Twined Fragments: Sex, Love, & Romance
Twined Fragments is an ongoing collaboration between authors Miriam Suzanne and Allison Washington. Each fragment is sparked by the previous, as trans women of different generations pass their memories back and forth, reflecting on lives and transitions separated by a quarter-century.
Working through these fragments of reflection lets us touch on moments and emotions that are sometimes too painful to interrogate deeply. In conversation, we do together what we could not alone, and end up with more questions than answers. We want those questions, and hope you will extend this conversation in the comments below.
A few months into my gender transition I’m living full-time as a woman. I don’t have many guy friends, but my guitarist is one. Parting, I lean in for the cheek-kiss but he plants a good one right on my lips. His wife raises an amused eyebrow,
—Ha, well, I guess you two get to do that now.
#Allison #1989 #InTransition
A week after coming out as trans I’m with my old roommates.
—I’m trying to see you as a woman, but…with women there’s the possibility of sex. I’m not ready to look at you that way.
Sex was always a possibility. You weren’t paying attention.
#Mia #2015
Charles and I are friends when I’m faking male — I’m married to a woman, I’m being a ‘father’ — I am doing everything possible to make a man of myself, and my mate Charles is part of that. Or so it seems. I feel closer to him than anyone else.
I go through a retrospective sorting-out once I get myself realigned. As I look back across my history I see things from a different angle. Everything that didn’t make sense then makes sense now.
I was deeply in love.
#Allison #1985
Mom sees a picture of me in heels.
—Have you been exploring your bisexuality?
—What? No. I’m already comfortable with my bisexuality. That has nothing to do with heels.
It will be years before I realign anything, but the retrospective is continuous — friends that should have been lovers, but I wasn’t paying attention. They were all gay, but I wasn’t? Somehow?
The first year of my transition men look like aliens. I watch from a distance, confused and slightly disgusted. How did I think I was one of them?
It’s strange to see them, so content in the prison I escaped.
#Mia #2010–2016
During the worst of the ‘boy years’ I tell myself I’m straight. Never mind all the men — I ‘forget’ about them. There’s a lot sequestered in the shadows of my mind.
During transition I reframe: I must be bi. But since transition it’s been only men: I’m straight after all. Never mind all the women.
Sexuality is confusing.
#Allison #1980–2017
For many who know me, transition obscures my sexuality. When they see me with a woman, do they understand that I’m a lesbian? It never comes up.
In public, I’m a woman holding hands with a woman — just another dyke on Broadway.
It’s a relief to know that L, sometimes, can overshadow T.
#Mia #2017
LGBTQ…it’s a strange acronym for a straight woman to inhabit. During my transition it’s just LGB and I have no connection — that’s them, over there. Doctors and trans-exclusionary radfems call me a homosexual male transsexual, but the T has nothing to do with sex. My situation is…something else. I’m just a woman. A straight woman.
In 1989 I have to be straight to get approved…and femme, and passing, and it helps if I’m cute. The doctors call it ‘criteria’; we call it ‘the beauty contest’.
After I’m done I drop the T. I’m taught that it no longer applies: I’m a woman now. And I must never tell. Cis isn’t a word yet, only normal. I become normal. Hidden in the woodwork, I am normal for decades.
I never tell.
#Allison #1989–2016 #WomenAreWomen
In the “transsexualism typology” invented by a couple cis guys, I have nothing in common with Allison. She transitioned to trick straight men into fucking her, while my perversion is autogynephilia. We trans dykes are turned on by seeing ourselves as women. This is somehow abnormal, and proof that girls like me are really men with a fantastic kink.
There’s nothing fantastic about it. It’s sexy to feel sexy and hot to have a twat. ‘Autogynephilia’ is just women’s sexuality.
But women aren’t supposed to enjoy our bodies.
#Mia #2017 #Autogynephelia
Sometimes, in the nude, the mirror just stops me. I can hardly believe what I see: Soft features, long auburn hair, graceful arms, breasts, waist, hips, slender legs, a patch of hair covering my vulva. Not a perfect body, but a pretty body, my body. At last.
Me. Real, here, alive in the world.
At long last, a body I can love with.
#Allison #1990
Sometime before hormones but after shaving, I get a glimpse in the mirror — a sliver of what I might be underneath it all. I’m smitten, of course, with possibility. Now I see it daily, and it still makes me smile.
