"I often wonder if my diagnosis makes sense. Female to male transsexual is not a very good description of what is going on. It's too neat, too chronological. Too trapped between two states, man and woman. I find neither of these possible or desirable. I need the diagnosis for the surgery but I question the link between the two. I refuse the social construct of gender and desire a flat chest. I am forced to advocate that which is arbitrary and false. If I were to diagnose myself, I often think essay would be the better term. I am a piece of writing that I want to look and sound a certain way. I have this deep impulse to sculpt and shape my body. I think of the surgeon's scalpel like the squat nib of a fountain pen, marking up and crossing out. When I write, I am trying to say something true about the world. I am trying to polish language until it vanishes, becomes a window. I am not writing for the sake of writing, I am writing to bring the world into being. Living seems to be much the same process; I am not living for the sake of living, I live in order to carve, and sculpt and incise, wax/buff/burnish, weather/age/distill myself. To do this until I am a walking transparency, making the whole world visible. And people say I am an idiot for doing this, for carving up my body. I have two long scars where my breasts have been. Two dry rivers or else a tightrope with a gap. Maybe they agree with me about the fallacious sculpting of the fallen branch. Maybe the art was done when two fatty protrusions emerged, hanging from my sternum. Maybe nothing will be as masterfully mound as the glands I excised. Nothing as masterful as my big, fat areolas, my moving, hanging milk-works. If the artist is wrong-headed, then so am I."
— Jay Bernard, 'Idiot', 2021 Edinburgh International Festival
