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.”

And I’m not trying to say that 911 is all about my hormones and my soft skin. I’m just saying that when I watched the chaos in New York City, and then saw terrorist attacks in other countries, I wondered what happens to transsexuals in a national catastrophe? No one ever talks about that. What if I was trapped in New York when all that went down? I couldn’t breathe. I think the same thing when I see what happens in the wake of hurricane Katrina. I just can’t hole up with 10,000 potentially homophobic and transphobic people in a sports stadium for days. People tell me I’m vain when I wonder if the survivors would be too busy distributing food and water to the wounded and homeless, to grab me “8mg of Generic Conjugated Estrogen and 300mg of Testosterone-blocker, twice a day, cause this crisis could last more than a week or so and I’m not going to be looking as feminine as I want to. So just until the crisis is over can we all pull together and make this happen?” Cause after everything I’ve gone through to start living as a woman, I’m not going back – not even for the end of the world.

So in 2003 I promise myself that if global trouble maker George W. Bush is re-elected in 2004, I will have my testicles -the source of testosterone production in my body– surgically removed. Maybe I am paranoid, but I’m scared he’ll put into motion a series of events that would bring about the end of society.

But after that year’s American election, I waver and turn to one of my best girlfriends for reassurance. “Is it weird for a girl to have a dick but no balls?” She spurts, “Stop thinking like a tranny chaser! Besides, with those things gone, you’ll be able to give a camel toe effect in tight pants this summer. Hot shorts, girl!” I hug her and board a plane for sunny Guadalajara to meet Dr. Sony, the Mexican cosmetic surgeon. He is a specialist in feminizing transwomen. He can perform the surgery cheaply and without a year-long examination by a psychologist to prove I am mentally stable. Yeah, skipped that step. FYI, Dr. Sony turned out to be so shockingly soap star handsome I wanted to tell him “Just make me into whatever it is you like, cause that is exactly what I want to be.”

After the operation, when the first hit of local freezing wears off, it feels like someone starts kicking me in the groin, over and over and over and over and over and over. A dull thudding ache. This feeling slowly fades over the next few days. Also, the empty sack fills up with blood and swelling fluids. It grows to the size of nearly two baseballs. I have never felt less like a woman. I cradle the inflated bag of bodily fluids in my lap like a little baby, and try not to move, because movement means pain. No one else in the recovery centre speaks English. Two weeks. All the TV channels are Mexican variety shows. Two weeks. I ask Dr. Sony for extra pain killers just to pass the time. Two weeks. I wonder “Will it be this painful if I decide to get a vagina one day?”

When I am fully healed I can see that the doctor sewed everything up so it just looks like I have really small balls. I just have to say when I see shemale porn or my t-girlfriends naked I’m totally okay with seeing a woman with a dick now. That took a while for even me to get used to. But if she’s got these big low hanging balls, I just don’t think that’s feminine. Since my castration my moods have stabilized. My liver is in perfect working order, and if doomsday comes and society falls apart, I will be crawling through the rubble of the apocalypse proudly, cleavage intact, with soft beautiful skin and really tight pants –secure in the knowledge that I will always be feminine! Thank you, George W. Bush.

(Nina stands and salutes. Her other hand is over her crotch.)

The new version of The Silicone Diaries will be performed at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Nov 14-21, 416-975-8555 for tickets.)

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.)