Performer dissects her own gory metamorphosis

The Silicone Diaries documents transformation from a trailer park boy to a transgender woman

By Sarah Berman, Special To The Sun February 9, 2012 6:17 AM

http://www.vancouversun.com/Life/Performer+dissects+gory+metamorphosis/6125167/story.html

Performer Nina Arsenault isn't interested in cookie-cutter stories of empowerment or triumph.

Though her transformation from an eight-year-old boy living in an Ontario trailer park to Canada's best-known transgender woman is undeniably self-determined, Arsenault prefers to raise questions rather than offer pre-packaged answers.

"I think it would be insulting to people's intelligence if I tried to wrap up my experience with a really cute bow," she says of her confessional one-woman show The Silicone Diaries, which opens at the Cultch Feb. 14.

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The Silicone Diaries reveals Nina Arsenault's quest for plastic beauty

In The Silicone Diaries, Nina Arsenault reveals her sex work, her endless surgeries, and her redefinition of what a woman can be
By Colin Thomas, February 9, 2012

http://www.straight.com/article-601516/vancouver/quest-plastic-beauty

Nina Arsenault knows that she contains multitudes. She's convinced that you do too.

In her solo show, The Silicone Diaries, the transsexual Arsenault shares the story of her epic, often dangerous pursuit of beauty. She talks about how, when she was a five-year-old boy named Rodney, growing up in a trailer park in Beamsville, Ontario, she went to Zellers with her mom and encountered the most beautiful woman she had ever seen: a mannequin. As an adult, Arsenault transformed herself into a woman whose appearance is every bit as stylized as a mannequin's—although, unlike a mannequin, Arsenault is voluptuous, a 36D-26-40 bombshell. In The Silicone Diaries, Arsenault's goal is not to pass as a cisgender—female-born—woman, but to sculpt herself, with her Mexican surgeon's help, into a state of idealized femininity, to carve her will into her flesh.

Transsexual Nina Arsenault explains the story behind "The Silicone Diaries"

The Silicone Diaries is transsexual performer Nina Arsenault's account of a dramatic physical metamorphosis -- one that took her from an awkward man to a sexy woman.
Pamela Grcic
Posted: Feb 24th, 2012

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/culture/theatre/2012/02/24/transsexual-nina-arsenault-explains-story-behind-silicone-diaries

From the self-described "awkward man" to the perfect woman, Toronto-based, transsexual performer, Nina Arsenault tells all about her incredible and dramatic metamorphosis in The Silicone Diaries.

A one-woman show produced by the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Company, The Silicone Diaries consists of seven monologues. Beginning as 5-year-old boy Rodney, Arsenault expounds upon her late 1970's self. Growing up in a trailer park in Beensville, Ontario, Rodney's fascination with the "perfect female body" began at Zellers, where he would stroll past mannequins while shopping with his mother.

The obsession had begun. In 1998, at the age of 25, Arsenault began her eight-year transformation, which consisted of 60 plastic surgeries and procedures (including injections of silicone from the black market, which shaped her hips and buttocks). With these came the pain, joy and inner-exploration that formed her into the Barbie-esque type of female that she looks like today. The Silicone Diaries is, more than anything, an homage to beauty and perfection.