She has said she realized that she was a trans woman in August 1996[4] and was fully mid-transition around 1998.[5] By 2007, she had undergone over $150,000 in surgery during her transition,[6] financed through work in the sex industry[3] as a webcam model, a stripper, and a self-described "hooker (oral sex only)."[7]
Career
Arsenault wrote a regular column on transgender issues for 36 issues of fab, a biweekly Toronto-based LGBT magazine. Her last column was in early 2007.
She had a well-publicized encounter with Tommy Lee, wherein he flirted with Arsenault for some time before discovering that Arsenault was transgender and subsequently left in a hurry.[8]
Arsenault appeared in a one-act play written for her by Sky Gilbert in November 2007 entitled Ladylike.[9] She also wrote her own one-woman show called The Silicone Diaries,[3] directed by Buddies in Bad Times artistic director Brendan Healy, which toured across Canada to sold-out houses and critical praise.
She also appeared on The Jon Dore Television Show, appearing in the episode "Manly Man". She stated the reason why she does not want bottom surgery:
I work as a dancer in a club that caters to men who like "transsexuals." They want us to have beautiful breasts, you know, to be sexy like females but they want that one thing to be different.[10]
In 2010, she performed an autobiographical play entitled i was Barbie.[11]
In 2012, she performed 40 Days and 40 Nights as part of the inaugural SummerWorks Live Art series in Toronto. For this performance, she spent 40 days undergoing a spiritual experience and opened the last 11 days to the public. As part of this performance, she spent two hours a night whipping herself while riding an exercise bike.[12] She has also performed For Every Time You Shattered Me I Made Myself Again, a six-hour performance in the Henry Moore Sculpture Room at the Art Gallery of Ontario where she appeared in several different personas live and onscreen, dressing, undressing, and washing herself with a number of unspecified fluids in front of the audience.
In 2013, at London's ]performance s p a c e [[13] she lived inside an art gallery for six days for a work called Lillex. Here, with UK artist Poppy Jackson, Arsenault performed rituals which explored feminine mythology as well as virtuality, including a trance-like dance which would often continue for six hours at a time. During these dances she was repeatedly burned with cigarettes on her chest, neck, breasts, and occasionally above the genitals, appearing unaffected by pain.
In 2013, Arsenault joined MAU, a New Zealand company of contemporary performance led by Lemi Ponifasio. Her first work with MAU was called The Crimson House and was scheduled for a world tour in 2014 and beyond. In the same year, she had a supporting role in John Greyson's web seriesMurder in Passing.[14]
Arsenault's life and work are the subject of the book Trans(per)forming Nina Arsenault - An Unreasonable Body of Work, edited by Judith Rudakoff, published in April 2012.[15]
