This Damned Body
Description of Work
An online play. At this point, I consider this project a failure, but include it for completeness. The intention was to document the beginning of my physical gender transition. There was a website, which would be updated daily with structured journal entries dealing with objective facts (what food and medication I consumed, how many times I was correctly/incorrectly gendered, who I spoke to, whether or not I was "saved") and weekly with more subjective video projects. The piece was intended to run for 2 years, but I abandoned it after one.
The reasons I abandoned it, as well as the reasons I feel it is a failure, is that it is unnecessarily masturbatory and navel-gazing. Originally that was intended to be the point, that it was in part about the self-scrutiny trans people are forced to do, but that did not sustain itself as an interesting central focus, and certainly was not a meaty enough theme to carry a piece of this size. Additionally, the immense level of self-scrutiny took a heavy toll on my mental health, which was not an intended or interesting consequence.