As Girls Go: The Ins and Outs of Cis4Trans Lesbianism

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Florence Carlyle, The Guest, Venice, 1913.

Two weeks ago, by request, I wrote about the relationship between cis and trans women. My goal was to explain to both a trans and cis audience the various assumptions, miscommunications, and power dynamics that so often colour and cloud friendships across the gender modality divide. My goal today is once again to avoid polemics and anger, and to produce something that is useful for both trans and cis women. However, this time I want to talk about C4T (cis for trans) lesbian relationships, and cis for trans lesbian desire more broadly. Please note, that I will largely not be discussing trans for cis desire. Discussions of it will be incidental. The reason for this choice is because cis women are the majority of women, and I am skeptical of anyone who says, “hey why are you interested in the most common thing to be interested in?” That framework almost always encourages self-segregation and reinforces an otherness. As an example, I pay a lot of attention to American politics, as do most non-Americans. When I meet an American who is very well informed about Canadian politics, I welcome the interest, but I do ask “why do you know so much about Canada?”. Usually, the American never thinks to ask why I know so much about America, after all, America is the global hegemon, the bloated center of a worldwide empire. Every decision America makes affects Canada and affects literally everyone else too. But if the American did ask, “why do you know so much about America?”, it would be either out of ignorance of America’s horrific importance or an attempt to implicitly tell me to stay out of American politics, that I don’t deserve an opinion. So, I will not be attempting to talk about why trans women are interested in cis women. Cis women are the global norm. Cis women’s culture is the dominant world woman culture. To be attracted or romantically interested in cis women is automatically implied when you say, “I like women”. As such, it is pointless to ask why trans women are interested in dating cis women. Indeed, if there is to be a question about it, it should be “why do so many trans women refuse to date cis women”. That question, will, with as little finger pointing as possible, will be implicitly answered here. Strap in folks, this will be a long one. I will do my best to make it as elucidating as possible.

How C4T Can Start

To begin, there are two possible ways in which a cis woman can begin to date a trans woman: either she was dating someone who transitioned into a trans woman, or she started dating a post-transition trans woman. These have their own unique challenges. I am going to spend the majority of my time on the second because it has been talked about the least, and because devoting too much time to the first implies that this is the primary way in which trans women come to date cis women, an assumption rooted in the transphobic stereotype that cis woman would never want to date a trans woman. Still, it is worth spending some time on instances in which a cis woman’s partner transitions.

Transitioning from an apparently heterosexual to a lesbian relationship can be incredibly challenging for both parties. The key to a good relationship, in my opinion, is a mutual respect of each other as equals, as peers. While it can be fun to play with hierarchical dynamics, this must merely be play. So many heterosexual relationships come to ruin because of the inequality that patriarchy breeds into them. On this front, the “heterosexual” relationship the couple appeared to be in prior to the transitory event was likely less affected by patriarchy than most others that looked like it. That’s good. That means there’s a strong basis for things to go well. And, in this, we have both parties to thank. It is likely that the trans woman internalized less patriarchy, or internalized it differently (as oppressive), compared to her male counterparts. Likewise, the cis woman likely already seeks out relationships that feel more equal than many cis women. However, the relationship is now, in-early transition, one launched into a severe state of inequality.

Frankly, the cis woman is going to be better at womanhood than the trans woman for a long time. Womanhood, to paraphrase Beauvoir, is something you achieve. One must become a woman. Worse, becoming a woman is not like becoming a mechanic. There is no grace period. I do not mean just for trans women. Cis women do not get a grace period either. Teenage girls are subjected to incredible scrutiny and ill treatment from society and peers alike. This same scrutiny gets applied to trans women early in transition, plus the additional baggage of transphobia. What this means for the relationship is that the cis woman finds herself dating a woman who is must worse at womaning than her. She then has two choices, to cringe through it, or to parent through it. Cringing through it is not easy. It is hard to watch someone you love embarrass themselves doing something you’re good at. However, if you choose to teach her how to do womanhood correctly, you change the power dynamic and actively acknowledge that at least in this fundamental aspect of life, you’re not yet equals. Finding the correct balance of letting the trans woman explore womanhood, making mistakes, and teaching her how to do things correctly, is very difficult. Both parties are likely to want a different balance (although it often varies who wants more of which). Further, it is often the case that the trans woman refuses to accept that she is temporarily unequal in this regard. People, in general, are very bad at owning up to when they don’t know enough to engage with something in an informed way without guidance.

