Why, after 6 years as a staunchly no-hormones trans person, I have decided to use T: a love letter to my body, and an open letter to the trans community

When I was 16, I began to question what it would mean to change genders. How could you tell, I wondered, what gender you felt in a given moment? What did gender entail? I wondered, too, whether an ideological disagreement with a gender binary was enough to put you outside it. I started to research how different people were approaching their gender questions, what the world of gender and sex possibility looked like. 

I quickly found Hudson’s Guide and read everything. Because I started from a fundamental lack of understanding of even the basics of gender, I absorbed any opinion and advice I read. On Hudson’s Guide, this specifically meant some pretty binarist ideas about what it meant to walk through the world as a trans guy whose gender was acknowledged as valid. Still, Hudson is helpful for some things, and it was where I did all of my research on medical transition.

I was obsessive in my research during this period. I remember spending hours doing nothing but trolling the internet for the perfect answers to my ineffable questions. I couldn’t think about anything else. Still, somehow I don’t have a very strong recollection of my research into hormones and surgery. It must have been very quick. If people were posting their entire transition chronologies on youtube and tumblr at that time, I didn’t know about it. I must have looked at a couple of pictures, read that genetics dictated your likelihood of baldness and the density of your body hair, and decided that it wasn’t for me, never mind how appealing some of the other changes sounded. I was changing gender presentations every day at that time, and the idea of making intentional, permanent, gendered changes to my body felt senseless given the constantly shifting nature of my body needs.

That was it; I never looked back.

There were times over the years that I would wistfully watch someone else’s testosterone-induced transformation and wonder if I had made the right decision, but I would always quickly decide that I had. At the time—and in many ways still—it felt like a non-normative decision to make. I didn’t make the decision in order to be non-normative, but I have always taken special pride in the things that are true of me that set me apart. Many of the people around me had never met a trans person before, and the answers they were able to find from the internet and pop culture painted pictures I wasn’t in, so that meant that I was constantly asked to defend my choices and, by extension, to defend my gender. I lost friends as they got bored and impatient with the effort it took to justify my existence. 

As I moved away from gender-switching towards seeking an understanding of my gender as constant, whole, and all-encompassing, the choices I had made despite all the pressure to do anything other than what felt right solidified into an identity, a badge I had to wear proudly so as not to lose it. I developed rhetoric and scrambled to spread it as I witnessed a lack of resources causing so many trans people to adopt the official narrative before their stories had even had a chance to unfold. Identity policing from in and outside of trans communities disheartened me, but also hardened me. I worried a lot about the exhaustion involved in pushing yourself beyond sanctioned existence and hoped for myself that I would find ways not to bow to the binary and end up medically transitioning to make life easy rather than honest. I adopted an anti-assimilationist ideology that I hoped would bolster my resolve if things got tough. 

I never really found community, but I met individuals who understood what I was doing and why—people for whom the personal and the political also spiraled around one another. My ideal lifestyle involves my methods of survival and my political rhetoric refining and redefining one another until they become indistinguishable—until I am an angel dancing on the head of a pin—the perfect point of liberation. In reality, this has often ended up with me taking up my stance too extremely in my own life, forcing constancy and rationality onto my passions. Maybe my stead-fastness with my no-ho status was one of those times.

My first shot is tomorrow.

So what’s changed, and why am I allowing it?

Well, probably the biggest thing that’s happened is that I’m in therapy and I’m in a healthy relationship. I love myself more now than my 16-year-old self could have imagined possible.

See, when I was 16 and making decisions I was going to force myself to stand by for the rest of my life, I hated bodies. Now, don’t misread that. It isn’t that I hated my body (I mean, I did hate my body, but I didn’t especially hate my body) I hated all bodies. I thought all bodies were horrifying. In fact, I was in the habit of comparing my body to other bodies and preferring mine. This habit (and some choice reinforcement from my parents) caused a panic at the idea that anything might change about my body. It was beautiful as it was, but only because it fit a certain idea of what beauty looked like. My decision not to take T wasn’t just about not wanting to put effort into permanent changes that would only occasionally be right for me—it was about a complete terror that my body, with its high likelihood of hair going everywhere but the top of my head, would become disgusting.

Turns out I developed an anti-cissexist, body liberationist theory out of a deep-seeded fear of bodies born of cissexism and body colonization.

