NSFW

NO STOPPING FOR WATER.  None. C'est interdit.

So, I'd like to be able to talk about sexual things on this blog, through the lens of my own sexuality and thoughts on it. I've been debating how to go about this for some time. On the one hand, I'm extremely leery of being regarded as part of the "T-girl porn" culture, which is, I imagine, (prior to the whole Bruce Jenner media frenzy) one of the only ways in which many cisgender people have ever been exposed to the idea of a trans person. (In second place is The Silence of the Lambs, and don't even get me started on that.)

But on the other hand, when I have written about intimate events, actions, and thoughts, the responses I've gotten, most often from other trans women, have been resoundingly of gratitude and relief at the real reassurance that things that they had thought and felt were not things unique to them. That they weren't as alone as they'd previously believed, and that to feel the emotions they'd been feeling was not wrong or dirty. And in the end, I feel like almost anything I can do to help make the lives of other trans women even infinitesimally better or easier is going to be a thing I need to do if I am able. And I am able to write. Quite well, in fact.

I suppose that when this blog has been around for awhile, fingers crossed, it will become apparent that sex and gender, as topics, appear not terribly more frequently than they cross the minds of people in general, anyway. This should, I hope, contribute to my goal of sharing my life as fully and honestly as I can, to demonstrate how much more like everyone in the world I am, than unlike.

I will make every effort to appropriately tag posts that deal with sex and sexuality, or that show perhaps more of my body than is appropriate in some settings, as nsfw. But that is, really, more of an acknowledgement of the realities of our culture (that these topics, and images of the naked body, even in mundane and non-sexualized contexts, are literally "not safe for work") than any tacit agreement that shame and filthiness are intrinsic parts of sex or sexuality, or our bare bodies.

With all that said, my number one debate had been not so much about whether to write at all, but about tone; how to approach writing this way if I was going to indeed do it here, seriously, rather than in fragments on my tumblr. My first thought, to counteract the idea that there was anything pornographic about what I was sharing, was to use the driest, most clinical language possible. But sex is not really dry and clinical. We have to approach it that way to study it in any useful, quantifiable way, but that is not its nature.

On top of sex not really being a dry or emotionless topic, inherently, there's the fact that I do already have some idea how to talk about sexual things, because I often do this with my friends already. And we're casual about it. Nobody says "I stimulated him orally until he ejaculated into my mouth, at which point, I swallowed the semen." Right? Nobody's high-fiving you for that. We say, much as you probably say, "I blew him and swallowed his load." High five.

So, that's the tone you can expect from me when I'm writing about sex. It's not going to be overly (or overtly) sexual just for the sake of being sexual, but it is going to be casual, while remaining as descriptive and detailed as it needs to be to get the point across. The point of the text will never be to describe any particular event, but rather to describe enough of it to provide the full and necessary context to understand my conclusions about it. It would be the way I would say things to my friends, because really, that's what I'm hoping you will all be. And I'm hoping that my openness, as soon as I can manage to really get over myself and be as open as I'd like to be, will really help a lot of people feel more comfortable with their own sexuality. I'm sure I will start to get some unsavory attention for this, but I suppose I'll have to just deal with that when or if it happens.

Anyway, a couple of positive things happened for me in the shower just now. The first was just noticing a bare boob shadow for the first time, against the shower wall. I was like, “is that my shoulder? Noooo... Cooooolllll...” (I confirmed what it was, naturally, by cupping and lifting it. It was the left one, if that matters to you for any reason.)

The second (and far more impactful) was that I regarded my penis as feminine for the first time. It was purely subconscious, like my spontaneously regarding myself as beautiful (in a sexual context) when I’d been in the shower the other day. I immediately felt very similar sensations to that previous time — I at first felt very warm inside; happy, and pleased with myself and my body, as it is.

And then I felt a strong sense of unease.