One unexpected issue that can be run into is excitement. If the cis girl is bisexual, she might be extremely excited to be in a “visibly queer relationship”. This, in itself, is affirming and cute. However, I’ve seen enough instances of said cis girl outing her trans girlfriend before she was ready. Personally, I had an instance in 2014 where my girlfriend decided to start using they/them pronouns for me without my permission (I was still using he/him around everyone but her) and actively outed me to all my male friends. She did this because she thought the closet was shameful, and because she believed deeply in gendering people correctly in all circumstances. But it made my life hell. Suddenly I had to answer a million uninformed questions from some rather macho dudes. I’ve seen several girl’s cis girlfriends do the same over the years. I’ve also witnessed cis girlfriends insist on their trans girlfriend wearing a dress she did not yet feel uncomfortable in, or makeup outside of the house, seemingly unaware of the harassment and danger that these choices invite.

On the other end of the spectrum is the fear. Often the cis girlfriend is afraid of ‘losing the person’ she fell in love with. She wants reassurances that her partner isn’t about to grow a new personality, just new breasts. To the cis girl’s credit, it takes a remarkable amount of courage to face the unknown in the sphere of intimacy. The unknown is supposed to be deep in the woods, or far away in time. The unknown should be marked on the map with “here be dragons”, itself an instance that the unknown is actually known. Humans want to conquer the unknown or stay far away from it. It isn’t supposed to share a bed with you. Yet, as trans women, most of us briefly inhabit an unknown that shares a bed, a breakfast nook, a spot on the couch. We’re slow-moving shapeshifters. Our personalities, interests, and appearance ideally do shift during transition. To be a trans woman with the exact same personality and interests as when you were a boy is to have failed at becoming a woman. It is also nearly impossible. Living as a woman means being exposed to new ways of being treated, seen, and interacted with, that necessarily change who you are and how you are. Transitioning is signing up to rise to those challenges, to adapt, change, and grow. Yet sometimes the trans girl attempts to promise that she won’t change too much. This is almost always unknowingly a lie, and if it wasn’t, my cis reader, would you want to do that to someone? Would you want someone to stifle their potential for you, stagnate for you, petrify for you? Everyone grows and changes over their lives, and the flaw in most heterosexual marriages I’ve witnessed has been a failure to grow in compatible ways. Homosexual couples tend to do much better at this. So, if you’re a cis girl reading this, and your partner has come out as trans, yes, she will change, but she might change in a manner that is more compatible with you long term.

The last issue that is worth discussing is sex. In early transition C4T relationships, there is bound to be a lot of tension around this subject. How sex is had is likely to change as dysphoria worsens or lessens. Sometimes, the trans girl will try very hard to make it not change, afraid of being discarded if she stops performing her top role. She’ll fight her body on it, get androgyn gel, anything to keep things stable and happy. Now, I am not saying that there are no trans women tops who enjoy sex with cis women. Indeed, they’re about as common or very slightly more common than in the cis lesbian community. What I am saying is that every trans girl deserves the freedom to experiment and learn if she actually is a top, or if that was just a role she assumed because it was expected of her in a heterosexual context. To a certain extent, she is a virgin again. And like many virgins, she will pretend she is experienced and knows what she wants. But, her sexuality cannot be separated from her womanhood, and thus, both are fresh. A bit of advice, it may be smart to open the relationship for a little bit, to help her explore and find out who she is sexually. Trans women tend to benefit from having another trans woman to explore with, who they can be completely open with in a way that is blocked by your, my cis reader, cisness. I’m sorry about that. I truly am. But things will likely be easier for you if you accept that your girlfriend has opened a pandora’s box of sorts, and she is trying to keep that chaos controlled for you, but that that might not be best for her. If you want to stay together, give her a place outside of your relationship where she can experience the wild chaos. If you both insist on monogamy, then do your best to be really truly open with one another.

