Subincision is the ritual slicing of the back wall of the spongy part of the urethra. I learned about all sorts of initiation rites in a history of religion course. The horrors people inflict on their genitals to curry favor with various gods or just to survive in harsh natural conditions! Some Indigenous Australian tribes cut men’s urethras, leaving white European scientists scratching their heads about why. Repeated cuts that caused bleeding were dubbed “male menstruation.” My bold biology teacher once said men have periods too, but she didn’t elaborate on how. Recently, I had blood coming out of my ass after some rough sex—or could it be those white, cloudy stains I sometimes find on my underwear before showering? I’ve been puzzling over this since seventh grade, wondering what counts as “that.” Maybe Maria Georgievna’s tribe practiced subincision, or she knew something about her father that we didn’t about ours.

Back to mutilations. Every time I open Twitter, I see the same dick. It belongs to a guy who fled Moscow for Almaty at the start of the invasion. His cock is gorgeous, textbook-perfect, with a massive silver ring jutting out of the urethra. The sight gives me a slight shiver every time. How does he deal with his piss streaming out of the urethra and trickling down the shiny metal surface of that ring? What does he feel during sex? For years, I lived with phimosis—a condition where the foreskin clings too tightly, keeping the head of the dick from fully emerging. Some found this little quirk hot, but for me, it was a major discomfort. Sex meant pain until, well into adulthood, I finally got the surgery. Dicks get sliced left and right, blood spurts, but that’s still not “male menstruation.” The world’s more complex than clumsy metaphors.

All kinds of deviations from the “norm” of how genitals should look—I saw them in Soviet sexopathology textbooks stacked among my doctor-parents’ books. I’d flip through pages of black-and-white photos of clueless people of all ages and sexes, maybe even kids. Enlarged testicles, disproportionately huge glans, vaginal abstractions—each time, something new. I used those books as porn, always within reach, unlike the piles of *SPIDinfo* newspapers littering the ground near the post office in our building, which, for some reason, I was inexplicably proud of. Maybe that’s why I’m driven to jot down every tiny detail about the bodies of my partners.

My body and others’ bodies stirred all sorts of sensations. Like when I thought about suicide, I could vividly feel the pain of a train’s impact or hitting the ground in a free fall. Then I’d picture my mom crying. Is that the survival instinct kicking in? In those moments, I detached from it, seeing it as a separate entity. There’s a science called biosemiotics, which views the body as a hierarchy of sign systems: from molecular (like cell signaling pathways) to organismic (behavior, gestures, facial expressions) and social (language, culture).

These past few years, I’ve blown thousands of euros, spent months grinding in gyms and dance studios, chanting like a mantra that my body’s never been this jacked, not even at 18. Yet every morning, staring in the mirror, I see no real change. I feel like I haven’t earned the right to turn anyone on. Once I fix that little lump in my elbow, the back pain that stings like lashes from a whip! “The body’s volume is made of volumetric patches, ” “lumps, ” writes biologist Sergey Chebanov. I imagine the substance of a male body in the colors and forms Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon would give it. It turns out that these artists were as close as you can get to anatomical precision, unlike Rembrandt’s corpse, shrouded in mystical light during Dr. Tulp’s anatomy lesson.

A genetic test showed I have high levels of estrogen, the female hormone, which could be harming my health. My feminine side is killing me. Maybe that’s why my sweat smells like flowers, and I’ve never fully felt like a man. When people say, “that’s a real man, ” “you’re like all guys, ” or “manly, ” I think they’re talking about someone else, not me. Is this just hormones messing with us?

