Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, La paix ramenant l’abondance, 1780
I was sitting down recently with a trans masculine butch I had met a day or two before for a live performance, a dyke themed comedy show. They had asked to sit with me, and I’d let them guide me to an abandoned row at the back of the theatre. The event also had a dating element. We were supposed to wear bright green stickers on our lapel if we were open to being hit on. We both wore them. Neither of us had acknowledged this, except that they asked me if ‘any cuties had caught my eye’. Truth be told, they had. However, this seemed a little blunt of a response. Instead, I said that that sort of perusing for eye candy didn’t really feel available to me as a trans woman, at an event known to have terfs hidden around. I said I really needed the other person to be more overt and make the first moves because a mistake in an environment like this could be disastrous for me. They reassured me that they would wingman me and have my back. My heart sank a little but so what. I figured better to shoot my shot one last time and if it didn’t work, ah well, cool friend acquired. So, I said something about how I was into butches and that felt particularly risky territory. They replied that there were plenty of trans masculine butches like themself here. Ding! Ding! Ding! Success! Or so I thought. I replied “yes, bless trans masc butches, you’re all so good.” Then, they promptly decided it was time to leave, said they wanted to go home, and left me to enjoy the comedy show to myself. We did not talk again.
A few nights ago, I was hanging out with a friend, and it turned into a hookup. This wasn’t entirely unsurprising. We have a bad habit of seeing each other once to twice a year due to busy schedules. But when we do, we often end up sleeping together. As a result, this friend of mine has witnessed a lot of changes to my body and the way I engage with it. The first time we ever slept together they horrified and charmingly nervously informed me that they had never been with a trans woman who’d had bottom surgery before. Laughing I admitted I was tucking. Now, many years later and well and truly healed from bottom surgery I struggle to remember what that first night was like. I must have liked them a fair bit though, they must have made me feel safe. It is with a lot of joy that I let our dates turn sexual. This particular night, they eat me out for what I estimate to be well over an hour. Normally I would circumvent this vulnerability by returning the favour, but I’ve been told not to. It is incredible, but I truly do not know how to process it. I was a dominant before I transitioned, and it is how I’ve been semi-coercively been slotted into the local T4T scene. I’m not sure what to do if I can’t even return the favour. Despite it being vanilla sex, it is the most submissive I’ve been with anyone in years.[1] Afterwards I panic and while I can hardly dom this dominant enby with hands that feel stronger than my own, I start talking about being a dom. I even awkwardly demonstrate a technique and take a few swings with their flogger at an oversized stuffie. I cringe now remembering this desperate attempt to suppress this wonderfully liberating vulnerability. Thankfully, they didn’t care. They walked me home and kissed me goodnight, asking to make plans soon.
What I am trying to convey with these two stories is simple, kinky ‘sexually liberated’ queers are still deeply, deeply sexually awkward and fucked up. What ties them together is two shared themes. First, both of these instances had to do with sexual identity. The first story included my trans femme tomboy self-attempting to navigate a butch4butch situation, one in which I worried that my desired partner did not read me as sufficiently butch due to my trans femme status to meet their stated preference for butches, while also trying to make legible my own desire for butches, and specifically them. The second story involved me attempting and failing to let myself be vulnerable by enjoying the sex without reciprocation or more importantly running back to that safe haven (which has increasingly become a prison) of ‘being’ a dominant. The second theme that ties these two stories together is that both involved a retreat, rather than sitting with a potentially awkward or vulnerable situation. In the first story the butch straight up left the comedy show rather than telling me they were not interested, or for that matter, asking openly if I was hitting on them or what my intentions were. In the second story, I couldn’t handle the vulnerability, and psychologically ran away into a more controlled role. Thankyfully my friend did not let me stay there and coaxed out the vulnerability again. Still, it was a retreat.