Lucky for me, the theory holds water. Even luckier for me, it’s actually been helping me to liberate myself as a person with a body. As my fear and loathing of bodies has been eroded by my belief that all bodies are valid, worthy, and beautiful and that they should be autonomous, I’ve come to really, really love my body. And unlike my old “love,” which was based on the shaky foundation of stasis, this new love is firmly rooted in a love and understanding for all bodies that my 16-year-old self would never have thought possible. What this means is that I’m no longer terrified that my body might do the thing that bodies do best: change. I am not even perturbed by the idea that I might not like all the ways that it changes. I feel able to approach any changes that don’t excite me with the understanding that I have the capacity to find love, healing, or both. 

This is all to say that when the question of whether I had made the right decision came back up for me recently and wouldn’t go away, I thought that changing my mind might be a betrayal of my politics. How could I continue to tell people that being trans didn’t require a cissexist understanding of how bodies are sexed, doesn’t require self-hatred or medical transition? How can I continue to argue that it is the world that must change, not us? I don’t worry about that anymore. My politics have always asked the questions, how can we counter a normative gender narrative? How can I keep from getting caught up in gender norms coming from anywhere but inside me? How can I live my life as a trans person whose gender is mostly a source of great joy to them? Taking testosterone does not stop me from asking these questions; it actually helps me answer them. It also doesn’t mean I have copped out to pressures to assimilate myself into the binary. That isn’t why I’m taking T, and my hope is that it never will be.

My entire exploration has been chasing an answer to the question, “what if?” So now I’m asking it again: What if I stopped allowing my fear of change to stifle my curiosity? What if it took people 5 seconds to decide which binary gender applied to me, instead of the two it takes them now? What if I took this hard-won love for my body and let it propel me forward? What if things could be even better than they already are? 

I want to be clear now that this decision is not a reversal of my previous one. Rather, it is a continuation of my previous one. There is no moment in which I wish that I had started T earlier, no moment of my gender exploration that I regret. Indeed, I could not have made this decision at any point in my life before now, because I could not have made this decision out of anything but a deep, deep love for myself, my body, and my gender. It is not a concession to any of the forces that have tried to tell me my life was impossible. It is the decision to acknowledge and prioritize my desires. And I feel pretty damn good about that.

Wild Metaphor for My Gender

I’m reblogging myself because this was just recalled to my attention, and, well, I’m really proud of it.

boygirlboigrrrl:

It’s sunday, which means no sleep for this makeup-wearing, hyper-feminine, female-assigned, male-centered, genderfucked androgyne with a passion for facial hair and women’s shoes.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about exhaustion again, and I’ve got a metaphor for you to ponder.

My gender is like a really fucking sweet pair of orthopedic sneakers. And here’s why: I got these sneakers really tricked out. I went online and I found this site that makes custom orthopedic sneakers that not a lot of people knew existed and I got these babies bedazzled, I got them in rich, bright colors, I got them satin-lined, and I got my name embroidered on them. They’re gorgeous and they go with everything I wear and I go places and people compliment me all the time, “wow, those are some really incredible orthopedic shoes; I didn’t know those even existed and now you’ve blown open my world and I’m thinking of getting a pair.” “Can you give me some advice on how I can make my own pair of orthopedic shoes?” People generally receive them well. Sometimes though, I get shit like, “ew, are those orthopedic?” or “are those regular sneakers or orthopedic? I can’t tell, let me whisper about it with my friends.” The fact of them being orthopedic shoes makes people feel they can ask me highly personal questions about them like what sort of medical condition I must have in order to have to wear such undesirable shoes, no matter how much I’ve been able to dress them up. Sometimes I’m told I’m brave for wearing my socially-unacceptable shoes out of the house and not letting anyone give me shit for them.

And then sometimes I get fake compliments like, “oh wow, those shoes are great. Don’t worry, I’d never have been able to tell they were orthopedic, if only you hadn’t told me, I would have just thought they were regular shoes.” To which I have to reply, “please, you wish you had known they were orthopedic. Not only are they fly as fuck, they’ve got great arch support, and I’m never going to be ashamed of recognizing that I don’t need beauty if it can’t also take care of me.” These shoes are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I can walk for miles without any back pain; I no longer have to hang my head. They make me feel safe and comfortable at all times.

