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Mitch (now Michelle) as the male strip­per Stud-U-Like (1980s)

 (Out mag­a­zine, March 2008)

How do you turn a penis into a vagina?

It’s not as dif­fi­cult from a med­ical point of view as you might think. Yes, it involves some rather del­i­cate major surgery and the risk of all kinds of ghastly com­pli­ca­tions. Nobody under­takes such a project lightly. But — and I know this will come as a dis­ap­point­ment to many — male and female gen­i­talia are, anatom­i­cally speak­ing, suf­fi­ciently alike to make the pro­ce­dure rel­a­tively straight­for­ward. Essen­tially, the penis is turned inside out, inverted, and placed inside a cav­ity tun­nelled out of the lower abdomen.

Michelle (for­merly Mitch/Stud-U-Like) c.2009

Or as my good friend Michelle, a post-op MTF trans­sex­ual (pic­tured above), joked with typ­i­cal tact: “I’m now shag­ging myself 24/7 — and don’t even need to buy myself dinner!”

Michelle is a very spe­cial lady. Not because she turned her penis into a vagina, but because back in the early 1990s she was a sexy male strip­per on steroids called “Stud-U-Like” (see kinky Santa snap at the top of the page) whose tat­tooed mus­cles and XL penis were the toast of hen nights and gay bars up and down the U.K. But one day Mitch, who had always had gen­der iden­tity issues, decided that despite the whoops and wolf whis­tles, the whole boy thing wasn’t work­ing for him. Mitch became Michelle, stopped tak­ing steroids, and started tak­ing female hor­mones instead — becom­ing with the aid of hair exten­sions and dan­ger­ous crash-dieting even sex­ier than Mitch. After liv­ing as a woman for a while, she finally said good­bye to the last of Mitch, i.e. her nine-inch chop­per, and had the Op. Break­ing the heart of many a gay man.

“Oper­a­tion Pussy­cat,” as she dubbed it, was for­tu­nately a total suc­cess. “I now have a 7.5-inch punani!” Michelle declared proudly while recov­er­ing in the hos­pi­tal the Day After. “And in about six months, Mark, with use it will stretch to the full nine inches I had when I was a man!”

“More like a month in your case, dear,” I quipped.

Michelle pursed her lips (the old pair).

Michelle’s trans-tastic voy­age, from Stud-U-Like to Chick-U-Love, turned out to be eerily prophetic. She her­self has adjusted well to her life as a woman with large breasts, but I’m not so sure about the rest of us.

Look­ing around at our sex­u­ally trans­par­ent, stimulated-simulated, implanted-imploding cam-fun-anyone? world, it’s dif­fi­cult not to con­clude that most of us are going tranny but with­out the, er, balls to actu­ally change sex or even prop­erly cross-dress. We’re all becom­ing male-to-male and female-to-female trans­sex­u­als: tran­sexy.

“Male and female cre­ated He them” — but now He’s watch­ing His hand­i­work rush down to the cos­metic sur­geon for a nip and tuck, lipo­suc­tion, rhino­plasty, pec and but­tock and calf implants, breast reduc­tion, breast enlarge­ment, penis exten­sions and girth widen­ing, vagi­nal tight­en­ing, revir­gina­tion, six-pack etch­ing, and labial and scro­tum reduc­tion. All in all, He must be feel­ing a lit­tle bit miffed.

It’s not enough, you see, to be male or female any more. You have to both embody and go beyond sex. You have to turn your­self inside out. We’re all becom­ing… Pamela Ander­son. Which is nice, but we don’t all have the legs for it.

Tran­sexy is not quite the same thing as androg­yny — which, in addi­tion to David Bowie being enig­mat­i­cally fey in a span­gly 1970s leo­tard to a glam-rock sound­track, means a mix­ture of mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine char­ac­ter­is­tics. Androg­yny can be actu­ally quite affirm­ing of sex­ual dif­fer­ence. Tran­sexy, because it’s obsessed with trans­parency, tran­scends mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine and oblit­er­ates sex­ual dif­fer­ence — even and espe­cially when it’s try­ing oh, so-hard not to look androgynous.

Let me give you a very hairy exam­ple. Newsweek recently reported the case of “George,” a 6-foot-3 man “with chis­eled pecs and a bushy beard” who “seemed like a model of man­li­ness.” Yet two years ago the 47-year-old decided he didn’t look quite macho enough. “So he had 3,000 hair fol­li­cles ripped from his scalp and trans­planted into his face, chest, and belly.” He still wasn’t sat­is­fied. So a year later he returned to get an addi­tional 2,400 grafts done. “‘I could still have another surgery and not be com­pletely cov­ered,’ says George today. ‘I’m very pleased, but 2,400 grafts is not a very hairy chest.’”

A lit­tle bird tells me George is never going to be sat­is­fied. After all, what is a very hairy chest? Once you start obsess­ing about such things, there’s no end to this.

