So is this the chest I want one day? I have been thinking about my body for a long time now, in an abstracted, slightly disassociated way. I think that I treat it like a doll-body and of course, that is my privilege. Not everyone has the shape of body that they can manipulate in the way that I do but at the same time, perhaps I would like to create something more from the flesh that I have?

I have been taking study breaks while I work on my take-home exam which involve a site called 'xxboys', where i got this photo. It's a photography project by a French transboy called, Kael. The blurbs by some of the boys are really progressive and simultaneously critique the project- the trans freak body as an erotic exotic... the relative absence of black faces/bodies. There are also a couple which discuss the process of becoming something feared, from whom little old ladies protect their handbag, a black man.

Mmm. and at the same time as I envy and perve on these bodies, a conversation I had with a friend a while ago, rattles around the back of mind. about infatuation with masculinity. about the way a trans identity might become another rejection of the beauty and the kinds of masculinity that inhabit the bodies of women. Wondering to what extent my desire to have my breasts removed derives from my discomfort with the parts of my body that jiggle and flop and fail to conform to taut, toned standards of beauty. But shouldn't it be a person's prerogative to tamper with the vehicle they're in, to modify and adorn? I'm just not that wrapped up in breasts, overlaid as they are with so much cultural baggage. milk machines, symbols of feminine mystique. Floppy symbols of my body becoming slow and heavy in adolescence. Off with them I say!