Society, on the other hand, is a ride on the M train from Middle Village to Forest Hills, and the whole time I don’t get a seat. For those of you who are not from New York, that is the first and last stop on the M train. They are a 7-minute drive from one another, but if you take the M, it’ll probably take you about 2 hours to get there. And that’s what I’m doing, I’m standing for a huge stretch of time on a train, taking the longest, least effective route to get very little distance. And by the end of my ride, my feet are tired, and maybe I’m a little whiny and people say to me, “oh, but why are you complaining? I thought those shoes were supposed to be really comfortable,” when really I’m talking about how the whole time I couldn’t find a single place to just give my feet a little bit of rest.

On having an insecurity that is not tied to oppression

I find that in most of the anti-oppression communities I am a part of or in solidarity with we have this idea that if the particular oppression we are focusing on would go away, no one would be insecure about that aspect of themselves. To follow this theory to its logical conclusion, we figure that if all oppression were gone, so would insecurity go. Well, that’s not exactly true. In fact, I come from a place of such extreme privilege that I’m relatively certain that not one of my major insecurities is rooted in oppression. 

The topic of this post is my hair.

If you look through the pictures of me that I have posted on this blog, you will see a variety of hair colors. You will notice that the only pictures that have brown hair in them are in posts about my history. All of those pictures were taken before about March 2008. I have been changing my hair color every month or so for the past three years, and I can’t imagine stopping.

As a white person with relatively straight, easily manageable, soft hair, I have been told my whole life that my hair is the best type of hair to have. Sure, the real ideal is blonde, but that never really affected me as far as I could tell. Still, somehow I have a mental block on having naturally-colored hair. Frankly, even the white is a little too close to natural for me; it’s always a relief to dye it something bright and eye-catching again. I think that a lot of the insecurity for me comes from feeling that I am not, in my natural state, particularly noticeable. 

And the weird thing is that I’m not just worried that people won’t be stricken with immediate attraction to me if I don’t stand out (though that’s part of it, you can be sure), I’m scared that other people won’t stare at me for all the various reasons that they currently do—that if I don’t have something that causes me to immediately catch people’s eye, I’ll lose all the attention—good and bad—that I get right now just for being in a place. I’m afraid of losing the hostile stares too, and the confused ones, and the quizzical ones, and the ones that are accompanied by not-so-secretive discussions about my gender. I’m just an attention hog.

I also like the constantly changing hair colors. I’ve always feared change, and I used to say that my hair was a way to force myself to confront change, but I think that’s lapsed at this point. Changing my hair color isn’t scary, it’s the norm. It’s a way of maintaining the stasis, of being Enoch Riese, that one guy with the colorful hair. It’s funny because when I was younger, I was that one kid with the very long hair and the idea of cutting it off made me panic that I would have nothing for people to know me by. Hair has always been tied up in my sense of self. 

Understanding the politics of other people’s hair makes me wonder if it’s possible that there’s a self-loathing element to my need to keep my hair unnatural, but because the texture and color of my hair are privileged, it’s somehow reversed. I hate to admit it, but I’ve considered that my compulsive hair dyeing is a guilt-driven response to privilege.

I don’t think that’s the case though, because I think that it’s more tied to my other feelings of un-reality and being a constructed person (I don’t know how much I’ve discussed those feelings here, but they’re a lot). Because I don’t always feel exactly like I’m real, I’m not particularly interested in giving people the impression that I am. The way I feel about having natural-looking hair when I meet someone for the first time or when I’m out in public is similar to the way I feel when those things are happening when I’m dressed casually, or, at an earlier time in my life, when I was presenting as a woman: it’s a panic that they won’t see me and interpret me as I interpret myself, and that once their impression is made, it’ll be too late for them to really know me.

Lately I’ve been thinking about growing my hair out a bit and letting it be brown again. I definitely have some friends who are trying to encourage that. They’ve tried to reassure me by reminding me that I am not a low-profile person—I still dress loudly and am highly androgynous. While I like the idea of experimenting with longer hair and seeing if I still get read as male as often as I do now (not all that often, actually), I can’t bring myself to feel ready to give up the colors just yet. I don’t think I’m ready to see what happens when people have to notice something else about me.