It wasn’t quite so strong as the last time, but then, this was not a sexually charged moment. I don’t think I was even washing my penis, at the time. In any case, I didn't start crying, I just felt sort of gross. I am going to guess that this was a manifestation of cultural influence on my own self-perception. My unchecked thought was that my penis was feminine, which pleased me, because that is how I perceive myself; but my higher, culturally-influenced thought has always regarded any penis, automatically, as absolutely masculine. As literally representative of masculinity.

Ultimately, a lot of my own perception of my gender is tied very strongly to appearances, not just in the visual, but in the visceral aspects of creating those appearances. Which means that, since I will spend a great deal of my life wearing clothing, I need that clothing to be what I perceive as truly “feminine” clothing. (Realize that I am only speaking for myself, here. Whatever defines femininity to you personally is up to you, of course, as it is for me with my own body.)

And that means that I do still think that, even if I consider the possibility of a future where I do not dissociate as strongly from my penis as I do right now, I will end up having full SRS, and not just an orchiectomy. I’ve not touched it in months, aside from incidental contact; nothing sexual, at any rate. Not by choice or force of will, but because I rarely even register its existence anymore. This has been one of the most pleasing results of HRT.

I do still start crying a little bit sometimes, depending on my mood, when I see myself naked. Mostly because of the penis. Somewhat the facial hair and adam’s apple, but those can be addressed to some degree with shaving and makeup and lighting. But the penis is just... there. It’s this big, external reminder that my body isn’t what would really feel right to me. It’s a body part that ultimately defines what it means to be a man for a lot of people, and that is not an easy association to erase when the vast majority of one's entire culture is bent on reinforcing it.

And that is the real issue. I've been wrestling very much recently with how far to transition. My first thought, on realizing I'd misunderstood my gender for my entire life, was that I wanted a completely female body, to the greatest extent possible. And at the time, that meant vagina, breasts, hips, slimmer natural waist, no facial hair, no adam's apple, fundamental vocal frequencies about an octave higher, and certainly not a penis or anything associated with it. The reason that I wanted this was for comfort. To feel right in my own body, to feel at home, and not like I'm stuck in a maze that I cannot understand any more than I can escape.

But I have since realized that that sense of comfort does not really come from inside me. It lives inside me now, but it came from my environment. It was cultural. This is the confusing part about it, for a lot of cisgender people, I think. Passing can be about many things. It's often about avoiding discrimination and harassment and violence. Sometimes even death.

At its core, for me, passing is about personal comfort, and that is informed by our culturally-defined perceptions of gender. When I am out in public, passing is to some degree about what everyone else sees. But when I am alone, and, truly, all the rest of the time, too, passing is not about what everyone else sees, it's about reacting to the judgments that everyone else makes and acts on. And I carry those with me everywhere. I imagine everyone does.

The thing that I've realized, thanks to discovering Laura Jane Grace, is that we can change those cultural definitions. And to some extent, this is already happening. Everything I am doing is geared towards doing that, if you really examine what I'm trying to accomplish.

I spent a few days really agonizing over what to do about my voice. I felt such a tremendous sense of obligation to not change it. Because representation is so, so, so incredibly important. But then I acknowledged that I'm already greatly shaped by the cultural definitions I'd developed and carried over the course of nearly 40 years. I recognized that to not get VFS, possibly making my own life more unpleasant than it needs to be, would be martyring myself to some degree. And I concluded that that isn't necessary.

Where that's left me in regards to transition broadly is not very different a place than I was before, but with a very different mood. Previously, I had a plan, and I was very driven in moving it forward and sticking to it religiously. Now, I have a rough outline, an order of operations (haha), and the actual plan part of my plan is to just see how I feel when I reach the point where I have the resources to actually take the next step. Whatever that may be.

Welcome to My Life

I should clarify something.  When I started this blog, I knew I wanted it to be a platform from which I could disseminate some firsthand accounting of the experiences of a trans woman.  But then I started to wonder, should I write only about things specifically related to medically transitioning, like HRT, electrolysis, and SRS?  Or, would it be better to just treat it like a diary, and rely on tags to sort content for people who only want to read about certain things?

