Candida

Once upon a time, in a country not so far away where it was easier to change your sex that to get a driving licence  society perfectly understood that gender identity was a fundamental human right and trans-identity was accepted with rigorous respect.

It was, without a doubt, the best of all possible worlds.

That is, if it weren’t for the driver’s license applicants, who were very bitter for not being able to get their desired license. It was quite an odyssey, an ordeal, a lot of work and very expensive. In other words, a tremendously fucked-up pain in the ass.

Candida did not have a license, just a pussy.

A long time ago, Candida had changed her sex because that had been her wish.

“A pussy, fairy godmother!”

And POOF!, out of the blue, she had a pussy thanks to Hairy Potter, her fairy godmother. It was that easy!

Candida couldn’t have been happier.

But our story would be boring if it did not include the jealousy and bitterness of the driving license applicants. It is well known that one cannot bear one’s own failure and, as a general rule, there is more satisfaction in annoying others.

Yes, easily achieved happiness, which changing one’s sex provided, was a source of envy. And although getting a driver’s license and changing one’s sex were different things, equidistant from intrinsically human chaotic mental doodoo, driving was a procedure that was too simple to just call your fairy godmother, Hairy Potter, so that with a puff of smoke she would come to your aid. To the embittered people, it was more exciting to make life impossible for Candida and all the others out of mere unhealthy envy than to put themselves in their shoes and be more empathetic, or to do what they had to do to achieve their dream of driving and make it a reality.

In the mouths of the jealous-spineless-applicants, the «chronically ill» people who had a sex change should not benefit from such easy happiness. They said that changing one’s sex, or even changing one’s gender without having to undergo any surgical intervention, were “fads.” “Fads” that «harmed» who?, really, since the ones unable to get their driving license seemed to be the ones who suffered the most. Meanwhile, they put on numerous shows that were painful to watch, making dangerous parallels between people who change their sex and sexist aggressors who could supposedly sneak into a women’s prisons tp serve their sentences. They didn’t even talk about driver’s licenses, which was supposed to be what really mattered to them.

There were other pitiful, more radical jealous-applicants who would claim, without blushing, that the possibility of changing one’s sex, in other words, being able to be whoever one wanted to be, put in a difficult position “those who might feel like a platypus or… [drum roll] Lady Gaga.”

Not to mention important public figures who thought that “the Vice Presidents and Ministers were going to become Ms. Vice Presidents and Ms. Ministers,” despite themselves. In that case, “the Henrys would become Henriettes,” even if the Henriets didn’t want to have tits by means of hormonal treatments or surgical operations. Or maybe they did, who knows? Maybe they were really Henriettes without even knowing it themselves because they had not thought about it, or they were too afraid to, or they had not been given the voice and maybe (maybe?), deep down, they secretly wanted them. In the end, nobody knew because only their bossy president spoke for them, in her name, always and forever trivializing everything. And thus, WHAM, the only thing she was interested in was beer, oh yes!, and, above all, to not run into their ex.

Her execrable self-government authorized them to travel in autonomous highways in autorange buses with horrific messages that we will not reproduce here because it goes without saying that TRANSPHOBIA IS A CRIME.

Even in that supposedly best possible world!

In fact, that world was actually, fortunately or unfortunately, who knows, a kingdom. And that was the crux of the matter because they drove carriages. Yes, carriages! Which explained the difficulty added to the infinite bureaucratic paperwork of learning to drive them. Even though they were all modern carriages, with an engine, a customized steel steering wheel, next-generation ABS anti-lock brakes, as well as dashboards with touch screens inside, it was not easy getting used to driving them, even if you had a copy of «Carriages for Dummies» at home.

Furthermore, these contemporary carriages had the built-in disadvantage of polluting like mad and, for aliens like us with cabbage heads, observing everything from deep within the universe, we rejoice at not having to live in that presumptuous best possible world of bad-tempered humans because it actually seems more like a pigsty, a disgusting hell.

Ha ha ha.

Let’s not digress too much with our malicious hysteria, however, and let’s return to planet Earth, to follow the wonderful story of Candida and her country of the most rancid evil.

In order to go to the shopping center every Saturday and spend your salary, it was necessary to have a carriage and, above all, the aforementioned license. In order to pollute more and to feed the incessant consumerist machine, the famous license was required. It really wasn’t so much a driver’s license, as such, but rather an unspeakable thing whose proud possessor became ipso facto the fucking king of capitalism, indeed!

The thirteen million angry-applicantees-etcetera stuck to their guns and continued turning the story into a ffrivolous, globalizzing, ffizzy ffarce of total consumerism in order to pose as the victims of their own horrifying failure, their greatest unhappiness. Relax, Rolex. One just had to consume more, yes! The English Cut. Consume more and more and even more! Luxury, Chanel! Reproduce the model on an assembly line. RightNow -this is not a brand. Reproduce. Superhypermarket chains. Durex, be gone! Flow, hello! A sperm festival. Yeah! Long live the badass supermarkedettes. The crazy woman’s ex producing mini-pepsicolas with his phallic cola with Crayola and BAM! without further sponsorship, they procreate babies that, under their parental authority, will in turn be grandparents of grandchildren who will have more babies to consume more more more more more momoremomommooooo. BANG!

Blackout?

No way! Amazon. Apple. Adam’s Apple. It all comes down to hunting in your comfort zone.