Intro to CT4 Down The Road

Let’s shift our focus now to where the majority of C4T should occur, once both parties are fully formed adult women. Ironically, I am not entirely confident that this is where the majority of it does occur. Trans women as they go farther into transition often become more reticent to date or sleep with cis women for some very understandable reasons. Likewise, cis women seem more likely to suddenly find out their ‘boyfriend’ is a trans woman, than to choose to date a trans woman apropos of nothing. There has been some good writing done from the perspective of cis woman fetishists of trans women. This has primarily been done either by Halimede herself, or by people examining her. I’m using fetishist in the Marxist sense of the term, as I’ve done before in my explanation of chasers and T4T. That is to say, I am not trying to demonize Halimede. However, I hope today to expand beyond the sort of Jungian archetype of trans womanhood that she is so obsessed with. Afterall, the lesbian trans chaser is something different from the trans hag who I discussed in Between Cis and Trans Women. Likewise, there are many cis women who fit into neither of these categories but still find themselves dating trans women. That is, thankfully, because trans women are women, and therefore not something you need a specific personality type or psychology to be inclined to date. Thus, my hope for the rest of the article is to speak to those of you interested in a C4T relationship without it being dick centric, and without the cis woman giving up her cis life.

Still, I should quickly warn you, if it is about the dick-in-vagina action for you dear reader, you should assume that that is temporary. For trans women who are drawn to cis women for that, as few of you as there are, it is worth remembering that many cis lesbians do not enjoy penetration. Dildo and strap use among lesbians is far more common than it was in the 1980s, yet a surprising number of cis lesbians still decide to do without. Personally, as a woman with a vagina, I get it. Penetrative sex is fun because it is a means for both parties to experience genital pleasure at the same time. Yet, for many cis and trans women the vagina is, as Kinsey discovered, nearly a dead cavity. There are nerves in there. Both cis and trans g-spots are fun. The warmth of someone else inside you is pleasant. But very few women achieve orgasm primarily through the vaginal canal. And, if you talk to them, many cis lesbians are kind of freaked out by the idea of another living human being sharing the same physical space as their body. Likewise, to my cis lesbian readers who do really love penetration, and especially penile penetration, you should be aware that many trans women do not enjoy using their penis (if they have one) that way. Likewise, even if she does enjoy using it that way when you start dating her, there is no reason to presume that will remain the case. Many trans women’s relationship to topping or their penis evolves over time, over years. Physical capacity changes due to hormones, responsiveness becomes much more feminine in nature, and sometimes it just isn’t what you want anymore. If you’re a cis woman dating a trans woman, you need to be prepared for your girlfriend to get bottom surgery. You also need to be prepared for that bottom surgery to be simultaneously a grueling and ecstatic process.

