it is possible) to transform himself into a woman.

Could it be that reading these texts is accelerating my decent into self-hate?

I used to think that it was merely my assigned gender, what I was supposed to be, that was what I needed to avoid. I could deal with that. It would be difficult, but I could scrape out every masculine cancer of my identity. Even if not, I could work at it.

But now I'm not so sure. Maybe it is my unchangeable sex that is at the root of all this. Maybe I am stuck with these hateful attributes, for as long as I live. Even HRT won't get rid of all of that.

I know how I should be reacting, how I used to. I should have read The SCUM Manifesto and come away with defiance and a desire to prove that I too could be beautiful, could empathise, could feel passion. I should be reading the more rad fem passages in Oranges and denying that I am incapable of love, willing the chance to prove it.

But these days... I'm almost agreeing. I'm beginning to despise my sex in general and myself in particular. I hate everything about my sex. I hate the little psychological ticks being male gives me, and I hate that my sexuality is so indiscriminate, so ruthless. Now, when I read Oranges, I wish so hard to be a lesbian. I want to be and to be with women, to be able to feel all the things I am... incapable of feeling. I feel so utterly inferior, I feel so utterly worthless.

Where is this headed? To oestrogen? To taking a scalpel to my testosterone? I don't know.

I am a turd, a lowly abject turd.