The Taboo Of Transgender Sexuality
Why does nobody talk about trans people having sex?
Content warnings: (crude) sexual descriptions, pornography, homophobia, transphobia
Ever since I came out as trans, a burning question popped up in my mind: what is my sexuality? It felt like a natural thing I should figure out, since I’m transitioning and all. I undoubtably felt attraction to women, but what about men? I kissed a few guys both pre- and post-transition, found a couple of them attractive now-and-again, and fantasized about them every so often
Now, this should obviously put me somewhere underneath the bi umbrella. Yet, I was forever uncertain — always swapping between identifying as a lesbian, as bisexual, as abrosexual as homoflexible, as bisexual-homoromantic and all that jazz, never seemingly able to find stable footing in my attraction to men. But… why? There was this clear roadblock in the form of “I like men, sexually, but sex with them seems… icky for some reason”. Almost all sex acts involving men had this weird, dysphoric weight attached in my head, despite me having little-to-no bottom dysphoria. But there was just this something about, say, having a guy give me a blowjob, that put me in a horrible mindset.
I always felt like this problem would disappear if I had a vagina — which, again, is weird, because in literally all other situations in my life bottom dysphoria is negligible at worst. I can have any other type of sexual activity without much issue — heck, I even managed to pee standing up without breaking down. My bottom dysphoria was always very social — so something social was at hand here as well.
So I thought about it a lot. Like, a lot. Talked with other people about it a bit. And the moment I understood what was going on, I felt I was about to repeat the act of a certain Greek philosopher and run naked in the streets shouting “eureka”. Having sex with a man felt, on an incredibly deep, subconscious level, gay. The type of gay you don’t want to feel as a trans woman.
But… why? These days, queer relationships have become quite normalized in media — and somewhat in general society (at least in some parts of the world). And this includes sex. Ideas such as a girl eating another girl out or a guy being sucked off by his boyfriend went from icky, odd, weird and different to being a regular occurrence in people’s lives — all it took was hearing about it a little.
But how many times have you even heard, read or watched literally anything of the above regarding trans relationships? It feels as if transgender sexuality is taboo for some reason. Just… beyond the scope of what is conceptually understood by society. Phrases such as a guy sucking his girlfriend’s dick or a girl eating her boyfriend out and even a girl putting her dick into her boyfriend’s pussy carry with them an oddly alien feeling. This seems to be especially true in heterosexual transgender sexuality. Because, well, most trans people are not straight, so homosexual transgender sexuality is a bit more commonly seen if you spend some time in the community. It may just be me, but a girl sucking her girlfriend’s dick does not carry the same feeling as the three sentences highlighted above.
But the brain doesn’t just short circuit when it encounters these situations. Doing mental backflips comparable to those made by cisgender, heterosexual people when they ask a lesbian couple “who is the man in the relationship”, it compares straight sex with a trans person, to gay sex with a cis person, thus leading to dysphoria. Not from the genitals themselves, but from how my mind interprets the way they’re being used — it just finds immense difficulty in imagining “a guy sucking dick” as anything else than a gay thing. Even if I’m on the receiving end.
The best thing is that the solution to this problem is there — and it’s quite simple, too. Just… have more genuine, non-fetishized discussions of transgender sexuality. Having it be more visible in media in general would be incredible, but, in all fairness, just writing this post alone helped me, personally, get rid of the fast majority of my own weird prejudices toward myself (partially because it’s somewhat of a personal conclusion to a long process of discovery). The sentences two describing transgender sex feel less and less weird each time I proofread this text. So normalizing this seemingly “non-ordinary” sex descriptions works exactly the same as with all other sex stuff — the more you hear about it, the less weird it becomes.
And, as an end note, I’d just like to quickly address that trans people are often extremely fetishized. Chasers are an omnipresent annoyance (or even a threat) when you’re trying to date, people want to sleep with you to “experiment with their sexuality” and the porn industry somehow manages to make their portrayal of trans women even more unrealistic than the one of cis women. Despite all of these being seemingly common depictions of transgender sexuality, I feel like they do not carry this… normalizing force that more genuine, non-fetishistic pornography, erotica and sex do. Simply because they do not present transgender sexuality as a normal variation of human desire, but as a source of fetishistic pleasure.