After living with my husband for over a year, he got really into bodybuilding, buying steroids and injecting them regularly. I noticed how his white teacher’s shirt started bulging. Men artificially make themselves more masculine to be hotter, more biologically appealing. I see my body slowly changing under the grind of daily workouts; the toxic fumes of estrogen are fading, and I’m getting healthier, coming to terms with my male identity. These thoughts bring to mind berdache—a way of life in some Indigenous American communities where people took on different gender roles: men wore women’s clothes, did household chores; women hunted alongside men. White scholars called this a “third gender, ” imposing their own worldview. In some of these hierarchical models, you could choose to stop being a berdache. Until recently, for modern, progressive white society to officially recognize your gender, you had to go through a slew of complex surgeries. To be a woman, you’d first need to chop off your dick and balls, severing the threads of androgenesis. I don’t want to cut myself to feel like a woman today. I don’t want to reduce the multifaceted sensations, signals, and symbols—my relationship with my hormones, my communication with my gut microbiome—to a numerical measure.

As a kid, I’d fall asleep staring at the floor, imagining I’d wake up a woman, but in the sense of The Talented Mr. Ripley or Roger from American Dad—an alien with a flair for impersonation. I wanted to try on other personalities along with their genders. When I got fat from stress, staying home, and a junk food delivery addiction during COVID, I didn’t see a fat person in the mirror. I saw black bangs covering half a face, a baggy black T-shirt, the outline of a face. I didn’t like that person; I just didn’t see them.

In some Indigenous American communities, “berdaches” held symbolic and ritual power, sometimes becoming shamans. For example, the lhamana We’wha was a cultural ambassador for the Zuni people in Washington in 1886 and took part in rituals tied to the tribe’s spiritual life. Here’s another example: Russian colonial ethnographer Bogoraz described the gender diversity of the Luoravetlan people like this:

“The Chukchi of northeastern Siberia recognized four genders: gender men, who are male by sex; gender women, who are female by sex; gender women, who are male by sex; gender men, who are female by sex. ‘A man who has changed his sex is called a “soft man” or “like a woman, ” ne’uchika, and a woman who has changed her sex is called ka’chikicheka.’”

If Bogoraz had read Judith Butler, he’d have described his encounter with the Luoravetlan differently. How would they have described their encounter with Bogoraz?

The art of drag queens is like shamanism—cross-dressing, dance, ritual, role-switching, bewildering the spirits. I’ve tried on the role of a drag queen, lip-syncing to St. Vincent or Zemfira. My heroines are these bisexual and homosexual women with guitars, because my feminine expression shuns exaggerated sensuality and mannerisms; it’s asymmetrical. Many drag queens are deeply insecure, hating their bodies, their reflections. In gay communities, they face ostracism over their gender rituals, which many even more insecure men can’t stomach. On dates, they lie, saying they work in “showbiz, ” dodging the specifics.

To hide my protruding belly, I pull my shorts up high, slap a flesh-colored bandage on a sore on my left leg that hasn’t healed for months—blame Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Philolaus, Archytas, and their followers, who cooked up “harmony” and idiotic body beauty standards applied by a clique of brainy types in a long-dead civilization, nothing like our modern states. I thought my chest was ugly, so I got a tattoo of a mythical scene from a metal buckle left by ancient Ural dwellers, subconsciously swapping the tattoo for hair—another marker of masculinity, where symmetry and puffiness turn a man’s chest into an object, a slab of meat on a store counter, meticulously picked over by other men on dating apps after work. At summer camp, a whole squad giggled at a boy for his overly bushy pubic hair. Precocious puberty, untimely becoming a man or woman—that’s another thing society doesn’t like. Pubic hair? Camp queer.

I collect the naked bodies of all my partners, picturing them nude before undressing them, remembering every sensation, the pain and pleasure of their touch. I also recall every moment of torment, the torture our bodies endure from mishandling, contact with other bodies, microbes, fungi, hands, feet, dicks. Sharp pain is a borderland awareness, a portal between worlds, when you’re acutely tied to your body. My memory holds fragments of unbearable bouts of destructive horror from poisoning, infection, sensory overload. My head, dick, stomach ached—like after a subincision—so bad I couldn’t stand, open my eyes, sleep, think of anything good, or write this text.