I’ve been drawing myself with tits since 2020.
It started as a “Make an animatic” uni assignment. This was back in the day where every piece of art I made was written subconsciously and without intention, by zoning out and free-drawing. I started to draw the story of two characters. One that looks exactly like me, with tits, who exists exclusively indoors; And the other, bald and masculine, who only exists outdoors. The trans allegory is obvious, and it’s even called “Transience”. But transience means “the state or fact of lasting only for a short time”, and the pun was intended to be a metaphor for feeling like a transient, as I felt I didn’t have a real home during the first level-four lockdown. I didn’t think about it at the time, where this story came from, or what the point of the story was.
During the assignment period I witnessed the journey of one of my uni friends as she transitioned from a straight Christian boy all the way to a queer atheist woman. The first time we hung out outside of Yoobee Colleges, we were drinking coffee, she told me she was gay and then she asked me, “So…what are you?”
“I don’t…know?” I said. I waxed poetic some bullshit about the gender binary, feeling fluid between things, and getting angry at society for making me have to “figure out” my gender and sexuality in the first place. That was my usual way of talking about it. There were no conclusions, there was no purpose to it, and everyone could tell that I had a lot of anger that I wasn’t letting myself feel about it.
I turned the animatic into a full-length comic zine, always intended as part of a trilogy. And still at no point in the drawing of 175 frames and 24 comic pages did I stop and think to myself, “This comic is about me, I am a trans woman”.
In the comic, the physical manifestation of my mental health calls my self-insert character a lot of hurtful things, including an “egg”. I just meant this in the classic Kiwi insult way, at this point I didn’t know what an egg was – a trans person who hadn’t hatched yet. It wasn’t until I was selling the comic at Auckland Zinefest that someone pointed and laughed at the obvious joke that my subconscious had written.
For years I procrastinated making Transience #2. The story was directionless because I hadn’t lived through the realisations yet in my real life. I knew now that the comic was about my transness, but I didn’t realise that it was about my repressed anger too. In therapy I was working though my self-directed anger, constant people pleasing, and inability to say “no” to anyone.
I had a scene in #2 where the “boy” and “girl” self-insert versions of myself merged together, and that was what I kept getting stuck on. It was stilted, it didn’t work, they wouldn’t just merge together without some kind of catharsis, a resolution. He would be begging for it, and she wouldn’t be.
I was falling asleep one night when I vividly hallucinated the real scene, the “true” scene. The girl in me was angry, she was violent. She would tackle the boy version of me to the floor, and beat the ever-loving shit out of him. Then, and only then, could they merge into one person in my mind. Boobs and balls, together in perfect harmony.
I started writing a comic for this issue of Rat World back in November called “I Guess I’m a Woman”, before the issue was announced as a collaboration with Auckland Pride. And after four months, I’m still not ready to bring myself to draw that story yet. I’ve spent most of my time working on it procrastinating by playing the videogame “Celeste”, about a young trans woman crippled by self-hatred and anxiety as she attempts to climb a dangerous mountain and reconcile with the physical manifestation of the negative parts of herself. I couldn’t have written the irony of that if I’d tried.