Asking Her Out

I will try to be brief here, because this is a subject that I Have Not Shut Up About over the years. Essentially, what I have argued and will continue to argue is that if you are a cis woman and you are currently experiencing romantic or sexual desire for a trans woman, it is on you to make the first move. Yes, I am fully aware of the way those middle school girls filled your head with fears that lesbians were predatory, that your attraction to your fellow women was creepy, that it was something to deny, to never act on. What you need to understand is that for trans women it isn’t just twelve-year-old girls, it is the whole of society that tells us from childhood onward to imagine ourselves as creepy, as predatory, as violent, as tricksters, as evil. It is Ace Ventura, and it is Buffalo Bill. It is The Crying Game and it is Crocodile Dundee. It is the League of Gentlemen and it is Batman Returns. It is horrific YouTube “comedy” and it is the entire BBC and NYTimes. Whatever you, dear cis reader, have internalized about cis lesbians, trans lesbians have internalized something a million times worse. And, we’re afraid that you’ve internalized that about us too. After all, the entire world has been telling you we’re horrible creeps. If you haven’t internalized that, it is on you to show that to us. It is on you to make the first move. Hell, it is probably on you to make the second and maybe the third move too. The trans woman you’re interested in probably will not. That is understandable of her. She’s trying to protect herself. Once you make it clear to her that you’re interested in her, there’s a good chance her sheepishness will disappear. Afterall, we might have watched Crocodile Dundee, but we also listened to Susan Vega’s “As Girls Go”, and foolish optimists like myself keep hoping to awaken the latter sentiment. Still, it’s your move. This applies no matter how well you know her. If this is your first time seeing her in a bar it applies; if you’ve been friends for ten years, it applies.

Obviously, this requires you knowing that she is a trans woman, and you might not. Many trans women are passing or “stealth”. I am often passing and sometimes I even stealth. I don’t have a great solution to this. The truth is, I still wait for the other person to make a move. To some extent I feel like after years of dating as a dude, I’ve earned the privilege of not being socially obligated to make the advance. But more than that, I am still afraid of being “the trans aggressor”. It is difficult for me to conceive of a trans woman who would risk it and make the first move on a cis woman. I know they exist. I know many by name. I also don’t know any of them who don’t have almost certainly false rumours about them flying around the dyke community. If I’m being honest, at my harshest, I consider the most active of these women reckless morons who are opening themselves up to accusations of predation and maleness with their behaviour. But I know I shouldn’t be so harsh. I know that it is wrong to blame the victim.

Among Cis Friends

So, you’ve started dating a trans woman and you want to introduce her to your friends and bring her into your life, that’s great! One of the most important conversations that you can have with her is about outing her. Some trans women want others politely, almost in passing, informed of their transness in advance. This can help the trans girl you’re dating know where she stands in relation to your friends. This way she does not need to have awkward conversations with them where they try to subtly bring up gender to her, or worse, ask her pronouns (and no one else’s). However, an equal amount of trans women would prefer their gender modality not brought up to your friends. Often these are trans women who feel themselves more likely to pass or would simply rather handle it themselves. Personally, I fall into this latter preference. People who fall into the first category, who want you to tell people in advance, are usually either insecure about whether they beyond in the group and want to give the group some warning, or have a remarkable capacity for being a political center of attention, and are willing and eager to use their existence in the location to further their trans politics. I, however, am tired. I want to be amongst people who are not constantly thinking about my gender or slotting me into a “type”.

You’ll notice that these two groups aren’t actually too dissimilar, and that’s largely because one was previously the other. Trans burnout is real. But you can’t quit an identity (even if you try). A large part of what makes trans life livable in the long term is finding ways to relax in spaces, and it can be incredibly difficult to relax among cis people. Almost all trans women went through a few years in which they did not pass, and most of them suffered a shocking amount of mistreatment during those periods. We’re traumatized by the years we spent learning how to be less visible to cis eyes as trans. And once you start passing, one of the big problems, is that you are never fully sure if you are, or if people are just being polite, until you out yourself. TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) love randomly finding trans women on the internet and telling them either “you’ll never pass” or “we can always tell”, and despite the fact that many trans women love tricking TERFs by substituting a celebrity lookalike (a girl named Mia Moore loved to use Susan Sarandon for this), the rhetoric does get into your brain a little. You start assuming that everyone is just being nice. Last month I found myself in a banya (a Russian bathhouse) surrounded by cis lesbians, AFAB non-binary people, young Russian couples covered in unfashionable tattoos, and old men who lived most of their life in the USSR. Vodka is offered to me. Pierogi are had. No one said anything, I was fully naked several times. I was treated exactly like one of the girls by everyone there. Only one person (the NB) knew I was a trans woman. There were zero signs of transphobia. And yet, part of my brain went “oh wow, these people are so nice about it. I got naked in front of them and none of them cared. They got naked in front of me and none of them cared. My friend must have prepared them, and they must be really chill.” I often forget that to most people I’m a cis woman, and an attractive one at that. And there are just enough instances of misgendering (on average once a year) or people figuring out that I’m trans, that I start presuming everyone knows. I get paranoid. My guard goes up and down in social settings. I’m far from alone in this.

