Pixie Ann Pan (she/her)

I feel like I know my body and have a better relationship with my body than ever before.

Through working on my mental health, transitioning, and sex work I am more aware of what I need physically and how to respond when my body tells me what it is lacking. Mostly though I have learned to acknowledge and listen to my intuition. After being on the "cis male to enby to trans woman pipeline" for a long time and trying to find ways to describe how gender felt in my body/what genders are part of me, I've recently found an inner peace tied to the acceptance of what I want my body to feel and look like.

Around 30 years old I started developing a feminine alter ego and along with "myself/ego" and actually a third alter, and we collectively had the task of protecting my inner child. I knew I had a lot of work to do there but it wasn't until after 40 years old, during the lockdowns, that I decided we should start providing for that inner child instead. That fell very much in line with giving myself permission to explore my gender identity and honestly consider why I had this feminine alter ego to begin with. What was she trying to say? And what I heard was that she was ready to come out now and that previous me could finally rest from being protective so long. Pixie is here to provide and expand the world and to accept it (and myself) without hiding from them.

My body is an ongoing story, but about a week ago (and about 2.5 months on estrogen) I started noticing parts of me that were now subject to jiggle physics, like how my butt bounced even when I stopped moving. That was incredible. Noticing when the tiny changes become bigger changes has been so encouraging and the more my body changes the more excited I am to live in it. Transitioning has been easily the hardest thing I've ever done and it has also easily been among the most rewarding.

Sex work for me has been so comforting in allowing me to explore my new and changing body and be intimate with myself in ways I'd always wanted to be. It's really helped with confidence. I don't always want to be outside amongst people, and especially in New York, there's no privacy. There's nowhere you can go to get like a second to yourself in this fucking city. So you have to just experience all the emotions with people watching. And and not that everybody gives a shit, but they're still there. And you're very open to whatever anybody wants to say on the street ,which is a whole ‘nother thing. But one of the ways I don't let that get to me is by remembering, hey, you're fuckin’ porn star are and you know, a lot of these people who have something to say are the same people that are gonna be tipping you later on.

There are times that I get the feeling that I should have done it sooner.

Especially like after coming out, I look back and I saw all these little things that I was like, oh, that makes more sense now. But I try not to get into that too much because like, yeah, it would have been cool I guess, to come out in my 20s, but then again in my 20s it was like the early 2000s, and I don't know…I can't really say whether it’s better or safer now or then because while there might not have been as much awareness when I was younger, there also wasn't as much stigma and outward violence. When I was a kid, it was just like oh yeah, that woman used to be a man, like it was on TV shows and stuff. It wasn't that far out culturally, and it didn't make people angry. Now people are riled up about it. Not that they personally give a shit, but they're told to.

What I think is happening is that the structure of how things were is falling apart. The world is changing, institutions are changing. Things that were designed with one world in mind aren't going to work in another world. Because of the country we live in, we're highly propagandized to have very narrow beliefs. And I think people are highly anxious, people are highly scared. I think there's a lot of things that happen that we can't do much about. That we don't have any knowledge of or control over.

On one hand, the breakdown of institutions has led to more people exploring themselves and more. People saying, well, if the rules don't fucking matter, what am I doing? Why am I killing myself for a company that's going to lay me off at the end of the year to get, like, $2.00 higher on their stock? I think a lot of people are taking advantage of institutional breakdown and collapse in their own way. But other people are very scared by it and don't want things to change. Some people want the world to stay the way it is, and some people are like listen, I learned these rules when I was a kid, I know these rules, I don't want these rules to change. And then some people are just like, well, things change and we adjust and we adapt. And some people are like, fuck it. I want everything to change.

We're going to get authoritarianism, whether it's through fascism or corporatism or oligarchy or whatever, there is going to be a greater amount of authority. And with that automatically comes dehumanization. Probably the most basic way you get one group of people to hate another is that you take away their humanity. And I do think that with the times we're in, there's a lot more incentive to dehumanize other people. With queerness, we are saying we’re different, like that's basically the point. Everybody agrees we're different. We're just saying you can't kill us about it. It doesn't mean it's OK to murder us and attack and then say whatever the fuck you want.

I can’t approach the world the same way I used to. I can’t get mad every time somebody misgendered me, I can’t get mad every time somebody gives me a dirty look. I have to stay calm and focused. I started saying, OK, if everybody is a reflection of me or a reflection of something I'm connected to, then have I ever been ignorant before? Have I ever said something mean before? You know, I'm not trying to forgive bad behavior or anger or patriarchy, but at the same time I can understand that people act out of fear and ignorance. I can say, OK, this person is speaking out of fear, and I've been afraid too.

And it's not about me. So I'm not going to get mad and respond and make it about me. You have a problem with another person you've never fucking met in your life, then that’s about you. I don't want to involve myself with that.