If it isn’t obvious by now, the title of this little piece is very tongue-in-cheek as lord knows I am not sexually normal. But I think I’ve been making some progress. I am, however, putting the cart in front of the horse here. So let’s make a few things quite plain. Sexual normalcy cannot be and never was vanilla heterosexual monogamy. Whether you read Engels, Marcuse, Gayle Rubin, or Kinsey, I think we can all agree that people have always had some truly wild sexual desires and practices, ones which were constrained by capitalist and heterosexual forces (which prop each other up). And, truth be told, I think that sort of sexual human plurality is an inherent good. So, I do not mean, let’s be vanilla. Nor do I believe, following Marcuse, that actual free love is possible within today’s society. Instead, what I mean about being sexually normal is in that Y2K slang speak of “can you just be fucking normal about this?”
Yep, you got it. This is yet another think piece about open communication. To my mind, the two greatest impediments to open sexual communication are harm and shame. We have spent over a decade now trapped in a much needed yet overly simplistic cultural reckoning with sexual harm. Harm has become our framework through which we process almost every negative emotion or act. Some years ago, I was rock climbing with a group of queers and was promptly ostracized from the group after one particular day bouldering. I was never given an explanation. A year later I learned it was because a trans masculine member of the group told them that I’d done something that made them “uncomfortable”. I wracked my brain in panic to figure out what it was. I’d barely interacted with the dude. Six months later I learned that what I had done was wear a sports bra while climbing. Now, we could talk about the transmisogyny involved about reading wearing a normal workout clothing item as a sexually aggressive act, but that is for another time. What is important is that discomfort was considered harmful. More specifically it was considered an act of harm, something perpetrated. This to me is a perfect example of how harm has come to be our only sexual moral framework. In doing so we’ve forgotten about the other big player at work and blended it with harm. We forgot shame. In his recent book The Philosophy of Shame Frederic Gros writes that “normality is not a statistical pattern or a simple average, but a model of respectable behaviour. […] The bourgeois family has obsessed about three major avatars of shame: the adulterous woman, the gay son and the masturbating child. It is this entity, more than Christianity, that has saturated sexuality with shame” as a control mechanism for regulating society.
Transgender transmisogynists are full of shame. They are shamed at their own disgust. In her recent book Sexed Up Julia Serano speaks about a study that discovered that images of two men kissing evoked the same heightened “physiological markers of disgust” as did maggots. More interesting for our purpose is that the research found that this “disgust response occurred across all subjects” including those who considered themselves gay allies. It has been my experience, that many of the sexualized transmisogynist actions I’ve had to endure over the years from fellow trans people have been due to this disgust and the shame of it. Afterall, you cannot admit that you are disgusted by a trans woman’s body, that it grosses you out, so you reframe it as a harm done unto you. That feels much more noble, much more speakable. Thus, disgust becomes shame which gets reframed as harm. But this has the side effect of normalizing the equation of emotional discomfort experienced within the self with a perpetration of harm done by an other. While a lot has been said already about the ways in which this harms trans women (and others, but lets be real, most importantly trans woman and especially trans women who are marginalized in some other additional way), we haven’t really acknowledged what this does to the psyches of those involved—and we are all involved.
Equating discomfort with harm scales up the emotion. Discomfort can be a lot of things. When someone asks me if a chair is comfortable and the chair very much isn’t I am not being harmed, but I am uncomfortable. I do not hold any anger or contempt for the person who offered me the chair. However, when a doctor who is about to give me a sedative needle says “you might feel a little discomfort”, what he is really saying is “I am going to cause you pain via a small amount of harm I am doing to your body with a sharp implement but this will pale in comparison to the help this same act will provide to you.” Likewise, when I am followed through the empty streets at night by a man whistling at me and matching my pace, I feel discomfort in the anticipation of potential harm. One could argue that there was some amount of psychological harm done to me by my exposure to this. But as far as I can tell, it is undetectable (especially when compared to actual PTSD I’ve acquired). When a friend and I went and grabbed a drink at a fancy bar and she asked me if it was a date, and I had to tell her I had no feelings for her, I also felt discomfort. There was absolutely no harm done. But there was in that moment discomfort. And a year later she told me that she worried that she had made things awkward or “made you uncomfortable”. She did not, and we are closer than ever. As you can see, a lot gets sorted into discomfort. It is a very broad term. And this last example, this friend who was worried she had made me uncomfortable really meant that she was worried she had done me harm.
