“We deserve to have sex without it becoming a gender studies class” - Mira Bellwether in Fucking Trans Women

You’re in the middle of sex with one of your regular hookups and feeling totally in your element. With each flick of your tongue, smack of your paddle, and dragging of your nails, you see your partner writhe in such pleasure. You’re so fucking good at this! Like a machine, almost. And like a machine there’s this subtle motor running in your head, pushing you forward to do all the right things; to not relax and to really get this person off.

Y’know, for someone who “gets off on pleasuring others”, you feel really disconnected to your own sense of pleasure, actually. An emotional pleasure in doing a good job, sure, but not like the pleasure you see in this person you’re getting off: Embodied. Like quivering electricity connecting them right down to their smallest nerves. It can actually be quite frustrating for you to think about sometimes.

And once the sexual/erotic focus is on you, you feel this gripping non-sexy stillness compressing down on you. You start to wonder if the person going down on you is enjoying themselves while you feel totally stuck in this feeling of performance for their pleasure. You aren’t able to melt into the present sensations and it actually doesn’t quite matter if they’re going down on your genitals or not. They could be licking your chest, biting your neck, or spanking your ass. It’s as if you’re still trying to get them off while they’re focusing on you. Your body can’t seem to bring your own sense of arousal in the room with theirs.  

We could write this all off as dysphoria, sure, but there’s something more.

As trans and nonbinary people, there is often a subtle or even overt mental and emotional distance that is felt between us and our relationships, surroundings, and communities. A sort of lack of affect which comes from a state of numbness and dissociation, even after transition. As Hil Malatino writes in his book Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, there is a disorientation and lack of stability that trans and gender diverse people experience in everyday life; where there is constant injury, trauma, and lack of support to us in relationship with others and ourselves (2022). 

This injury and trauma affects so many modes in which we relate to each other, namely our ability to feel that our wants and needs can be in balance with others, and a sense of validation and acceptance into our own being relationally. For a lot of trans/nonbinary people, when we first step into our public identity, we feel like we have to “prove” ourselves in some capacity. To some this might look like becoming the “expert” on all things trans. We can run circles around the cis people in our life with gender theory, endocrinology, anthropology, history, etc. For others it might start earlier in life as a young - unbeknownst to us- queer person feeling, and sometimes not even knowing, a sense of nonbelonging. Where we may be constantly feeling the uncomfortability, vitriol, and hesitancy around us; continually being on guard for misinformed anecdotes, jokes, misrecognition of our experiences and being, as well as straight up verbal/physical assault. What incentive do we have to be present? When has it been safe to feel into our own pleasure in the company of another person, especially for those who are just taking that big step into their trans/nonbinary being?

In Michigan, I facilitate a somatic trans sex therapy group called Transcending where we dive into how all of this gets internalized in our bodies and how to soften our way towards pleasure in safe and inviting ways. We work on being present with the body sensations that come up during sex and kink scenes, and the patterned beliefs that may accompany them. For example, for someone who is experiencing that gripping nonsexy stillness that’s compressing down on them, when being slow, present and mindful with it, they may find that the belief connected to that sensation is “taking up space is masculine, don’t feel into your pleasure if you don’t want to be seen as masculine”, “you have to be good at sex/kink for them to be okay with you being trans/nonbinary/etc.”, or even “your desires aren’t worthy of consideration”

These beliefs and patterns can’t just be logic-ed through, as much as my fellow over-intellectualizers might want them to (dang it). And it is a very vulnerable process to move into ourselves as being an option for sexual and erotic pleasure. After all, we live in a violently transphobic world that permeates through so much of our lives and compounds with our other identities and experiences that we have sustained trauma and injury around. It’s difficult to yield into ourselves when that is our reality, even in safe relationships.

What I hope you are getting from this, is that our sex and sexuality are inextricably linked with our emotions, beliefs, and fundamental way of being in the world. It is imperative as trans/nonbinary people focused on our own sexual liberation to discover and learn how these injuries, traumas, and limiting beliefs are stored in the trans body not only on the individual, but collective level, and how we can work on healing towards an expansion of the sexual self within ourselves and in our communities. After all, being able to balance our pleasure and needs with those of others is in direct opposition to the forces that keep us from ourselves. This is not a “embodied trans fucking is resistance” call, necessarily, but a gentle reaching out to the trans/nonbinary people who perform pleasure for others to do the risky thing and slow down to be with ourselves and what gets us off. To have that be witnessed with the risk of it being held by others.

Refences

Malatino, H. (2022). Side affects: On being trans and feeling bad. U of Minnesota Press.:

Deirdre (Dee) Church is a trans-centered clinical sex therapist based in Ypsilanti, Michigan who specializes in sexual, relational, and developmental trauma in queer and transgender Michiganders. Church's research and education focuses on trans experiences of sexual health/pleasure, queer and trans embodiment within kink/leather/BDSM, and how queer/trans people navigate polyamorous and non monogamous relational systems.