If you’re a cis woman dating a trans woman, you’ll likely have to figure out how to navigate these circumstances. Your girlfriend is likely to have bouts of fear, not only about whether or not your friends know that she is trans, but even if she’s sure that they don’t know, how their assessments of her would change if they did. You want to think of your friends as wonderfully understanding and kind people. But you need to be aware that she might be at least a little bit right. Afterall, the reason she is so concerned with whether she passes or whether your friends know, is not because she is ashamed that she is trans, but because she knows that once people find out that you’re trans, they tend to mentally remove your womanhood from you. Yeah, many progressives will still treat you well, kindly, friendly even. But many will not consider you a woman. And to a woman who has put an unfathomable amount of work, of pain, into being a woman, that’s amongst the scariest things there is.

Among Trans Friends

I almost did not write this section. But I think it is important to talk about. Afterall, I promised honesty and I promised to be fair to my cis readers. Trans women are women, and we are women who are particularly afraid of not being perceived as women. Because of that, trans women are among the least misogynistic women you will ever meet. Categorically, you by and large will not find trans women slut shaming, fat shaming, or engaging in any of the common misogynistic practices that cis women do. You will not find us being a “pick me” or pretending to be “like one of the guys” to fit in with male friends. Even among tomboy or butch trans women you will not find women slagging off femininity. We do not have the same second-class citizen complex that many cis women do. We do not admire men or patriarchy. Most of us do not long for male approval. However, if we escape the ways in which cis women behave misogynistically, sometimes we fail to notice the more subtle ways in which we may let cis women down—these are behaviours women are taught by patriarchy to do, and which men are not to do. As I said, you won’t find trans women being actively misogynistic. But, you will occasionally see groups of trans women failing to understand the feminized obligation and social actions involved.

I think a prime example of this is when I was over at a C4T couples’ home a few years ago for a big dinner party. It was a lovely party, but at the end the cis girl got up and went to the kitchen to start washing up and I looked around as no got up to help her. The other host did not think to, and the guests, feeling that offering to clean up was not something guests do (unaware that this is only true of male guests) did not either. So, I quietly prompted my trans girlfriend to get up, and we both went into the kitchen to help. To this day, I don’t think anyone else from that party is aware that their failure to action was rooted in misogyny. The cis girlfriend was incredibly grateful to us. And I was deeply relieved that there was not one cis girl cleaning up for ten trans women who had not lifted a finger. Sometimes you must be the change you want to see in the world. And we had fun! We chatted and had a few drinks together as we cleaned. I felt included in a centuries old feminine tradition. I tried not to think about the historical position my fellow trans women, many of whom were friends, were playing. It’s not that they thought that the cis woman should be doing the clean-up. I’m sure of that. I think it is that they never thought that they should, as women, offer to help. They did not think about how their failure to uphold this patriarchal norm that most cis women automatically uphold placed undue burden on one (cis) woman. Nor did they think how efficient a clean-up it would be if all women (the only gender there) upheld this norm. And I am certain they never thought that joining in might be a fun bonding experience, a welcoming in, a sheltering against those who do not help.

