Body Art and Being Trans
Was the catalyst for my lifelong interest in body modification an acceptable outlet for a need to sculpt my body?
It’s been a bit since I last documented my journey of discovering my authentic self and living my Truth and my best life.
So, a bit about where I am now.
I’ve chosen to use just Marie as my everyday name. It’s part of the legal name, Drew-Marie (it’s NOT a deadname, it’s just not my preferred name), which I chose three years ago, before my understanding of myself had fully evolved. My pronouns are they (preferred) and she (accepted). It’s just too much of a hassle to do all the legal name change stuff again. Plenty of folks use part of the name as their everyday use/chosen name/nickname, after all. I just passed my third tranniversary (the anniversary of when I started HRT) and commemorated it in the same way that I did the second, by getting tattooed.
I just passed my third tranniversary!
The main image is the one that I just had done, symbolizing being a lesbian.
The labrys was adopted by the lesbian community in the 70s to represent the strength, feminism, and self-sufficiency of queer women. Wikipedia
And this is the one I got on my leg last year to mark my second tranniversary.
This has a lot of meaning to me, in terms of representing my identity:
- Intersectional (fist of humanity)
- Socialist (rose)
- Trans (colors of the trans flag)
- Lesbian (colors of five stripe version of the sunset lesbian flag)
- Feminist (fist in the female symbol)
I was showing these off to folks in a Trans Discord server (most of them Medium writers), along with the other queer and gender-related tattoos that I’ve had done over the previous years.
Most of the tattoos I shared were done in my few pre-transition years with two more done in my first year of transition.
While sharing, I came upon a realization that sent me on one of those deep dives into memories and understanding of why I had many of the experiences I did when I was younger. I’ll get to describing that revelation after I show you my other queer and trans tattoos.
Let’s begin with the first two I got after I started my medical transition.
This one was inked in September 2019, seven months after I began my transition.
This was my Transfeminist fist tattoo. A feminist fist inside the Trans symbol colored with the Trans flag.
It represents my base gender identity — Transfeminine Demigirl.
This next one was a birthday gift to myself in July 2019 (five months into my transition). It’s the symbol for a Trans woman with the right side of the crossbar missing, turning the woman part of it into the Demigirl symbol. And it’s colored as per the Transfeminine flag. It represents my base gender identity — Transfeminine Demigirl.
These next few tattoos were done while I identified as nonbinary before I realized that I needed to transition.
The next tattoo was inked in December 2018. The Trans symbol is combined with the Nonbinary symbol in the colors of the Genderfluid flag. I no longer claim that specific identity but I do identify as Girlflux, which falls under the Genderfluid umbrella. This combines into a more comprehensive definition of my identity: Girlflux Transfeminine Demigirl.
This next one I got the morning of the Saturday during the September 2018 Riot Fest in Chicago. I don’t remember the name of the shop or the artist. I just took in the design: Queer Feminist (feminist fist symbol in the colors of the Philly Pride flag).
I got this next one in June 2018, right after I had come out as nonbinary. I messed up the design by accidentally flipping the trans symbol. It represents being Polyamorous and Pansexual with the infinity heart symbol (one of the symbols of polyamory), colored in the Pansexual flag, inside the (accidentally reversed) trans symbol, with the circle replaced by a heart and colored in the Polyamory flag. I had meant the symbol to represent all genders. I was still getting educated on what all those symbols and such were at that time, so this symbol has a personal meaning to me as part of finding myself through the evolution of my understanding of gender and truly getting in touch with my authentic self.
…this symbol has a personal meaning to me as part of finding myself through the evolution of my understanding of gender and truly getting in touch with my authentic self.
And now, the first of the Queer tattoos that I got in 2018. This one was in March — a stylized P in the colors of the Pansexual flag with a symbol meant to represent pansexuality. The design is known as the Pansexual P.
All tattoos lead to self
This review of how my tattoos over the last few years have been a reflection of my identity has been leading to a truth that I recently unlocked from within about the interest in body modification/body art that I developed in my early 20s. A part of this interest, body piercing, which back in the 90s was not yet in the mainstream awareness, would become a profession for a few years.
In 1994, I opened the first piercing studio in Washington, DC.