On Erasure

My name change is official now. It’s a forrealsies thing that I have papers declaring and it’s really awesome and I’m very happy.

But as I’ve been going to various agencies that have documents proving who I am so that I can inform them of my new name, it’s occurring to me that my old name will cease to exist. I went in to change my birth certificate yesterday, and once they send me the new copy, it’ll be like I was born this way.

I know that for some trans people, that’s perfect; everything that happened before they were able to live as themselves needs to go. For me, I’m not so sure. Yeah, it’s true that I don’t need anyone to know the name I had before I was Enoch, but I’m not so disturbed by the idea that they might. I’ve intentionally put it in the public domain, though I suppose much of that is just in case someone who knew me from before is looking for me. And I guess all the stuff that happened to me up till now will still be in the old name, but it still feels a bit like erasing my history. 

I’m not sad, exactly; I’m not even wistful, it’s just interesting to think that in a few weeks, that name will really be gone.

Well, bring it on, I guess. I really am looking forward to having a piece of ID with my real name on it. The registrar at my school said I should be able to get my new ID next week. I hope he meant Monday.

On my “social” transition

While I was sitting in the court room, bored and also on edge and waiting for my name to be called, I realized something I hadn’t really thought about before:

Changing my name is my entire transition.

Woah, right?

As a non-medical transperson, I don’t think of myself as really having steps or a process to my transition. I don’t think of myself as really in transition, though I do think of myself as having had a transition. I really thought of it as this sort of amorphous, some-what ongoing, but also somewhat never-really-having-happened thing. I mean, I started out with some questions and I mostly answered them the best way I knew how and I’m always figuring out more efficient, realistic, honest ways to answer them, and that’s been what I call my gender exploration. I’ve totally changed from who I was, so in that way I call it transition, but usually I just stick with exploration. I talk about the early stages and the more recent stages, but never really the beginning or the end.

But changing my name is a concrete, not-particularly-reversible step in transition, and it is the only one of its kind that I plan on taking.

So…. on Thursday, I will be done transitioning (I mean, add some time for all my ID changes to come through, but still). Trippy, right?

Update: Name Change Process

I had my court date today. Pretty boring, routine stuff. You turn up, you tell the clerk you’re there, you sit around for, like, ever, you (I) get all anxious because you just want it to happen already, the judge calls you up and asks you some silly questions that have nothing to do with anything, but also, do you know what you have to do next? She was pretty cool and told me essentially that she couldn’t care less about my name, but in a good way. Also, there was this little girl who was getting her name changed and it was her birthday and the judge was really adorable when she was asking her the questions and that put me in a good mood for a while but then some dude had some kind of complicated stuff going on and it made me anxious again.

Anyway, I’m totally approved for my name change. She told me to publish in the cheapest newspaper in the city, I went home, called them up, faxed off my announcement. It’ll be published on Wednesday, I’ll swing by on Thursday, pick up the affidavit, go to the court house and LEGALLY BE ENOCH OCEANA RIESE like a fucking badass.

Also, I thought replacing ID’s was gonna be a whole bunch of other money, but according to old and possibly out-of-date info on the SRLP site, a lot of it is pretty cheap. Just checked passport fees though, and holy crap. The judge told me that I don’t have to change everything at once if I don’t want to. I’m privileged enough to be able to, but if anyone else is considering changing their name any time soon and money is a worry, a new social security card is free and a new state ID from the DMV is apparently 5 dollars, so your most essential IDs aren’t too hard to cover.

Some other tips on making your name change cheaper: if you have a bank account, you can go to your bank and have them notarize stuff for you. All banks have notaries and if you have an account, they notarize you for free. If you wait to get stuff notarized at the court, they’ll charge you per form and it’ll add up.

Also, I think, in New York at least, you can tell them that you can’t afford the fees and there’s a way to get it waived. You’ll probably still have to pay for your certified copies ($6 each) and your publication fees ($35 at the cheapest paper in New York City), but that’s a hell of a lot better than trying to come up with the $60 petition fee in addition. 

It also helps to figure out how many certified copies you need so you don’t spend on extra ones you don’t need. You can always go back and get more.

Q:Hey, that's fine, I wrote the words for you, not for anyone else, though I may end up posting something to the same effect on my own blog somewhere.