The other area that tends to differ between cis women and trans women socially is how conversations are held. This, I suspect, is largely a difference that exists only in North America, and, of course, it is not one that applies to all trans women. In fact, it is one in which I’ve always struggled with when socializing in large groups. Cis women here (and myself due to a very strict upbringing when it came to manners) are taught to carefully observe the rest of the room when having a group conversation. They keep an eye out when someone wants to speak, and are taught to speak up on the behalf of those trying to get a word in, to keep an eye out for if someone hasn’t spoken in awhile and invite them to speak, and other attentive social graces. This is very much a learned skilled, one hammered into women when they are still young girls. It is a patriarchal imposition to make these future women better hostesses, mothers, and subservient to their husbands. But when done in a group of only women, it can make the room more equanimous and collegial. Most trans women do not receive any training to do this. In fact, it is getting less and less common among cis women too. Still, I find that there is a noted difference between the competitive nature of conversation that can occur among some trans women, and the welcoming conversational tone that is more likely to occur among cis women. Don’t get me wrong, both groups can engage in both behaviours, yet the norm is different. Unfortunately, if you are used to the cis woman norm, you are likely to turn quiet and feel talked over in trans femme spaces. Likewise, if you are a trans woman and used to those norms, you might find yourself accidently coming off boorish among cis women. It’s an easy thing to correct for, the trans woman only has to train herself to pay attention various faces, gestures, and frequency of talk in a conversation. Likewise, the cis woman who finds herself socializing with a group of trans women can learn to force her voice to be heard a little more, and take comfort in the fact that they do not think her rude, but instead, that this sort of self-assertion is the norm in these spaces.

It is important to remember that these sorts of behaviour that a cis woman might “recognize” as masculine behavior isn’t so much masculine as it is neutral—these are behaviours that are not behaviours, they are a lack of socialization, not a distinct movement towards masculinity. As I’ve said before, all women have to learn how to be women. Some of it is a lot more obvious than other aspects of it. What defines womanhood under capitalism: makeup, dressing right, a socially inferior relationship to men due to patriarchy—these things are very easy to learn, or simply unavoidable. They’re also obvious. No one had to tell you about them. But the stuff your mother scolded into you, the stuff she painfully tugged on your earlobe about, the stuff you resent her for, that’s also part of womanhood, and its more subtle, and it results in unspoken sets of behaviours, of manners, that are unevenly distributed even among cis women, and largely escape the attention of everyone else. Afterall, a huge part of patriarchy is rendering women’s labour invisible yet virtually instinctual. If you’re a cis girl and you find yourself in a situation where you’re doing labour for oblivious trans women, talk to one of them you trust afterwards and explain in as kind and non-gendered a way possible that you would like help in the future, that you expect it of your fellow women.

Lastly, I have witnessed this behaviour in C4T relationships being deeply enjoyed by the cis girlfriend. In these situations, it is almost always a bisexual cis girl who is used to dating men who is dating a top trans woman. My conclusion in this situation is deeply unfortunate for both parties, which is that the cis woman is conceptualizing her partner as a “safe man”, as man-lite, or as “dipping her toe in” to lesbianism, aka lesbianism-lite. It seems, in these situations, that the cis woman is comforted by being able to fulfill the social function of “woman” in the household, and in doing so, is trusting the role of “man” or “husband” onto the trans woman, who remains oblivious. I cannot say not to do this, since it is your own relationship, and if you two talk about it I guess, fine, I give up, but it seems at very least an epistemic injustice is being committed here. You can make a lot of very fine-toothed arguments about this being butch/femme dynamics, but I think most of the time, in this situation, it is an act of subtle cruelty to the trans woman.

Together: Status

In 1984 bell hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. In the first chapter she endorsed exactly what intersectional theorists always claim intersectional theory is not about, a hierarchy of oppression. She claimed that Black women have “no institutionalized “other” that we may discriminate against, exploit, or oppress”.[1] Despite this, hooks is often considered an intersectional theorist. When Kimberly Crenshaw coined the term in 1991, she meant something different. She argued that “the intersection of racism and sexism factors into black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking separately at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences.”[2] She wanted to highlight “the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.”[3] I tend to side with Crenshaw. There are sexual and race-based hierarchies, but the idea that there is any one group who cannot oppress anyone else betrays to me a lack of awareness of the complexities of the world, of global economics, politics, and of personal identity. It also universalizes a very American view of the world’s conception of sexuality and race. I want to be clear, I have this all in my mind when I say that cis women have a profound power over trans women within the confines of a relationship.