I also did scarification and branding, and we later added a tattoo artist to the shop. I now know that my deep interest in body art/body modification started out as an expression of my unconscious need for my body to be changed. My conscious mind as a young 20-something was latching onto a socially acceptable way for me to sculpt my body. Albeit, body piercing was pretty rare at the time and existed mostly on the borders of certain subcultures, two of which (the queer and the goth/industrial) I belonged to.
In the early 90s, I was loudly and proudly Queer and helped reclaim the word for the LGBTQIA+ community as a bi (presumed) ‘guy’ and an activist with ACT-UP, Queer Nation, and the Boston Bisexual Men’s Network. This was the best way in which I could accept that need to change my body that my internalized transphobia would allow. My subconscious mind did a darn good job of keeping any awareness of being trans buried and didn’t ever allow it to cross into my conscious awareness. Not even when I was a very gender non-conforming (presumed) ‘guy’ who painted their nails black, wore black eyeliner, and the occasional skirt or leggings underneath black jeans cut off at the calf. Or when I fantasized about being Gethian after we read The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin in a Gender Roles in Literature class.
Gethians were a branch of humans that evolved to be androgynous most of the time, and occasionally go into ‘kemmer’ when their bodies would become ‘male’ and be able to sire children or become ‘female’, become pregnant, give birth, and breast feed children.
It wasn’t until middle age when my egg started cracking that I realized hey wait, those were definite signs that I wasn’t a man.
In the early 90s, I was loudly and proudly Queer and helped reclaim the word for the LGBTQIA+ community as a bi (presumed) ‘guy’ and an activist…
I was raised as a Jewish (presumed) boy, and tattoos were verboten to Jews. So, I thought it was a way to assert my individuality and own myself, to choose to live my own life rather than one that my parents and society might dictate for me. Back then, I had no conscious awareness of being trans, and no conscious awareness of desiring and needing to change my body because of gender dysphoria.
My unconscious mind latched onto body art as a way to fulfill the need to change myself.
Body modification was part of the gay BDSM community, and body art was part of the punk and goth/industrial communities. The bi woman that I was dating at the time (when I was a queer/bi identified ‘guy’) introduced me to the book Modern Primitives.
I began with facial piercings (ears, nostril, eyebrow, tongue, septum, and various cartilage ear piercings), and later had both nipples pierced at different times. Specifically, the right nipple was done with a vertical eyebrow to line up with the vertical arrow in ‘arrows of chaos’ that I had tattooed on my right chest. I remember that tattoo being done while watching the election results for Bill Clinton defeating George Bush. That was my second tattoo, The first one was a unicursal hexagram with a five-petal flower in the center on my inner left calf. I was very into the study of Aleister Crowley and Thelema at the time and wanted my tattoos to have that meaning associated with them.
So, subconsciously, I was making myself ‘pretty’ with my facial piercings. I was taught that piercings were generally associated with femininity, while my conscious mind was thinking that intentional body changes would show that I belonged to these cultures and also show my independence from the body rules and culture I was raised in. My tattoos were about taking control of my body, making it into a design of my choosing (to compensate for my unconscious need to have different genitals, fat distribution, and breasts), and showing the world what was important to me.
Out of my 17 tattoos, only one is mostly decorative.
Its only personal meaning is as a link to that time of my life. Two of the tattoos that I had done in the aughts were also related to Crowley/Thelema, though on a more personal understanding rather than known symbols.
My tattoos were about taking control of my body, making it into a design of my choosing…
I most definitely do not regret my immersion in the culture of body art and learning about the vast differences in how people choose to tattoo themselves, and what meanings those tattoos have to them. Are they purely artistic, symbolic of something important to them, for ritual purposes, or do they have other reasons for placing permanent markings on their skin?
I almost forgot, just because I don’t think of them as tattoos/artistic works, but on my face, I have microbladed eyebrows in which ink is placed into the upper layers of my skin through many short, shallow cuts. I also have permanent eyeliner which uses a tattoo machine to place the ink into the traditional depth into the skin like other tattoos.
I do sometimes wish that I had more feminine style tattoos, with bright colors or pastels, and incorporating flowers, but that might even be where I’ll go next, after all of my medical transition payments are complete.
We’ll see.