And, boy, have we have started. Says Newsweek: “George’s quest for max­i­mum hir­sute­ness isn’t as unusual as it may sound. He’s part of a grow­ing group of ‘ret­ro­sex­u­als,’ men who shun metrosexuality…in favor of old-school mas­culin­ity.” The arti­cle also cites an increase in the num­ber of men ask­ing sur­geons for “man­lier” chins and noses as fur­ther evi­dence of the so-called “rise of retrosexuality.”

Since when did “old-school mas­culin­ity” per­sis­tently per­ceive itself as chron­i­cally lack­ing in male­ness and obsess over its phys­i­cal appear­ance, and since when did “old-school” men resort to repeated painful and costly cos­metic surgery of ques­tion­able effect to make them­selves more attrac­tive, more wor­thy of love — more “manly”?

It’s a mea­sure of how totally tran­sexy we’ve become that sur­gi­cally fix­ated MTM Pammy-trannys are seen as “ret­ro­sex­ual” by Newsweek. Like last year’s men­da­cious “menais­sance,” with all those prissy-missy lists of manly dos and don’ts, this is just Fight Club the Musi­cal (which by the way is com­ing to tap-dance and gush and bray on Broad­way soon — no, really).

But why not? This after all is a gen­er­a­tion of men on hor­mones: hun­dreds of thou­sands are tak­ing steroids, accord­ing to recent reports. Most of them not cir­cuit party queens. Not only do base­ball play­ers appar­ently now need to take them to be base­ball play­ers, and high school foot­ball play­ers to be high school foot­ball play­ers, but also ordi­nary nonath­letic, non-body-building men need to take them to be nonath­letic non-body-building men. (Only 6% of steroid abusers in the United States play sports or con­sider them­selves body builders.)

The vast major­ity of males tak­ing “the juice” are not doing so to be stronger or faster or scarier, all tra­di­tion­ally mas­cu­line ambi­tions, but sim­ply to look more attrac­tive in the gym, on the dance floor, at the beach, or in their online pro­files — to look, in other words, like male strip­pers: Stud-U-Like. Or what is much the same thing, Vin Diesel.

But steroids, like tran­sex­i­ness itself, can have a para­dox­i­cal effect. In addi­tion to tes­ti­cle shrink­age and erec­tile prob­lems, in large doses they can turn into estro­gen in the body, which causes “bitch tits” and female fat dis­tri­b­u­tion: Stud-U-Like into Chick-U-Love. Per­haps this is why Sylvester Stal­lone looks more and more like his mother, Jackie. Given his recent steroid scan­dals, the tagline for his new Rambo movie, “Heroes never die…they just reload,” prob­a­bly refers to syringes rather than ammunition.

The world of celebri­ties is of course tran­sexy with knobs and knock­ers on. This is really the whole point of celebs — and the rea­son we’re so inter­ested in them. They’re what we would be if we had the time and money and could be both­ered. Celebri­ties are the per­sonal fit­ness instruc­tors of post­sex­ual iden­tity: inspi­ra­tional and moti­va­tional and very shouty. Women such as Paris and Nicole are ads for tran­sex­i­ness — not because they look like skinny boys with smacked lips hold­ing water bal­loons, which of course they do, but because they look like women who have had all sorts of costly, painful, and occa­sion­ally risky pro­ce­dures — to look, in fact, like Woman. They are all, like sex in the dig­i­tal age, copies of an orig­i­nal that doesn’t exist. The ques­tion we con­tin­u­ally ask of celebs is, How can we be like you? How can we copy your copy of sex?

Attacks on fash­ion design­ers for their unreal and unhealthy ideals of fem­i­nine beauty some­what miss the point that fash­ion is fash­ion. The fash­ion world, for all its dic­ta­to­r­ial ges­tures, only reflects cul­ture — or what is the same thing these days, what cul­ture aspires to be.

Celebrity males are, of course, at least as tran­sexy as the women. Tom Cruise, still the biggest Hol­ly­wood box-office draw despite jump­ing the chat-show sofa, is a pint-size all-American action hero who is the absolute epit­ome of arti­fice. After 22 years he’s still play­ing his Top Gun char­ac­ter, Mav­er­ick (and the Sci­en­tol­o­gists appear to have his por­trait in their attic). The tagline on the posters for the Missy Impos­si­ble movies should read, “Can you spot the weave?” Weaved or not, Cruise’s zoom­ing nar­cis­sism always out­guns his lead­ing ladies.

As Tom’s multimillion-dollar smile shows, male and female nowa­days mean exactly the same thing: a rav­en­ous, ruth­less desire to be desired. And they both have the num­ber of the same plas­tic sur­geon. Sex­ual dif­fer­ence has been replaced by sex­u­al­ized com­pe­ti­tion. As with Blu-ray and DVD HD, there’s not much to choose between the for­mats: One has more stor­age space, the other has a bet­ter inter­face. That’s pretty much it.

Put, say, a pic­ture of Nicole Kid­man next to ex-hubby Tom, and you’ll see what I mean. Can you really say that these two peo­ple are oppo­site sexes? Or even dif­fer­ent sexes? Or put a pic­ture of her next to Keith Urban and watch them blur into one. it’s no won­der these two ended up together. After all, they seem to be shar­ing the same stylist.

