Nina Arsenault is a columnist for Fab Magazine, a freelance writer and sex-trade worker. Her television appearances include Showcase TV's Kink and Global's Train 48. Shinan Govani reported in January about her famously friendly chat with Tommy Lee at Ultra Supper Club; she has previously revealed that she has ''had sex with two professional athletes, a movie star, two TV personalities, the CEOs of two Fortune 500 companies, four guys who worked for the mob, a string of strippers, many male models, a bunch of body builders, loads of nightclubbing suburban guys ... all of them straight."

Last December, I lay on the operating table of one of Toronto's top plastic surgeons getting my boobs re-done with state-of-the-art cohesive gel silicone implants, a.k.a. the ''gummi bear implant.'' They're nicknamed for their gelatinous consistency.

Anesthesia coursing through me, I aggrandized my upgraded $9,000 breasts. With no liquid silicone they can't rupture and leak. They've a more realistic droop and came custom made in shape and size -- differentiated by a tenth of a centimetre to my specifications.

I didn't know that I'd need five more operations to fix complications from this impending boob job. I've had 50 cosmetic procedures to transform my body, some in Third World countries and hotel rooms, and the latest surgery has gone wrong.

I grew up, a little girl inside a little boy's body, in The Golden Horseshoe Trailer Park in Beamsville. By age five, I loved Barbie dolls and X-men comics. I'd pretend I was Storm, fighting evil in a disco-inspired super-bikini, with a killer bod to boot. I also had secret crushes on the prepubescent hell raisers of my little town, foul-mouthed boys who already smoked and who'd probably end up doing time for petty crimes. One summer afternoon, they allowed me a peek at the glossy images they'd heisted from their fathers' hidden caches of Playboy magazines. I was awestruck by portraits of an elusive, fully sexual female-ness that seemed more mythical than real.

By 1997, I'd become a 22-year-old man who resembled character actor Crispin Glover (the ''Thin Man'' from the Charlie's Angels movies). I was living in South Africa when my doctor noticed a cyst growing below my left eye. Worried it would cause serious damage to my face, he sent me to a plastic surgeon. The physician injected freezing into my face. I felt no pain as he started cutting, but I heard tissue tearing. He cauterized some bleeding and my nostrils filled with the smell of my own burnt flesh. Minutes later, he was sewing me up. I paid him with money my parents had sent me; thanks to the favourable exchange rate, roughly $100 Canadian covered it.

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