To go back to Gros, he claims that one of the central forms of sexual shame, when interlaced with sexual victimhood is the sense that the victim is “reduced to the status of an object exposed to the desire of the other, and there to be consumed.” Likewise, he insists that desire is experienced as shameful, as an “alien presence,” as an “aberrant Other within us, bellowing its demands”. We cannot control our desires and since 2014 we have increasingly been taught that making our desires known to others can harm them insofar as discomfort is now construed as a form of harm. Thus we view our own desires as capable of causing harm once and by giving them voice, and we view the discomfort we might feel at someone voicing desire towards us as a potential harm against us.
This is untenable. We cannot continue like this! And indeed, we’ve been finding ways to cope. I think one of the least talked about forms of coping we’ve done has been the retreat into staunchly defined categories and performances. Through their modern histories, there have always been people within queer spaces that used labels like “top” and “bottom” and “butch” and “femme”. It is unclear how much of the historic queer and gay populations used these terms, but certainly they existed as sub communities. You could go to butch bars in a similar way you could go to leather bars. However, top/bottom, dom/sub, butch/femme are unlikely to appeal to the vast majority of queer people. Straight people for instance are likely to change their outfits depending on their vibes that day and also what is called of them that day, what spaces they intend to inhabit. Likewise, even within the tight confines of vanilla heterosexuality, you still hear about a woman taking control sometimes, and not being in control other times. Sometimes straight men speak about things being done to them in a manner that clearly conveys a lack of control on their part. The idea that the vast majority of us are at least a little ‘vers’ and a little ‘switch’ shouldn’t be shocking. It seems only natural that turns would be taken, that people need and want different things at different times. And yet, today’s younger queer people (by which I mean under 35) speak in a language in which they readily place themselves and others into the more restrictive categories. Why? It would seem only statistically likely that the majority of them, if they truly do live by these categories, are not having all their desires met by them.
There’s a couple hundred tumblr posts, and more than a few Instagram ones, about how ‘bottom’ and ‘femme’ are retreats into a non-acting position and how this is tied to fear. I wish to caveat here that I am not speaking about actual femme subculture communities, but rather their vulgarized and popularized idea of them that has spread widely without any actual involvement in materially and geographically situated sub communities. The argument, which I more or less believe, can fit into this essay like this: queer women terrified of their own desires as having the capacity to harm (to make someone else uncomfortable when voiced), and witnessing the permanent and catastrophic consequences of public shaming online, have decided to retreat into a role which allows them to be passive. In doing so they essentially reproduce a very classical idea of heterosexual courting where the ‘woman’ is expected to entertain the advances of ‘male’ suitors without having to make her own desires known outside of the act of choosing between them. This has some very obvious problems even when it works out, the most obvious of which is that because the femme/bottom has no voice she wishes to give her desires, it is extremely unlikely that her non-telepathic butch/top will fulfill them. However, it often doesn’t work out. It is too appealing. Everyone loves the idea of not having to risk harming anyone while being actively pursued. And thus, people start complaining about the ‘butch shortage’ and the ‘top shortage’.
On the other side of things, the side I tend to fall on, is the butch and the dom. I admittedly am wishy-washy on the term butch and prefer tomboy, and sometimes I’m a tomboy that cleans up real pretty like. Even when I am more butch, I tend to prefer mimicking the suited dapper look rather than the 1980s trucker pastiche that is so common in the public imaginary of what a butch is. We could even talk about if I’m allowed to call myself butch. Indeed, one of my earliest trans femme experiences online was having photos of mine end up on a facebook group for transphobic butches to laugh at trans women who IDed as butch. But if you want my thoughts on that you’ll have to buy Reverse Tomboy. What is more important here is that IDing along these lines has also for me been a retreat of sorts. As in the story with my friend that I began this essay with, I find myself often unable or unwilling to trust others enough to be anything but dominant. When I do let my guard down, I feel the need to retreat into this thing that if I’m being fully honest no longer applies fully to who I am.