No won­der Sharon Stone recently announced that she is sick of men who “act like women” and claimed she’d rather be romanced by a “mas­cu­line lady. It is dif­fi­cult to have a rela­tion­ship because I like men in that old-fashioned way,” she sighed. “I like mas­culin­ity, and in truth only women do that now.” So true, Sharon, so true. My TS mate Michelle, who is also an old-fashioned girl at heart, agrees with you com­pletely. She’s really fed up with the first thing straight blokes ask after she tells them her lit­tle secret being: “Will you fuck me??” Hav­ing been through all that trou­ble to have your large penis turned into a vagina, it’s a tad annoy­ing to have to go out and buy a selec­tion of strap-ons.

I sus­pect Sharon’s been watch­ing that show Entourage, in which a group of young men from blue-collar back­grounds behave like Sex and the City women, only more super­fi­cial. The Entourage gen­er­a­tion of men lives to shop and to be looked at and aspires to be noth­ing more than trophy-man wives. “Hug it out, bitch,” is the motto of tran­sexy men everywhere.

Speak­ing of tro­phy man-wives, take a look at today’s celebrity cou­ples. Actu­ally, don’t even look; just say their names: Demi and Ash­ton, Jen and Marc, Angelina and Brad, Maddy and Guy. None of these cou­ples even sounds remotely man-and-wifey. They resem­ble — you can look now — anatom­i­cally incor­rect kids’ toys. Where is sex­ual dif­fer­ence here? In the drag-king stub­bly beards that the sack-and-crack-waxed toy-boys wear to empha­size their Tim­ber­lakian adora­bil­ity? No won­der these celeb cou­ples end up being called two-headed sin­gle names like Brangelina or TomKat: flesh of my undif­fer­en­ti­ated flesh.

Even when a celebrity cou­ple, like Maddy and Guy, act out a reasser­tion of tra­di­tional roles, it only serves as par­ody. When Madonna brags about her mock­ney gang­ster groupie hus­band boss­ing her about, it only serves to make it clear that Guy is the Eng­lish nanny whose duties include hav­ing to pre­tend to dom­i­nate Madonna seven or eight times a week.

But none can com­pare, of course, with the ulti­mate tran­sexy cou­ple: Vic­to­ria Adams and David Beck­ham. Some­how, Posh and Becks’s extra­or­di­nary appear­ance becomes, daily, more hero­ically arti­fi­cial — per­haps because they seem to embrace their tran­sex­i­ness com­pletely, per­form­ing it shame­lessly to the hilt in fash­ion shoots in which they sim­u­late tran­sexy sex (which is, by def­i­n­i­tion, sim­u­lated anyway).

If a record­ing of Posh and Becks hav­ing sex at home were to make its way onto the inter­net, as it has done with Pamela Ander­son and Tommy Lee, or Paris Hilton and Rick Salomon, it prob­a­bly wouldn’t test the server’s band­width much. Not because their naked angu­lar­ity might be uncom­fort­able to watch, but because there’s noth­ing more to see.

Porn has become the celeb sen­si­bil­ity because porn lit­er­ally makes sex trans­par­ent. By cease­lessly ‘show­ing’ sex­ual dif­fer­ence and turn­ing it inside out, straight porn over­ex­poses it, along with het­ero­sex­u­al­ity — and turns it tran­sexy. Most female porn stars these days look like Pamela Ander­son — did they copy her, or did she copy them? Or was it both? Mean­while les­bian­ism and sodomy, i.e. non penile-vaginal sex, are pretty much de rigueur in ‘straight’ porn. On the rare occa­sions penile-vaginal sex actu­ally occurs, it’s usu­ally either in the form of a man lying flat on his back while a woman bounces up and down on him (either she’s fuck­ing him or giv­ing him a vagi­nal blow job, take your sodomit­i­cal pick) or is joined by sev­eral other science-fiction-size penises at the same time.

Which reminds me, the male mod­els in straight porn are no longer the penises attached to fat hairy fucks of yore but increas­ingly resem­ble those in gay porn; they are get­ting younger and more attrac­tive, and their bod­ies are shaved and more worked out, and the cam­era won’t shy from show­ing this off. Or so I’ve heard.…

Mean­while, some­thing inter­est­ing — at last! — seems to be hap­pen­ing in the world of gay porn. Per­haps inspired by Michelle’s jour­ney, an impres­sively hung young model called Stonie — who bizarrely also played Borat’s son in the Sacha Baron Cohen movie — is now tak­ing female hor­mones. He’s already had breast implants and has changed his name to Brit­tany Coxxx (though for now he’s hang­ing onto his cockkk). And apart from the hexag­o­nal breast implants, he looks rather hot.

The curi­ous thing, though, is that he also looks even more like a gay-porn star now than he did before.

As Borat, per­haps the last true ret­ro­sex­ual left, might say: “Tran­sexy time!”

Copy­right Mark Simp­son 2008

Spe­cial thanks to Michelle and Don­ald K and also the late great Jean Bau­drillard, who shuf­fled off his vir­tual coil last year.

This essay is col­lected in ‘Met­ro­sexy: a 21st cen­tury self-love story’