"Easy Mode Genitals", Transition without SRS and being Vessel for Queer Discovery
Best of Both Worlds?
“What we just did… that was gay sex.”
I whispered into her ear as we lay panting on the bed. Doesn’t matter that she’s cis and that I’m a trans woman still equipped with the genitals I was born with. The genitals are not what makes queer sex “queer”. Our oxytocin-embrace, the warm cocoon of understanding a core truth of me and this body I inhabit: There’s no gender or sexual persuasion that can engage with this body and the resulting sex NOT be gay as hell.
This is what it means to be woman with a “functioning” penis.
Yep, I’m the gateway drug to queerness.
My sheer presence is making your friends and family gay.
There’s nothing you can do about it.
All the internal barriers and defences that hold back the queer tide preventing your loved ones going full homo… they’re nothing when faced with this body. I want you to picture The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, but instead of the iconic Alison Hayes, picture her as muscular and athletic. Give her a sweep of blonde curls and ivory skin. Skin adorned with vast tattoos in ocean green and blue of sailors sent to their watery deaths by sea witches riding their kraken myrmidons… oh and while you’re at it take note… she DOES have a penis.
I want you to picture this towering, monstrous trans woman kicking her patent-leather Demonia platform boot through the Hoover Dam. The explosive spray boils around her as she unleashes a flood of queerness of biblical proportions.
None can escape. All are swept up in the tsunami of homosexuality I create.
Yes, yes, quite the picture to paint, but how else do I explain the incidence of partners, cisgendered women I’ve been with who’ve been conditioned to be terrified of other women’s vaginas? Conditioned to only be passive, that sex has ‘a finish line’ rather than what it really is… a milieu of pleasure and not just something in service to penis owner/operators?
Sure, I’ve heard the long list of reasons why cis women don’t take the plunge into that comforting world of another woman’s vagina. Everything from “I don’t want to be a disappointment!” to “It’s too much responsibility!” And yet I’m continually met with woman who yearn for another woman. Women who know that deep in their heart, and other places, that sex with another woman is “right” for them, but cannot get past the fear of being bad at it because “I can’t even get myself off, how the hell am I supposed to get other women off?”
It’s a surprisingly similar scenario for cisgendered men. I’ve lost count of how many men, fed a steady stream of messages from birth that they must be tough and strong, seem terrified of discovering their potential queerness. They’ve spent their entire lives lived in the hunger-games-style social pecking order, constantly needing to exert ever increasing displays of manliness, to the detriment of their own sexual understanding. All these men who want to feel the strength of a body pressing against them? While they don’t suffer anything close to the drawbacks that women do under patriarchal heteronormativity, they DO suffer. Men are just as conditioned into compliance.
But fear not, a non-operative trans woman has entered the chat!
NOTE: I use the term non-operative instead of pre-operative. I hate the implication that there are only two types of trans women. One’s who’ve either have HAD or are GOING to have genital surgery. It’s one of those “when did you stop beating your wife” type tricks of language, as if ALL trans women are destined for the knife, which simply isn’t true.
I digress: This is the part about “the easy mode genitals”.
My self-aggrandizing hyperbole aside, the truth behind this obnoxious bullshit? I’m amazed at how often I find myself the vessel for people discovering their queerness. All these women longing for intimacy with another woman, all these men longing for intimacy with another man, it comes up surprisingly often. I’d like to think it’s because of my kind and compassionate nature, the unwillingness to not judge people’s bodies and my search for their intrinsic beauty, but I suspect more is at play.
Of the two most common genital configurations, one is known for its simplicity, ease of use and clear indicators that “satisfaction has been reached”. There’s little mystery surrounding “the dumb stick”. Yes, yes, I know I’m oversimplifying this, please don’t send me links to your resource manual on giving the perfect hand job (though actually do because competent and generous lovers should always be trying to improve), but we can all agree that overall, it doesn’t take great skill to reach some form of satisfaction. On the other side of it, 50% of all vagina owner/operators have difficulty reaching orgasm with a partner. 10-15% have NEVER achieved an orgasm. Genuinely my heart breaks. Everybody is different, sure, but when I see stats like that, I feel blessed to be able to knock one out with the same ease as a 14-year-old boy.
It’s stats like this that have pushed genital surgery to the very bottom of my transition to-do list. Why risk my glorious world of sexual satisfaction just because of a societal expectation of “what’s in my pants”? Especially as I don’t feel the crushing dysphoria that others do? Especially when I seem to be navigating it all just fine?
Recently I reconnected with someone I’d only had fleeting contact with at a heterosexual sex party. One of those “brave and bold souls” who’d the strength of character to not freak the hell out when witnessing this alien form. They were the one who I’d held close, the one I’d whispered to because I could see they were terrified of offending or hurting me. After all, I was both the first trans woman they’d ever met and the first they’d had a sexual encounter with.
My words at the time? Nothing dramatic: “While it may look different, this body functions just like all the other bodies you’ve encountered. There’s nothing to feel anxious about how it works.” Put simply, this body is easy to satisfy, it just looks like a mystery.
And when I again held her, as she sprawled across my chest, she admitted that there was something about that encounter that was unlocked for her. She’d never really considered dating women as an option, never managed to surmount, let alone see, the invisible wall of compulsory heterosexuality that’d been corralling her for her entire life. Here it was again, an ostensibly straight woman realising that there’s a whole world walled off from them, and my sheer presence had lifted the veil.
Yeah, I love to picture myself as being responsible for breaking down barriers and destroying the “heterosexual world”. I love pretending my presence alone is responsible for bathing the world in a queer flood. Waters that sweep into the town, forcing people scrambling upwards, refusing to let the tide take them someplace new. Clutching buildings, fingers locked around the tips of church spires and telephone poles alike.
The thing about “kicking down the dam” is that it’s mostly bullshit.
I’ve written many times about feeling like a stepping stone, a halfway point, for a cisgendered person to discover their queer identity. Because of this unusual body I inhabit I’ve been both the “first steps to queerness” for some and the “last gasp at straightness” for others.
Yes, sometimes it does feel like being “used”. In those rare moments it hurts less when I try to picture myself as some ethereal forest spirit. It hurts less when I picture myself guiding someone through the dark beneath the canopy, leading them to the sun-drenched clearing dripping in wildflowers. And in that tiny pocket of sunlight, sharing with them something vulnerable and true. So, if you’re blessed to have this strange forest-spirit find you in the dark then the chances are high you’re gonna be in for some gay shit.
But the thing about that dark, foreboding forest, or the metaphorical flood waters held behind the dam… I didn’t tangle the paths of understanding, overgrowing and obscuring them. I didn’t build the dam of denial, barricading the inescapable feelings. I didn’t create any of this. I’m just trying to navigate this world the same as you.
So, let’s make out and see if you like it. X
–S
This resonates. I feel like such a queer doula these days. A beautiful read once again x
Wow, great writing fun and full of personal and political insight. Thank you.