I do love myself as a woman.
In bed, I learn to reimagine my groin — pushing the old bits into new positions. I ask for extra T-blockers to keep me soft, and have the best orgasms of my life. Surgery sounds more and more enticing, but I don’t need it to be what I already am. My mind is happy to transpose.
Love what you got, or imagine something else, and love that instead.
#Mia #2017 #FuckingTransWomen
I did imagine something else, and I love what I got. But being a 1980s model, my vulva is not perfect and he could probably tell, up close. In the past I have used certain diversions to prevent her outing me, to avoid him knowing.
I am weary of diversion, of obscuring the most intimate parts of me, which I struggled so hard to embody. I am sick of secrecy. I have a choice to make: opening night is less than two weeks away.
He has been courting me for nine months. It may be something like love.
I am ecstatic and terrified.
#Allison #2017 #Realtime
Surgery has never been obvious to me. The shape of my genitals does not define my gender, and does not keep me from finding pleasure. Surgery will not make me the woman I already am.
It ain’t broken, so there’s nothing to fix.
But my entire life and body are in that phrase: don’t fix it. So much can be pushed away and ignored. I file an application with Dr. Bowers. A week later her office calls:
—Are you free on June 9, 2020?
—Is that a serious question?
I try not to think about it. Attention makes it real. Hope makes the present more painful.
#Mia #2017
Eight hours forty minutes from now I will kiss him. Sometime in the following nights I shall almost certainly sleep with him. There are things about me he does not know — yet — things he may or may not know by then. I have remade my life and my body in a way that does not require that he know. If I kiss him, if I sleep with him, if I tell him: this will be my choice, because I want these things, because I want him to have these things.
I am surprised at how calm I am about this now. Hope becomes the present.
#Allison #2017 #Realtime
I know it’s not fair, I tell her, but you’re in a lesbian relationship now. That’s how we’ll be seen. Will you be gay with me?
She’s hesitant to accept a label that others fight hard for. I recognize this fear — an excuse that held me back for years, afraid that transition was for cases more extreme than mine, more certain. As though gender and sexuality are badges to be earned through pain alone.
We find our lesbian selves in bed, a whole new layer to the relationship.
#Mia #2015
She’s the dom in our love affair. She is thrilled when she learns that I cross-dress. Out at shows, in the clubs, she drags me into women’s restrooms and throws me against walls, kissing me hard. She buys me a pair of absurdly high stilettos, expensive, leather. She likes me in mini-skirts.
When I finally admit that I’m trans — to her, to myself — I am surprised by her reaction. I am relieved; she is…not. But she comes round and we’re good. Supports me 100%. Defends me when I get assaulted in a shop. Corrects pronouns. Then, out of nowhere:
—I can’t do this. I’m sorry.
She leaves me for another woman.
#Allison #1988
When I start painting my nails, my soon-to-be-ex asks if I’m having an identity crisis. She double-checks with my roommate.
—So, is he gay?
—He’s not the straightest person I know. But no, not gay either.
When I change my pronouns on Facebook, another soon-to-be-ex calls me a troll.
—Do you want everyone to use ‘she’ for you?
—Maybe. No. I don’t know.
Erin asks my pronouns up-front. I have no idea, so she tries all of them — flipping from she to they and he all in a single sentence. A week in, I admit that only one sounds right. Before I change my name, she tests it out for a day. I ask her to say it over and over.
Mia. Miriam. Mia. Mia. Mia.
#Mia #2015
OK, I let him fuck me.
I don’t care about disclosure in a hookup; those men don’t need to know. But this is different. We’re in…love, maybe? And me undisclosed, again. No, this is not the plan. This time I am going to fix it.
But I am not lying when I remain undisclosed — what he sees is what he gets: this woman. The world is full of lies about women like me. The lies are titillating, entertaining, provocative, and make me into a Crying Game.
Disclosure drags in all these lies that have nothing to do with me or him or us — this is not truth. It does not give him choice. Truth is this body, this woman, that he holds so close.
#Allison #2017 #TheTruth #Realtime
This is Chapter 3 in the Twined Fragments series. Read Chapter 1… Chapter 2… Chapter 4 is presently in-draft.
Major monthly financial support is provided by Jayne Tucek, Lis Regula, Beth Adele Long, Maya Stroshane, Stevie Lantalia Metke, and J. Morefield.
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