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Lifestyle

Judy Virago

I use the pronoun “she.”

As a kid, I always felt like I was one of the girls. In high school I thought I was gay and lived as a gay boy. Then I started doing drag as a performance outlet. I thought drag would be a way to express my femininity without having to submit to it.

Then I realized I wanted to be a girl all the time. On the stage, you’re padding your body and everything is fake and temporary you only wear it for a night. I wanted my body to fit those shapes. I’m on testosterone blockers and estrogen, so my body is getting softer and wider in all the right places. I don’t have to pad it so much and paint everything on.

I feel happier in life – free. I never felt comfortable as a boy. I always felt like I was faking it, which is funny, because drag is such a fake performance. But I felt more like myself when I was in that fake persona than I did as a boy.

Gender and sexuality have an interesting interplay. When I was a gay guy, I had relationships with gay guys, and as a trans woman I’ve had relationships with female-to-male trans guys. Now I sleep with trans-oriented guys – straight men who are attracted to trans women.

Growing up in Auckland, which has the world’s second-largest Samoan population, I was exposed to the concept of the third gender at a young age. In Samoan culture, more effeminate male-born people are recognized as playing a feminine role. They perform female duties and are treated as sisters by their brothers. That helped me remodel my idea of man and woman, knowing it was possible to be something else.

Mainstream appropriation of gender variation and fashion have helped bring visibility to the existence of gender variance. But at the same time, that kind of fetishizes it. I want to be accepted as a woman and have a relationship with a man, and I’m not having bottom surgery. A lot of men I meet find that exciting in a way that fetishizes.

I’ve never had a problem with having a penis. I’ve never had that kind of dysphoria. It was more the way other people perceived me that I wanted to change. With the help of technology, the accessibility of hormones and the role of the internet in disseminating information, a lot more people who may not have thought about changing their gender have started to.

The whole gender binary paradigm has started to dissolve. People are realizing that gender is just as fluid as sexuality. I don’t think gender will disappear I think it will multiply. We’ll have more genders out there that are starting to be recognized. Gender is just as much of a rainbow as sexuality.

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