Ultimately, I realized, my number one goal in any media is to present the trans experience as just one part of the larger whole human experience of any number of people's lives.  That I want to shift the focus of the concept of "transgender person" away from the "transgender," and towards the "person." I mean, when you get right down to it, that is the problem.  People who hate transgender people, usually in concept, without any actual firsthand knowledge of or exposure to anyone they know is trans, hate because they do not feel anything in common with us.

The fact of a trans person's existence, that uncommon gender presentation, is, itself, such a fundamentally threatening thing, for whatever reason.  It makes us seem so alien to some people that they can only think of the "transgender" part.  Which means we're not actually people.  So, if we die, who cares?  The "trans panic" defense, recently outlawed in California but still legal everywhere else, exists as a testament to this problem.  People would rather allow our murderers to walk free than to acknowledge that we are human beings.  Rather than think, "how could one human being murder another?" they think, "I don't know, what would I have done if I found myself in bed with one of those freaks?"

The problem is a lack of education.  Partially due to a lack of information.  I've seen a statistic floating around that only 8% of people (maybe Americans, I can't remember) self-report as knowing a trans person.  (That they know is trans.)  Which means the rest of them are making up their mind about what trans people are based on the media, and not on their friend Sally, who was born Mike, or whatever.  That's another barrier to humanization.

On top of all that, on the macro level, nobody is even sure how many of us there are.  Part of that, again, gets back to the same lack of information generally about even the fact that we exist.  I knew that trans girls existed, but the only ones I'd ever seen were in porn, so it wasn't something I really thought about much.  It was so far out of my mind, and I so thoroughly lacked access to any real live trans people, that it took me a lot longer than it could have for me to even realize that I was trans.

Once we get past the how-many-even-are-there hurdle, it becomes pretty clear that what the mass media has decided is a good representation of the trans community is about as useful as the rest of what the mass media has decided makes for good representation: better than nothing, but only just.

So I concluded that it would be best to treat this more as a journal than as a very narrowly-focused trans information resource depot that would really mostly only directly help other trans people.  I will do my best to tag things with some modicum of intelligence, so that certain topics can be followed more closely than others as you prefer.

The idea is to just lay my life out there, as much as I can.  It'll be like reading someone's posthumously-published private journal, only while it's actually being written, instead of after they're dead.  It'll probably be pretty embarrassing sometimes, and I will be alive to feel it, but if all goes according to plan, by the time THAT starts happening, people will be getting embarrassed right along with me, because they'll identify with me on some level.

I'm absolutely positively certain beyond even a shadow of a doubt that I am going to:

• make an ass out of myself
• say some shit that is totally out of line, and have to recant it later
• get super defensive just because I feel attacked even when nobody is attacking me
• change my mind and vigorously defend something I had previously attacked (or vice-versa)
• maybe change my mind again, who even knows
• apologize and hope that I didn't hurt too many people too badly
• fuck everything up all over again

I hope that when I do all of those things, you will remember what I have to sometimes struggle to remember, myself: that I am a basically good person who generally makes the "right" choice (usually what I would probably describe as the most compassionate choice for everyone, among those that I am aware are available).

It's what I've started calling Aggressive Vulnerability.  If you are just relentlessly open about your experiences, your challenges, your fears, your failures, your triumphs, your family, your problems, your solutions and compromises... if you just let everyone in, they are all going to find something in common with you eventually.  And when they do, you become a part of them.

And when you are a part of someone, you aren't scary anymore.  You become important, integral, familiar, known.  They may still feel uneasy about some things about you.  But they will listen to you when you speak, and they will see you as ever more human while they do.

The point is that I'm not here to put my best foot forward.  I'm here to put my next foot forward, and it's not always gonna be pretty.  But I will be moving. I hope you'll walk with me.