Cis women earn more than trans women and are more employable, and less likely to face harassment at work. Transgender women have higher victimization rates of violent spousal abuse than cis women. Trans women are more likely to experience rape, including intimate partner rape, than cis women. The rates are incredibly high, even in Canada. Yet, The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have found that trans women are frequently portrayed via “gender misinformation” as “men dressed up as women in order to attack the latter”, as well as “predators” and “violent males”. Via movies like Silence of the Lambs and weird AI posts your mom likes on Facebook, the world has been primed to think of trans women as dangerous, as violent, as powerful, and as suspicious.

What this means practically is that if you are a cis woman in a relationship with a trans woman, you are far more likely to harm her than she is to harm you. However, you are far more likely to be believed than she is. As Hanna Vignolius recently put it, “cis women are the men of women”. If this was 2014, I’d try for a #BelieveTrans. Since it is 2026, I will simply say this: cis women rape trans women at far higher rates than you are willing to believe. Even hearing those statistics above, you likely thought “men are awful”. No, some of this is on cis women. A lot of it is on cis women. You need to internalize that. You need to believe that. If you are a radical feminist, that is likely an extremely difficult pill to swallow. I can sympathize. I first saw Schindler’s List when I was six years old. My father, an anti-Zionist, showed it to me. He also dragged me to every concentration camp and holocaust museum he could afford to. He did not give me the narrative that so many Jewish fathers do, of unique Jewish suffering. He told me about the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. We watched the Darfur genocide on the news together. But he did always praise the Jewish people, our people, for a long history of pacifism and peace. I wasn’t blind to Israel’s issues. He yelled at the TV about the shame that country was causing. But I never believed Jewish people capable of the type of fully open brutal genocide we’ve witnessed in Gaza. It horrified me because it was horrifying, but also because it did not seem possible. So, I understand the desire to avoid, to disbelieve. I understand “my people could never do that”. But they can, and they do. Cis women rape. And, cis women rape other women.

But, rest assured dear reader, I am not suggesting that you would do such a thing. Generally, I presume my audience are good people (mostly cause that makes me feel better about myself). However, I want you to understand that when a cis woman is in a relationship with a trans woman, she has an incredible amount of social, political, and relational power. This is, of course, tempered by other identity factors in each individual situation. And there are ways in which the trans woman has some more power than the cis woman. For instance, the trans woman is likely taller and likely has a stronger bone structure, which means that in some very limited tasks she might have some physical advantage. However, even this claim is mitigated by the trans woman’s complete lack of testosterone (meanwhile cis women have some testosterone, which can actually give cis women an advantage in some physical activities over trans women). Beyond this, I do very much struggle to think of a way in which trans women are likely to have any privilege that cis women do not. This should factor into your relationship.

You, cis reader, should be aware that when they complain about their trans girlfriend to cis friends, or really when they just get a trans girlfriend at all, that their friends will be primed to see her as the enemy, as nefarious, as potentially untrustworthy. They will make a lot of assumptions about why you’re dating her. They’ll privately say things like “I thought she liked women” or “I guess she’s really into dick”. They’ll reduce your girlfriend to her gender modality. And if you come to them with a problem, they will be far more likely to see you as an innocent victim, the issue as one-sided. I would caution you against trusting your friends to be unbiased observers. You should be aware that due to internalized biases they may be overeager to pit you against your girlfriend and to make issues more intense and less solution oriented than they otherwise would be.