Sexualities and relationships to sexual desire and dynamics are bound to change throughout one’s life and one’s transition. This is something experienced kinksters enmeshed in their local scene know very well. They’ve witness people age in and out of various roles. They’ve seen people become more experienced and desire to see the other side of the scenes they involve themselves in. Curiosity breeds change! Indeed, these roles are best approached this way, as potentially fluid, as relational, as negotiated. They can be marvelous then. But the truth is, the vast majority of queer people who adopt these roles are not involved in a grounded and local kink community. They’re not showing up to the dungeon. They’re just dating and hooking up. And that’s fine! The issue is that these roles are being used to shield us from having to actually talk, negotiate, and be awkward and uncomfortable, to voice desires, and sometimes, to feel shame. The path forward cannot be retrenchment into increasingly niche and increasingly ossified categories. I don’t need to hear if you’re ‘prey’ or ‘predator’ and if you do tell me that, you’d better fucking mean it.
So, what do we do instead, how can we be sexually normal? I think the best thing to do is to accept discomfort, and accept that we’re all fucking weird, and to normalize having forward conversations with each other about how we view sex, what we want out of sex, and what our desires generally are. We need to be comfortable with these desires changing and evolving over time, especially with changes to our bodies. We need to be comfortable being hit on, and hitting on people. We need to not run and retreat from the sexual, from the chance someone might want to do something with us. We must accept that every adult is a potentially sexual being and probably has a sex life of some sort. Not only that, it is probably ‘weird’ in at least one way. That has to not be uncomfortable for us.
Like Gayle Rubin, Lacan, Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, and yes Frederic Gros, I am one of those people who thinks Freud got more right than he did wrong. I think that the modern obsession with painting Freud as a regrettable whack job who thought we all wanted mommy, a conservative anti-feminist, or whatever else you want to smear him with, is a retreat. The real reason people like to distance themselves from Freud is because he thought we were all sexual freaks. He thought society itself made it impossible to not have strange and bizarre sexual desires. The idea that not only ourselves but our friends, family, and coworkers, might be sexually ‘deviant’ which is to say, statistically normal, was too much to stand. When Kinsey wrote his foundational work on Sexuality in the Human Male it was praised! When he followed it up with a sexual, Sexuality in the Human Female, he was almost destroyed. Turns out that what we really can’t stand is the idea that not only men are perverts, but women too. We have valourized women’s passivity, their non-acting position, their purity so much that when we get evidence that they’ve desires too, even when we ourselves are women, it is too much to handle. No one seems capable of accepting feminine women have sexual desires that often are intense and bizarre—not even feminine women.
I think this sort of has to end with a call to action then doesn’t it? If society hates the idea of women having sexual agency, desire, and being active participants in courting and sex and if queer women increasingly hate the idea of the messiness of sexual agency, their own desire, and being active pursuants and participants in courting and dating, then it would seem that normalizing femme desire and bottom desire, and the fluidity of those categories is essential. The passives must become active! Of course, it cannot end with them, and it’s actually probably best if the rest of us hurry up and get on with it too. Afterall, we don’t need anymore trans masc butches running out of theatres posthaste because the girl next to them implied she found them attractive. We need a queer community that can handle saying ‘hey I’m not into you, anyways, wanna keep hanging out as friends?’ And we need a queer community that can handle making overt sloppy awkward attempts to pick-up. And each of us needs to be okay with occasionally being on both sides of that.
But wait, haven’t dating apps have also given us all a convenient out? They’ve given at least the appearance of one. If all I need to do is swipe, and trust that other people are swiping, and the app will show us only who has already admitted to the app that they find us attractive, then at least that really awkward moment where you have to turn things sexual is avoidable. Except, of course, that anyone who has been on the apps can tell you that these dynamics somehow still play out on the apps. And what’s worse, the app’s algorithms which want you to stay on there longer, and ideally pay for better chances with people while on there for longer, do not want you to have good sex or set up healthy relationships with people. So welp indeed, I guess we have to go back to actually hitting on people in bars, coffee shops, and gasp other public places!
But wait, I titled this thing like a listicle. I had better deliver. Okay, so how to be sexually normal. It is easy, just do these tough things:
1. Learn how to turn down sexual advances without considering it a harm
2. Learn how to hit on people without worrying that it is a harm
3. Embrace your weird desires, explore them, talk openly about them
4. Sit with the discomfort of your friends doing the same
5. Accept that everyone around you likely has sexual desires you might find strange or uncomfortable
[1] Ignoring instances of being SAed.