The heartbreaking frenzy of spending distanced them from all rational reasoning like bees light years away from their nectar. Little by little they lost the awareness that their world could really be the best of all possible worlds if those who couldn’t get their fucking license stopped all the nonsense, stopped scratching their bellies or idly whacking themselves and started to pass new laws that would reform access to the Holy Grail of their happiness, less polluting happiness for the environment, clean, pure, simple, in accordance with the true nature of human beings. Otherwise, this peculiar world will continue as it is, heading downhill fast into the shit-house!

Let’s get to the point. Because of so much blind unequal capital consumption, the subjects, okay, the citizens, the inhabitants, the individuals, call them whatever you fucking want to, did not realize the immense freedom they enjoyed. No, no, they did not realize it and filled their mouths again on their own with the word “freedom,” depriving it of meaning and making it seem as if they were its etymological inventors, going overboard with their colleagues from the RAE and using it as a mere electoral slogan, way too easy, for the next regional or general elections to be repeated ad nauseam. Yes, an ad nauseam “freedom” emptied of its true meaning to better manipulate the masses and make them enter their eschatological parallel metaverse without any poetry. A perverse nec plus ultra without nectar for the bees in which the angry-empty-emptiness-applicants would not hesitate to use any outrageous means at their disposal to repeal all social advances, saturating public spaces with common goods and social networks and creating a kind of hot radical breeding ground destined to de-cultivate the entire town and dumb it down.

[Catch your breath]

Candida, who had no driver license but instead a pussy, noticed firsthand the increasing danger. Candida, not at all naïve, knew well that, faced with the threats of those who would run over her and her collective with their new carriages once they got their driver’s license, needed to act urgently. But, how? Candida was scared shitless that without Hairy Potter, her fairy godmother/mother courage, the jealous people would have already put her in charge of collecting-requisitioning as in other dark times in order to send her to the most abject of exterminations, and she felt she was beginning to lose all integrity and courage. What’s more, she rejected the idea of becoming an applicant-shit-blah-blah-blah… Help! she managed to scream into the emptiness with her anguish depriving her of all sarcasm.

Helppppppppppppppplease!

Suddenly I woke up.

Metaphorically and truly.

With the melodious singing of an erubescent Lolita in a Drag Race franchise, over there in the Americas, and an exuberant string of droool coming from the corner in my lips.

Out with the little Gainsbourgian Martian cauliflower heads, the mediocre applicants for driver’s licenses, the right and the extreme right, the platypuses, and Lady Gaga! Lady Candida had died at the very moment in which she abandoned the rich fantasy world of her dreams.

Or nightmares, depending on how you look at it.

So I resumed my life.

With my friends. Two Palomas.

Yes, real palomas, pigeons, divine queens. Like the eponymous French queen, winner of another franchise of the famous drag competition, or Cinderella’s blue-ish birds.

My pigeons from Maspalomas had written to me from their Palomar to entrust me with the fortuitous mission of writing a story for them and, despite having assented, excitedly alive at the time, in the end, I no longer knew what to tell them, still disturbed by that strange dream.

Like Cinderella, I began to scribble the beginnings of stories, but beware!, not with fairy tale princes, damn! but 1952 Romanticism and my pigeons would be the only blue ones, deep down, looking for a stimulating fable loaded with crude political punchlines, but my mind always went blank as soon as I started writing the first line.

I wanted to compose something in my image and likeness, something crazy, real crazy!, but I couldn’t think of anything. How odd! The truth is, I just didn’t feel sure enough. I was uncomfortable with my effective satire. The explicit perspicacity of the chosen words bothered me. Excuses! Candida and I were the same and her fears were also mine. Sure, I was terrified of expressing myself without filters, exposing myself in my entirety, intimately stripping to show myself as I am. Giving an opinion usually means, wrongly, in the minds of many, of being opposed to something. To express oneself = confrontation. And I, who didn’t want to confront or oppose anyone, knew in advance that what I was about to write was not going to please everyone. It is impossible to please everyone. Spoiler alert: there is no such thing as the best of all possible worlds! It is a utopian fallacy. Sorry Pangloss (read Voltaire!) and yes, despite myself, the unpleasant idea of displeasing people with my glossed lip gnawed at me.

I would be wrong if I didn’t recognize that people need to feel accepted in certain moments of their life. Most trans people will know very well what I am referring to since this feeling, this desire to fit in, worsens as we overcome the almost Herculean tests of the system in which we live, in order to finally find our true identity, to assume it publicly and feel respected. For now, speaking in plain English, although the chilling punchlines transcribed here are real, they themselves, as well as the improper comparison with the driver’s licenses, are, in addition to being insults towards us and our collective, a danger to all the rights we have won so far and to all the futures ones we still have yet to win.

Anyway, maybe maybe maybe, it was now my turn to go beyond the desire to fit in, to stop looking for a kind of permanent validation and instead to dive in and embrace the activist label that I renounced so much in the past and to pretend that I don’t give a damn about external judgments, at least as little as possible, move on to something else butterfly, to grow and mature. Like many of the projects I worked on, this one also has its therapeutic je-ne-sais-quoi.

I took up my pen again (maybe I, like my dearest friends, was also another pigeon) and I once again gave life to Candy Candida, a brilliant candidate for writer-critic-politician, writing that statement in a fit of rage.

After all, if I have to something to confront, it’s my greatest fears.

Get rid of them.

Yes, like Candida, I had to bravely confront my demons, with all my pussiest might!