So you use Enoch as as an androgynous name? What do you prefer to go by on the internet?

hapaxlegomina

Nah, I never had an androgynous name, really. When I was trying to choose a new name I looked into names that were given to people of multiple genders, but none of them fit me. I also realized that if I was presenting as a woman, it wouldn’t really matter what name I used, they would read me as a woman regardless, but if I was presenting as any other gender, I would need to use a name that no one would think could be a woman’s name in order to get them to even consider reading me as anything other than a woman. I used Ian as a name for all my presentations; Enoch seemed too old-school masculine at the time, but I’m now comfortable being a person who is not a man and has a man’s name (after all, if someone’s going to mistake me for someone who has a binary gender, I’d rather they mistake me for a man). Ian is still the name most people call me. It’s like a nickname for Enoch. I go by Enoch on the internet because I want everything to be in the right name, but I usually still introduce myself as Ian in person. And my initial hypothesis was totally right, even though Ian is not a woman’s name, a lot of people don’t seem to make the connection and still read me as a woman. Ridiculous. 

On Choosing Not to Medically Transition: what transition has and has not meant for me

My transition started in about the middle of 10th grade, when I got fixated on the idea of going to school “in drag.” It’s important to note at the very beginning of this that I never had any trouble being a girl. I had a lot of issues with what my peers seemed to think girls could and could not do, but I knew they were wrong. I had at that point kind of plopped into the middle of an already-formed queer family that had awesome politics and was teaching me what it meant to treat people with respect for all of their identities, and they were an important factor in making me feel like exploration was possible.

So I bought some clothes from the men’s section and an ace bandage (cringe, I know) and a hat to hide my shoulder-length hair, chose a name, put them all on and went to school: This is what I looked like. Not how not-dapper. It was a joke at first, but I started to take it more seriously as the day progressed. By the time I was with my queer family that evening and they were using the right name and the right pronouns and really affirming my experiment, I felt I had gotten more comfortable with the idea of being seen as a boy. All of a sudden there were so many questions.

I started to keep a journal specifically for gender exploration. I very quickly decided that intellectually I rejected the binary, but I had no idea what that would mean in practical terms. I’m not even really sure I knew what that meant in theoretical terms. Having come from a background of believing that anyone of any gender can do anything, it was very difficult for me to pinpoint what it would feel like to be a particular gender and what it might feel like to move among genders. Then I read Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook and interpreted Kate’s understanding of binary gender identities in a way that I feel is simultaneously her goal and not at all what she means and learned that man and woman are static, rigid words that describe opposite behavioral norms. Finally, I felt I understood what it would mean to feel like a man or a woman.

So I decided to try it out. I would wake up in the morning, decide how I felt, and dress as that gender. I had boy days, I had girl days, I had no-gender days, and I had all-gender days. Whatever gender I presented, I would try to maintain for the whole day. I had a pretty definite clothing code to help people recognize what pronouns (and also, initially what name) to call me, but my friends weren’t really down with having to memorize all that. In retrospect, their reticence makes sense, but at the time I think I really needed it and it was hard to feel like I was learning anything about gender when I wasn’t being treated the way I wanted to be treated. My queer family continued to try their best to be respectful.

Over the summer I got a more androgynous haircut and had a lot more freedom to try things out. My parents, though I wouldn’t talk to them about what was going on, insisted that if I was going to dress like I boy, I was going to have to find a style that suited and flattered me. I eventually found one and settled into it, presenting less and less often as a woman, but still definitely holding onto that part of my polygender identity. I continued to switch for another few months, even as school picked back up. I decided it would be easiest for people if I had only one name, so I decided on Ian and had my friends help me to make sure everyone knew.

Through switching, I learned a lot of things. I learned how to make myself seem more male through walk, stance, mannerisms, speech patterns, and, most importantly, the way I held my face. I no longer really use the other things that make me seem male unless I think a situation requires it (like if, for my safety, I need to be read unequivocally as male) but I think that learning my facial structure was the single most important part of my transition. I discovered one day—while taking a sip from a soda can in front of a mirror—that with my jaw dropped, I instantly looked more masculine. I had read all of Hudson’s Guide and knew that the advice they gave was to clench your jaw, but I already have a really strongly-defined jawline and clenching my teeth just made my face look small. Dropping it made my cheek bones look higher and my face look longer. I was always a tight-jawed kid, but I now keep my jaw loose at all times. I encourage everyone to spend some real time in front of a mirror playing with the way they hold their face. There’s a lot you can shape about your appearance without actually changing anything at all.