Together: Managing Emotions

It is my sincerest hope that most trans women learn over the course of their transition how to identify, manage, and process their emotions. For many trans women, emotions were for most of their life something to actively or automatically repress. They spent their lives drifting in and out of dissociative states. An ex of mine needed a therapist to even help her know when she was mad or sad. Being closeted is traumatizing in and of itself. Everyone treating you like a boy when you know you aren’t one is difficult. It makes trans women the masters of repression. The relief of living our truth and of the ease of emotionality that estrogen makes possible can combine with years of dissociation and repression in a torrent of confusion and overblown emotions. Don’t get me wrong, this is far better than the previous state, the egg state. However, it often takes trans women a couple years to fully get a grasp on how to have ready access to their emotions, and to learn how to properly deal with them. It does not help that during these formative early transition years, the average trans girl is likely to experience traumatizing harassment and abandonment. These factors can make navigating relationships with trans women more tricky. Thankfully, this primarily applies to girls in their first few years of transition, and should not be used to stereotype the whole community. It gets better. We get better. We heal and we learn. If you’re in a relationship with a trans woman who does not yet understand her emotions, please know that it isn’t your job to teach her how to. Instead, try and be patient, and if she can afford it suggest therapy, if she can’t, suggest a well reviewed therapy app.

Lastly, it would be remiss not to include some discussion of the leveraging of one’s (usually guessed) chromosomes and assigned gender at birth. Unfortunately, in C4T relationships it is quite common for the cis women to have internalized a narrative in which she is consistently the victim (or the most likely to be) and that it is her partner’s job to fix anything potentially wrong. This problem exists in cis lesbian relationships too. In fact, it is rather endemic there. However, since both parties are cis women, in those spaces it often ends up being a she-said/she-said situation where both parties desperately try to shirk responsibility while pinning it on the other party. Centrist versions of feminism, and even some radical ones, that have been implicitly propped up by internalized Christianity and patriarchy, often teach young girls that theirs is the innocent gender/sex. In the worst of these, infantilization is encouraged, or the woman is instructed to think of herself as a completely different type of entity from men. My shitty TERF birth-mother was a huge ecofeminist and showed me from an early age how narratives about “Women and the earth have a spiritual connection, as both women and Gaia give life” can quickly turn into essentializing and dehumanizing narratives in which women are not so much flawed people as they are elves or goddesses. I’ve already touched upon the data that shows the comparative increased vulnerability of trans women compared to cis women. I’ve also insisted that cis women are often the perpetrators of sexual and physical harm against trans women. Needless to say, I do not buy into narratives that dehumanize cis women by removing their flaws and reduce them to caricatures. As such, it is important for cis women to attempt to lessen their tendency to self-infantilize and self-purify, especially when they are dating trans women. For when you use that rhetoric against trans women, what you are really saying is “I’m a goddess and you’re a man”. You deny yourself and you deny her human womanhood. If she believes you, and considering the years of suppression and uncertainty that taught her to shrink herself and agree with whomever to avoid conflict, you are forcing a trans woman to agree that she is not a woman. You are refusing your own capacity as an actor to produce consequences in the world, and framing your girlfriend as the only one who could have caused or prevented the events that have upset you. You are saying that you’ve no control over your emotions or how you process them, and you are justifying whatever reaction you had as the objectively correct one. None of this is good for her, nor is it good for your future happiness, your ability to find and sustain love. Heal thyself by learning you are a person.

Acknowledgements:

The following people are “founding member” paid subscribers. That is, they are people who decided that my work was not only worth supporting, but that they could afford to pay more than the rate I was asking. On both a financial and emotional level these people mean an incredible amount to me. I screamed aloud the first time anyone ever became one. I cried when a second person did. The least I can do is thank each one individually. They give me hope. Thank you to:

X Valentine, T S, i.m., and Rachel K.

You have filled me with joy, and helped make this writing possible.

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[1] hooks, p.15.

[2] Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” p. 280

[3] Ibid.