One afternoon when I was studying from the heap of library books that xe had stolen before we moved into our home, xe came to me and told me about how xyr study of beating heart cadavers made it easier for xe to relate to xyr womb.
Often times pregnant women have been deemed legally brain-dead (which means that there is no activity in their brain stems) and still carried offspring to term. The first recorded case of this occurred in 1981 when a 24-year-old woman was declared dead, but still pregnant. In another example of this phenomena a woman gestated a fetus 107 days after declaration of brain death.
Xe emphasized that if a person can be considered dead and their womb still be active, then perhaps xyr relation to xyr womb was a psychic organ and xyr womb was a physical organ. Xe exhibited relief in stating to me that xe could work with this, the presence of a psychic organ and a physical one at once. Echoes being transmitted between them.
I enjoyed sharing with xem what I had found out about how five out of twenty five brain-dead patients, when tested, proved to exhibit reflex to sexual stimulus.
When neurosurgeons performed experiments on the moribund bodies, they found that the nipples and the penises, when stroked, brought about reflex response in these bodies pronounced dead.
Why were there no reports regarding sexual stimulus of the clitoris in this context? Was it because the neurosurgeons did not care to look at the subtle radiances that emanate from a stroked clit? Or were they not even able to see those radiances? Did they think working with the nipples and the penises was somehow easier to gauge because those organs worked in more obvious ways?
From this xe and I became obsessed with studying the varying effects testosterone injection has on clitorises. I mean, we knew about expansion and contraction of our genitals, but what about others' particulars? What extremes of increase in size were possible?
"Just more proof that the between state is something going on now" xe said.
"Yes, and also that if something exterior to us pronounces us dead, diminished or depleted, we may still have the agency to refute how we have been deemed" I said.
j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with xir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous cross-genre works previously published and forthcoming (a few of which are): prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil), long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones), a womb-shaped wormhole (BlazeVox), treOOA (with Eileen Tabios/ Marsh Hawk Press). j/j's writing has appeared in numerous journals including Trickhouse, Vlak, Big Bridge, The Offending Adam, Dear Sir, Eccolinguistics, Housfire, EOAGH, Aufgabe, Queerocracy Art, Masculine Femininities, Caketrain, Plath Profiles, Bombay Gin. j/j is currently in the process of curating an Anthology of Queer Nudes (Knives Spoons and Forks Press, 2013) and has helped curate (and participated in) two major Trans anthologies.
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