I learned other things too, like that it was uncomfortable for me to be seen as a woman because my female-assigned body made it so easy for people to get locked into the idea of a woman. If they saw me as male, I could probably play with their perception of my gender, but once the idea me as female took root, I’d probably never be able to alter that idea, no matter what I did. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up certain things women did, like wear great clothing.

I also found that I was uncomfortable being a man because the only things I knew about manhood were the things Kate Bornstein had told me, and I really just couldn’t uphold the type of masculinity ze said being a man required. I kept those clothes too, though, for the days when I was feeling too lazy to dress androgynously. Androgyny was where I found I was most comfortable, but it is sometimes work to maintain it the way I like it. So maleness became the identity of exhaustion. It still feels really cool to me that I can be read as male, so it feels pretty nice to just look really masculine in jeans and a t-shirt, and that makes it a good backup, but it’s not the way I like to dress. I am always self-conscious when I meet someone for the first time and I am not dressed up in my andro-femmeboi clothing.

So, slowly, I came to the conclusion that I did not enjoy switching gender every day, and also that I did not like the ideas that led me to do it. There are men who are like me, and women who are like me, but I didn’t want to be either of those things. I wanted to be trans and I wanted to make sure that transness was always at the forefront of my gender identity. 

So I guess you could say that my transition has included a social transition of changing my name and gender presentation and the pronouns I use and all that good stuff, cutting my hair, developing my own binding method (which I guess I forgot to mention, but yeah, I make my own binders), figuring out the shape of my face so that it looks more male without me having to do anything permanent, learning how to dress my body, learning what gender means to me, learning how to actually (to the extent that it’s possible) escape the binary, embracing the parts of me that people told me I could not take with me through transition, researching what other people did during their transition, coming to terms with the reality of my body, getting comfortable enough in my transness to wear clothes that could easily get me mistaken for a woman. There’s probably more, but this is a lot.

When I hear people who medically transition talk about non-medical transition, I feel like they often imply that it’s only a social thing. I want to be clear that I have done a ton of internal transition work as well. And maybe that’s because I didn’t start my process with a clear idea of what my gender was, but it’s not just about a haircut and some new clothes and a shiny new name to go with. 

But I haven’t even addressed the question: Why no medical transition, Enoch?

While all of that transitional stuff was happening, I was dealing with some body dissonance, but I was only dealing with it some of the time. There were whole weeks when it felt like my head didn’t fit on my body and it was very distressing to me, but then there were all these times when my body was exactly what I wanted and needed. Because I was switching genders all the time, my needs for my body were changing all the time. Like I said, I looked at everything Hudson’s guide had to offer, including explanations and pictures of hormones and surgeries, I made sure to research my options thoroughly, and each has a unique reason for not being a good option for me, though underlying all of it is a fear of permanence. My needs are not permanent, but all of these options are, to varying extents.

T: Baldness and body hair run deep on both sides of my family. I have very hair legs that I’m extremely proud of, but that’s really all the body hair I want. Because baldness and hairiness are so prevalent, I know that they are beautiful, but they have never been what I have wanted for myself. Sure, I could get a deeper voice and bigger muscles and an even more male-appearing face—and those are things I do kinda want—but none of them are so important to me that they would be worth the effects that I don’t want. Besides, my father pointed out that no one on either side of my family has ever managed to grow a really great set of sideburns.

Top surgery: Top surgery was a no for three reasons, the first was that with my needs always changing, I knew that top surgery would be an inadequate solution; if I made my chest flat, there would be times when I wished I had the chest I have now, so I might as well leave it be. The second is that I had to become comfortable with my chest in order to be able to deal with the conclusion I had come to that I couldn’t get rid of it, so now I really like it and I use it in my genderfucking. The third is that I was not personally excited about the available results. It’s true that I looked at surgical options about 4 years ago and technology is improving rapidly. Every once in a while I will see someone’s top surgery results and feel a slight pang of jealousy, but for the most part I felt that the results were not exactly what I wanted and I didn’t need it enough to compromise.

Bottom surgery: Similar to top surgery, I was not excited about the available results. Also, I just really don’t need a penis.