(this is a monologue that I cut from the performance text of The Silicone Diaires. I performed this at The Saint John Theatre Company’s production of The Silicone Diaries in August 2008. At that point the play was in a first draft form and contained stories that were highlights of my physical transformation. The text has since been rewritten, and I think it is more personal and profound. But I wanted to share this monologue cause it was truly a blast performing it in New Brunswick.  I hope you enjoy it, and find it interesting.)

For years I’m taking pharmaceutical doses of female hormones and testosterone blockers. Little pills give me soft feminine skin, enough breast tissue to get breast implants. They get rid of body hair, help with getting rid of facial hair. They will generally keep me from masculinizing as I age. What transsexual woman wants to worry about getting hairier as she gets older? Ear hair after forty? Do you know what thoughts like that do to me? I want every little bit of femininity that hormone pills, my tiny dream-come-true pills can offer me, and I go to two or three doctors at a time to get as many prescriptions as I can. Cyclon 21: the birth control pill with estrogen for women who want to avoid getting pregnant. Estrace: estrogen made from plants given to menopausal women. Premarin: synthesized estrogen from Pregnant Mare Urine. Pre-mar-in. Little yellow pills. Proscar: a prostrate cancer drug that stops testosterone. Androcure: a drug sometimes forcibly prescribed to convicted pedaephiles to cure them of androgens (male sex hormones). Yes, I am subverting the medical system, but pharmaceutical companies don’t even make drugs for transsexuals. I have to convince doctors to give me other people’s hand-me-downs.

But popping these dolls comes at a cost. That’s what I started calling the pills. Dolls. Like from Valley of the Dolls. I am spending nearly five hundred dollars a month on them, and I feel like I am PMS-ing everyday of my life – mood swings, I’m irritable, I’m depressed. Also, my doctors warn me about the effect these medications can take on my liver and the chance, the small chance that I could develop a lethal blood clot. I won’t listen, not where beauty and femininity is concerned. I tell the doctor, “Keith, give me the fucking hormones. Give me the fucking hormones, Keith. If you have to put me in the coffin just make sure I’m wearing something low cut to show off my cleavage.” Eventually, Keith sends me to another doctor.

September 11th, 2001: The phone rings. It is my boyfriend at the time. I am waking up groggy, no idea that the twin towers are coming down. “Hello?” “This is the beginning of World War 3, baby, and the end of society as we know it. Woooooooooo-eee!” The first thought that races through my mind, I can’t even tell you how fast it goes through my brain: “My femininity is dependant on swallowing these little pills everyday.” Yes, there´s more…. »

(The following is an excerpt from an interview I did with Chris Dupuis for the Nov 5th issue of Xtra! magazine. Chris’ full story will appear there and at Time and Space: A Forum for Critical Discussion of Contemporary Art, Performance and Politics. Check xtra.ca and timeandspacemagazine.com )

Chris Dupuis: How have you been able to deconstruct the ideals of beauty while at the same time trying to achieve it? How does this come up in your show?

Nina: I used a lot of the things that have traditionally been used to oppress women into stereotypically feminine beauty: make-up, styled hair, cosmetic procedures, fashion –but instead of reproducing society’s standard of beauty I took things too far. Lip liner that was too pronounced. Lashes that were too long for most women during the day. Night time make-up looks during the day. I think the fact that my appearance is constructed was exposed because I accented and highlighted the artificiality of my glamour. People could look at me and see the elements that produced a visual effect.

In many ways advertising, fashion magazines, female celebrities and porn transmit idealized images of women and femininity. I have a hate-love relationship to these images. I don’t so much recreate them as I reinterpret them through my own aesthetic. I make them more extreme. Sometimes I think that is my knowing wink of irony from inside that imagery -that I don’t take it that seriously. But at other times I don’t think I’m being ironic at all because I love dressing up and decorating my body. It goes back and forth.

But it wasn’t as if I was working with this knowledge and trying to achieve this intellectual analysis while I was having plastic surgery. I was following my instincts, doing things to my body that made me come to peace with it, that made me excited and proud of my body –often because I felt desperately uncomfortable in my prior physical form.

The play gives insights into some of the moments when I made decisions about altering myself –where I was emotionally and psychologically at the time. And the people who inspired me along the way.

I think a very important central decision for me that most transsexuals I know don’t make -maybe because they don’t have to – is that I decided that even though I feel I’m a woman inside that I don’t have to try to emulate or reproduce a middle class heteronormative idea of what a woman is supposed to be. I do not think I’m a “normal” woman who was trapped in a male body -that I’d be just like other women if I had a sex change. That cultural soundbyte doesn’t begin to emcompass the complexity of my experience. My experience of growing up queer, inside a male body, socialized as a male, living with male priviledge for 20 yrs, has made me who I am. I like being queer, and I like having a queer aesthetic which I’ve absorbed and reiterpreted from heterosexual desire. Being unique and different makes my life very challenging sometimes, but if I’m going to be true to myself i don’t see any way around it.

(Chris Dupuis is a former champion equestrian, ballet school dropout, and mildly successful catalogue model. His video and performance works have been presented at galleries, theatres, and festivals, across North America and Europe. He has held resident artist positions at Harbourfront Centre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and The Canadian Stage Company (Toronto), Studio 303 and OUT Productions (Montreal), the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff), and the Poortgebouw (Rotterdam, Netherlands). He spent four years as an associate artist with the New York/Toronto-based interdisciplinary performance collective bluemouth inc. and in 2004 received the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Production with the company for their five hour multi-location epic Something About a River.)

This segment originally appeared on Entertainment Tonight Canada in June, 2007, when I was the recipient of The Unstoppable Award from Pride Toronto and Toronto’s mayor David Miller.