I don't consider myself a writer, but this story begged to be written. I've heard other writers have that feeling, that a story needed to be told. It was obsessive, almost a living thing. I felt more like a transcriptionist than a writer.
You can find it on Smashwords other booksellers like Banes & Noble.
Smashwords: Bobby the Aardvark
From the introduction to my story:
While this is a story about a little boy becoming an aardvark, it is not about a little boy becoming an aardvark.
Over the last several years, I have given a workshop about what it is like to be part of the transgender community. More specifically what it is like to be transsexual.
In my dealings with the straight and LGB communities I have found quite a similarity of opinions, impressions, and questions about what it feels like to be trans* and be in the trans community.
It inspired me to create a workshop called “Transgender 101 - Transgender Information for the Non-Trans Community.”
In the workshop I try to bypass the knee-jerk reaction many people have to words that have the letters S-E-X in them. Many people feel that being transsexual is somehow a clinical term for a sexual deviant. They have images of men in dresses prancing around on talk shows.
But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. Being transsexual is a lifelong quest to simply feel “normal”. Being transsexual has very little to do with sexuality, or sexual gratification, or genitalia.
In my workshop I try to convey that being transsexual is about not feeling normal, of how everything feels out of place. And while many say that they feel like they are “a man in a woman’s body” or vice versa, I relate it to feeling like you have your shoes on the wrong feet, but all over your body.
In my workshop I say “How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and you were an aardvark? You looked like an aardvark, you smelled like an aardvark, and all the other aardvarks told you to just ‘aardvark up’ and get over it!” I used aardvark simply because it was a light-hearted reference devoid of any sexual connotations and, of course, it’s the first animal, and word, in the dictionary. Little did I know that I would be typing the word aardvark several hundred times in the creation of this story.
By using that imagery I attempt to convey that being trans* is like waking up in a completely alien environment. It is not about sex or sexual gratification. We don’t know how to be or how to act like the gender we were born, just like little Bobby has his problems trying to adjust to the aardvark world.
Also in the story I try to convey how humiliated we are made to feel because of our difference from mainstream society. And the way that society has often treated trans* people.
That then is the essence of this story. I have been this little boy. And I’ve spent quite a number of years in the world of “aardvarks”. And I too searched for a way home.
